Apple

Design of iPhone 6 'locked down,' claims analyst

A consensus of analyst speculation is building for an iPhone that's not quite 5 inches.

After a spate of recent speculation about Apple's next iPhone, Cowen and Company analyst Timothy Arcuri has chimed in, claiming an iPhone 6 with a 4.8 inch display is locked down, as reported by AppleInsider.

That will also include higher-speed 802.11ac Wi-Fi connectivity.

Updates to iOS may center on changes to iBeacon, Touch ID, and Passbook, as Apple pushes further into mobile payments, Arcuri said.

The screen size jibes, more or less, with that in an earlier research note from NPD DisplaySearch. … Read more

Apple says it will fix iOS 7 bug that causes phone to reboot

Whatever your opinion of iOS 7, one annoyance that some users have experienced after switching to the overhauled operating system is a bug that randomly causes a phone to restart.
"We have a fix in an upcoming software update for a bug that can occasionally cause a home screen crash," Apple confirmed to CNET on Wednesday. News of the fix was first reported by Mashable. The bug triggers the "black or white screen of death" that a user sees when starting up the phone. Some users have said that the bug kicks in when the phone'… Read more

Apple's original Mac can fetch $1,598 on eBay

When Apple released its first personal computer, the iconic Macintosh 128K, the price tag was a whopping $2,495. A steal at the time, really.

Since then, the Mac, like other Apple products, floated around eBay's marketplace, losing value as other personal computers took its place, according to eBay, which released a few sales stats to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Mac this week. It seems this computing artifact has been climbing in value lately, fetching an average sale price of $605 in 2004 to $1,598 this year. eBay said its sellers sold five of these models last year. … Read more

Icahn disses Apple board for not boosting stock buyback

Activist investor Carl Icahn is on the Apple warpath again.

In a tweet posted Wednesday, Icahn said that "Apple's board is doing great disservice to shareholders by not having markedly increased its buyback." He also promised an in-depth follow-up letter that no doubt will detail his ongoing grievances.

Icahn has been battling to convince Apple to direct more of its $150 billion toward stock repurchases. Initially calling for a buyback of $150 billion worth of shares, Icahn scaled back the amount in December, instead asking Apple to commit to at least $50 billion of share repurchases in 2014.… Read more

Foxconn managers arrested for alleged kickback scheme

Managers at Apple supplier Foxconn have been arrested on charges that they demanded kickbacks from iPhone component makers, Chinese news site Tencent said Wednesday.

Interpreting Tencent's story, CNET sister site ZDNet said that around a dozen managers have been taken into custody, including Deng Zhixian, director general for Foxconn's committee of surface mount technology, and retired senior vice president Liao Wancheng, who was fingered as the mastermind behind the purported scheme.

Prosecutors allege that companies that wanted to qualify as iPhone component suppliers had to pay the managers kickbacks and then further bribe them to make sure their … Read more

Former Apple CEO John Sculley recalls the Macintosh launch

John Sculley was recruited from PepsiCo by Steve Jobs and the board of directors to become the CEO of Apple. He joined the company 10 months before the 1984 launch of the Macintosh and remained CEO for a decade. Sculley shares his recollections of the day the Macintosh made its public debut.

This article is part of a CNET special report on the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh, looking at the beginnings of Apple's landmark machine and its impact over the last three decades.
There is justifiably a lot of excitement around the 30th anniversary of the launch of … Read more

How many iPads were sold last quarter? Analysts weigh in

Apple may have sold around 25 million iPads in the final quarter of 2013. At least that's the forecast based on a consensus of 45 analysts.

Eliciting the opinions of 28 professional analysts and 17 amateur or independent analysts, Fortune uncovered iPad sales estimates ranging from 21 million to 28 million. Stirring together all the numbers yielded an average of 25 million, up around 10 percent from the 22.9 million sold in the prior year's quarter.

Fortune found the independent analysts more bullish, calling for a 16 percent average jump in sales from 2012's last quarter. … Read more

Burrell Smith: Macintosh hardware wizard

This article is part of a CNET special report on the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh, looking at the beginnings of Apple's landmark machine and its impact over the last three decades. It could be said that without Burrell Smith, the Macintosh might never have made it to the Flint Center stage on January 24, 1984. He was to the Macintosh what Steve Wozniak was to the first Apple computers, a hardware wizard who came up with ingenious ways to coax more performance out of a computer with fewer chips.
Smith joined Apple in February 1979, starting out in … Read more

Software wizards of the 128K Macintosh

This article is part of a CNET special report on the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh, looking at the beginnings of Apple's landmark machine and its impact over the last three decades. The Macintosh hardware was brought to life by several teams working in concert on everything from the logic board, disk drive and power supply to the mouse, plastic casing and factory production line. Similarly, a small team of young and talented software engineers were writing the code that would bring the Macintosh to life.
At the core of the Macintosh software were the QuickDraw graphics routines, which … Read more

Judge pares down Samsung patent claim against Apple

A federal judge issued a partial summary judgment late Tuesday that invalidated one Samsung patent and found the South Korean electronics giant in infringement of an Apple patent.
Judge Lucy Koh of the US District Court of Northern California found that Samsung's Android-based handsets infringe on Apple's US patent No. 8,074,172 for an autocomplete feature that automatically generates word suggestions based on what the user is typing. Koh also found invalid Samsung US patent No. 7,577,757, which covers multimedia synchronization, reducing the number of patents in Samsung's complaint from five to four.
Data … Read more