Other than giving a bunch of Apple fans the initiative to call me nasty names (go here to understand why), the real question I’d like you to consider is, “Can anyone beat Apple?”
The answer is yes. No company is impossible to beat. Clearly, Apple has been pounded in the past, but with every cell phone and MP3 player company on the planet focused on kicking Apple’s hind end, why the heck hasn’t anyone been able to do it yet?
Read more »"Apple might have finally come around to allowing third party developers to create applications for the iPhone, but only up to a point. ZDNet UK claims Apple is leaving itself vulnerable to the competition and to a loss of lustre by blocking background tasks on the device. The author notes, 'Perhaps it doesn't trust application designers or users very much. Perhaps it wants the best software for itself, where it can limit what it can do in order not to upset its telco friends. Whatever the reason, it reflects badly on Apple.
Read more »"And the answer is... Microsoft. Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology analyzed 658 high-risk and medium-risk vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft products and 738 affecting Apple. They measured how many times over the past six years the two vendors were able to have a patch available on the day a vulnerability became publicly known, which they call the 0-day patch rate. What they found: 'Apple was below 20 [unpatched vulnerabilities at disclosure] consistently before 2005,' said Stefan Frei, one of the researchers involved in the study.
Read more »"The Apple brand has the biggest impact on the world's consumers, while Microsoft and the United States nation brand are those considered most in need of a remake, a survey showed on Monday," Rachel Sanderson reports for Reuters
Read more »Complaints about overheating notebooks — Apple doesn’t call them laptops anymore for reasons that become obvious once you use them for a few minutes — surfaced soon after the release of both the MacBook Pro in early 2006 and the MacBook later that spring
Read more »Ars Technica is reporting that the Beatles and Apple have signed a reported $400 million dollar deal to bring the entire Beatles Catalog to iTunes. From the article: 'As of today there is no time frame as to when the catalog will appear online, but it seems to just be a matter of time. McCartney himself even said in November that the catalog would be making its way onto the the store some time in 2008. While we have heard this sort of thing time and time again, this might just be the real deal. Prepare yourself — Beatlemania is coming to iTunes.'"
Read more »"MacNN reports that the thin design of Apple's MacBook Air is causing some confusion for the technically ignorant, according to one blogger who says that the ultra-portable caused him to miss his flight. When going through the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport security checkpoint, blogger Michael Nygard was held up as security staff gathered around his MacBook Air, trying to make sense of the slender laptop/notebook. One of the less technically knowledgeable staff points out the lack of standard features as cause for alarm..."
Read more »krquet notes an InfoWorld article on Sun's plans for the iPhone. After studying Apple's newly released SDK docs for 24 hours, Sun decided it was feasible to develop a JVM, based on Java Micro Edition, for both the iPhone and the iTouch. An analyst is quoted: "I think going forward, with the SDK, it takes out of Apple's control which applications are 'right' for the iPhone." The article doesn't speculate on how Apple might to react to such a loss of control.
Read more »Steve Jobs demonstrated a new "App Store" that will be pushed out to all iPhones in June. It's available now in beta. This will be the exclusive avenue developers will use to get their iPhone apps, written to the newly released SDK, to customers. Developers will get 70% of the proceeds from sales of their goods on the App store, with no further charges for hosting, credit-card processing, etc. Jobs called this "the best deal going to distribute applications in the mobile space."
Read more »The creator of the iPod and iPhone sets a dazzling new standard for innovation and mass appeal, driven by an obsessive CEO who wants his products to be practically perfect in every way.
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