World of Apple

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Apple CEO, Steve Jobs has revealed some facts and figures about the App Store which has now been live for one month.

According to Jobs more than 60 million applications have been downloaded for the iPhone and iPod touch, roughly 2 million per day. Revenue from those 60 million applications was $30 million, 70% went to developers, 30% was kept by Apple.

According to the Wall Street Journal if Apple continues at its current sales pace then the company stands to take in at least $360 million over the year in revenue.

“This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon,” Jobs said. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software,” he added.

Jobs also commented on stories last week that Apple had built an internal “kill-switch” into the iPhone which could allow the company to remotely disable applications.

“Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull,” he said.

Late last week Apple released the second build of Mac OS X 10.5.5 to the developer community, here are the seed notes that accompanied that release:

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Just one week after Apple seeded the first build of Mac OS X 10.5.5 to developers the company has released a second build of the next update to Mac OS X Leopard.

The latest build labelled 9F9 packs a further 24 bug fixes pushing the number of fixes past 100 in Mac OS X 10.5.5.

Fixes in this build are reported to be aimed at Address Book, Mail.app and syncing services.

Developers have also been asked to focus testing on Directory Services, Fonts, mDNSResponder, Screen Sharing, and X11 as well as the items from last weeks build.

Mac OS X 10.5.5 is estimated for release in late-September.

During last months financial conference call Apple announced that the iPhone 3G would debut in additional countries on August 22nd but gave no further details.

Today a slew of carriers began announcing that they’d be offering the iPhone 3G.

So far the following twenty countries have had official announcements:

• Argentina (America Movil)
• Chile (Claro/America Movil, Movistar/Telefonica)
• Colombia (America Movil)
• Czech Republic (Telefonica O2)
• Ecuador (America Movil)
• El Salvador (America Movil)
• Estonia (TeliaSonera, EMT)
• Guatemala (America Movil)
• Honduras (America Movil)
• Hungary (T-Mobile)
• India (Bharti Airtel, Vodafone)
• Latvia (TeliaSonera)
• Lithuania (TeliaSonera)
• Paraguay (America Movil)
• Peru (America Movil)
• Philippines (Globe Telecom)
• Poland (Orange, Era)
• Romania (Orange)
• Slovakia (T-Mobile, Orange)
• Uruguay (America Movil)

Sources: setteB.it and VentureBeat.

After this mornings report from Ars Technica that Steve Jobs had sent an internal email explaining the issues with MobileMe the site has now published the email in full.

Team,

The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour. There are several things we could have done better:

– MobileMe was simply not up to Apple’s standards – it clearly needed more time and testing.

– Rather than launch MobileMe as a monolithic service, we could have launched over-the-air syncing with iPhone to begin with, followed by the web applications one by one – Mail first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail) by Calendar, then 30 days later by Contacts.

– It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.

We are taking many steps to learn from this experience so that we can grow MobileMe into a service that our customers will love. One step that I can share with you today is that the MobileMe team will now report to Eddy Cue, who will lead all of our internet services – iTunes, the App Store and, starting today, MobileMe. Eddy’s new title will be Vice President, Internet Services and he will now report directly to me.

The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services. And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.

Steve

According to Ars Technica, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has recently sent out an email to employees admitting the issues with MobileMe saying that the services launch was “not up to Apple standards”.

In the email Jobs reportedly acknowledges many of MobileMe’s flaws and explains how the entire launch could have been handled better, adding that more time and testing was also needed.

Jobs wrote that MobileMe’s services should have been rolled out slowly instead of launching it “as a monolithic service”.

“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” Jobs wrote in an email to employees. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence”.

Additionally Eddy Cue is now heading up the MobileMe team, cue who previously was in charge of the iTunes Store is now in charge of Internet services, including MobileMe, the App Store and the iTunes Store.

“The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services,” Jobs says. “And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year”.

Apple has today posted version 2.0.1 of the iPhone OS software.

The description of the update only states that it includes “Bug Fixes” but after using an iPhone with the new software World of Apple can confirm that noticeably improved is iTunes backing up and keyboard typing in SMS.app.

O2 announced during their Q2 financial results last week that the company has gained over 137,000 new subscribers who are on a monthly contract. The new subscribers were reportedly gained solely from the iPhone.

The figure represents a 80.8% increase in subscribers for the same quarter the year before.

Additionally O2 stated that they have a “multi-year” contract with Apple to sell the iPhone exclusively in the UK after rumours pointed towards Orange picking up the exclusivity before the years end. Adding that the iPhone had not been on sale for a full year in the UK.

Last week Apple issued an advisement bulletin to its channel partners noting a production decrease of iPods and certain Mac models. The resulting decrease in production will cause a supply shortage in the coming weeks.

Apple informed resellers that they should place orders for approximately 4 weeks worth of their top selling iPod models adding that supplies could become very limited within the next week.

In addition to warning of iPod shortages Apple also warned resellers to place orders for at least 3 weeks worth of stock for existing Mac notebooks, specifically mentioning the MacBook and MacBook Pro but not the MacBook Air.

Such advisories are usually a good indication of revisions to the mentioned products.

Apple has today released Security Update 2008-005 for users of Mac OS X Server 10.4, Mac OS X 10.4.11, Mac OS X Server 10.5, and Mac OS X 10.5.4.

The update includes many security improvements but of particular attention is that Apple has fixed a serious DNS/BIND server vulnerability where an attacker could cause a Mac OS X DNS server to direct clients to forged websites.

• Mac OS X Leopard - 65 MB
• Mac OS X Tiger (Intel) - 143 MB
• Mac OS X Tiger (PPC) - 88MB
• Mac OS X Server (Intel) - 180 MB
• Mac OS X Server (PPC) - 135 MB