World of Apple

Apple has today begun a one-day sale that traditionally takes place on the Friday following Thanksgiving in the US.

Apple has posted the discounts on all of its stores worldwide with reductions in price ranging between 4-10%. Prices for the major products below for the U.S. and UK Apple stores.

iMac - $101 (£71) discount
MacBook Pro - $101 (£71) discount
iPod nano - $11 (£7) discount
iPod touch - $41 (£11) discount
Apple TV - $21 (£11) discount

Discounts are also available on Time Capsule and AirPort extreme base stations, keyboards, Magic Mouse and iWork and iLife.

Britains largest supermarket Tesco announced today that it will begin selling the iPhone through an agreement with O2, the supermarket hopes to have pay-as-you-go and contract models available before Christmas 2009.

Tesco is not currently offering any pricing or tariff details. But did describe the pricing as “competitive”.

Tesco Mobile which is a joint venture with O2 will be offering the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS in Tesco Phone Shops and online through Tesco Direct in the UK.

iPhoto 8.1.1 - 12.5MB

This update addresses issues affecting face recognition performance and accuracy. It also fixes minor issues in the areas of book ordering, and iPod touch support.

The update is recommended for all users of iPhoto ‘09.

For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3941

Following a barrage of convincing evidence that the iPod touch released in September this year was intended to feature a camera rumours now suggest that the models will finally appear in Spring 2010.

The source suggests that the iPod touch will feature the same camera as the iPod nano also released last September.

The iPod touch was rumoured to be set to include a camera prior to the current models release in September, since then it’s been reported that due to bad parts Apple removed the camera at the last minute, a fact proven by teardowns of the units.

Following last weeks change to how applications destined for the App Store are approved Businessweek has run an interview with Apple’s senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller who commented on the process which is often under criticism.

“We’ve built a store for the most part that people can trust,” Schiller begins. “You and your family and friends can download applications from the store, and for the most part they do what you’d expect, and they get onto your phone, and you get billed appropriately, and it all just works.”

The Apple exec also broke down the major types of rejection that are seen on the App Store, 90% of rejections are technical such as bugs “or because something doesn’t work as expected”, 10% of cases when the app is inappropriate and fewer than 1% of rejections fall into a grey area category requiring further research.

Apple today announced that this coming Friday it will be holdings its annual Black Friday sales, commonly offering modest discounts on Macs and iPods for just one day of the year.

The one day sale which will be held worldwide on November 27th has been held in previous years on the Friday following thanks giving in the U.S.A.

Boy Genius Report has published a document purporting to display this Friday’s sales, the discounts are only for the U.S. online store and offer $101 off iMacs, $51-$101 off MacBook Pros, $11 off iPods nanos and $21-$41 off iPod touches.

Apple has begun running all App Store submissions through a static analysis tool which will identify apps using private API calls.

Apple offers developers for the iPhone and iPod touch a list of public application programming interface (APIs) which are free to be used and well documented. Apple also has a collection of private APIs which only Apple is allowed to use and generally don’t inform developers about. There are several reasons why Apple doesn’t want private APIs being used; security reasons, consistency reasons, or that the API is subject to change potentially breaking the app in the future.

Many apps currently on the App Store already use private APIs but as finding them is incredibly difficult they often slip through the strict Apple approval process but now Apple has added an automated search of app code to find such banned APIs.

The automated process is already creating stories of apps being rejected for use of private APIs which developers are denying.

Estimated sales figures for the month of October suggest that Apple could be on track to please Wall Street expectations and sell 2.9 million Macs during the company’s first fiscal quarter of 2010 which includes the lucrative month of December.

The data released from NPD group points towards Apple selling between 2.8 and 2.9 million Macs with the Wall Street consensus sitting at 2.85 million. If those estimates come true it would put overall Mac sales up 14 percent year-over-year. NPD data for October was up 7 percent year-over-year.

The release of the NPD data was also accompanied on Wednesday by a report from Gene Munster, analyst for Piper Jaffray. The analyst warned investors that 50 percent of Mac sales in Q1 take place in December, suggesting that it was too early to tell how many Macs Apple might sell.

The analyst also noted that new desktop Macs released in October would benefit sales during the quarter, “NPD data indicates that desktop Macs were up 45% y/y in the month of Oct. In other words, the headwind that existed into the Sept. quarter due to aging Mac desktops has now turned into a tailwind for Mac units in the Dec. quarter.”

On the subject of iPod sales Munster noted that sales looked to be down 11 percent year-over-year but reassured investors that the majority of iPod sales during fiscal Q1 occur in December. “In other words,” Munster added, “we believe the actual numbers for iPod will be slightly better than NPD would suggest.” NPD numbers suggest iPod sales for the quarter of 19 to 20 million.

LED Cinema Display iSight Firmware Update 1.0 - 654K

This firmware update corrects an issue with the built-in iSight camera on the LED Cinema Display where the camera may not be recognized by applications.

DigiTimes reported on Thursday that the heavily rumoured Apple tablet will not appear until the second half of 2010. Previous rumours had suggested that the multi-touch device would see a release in Q1 2010.

DigiTimes which has had a rocky track record for Apple rumours also included in its report that Apple is bringing two tablets to market one with a “10.6-inch TFT LCD panel while the other will have a 9.7-inch OLED panel.”

Despite the report it is unlikely that Apple plans to launch two tablet models with such similar display sizes.