We already know that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is a big fan of Nokia's Lumia 900 and of the Windows Phone operating system in general. Now Microsoft has posted up a email on its Windows Phone site which it claims comes from a self-professed fan of Apple products. In short, this Apple user also loves the Lumia 900 and Windows Phone.

The letter, which Microsoft says comes from a person known only as "Scott G.", was written to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "Scott G." admits in the email that it was written on a MacBook Pro and that he has been a fan of Apple's products for a number of years. However, he recently picked up a new Lumia 900, after apparently not liking an Android device, and says he plans to keep it.

One of the thing "Scott G." likes about the Lumia 900 is that it works well as a phone. He states:

Several clues are indicating that Apple’s updated MacBook Pro and iMac could be just around the corner. Perhaps the most compelling hints are a couple of benchmark scores recently uploaded to Geekbench that show two unidentified Apple systems utilizing Intel Ivy Bridge processors.

The first system in question is listed as a “MacBookPro9,1” and is powered by a quad-core Core i7-3820QM operating at 2.70GHz with an overall score of 12252. As Apple Live Blog highlights, this is around 17 percent better than the current-generation 15-inch or 17-inch MacBook Pro.

Apple may be planning on releasing a less costly version of its popular MacBook Air ultraportable, according to a recent report. The new version of the MacBook Air would be released before the end of the year.

Digitimes reports that some of its sources have indicated the company is attempting to combat the recent slew of Windows-powered Ultrabooks by releasing a cheaper MacBook Air. The new laptop would be released in the third quarter of this year. Intel is playing a large role in both Ultrabooks and the MacBook Air's development, serving as the CPU provider for both platforms. According to Digitimes, the company is attempting to lower the entry-level price for the new style of affordable laptop.

As promised, Apple has announced a new version of its best selling tablet, the iPad. As reported by Engadget, the tablet has much of what was rumored beforehand to be included in terms of hardware. That includes a Retina touch screen display that supports 3.1 million pixels and a resolution of 2048x1536.

The new iPad also has, as expected, a A5X processor and a quad-core graphics chip which Apple CEO claims is four times as powerful as NVIDIA's Tegra 3 processor. It also supports the faster LTE wireless networks from Verizon and AT&T. It can also serve as a wireless hotspot. Apple claims that even with LTE running, battery life on the tablet is expected to be nine hours. Users can also check out a five megapixel rear facing camera.

Developers now have until June 1 to make their applications compliant with the new Mac App Store sandboxing restrictions, Apple announced on Tuesday.

The original deadline was March 1, but developers now have an additional three months to bring their software in line with the new rules. The sandboxing entitlements are already found in OS X 10.7.3 Lion and new APIs in Xcode 4.3.

Sandboxing of applications is Apple's initiative to make the Mac platform even more secure by restricting what applications can do within the operating system. This helps to prevent problems like malware taking over third-party applications and utilizing them to do something malicious.

Apple has posted a countdown timer on its web site in anticipation of the 25 billionth download on the App Store. The person who downloads the app that stops the clock is said to win a $10,000 App Store Gift Card.

Thr Company’s announcement reads: “As of today, nearly 25 billion apps have been downloaded worldwide. Which is almost as amazing as the apps themselves. So we want to say thanks. Download the 25 billionth app, and you could win a US$10,000 App Store Gift Card. Just visit the App Store and download your best app yet.”

Sources close to the company headquartered at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California have revealed to John Paczkowski of AllThingsD that Apple will hold an event early next month to launch the iPad 3.

These sources specifically told the blogger that Apple had chosen the first week in March to roll out the next version of its popular tablet computer.

It will reportedly be a “trademark” special event held in San Francisco, presumably at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. This venue is Apple’s favorite for unveiling new things.

The latest rumors about Apple's flagship phone suggest that the iPhone 5 could be announced in June at Apple's next Worldwide Developers Conference. This latest report comes from analysts at Daiwa Securities as reported by the Chinese newspaper Commercial Times.

The folks at 9to5Mac are predicting that WWDC will be held from June 10 to 15 this year.

The new scuttlebut follows a recent report from 9to5Mac also pointing to a summer release for the next iPhone. Citing a "reliable source at Foxconn in China," the Apple blog site said that samples of the iPhone 5 are already "floating around" Apple. The new phone reportedly will sport a 4-inch or larger display, with a form factor that differs from the iPhone 4 and 4S in both length and width.

If true, it means Apple will be returning to its usual schedule of unveiling the new iPhone in June. Last year marked an change of pace with the iPhone 4S not reaching the market until October.

The iPhone 5, as presumably it will be called this time around, will continue to use the current glass-to-glass touch panel technology, according to the Daiwa analysts, benefiting Apple's touch panel suppliers, including TPK Holding and Wintek.

Apple has released OS X 10.7.3 Lion, the third such minor update to the operating system since it was launched last July.

The update, which went out to Lion users on Wednesday afternoon, includes an update to Safari, bringing the built-in browser up to version 5.1.3. System-wide, the update promises to fix bugs and add new languages, including Greek, Hebrew, Thai and Catalan, among others. It also fixes bugs with authenticating with directory services and what Apple says were "compatibility issues" with Windows file sharing.

Apple is out-shipping traditional PC vendors by a wide margin on the back of strong iPad sales, a marketing research firm has found.

In the fourth quarter, Apple became the leading worldwide client PC vendor by shipping more than 15 million iPads and 5 million Macs, representing 17 percent of the total 120 million client PCs shipped globally in the fourth quarter, according to Canalys. Hewlett-Packard was a distant No. 2 with about 12.7 percent.

"We're going through the biggest shift the PC industry has seen in 20 years. It's very difficult to grow in the classic PC market when all of the growth is coming from iPads," Steve Brazier, CEO of Canalys, told CNET.

Apple's iOS is the most popular mobile platform among corporate workers, at least according to a survey from mobile security provider Check Point Software.

Among the more than 700 IT professionals polled for the study (PDF) released on Wednesday, iOS accounted for 30 percent of the collective traffic on their networks. But RIM's BlackBerry was right behind with 29 percent.

A Chinese firm scrapped plans to sell a lifelike doll of Steve Jobs after his family and Apple lawyers objected.

In Icons said in a statement they "have not overstepped any legal boundaries", but felt a "heartfelt sensitivity" to the feelings of the Jobs family.

The figurine was intended as a tribute to the Apple founder, and came with accessories such as a mock iPhone, turtleneck and New Balance sneakers.

In Icons has offered a refund to customers who had pre-ordered a doll.

The figurine, which was 12in (30.5cm) long and was to sell at $99.99 (£65), had realistic facial features that the company says had been reworked many times to achieve a lifelike appearance.

Apple is going after Samsung again in Germany. According to a report on Bloomberg, Apple has filed two lawsuits against Samsung, claiming that 10 of its smartphones and five of its tablet devices, including the Galaxy S II, violate Apple's design rights. A Samsung spokesperson said that company had received both lawsuits but would not comment further.

Apple won a victory against Samsung in Germany last month, after a court said that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet had violated Apple's design patents. Samsung created a new version of the tablet, the Galaxy Tab 10.1N, that launched last December in Germany. The new version changed some of the tablet's features including having the speakers on the front rather than the side, and changing the color of the tablet's bezel to a more silver shade.

Microsoft continues to expand its support for applications that will run on Apple's iOS devices. This week, the company released a new iOS version of its OneNote application. In addition to new features for the iPhone version, this new OneNote iOS app has now been fully optimized to use the large screen of both the iPad and the iPad 2.

The new 1.3 version of the iOS app also has a number of additional new features including a new tabbed user interface, table rendering an option to sync notebooks over a Wi-Fi connection and more. The new version also has new support for more languages and global markets along with improvements with signing into Windows Live.

A three-page contract that established Apple Computer Co. (AAPL) sold for $1.59 million at Sotheby’s (BID) in New York today.
A phone bidder acquired the document, signed on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. The price, which includes the buyer’s premium, soared past the estimated presale range of $100,000 to $150,000.

The contract was initially owned by Wayne, who met Jobs while working at Atari Inc. Wozniak, a friend of Jobs, worked at Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) Jobs enlisted Wayne to persuade Wozniak to join Apple. His success in doing so earned Wayne a 10 percent share in the new company.

Apple is actively testing a newly included option within iCloud's Photo Stream, the feature that enables iPhone users to have their photos synced across their entire range of iCloud-enabled devices.

There’s just one problem with Photo Stream - it doesn’t let you delete individual photos. If you’re a user, you’ll agree it can be rather annoying to see one bad shot after another churning up on all your devices.

Well, Apple plans to fix this annoying limitation in iOS 5.1.

After accusing Shenzhen, China-based Proview Technology of infringing on its iPad trademark, Apple saw its lawsuit rejected by a Chinese court which ruled that Proview had lawfully registered the "iPad" name as far back as the year 2000.

The court learned from Proview that its Taiwan unit had sold the ‘global’ iPad trademark to IP Application Development, a U.K.-based company, for the round sum of £35,000 (roughly $55,000) a few years back.

IP Application Development then transferred the trademark over to Apple, but the trademark for China's mainland market was not included in that agreement, Proview told the court.

More than 10 billion apps have been downloaded from Google's Android Market.

To mark the moment Google said that for the next 10 days it would cut the price of some top apps to 10p each.

The search giant announced the milestone on its blog adding that the store's apps were being downloaded at a rate of one billion a month.

However, some industry analysts played down the figure saying Google should do more to address poor-quality programs.

An analyst with Susquehanna Financial is boasting that Apple will build a different chip inside the next-generation iPhone 5, breaking the trend of using the same A-series chip in iPhones and iPads of the same generation.

"With respect to iPhone, iPhone 5 production is expected to start around the June timeframe," Susquehanna Financial analyst Chris Caso wrote in a note to clients.

According to a report by the IB Times, the analyst expects the iPhone 5 to have a completely new CPU that will not be present in the iPad 3.

Date: December 10, 2011
Place: Chernihiv, st. Shevchenko 99a, the hotel "Pridesnyansky", a large conference hall


December 10, Chernigov Stanfy company will conduct a master class. The meeting will be devoted to developing mobile applications for Apple iOS (iPhone / iPod touch / iPad).

Apple technologies have changed the lives of many people, both users and developers, opening a whole niche for work and creativity. After all, iPhone - is not simply a convenient device, but an entire culture.

Criminals are targeting internet users with a new gift certificate scam, according to security experts. Users receive an email that claims to be from Apple's iTunes store, warns the Eleven security blog.The ZIP file attached contains malware that may allow hackers to gain access to the recipient's computer. The blog says the attack appears to have been timed to coincide with Black Friday, one of the US's busiest shopping days.

Black Friday was the name used by Philadelphia's police department in the 1960s to describe the day after Thanksgiving because of all the traffic jams caused by people visiting the city's stores. It is now viewed by many retailers as the start of the Christmas shopping season. They mark the day with one-off discounts and other special offers.

As I look at my iPad 2 sitting next to me, I wonder how a device with the same basic proportions could actually be thinner. Yet, the latest rumor says that Apple will forgo the IPS (in-plane switching) display for the iPad 3, instead favoring a Sharp-manufactured display that will be thinner and lower-powered than IPS can manage.

Sharp, as it turns out, is also at the top of the rumor list for the heavily expected iTV (Apple's television project hinted at by Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson) as the primary display manufacturer.

Analyst Peter Misek claimed in the report published by Forbes that Apple has invested between $500 million and $1 billion in Sharp display technologies, effectively dispelling the possibility that IPS would be included in the iPad 3.

For many of us, the music used in the background while Microsoft's Windows 95 started booting up is still locked in our heads. That music was actually composed by well known ambient music composer Brian Eno. In a newly discovered radio interview with the BBC from 2009, Eno revealed that he actually composed the Windows 95 start up music on an Apple Macintosh machine.

Eno got a list of what the music should sound like from Microsoft, which included 150 adjectives. Some of those adjectives included words like "inspirational" "sexy", "driving", "provocative", "nostalgic" and "sentimental", which is a lot to project for just a few seconds of music. But the big revelation came when the BBC interviewer asked, naturally, if Eno had written the Windows 95 music on a PC. Eno replied, "No I wrote it on a Mac. I’ve never used a PC in my life; I don’t like them". Ouch.

Apple's iPad dominates the tablet market. How bad is it for the rest of the companies that make tablet products? According to a new report from the NPD Group, just 1.2 million tablets that were not made by Apple were sold in the US in the first 10 months of 2011. The amount of revenues from those tablets came in at $415 million for the time period. By contrast, Apple sold a whopping 11.12 million units of its iPad tablet just in the the third quarter of 2011.

Oddly enough, HP sold the most tablets in the US outside of the iPad in 2011 so far. While NPD didn't give specific numbers it did say that HP had 17 percent of the non-Apple tablet market share. This was likely due to the fire sale of the HP TouchPad which was officially discontinued in August after failing to sell at its original $499 price. In second was Samsung with 16 percent of the tablet market in the US thanks to Samsung's various versions of the Galaxy Tab.

A recent consumer survey by Nielsen found that for the second year in a row, the iPad is the most highly desired consumer electronic item on the holiday wish lists of kids ages 6-12. A whopping 44 percent of children polled hoped to find an iPad under the tree this year, which is up from 31 percent in 2010. Following close behind the iPad are the iPod Touch and iPhone in second and third place, respectively, at 30 percent and 27 percent each.

In this age bracket, computers, non-iPad tablet computers and the Nintendo 3DS were each desired by 25 percent of kids. The majority of the rest of the list is comprised of video game consoles and accessories, with Microsoft's Kinect and Nintendo's older DS iterations ranking higher than items like the Xbox 360 and Wii.

Apple is taking its new over-the-air update system for a spin today with iOS 5.0.1. The company expects the update to squash battery-draining bugs in the iPhone 4S and add multitasking gestures to the iPad.

The battery drain issue has stumped users for weeks, with lots of people offering advice but no tried-and-true fixes. Apple acknowledged the battery problem last week, and promised a software update "in a few weeks."

If you own an iPhone 4S and have seen your battery drain much faster than normal on the device, you are not alone. It seems that there are a lot of complaints from owners about the battery life of the new smartphone from Apple. The Guardian web site has posted up a possible explanation of this mysterious issue.

The fault may lie in a (so far) unconfirmed software bug in the "Setting Time Zone" option of the phone's Location Services settings . If a person with the iPhone 4S travels to a different time zone, the "Setting Time Zone" section, when turned on, goes into action to change the time on the phone via a location server. But it seems that the time zone option is still running on some iPhone 4S devices. That could mean that the location server is being pinged even when the phone hasn't moved to a new time zone.

Citing industry sources who are familiar with both Apple’s and Samsung’s business, a Korean report reveals that the duo’s partnership will continue with a deal signed for a quad-core A6 chip, while the litigations between the two continue.

And while there’s no sign of the two coming to a legal agreement any time soon, business is still business, according to a Korea Times report citing industry sources as saying that Apple still wants Samsung to be the main manufacturer of its A-series chips.

The A6 is headed for the next iPhone, says the report. The SoC (system on a chip) is quad-core, which sounds pretty fantastic now, but I reckon these kinds of application processors (AP) will become ubiquitous in late 2012.

Apple has launched yet another iOS 5 service for iPhone and iPad users - AirPort Utility, which lets users manage their Wi-Fi network and AirPort base stations right from their portable device.

The app goes only with iOS 5 and allows users to see a graphical overview of their Wi-Fi network and devices. Users can change base station and network settings, as well as manage some advanced features (security modes, wireless channels, etc.).

The app works with all Apple 802.11n Wi-Fi base stations, including AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and Time Capsule, according to the Mac makers.

It appears as though Apple has just opened up the doors to their iCloud service for the first time, dropping the beta tag and allowing access to the general public. To actually use the service you will need either iOS 5, or the yet-to-be-released version of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion to set up the account, both of which currently are not available to the general public; however due to the recent opening of the iCloud web front it can only be a matter of time before either or both of these iCloud companions are released.