World of Apple

In an email to a customer purported to be from Steve Jobs it has been acknowledged that an issue exists where third-party applications repeatedly crash on iPhones.

Many report the iPhone 2.0 firmware suddenly failing to load non-default apps regardless of their nature, briefly loading them before abruptly jumping back to the home screen.

The bug occurs both with freshly downloaded software and with updates, but is reported as never having a definite fix; although some report successfully deleting and re-downloading apps to regain access, others find the solution either having no effect or gradually decaying over time to where the apps again fail to run. Restoring the iPhone also seldom works.

Jobs replied with a one-line answer:

“This is a known iPhone bug that is being fixed in the next software update in September.”

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.

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”.

After concerns last week over Steve Jobs’ health, the man himself has spoken in private to a well-known reporter stating that his health problems weren’t “life threatening”.

According to Joe Nocera of the New York Times Jobs called him Thursday afternoon and said, “This is Steve Jobs… You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong”.

Jobs went onto explain some details about his recent health issues to Nocera but only on the basis that it was kept off the record.

According to Nocera Jobs’ health problems were more than a “common bug” but weren’t life threatening and the Apple CEO does not have a reoccurrence of cancer.

Apple has started a blog detailing the ongoing issues with MobileMe, the company’s replacement for .Mac.

Last week World of Apple detailed an issue where 1% of MobileMe users were unable to receive mail.

As the issue appears to be ongoing Steve Jobs has reportedly made a request for a blog to be setup detailing the continuing effort to resolve the issues.

An RSS feed of the blog is also available.

It has been revealed that Steve Jobs has been making use of his Apple funded private jet over the last few months.

According to Alley Insider Jobs billed Apple for $550,000 in expenses in the last three months of 2007, that cost then reportedly dropped to $30,000 in the first few months of 2008 and now an SEC filing reveals that Jobs racked up $102,000 in expenses during the June quarter.

In the past many investors have noted that increased use of Jobs’ private jet means exciting prospects are ahead as the Apple CEO does his dealings around the world face-to-face.

Ever since Steve Jobs’ bout with cancer back in 2004 investors and fans alike have had concerns of the possible return of the very rare form of pancreatic cancer.

Speculation over Jobs’ health has hit fever pitch this week after Monday’s conference call in which a company executive responded to a question about Mr. Jobs’s condition by saying that it was “a private matter”. That added to the concerns over Jobs’ weight in June following his gaunt appearance at WWDC has caused some turbulence in the Apple stock this week.

But according to the New York Times, Jobs has confirmed to several people that he is doing well and that after his initial surgery is completely cancer free.

The publication adds that Mr. Jobs has stated to people close to him that he had a surgical procedure this year to address a problem that was contributing to a loss of weight.

Top Apple executives including CEO Steve Jobs are once again facing legal action over the backdating scandal.

Last year Apple had the high profile case against the company dismissed after both the US Securities and Exchange Commission and an internal investigation.

Apple shareholders Kenneth Mahoney and Martin Vogel last week filed a new lawsuit that accuses co-founder Steve Jobs, other executives, and board members with damaging the company’s share value through backdating, causing a 14 percent drop in the company’s stock value during 2006 that wiped out about $7 billion of Apple’s worth on the market in just two weeks.

According to the claim executives dated stocks that weren’t revealed to shareholders and also falsified records.

During an interview with New York Times’ John Markoff, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has revealed some more details about Apple’s upcoming operating system “Snow Leopard” and the companies acquisition of PA Semi.

When talking about Mac OS X Snow Leopard Jobs stated that “Apple would focus principally on technology for the next generation of the industry’s increasingly parallel computer processors.”

“We’ve added over a thousand features to Mac OS X in the last five years,” he said Monday in an interview after his presentation. “We’re going to hit the pause button on new features.”

Instead, the company is going to focus on what he called “foundational features” that will be the basis for a future version of the operating system.

“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things,” he said. “I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.”

Apple, he claimed, has made a parallel-programming breakthrough.

Snow Leopard will also tap into the power of powerful GPUs that sit idle most of the time in many modern computers, “Jobs described a new processing standard that Apple is proposing called OpenCL (Open Compute Library) which is intended to refocus graphics processors on standard computing functions.”

“Basically it lets you use graphics processors to do computation,” he said. “It’s way beyond what Nvidia or anyone else has, and it’s really simple.”

Apple and Steve Jobs are currently touting Snow Leopard has featureless but a quick look at the preview pages for both the client and server reveals that this isn’t the whole truth.

The client version of Snow Leopard lists full Microsoft Exchange Support while the server version boasts read and write support for ZFS. Both considerably sought after features that are being added to Snow Leopard.

During the interview Steve Jobs also briefly mentioned PA Semi which Apple acquired back in April, at the time much speculation was thrown around.

“PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods,” he said.