World of Apple

Apple is set to open its newest Apple store in Leicester on September 4 this year.

The store which will reportedly take up 577 square metres will be located in the Highcross shopping development in Leicester, UK.

Apple is continues recruiting staff for stores in Liverpool, Belfast, Bristol and White City, London.

The newest version of Toast is here! Read all the way through the review for a chance to win a free retail box copy of Toast Titanium 9! I have been using Roxio’s Toast CD/DVD burning software ever since my conversion to the Mac platform when I was searching for a replacement for the PC-only Nero software. So, when an invitation came in to World of Apple from Roxio to review the newest version, Toast Titanium 9, I jumped at the chance and was given a copy of the program gratis from the developer.

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During the transition from .Mac to MobileMe it appears Apple has inadvertently charged customers signing up for a free trial. When customers sign up for a trial of MobileMe Apple pre-authorises a charge but it appears that many customers had that charge removed from their accounts, Apple is working to reverse the charges and sent out an email of apology to those affected offering a 30-day extension to their trial period.

Dear MobileMe Member,

Apple has identified and resolved an issue that caused an incorrect, temporary authorization hold of 121 GBP to be placed on your credit or debit card when your MobileMe trial account was created. We have addressed the issue and want to apologize for any inconvenience.

Typically when you create a new trial account, your credit or debit card is verified by authorizing a small charge (equivalent to USD $1). Unfortunately, an error caused the incorrect amount to be preauthorized for your card. Be assured that this is not a charge, but only an authorization hold. The hold is released by the card-issuing bank after a predetermined period, usually between a week and a month. Where possible, Apple is working to have these holds removed earlier.

To show our appreciation for your continued loyalty, we have extended your free trial period by 30 days. This extension is in addition to the 30-day extension of which you were notified on July 16, for a total of 120 days of free MobileMe service.

Look for the extension to be reflected in your account settings in the next few weeks. You may now enjoy MobileMe free of charge until [November 8, 2008], after which your annual paid subscription will begin.

Thank you for being a MobileMe customer.

Sincerely,
The MobileMe Team

Last week Apple sent out an email apologising for the problematic and slow transition from .Mac to MobileMe and offered every user a 30-day extension to their subscription.

Apple is beginning to exhibit signs that a notebook refresh may be close, previous reports have pointed towards Apple revising the MacBook in calendar Q308.

The Chinese publication, Commercial Times is now reporting that Apple has increased orders for “notebook-use printed circuit boards” by up to 2% for the forthcoming quarter (July - September).

In addition to this Mac Rumors is noting that Apple has told Best Buy that they will have limited MacBook shipments over the next two weeks.

On Thursday Apple showed off its first Apple Store in China to the media. The store which is situated in a new retail development known as the Village at Sanlitun Northeast of Beijing.

The Apple store will open at 10am on July 19.

The Wall Street Journal has posted some pictures from the media opening day and as always ifoAppleStore is offering complete coverage of the store opening.

“This is the first of many stores we will open in China,” said Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vice president of retail, in remarks at the store. He later added that Apple will open stores “in Beijing, in Shanghai and beyond,” and confirmed that another store will open in Beijing’s Qianmen area, a shopping street south of Tiananmen Square that has been renovated ahead of the Olympic Games, which begin next month.

Over the last 24 hours two big names in research have released figures for the PC industry, one putting Apple in third place the other just behind.

Gartner is reporting that Apple is sitting pretty at number three on the U.S. shipments chart shipping 8.5% of the countries PCs in the second quarter of 2008. That represents 38.1% growth over the same quarter in 2007 for Apple. The industry growth pace is said to be around 4.2%.

Although Gartner is placing Apple ahead of Acer in third place, IDC is putting the two companies in joint third position, giving Apple a 7.8% market share. IDC puts Apple’s year-over-year growth at 31.7% against an industry average of just 3.6%.

These figures just represent shipments in the U.S., Apple is yet to break into the top five vendors worldwide.

Apple has today announced that it will hold its fiscal year 2008 third quarter financial results call on Monday July 21 at 2pm PDT/5pm EDT.

The live audio webcast will be accessible through Apple’s website at here.

Apple has today sent an email to MobileMe customers with an apology and an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription for free. MobileMe launched late last week but suffered issues causing online services to be down for over 24 hours.

Apple also admitted in the email that use of the term “push” when talking about Macs and PCs syncing to the service was misleading.

Below is the email that Apple sent to customers.

We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.

Although core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications had lots of problems initially. Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running.

Another snag we have run into is our use of the word “push” in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella. While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe “cloud,” changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices. So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word “push” until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.

We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. Your extension will be reflected in your account settings within the next few weeks.
We hope you enjoy your new suite of web applications at me.com, in addition to keeping your iPhone and iPod touch wirelessly in sync with these new web applications and your Mac or PC.

Thank you,
The MobileMe Team

On launch day ExtremeTech was able to speak briefly with Apple’s head of iPod and iPhone marketing, Greg Joswiak. The site was able to ask Joswiak about the lack of copy and paste functionality and David Pogue’s comments last week that the GPS unit was too small for proper navigation.

When asked about the lack of copy and paste functionality on the iPhone, Joswiak didn’t fully dismiss the function, stating that Apple wasn’t against the idea but had a prioritised list of features and were only able to get so far down the list with this product release.

Finally on David Pogue’s comments that the iPhone’s GPS antenna was too small for turn-by-turn navigation, Joswiak stated that this was untrue, continuing that there are many “complicated issues” surround driving applications but ended with “It will evolve. I think our developers will amaze us”.

It has emerged that Apple appears to be testing a newer version of the iPhone 2.0 software which was officially released to the public last Friday. Boy Genius Report is noting that its server logs point towards users visiting the site using a version of the iPhone OS numbered 2.0.1. Two builds are said to be in circulation, 5B101 for 2G iPhone and 5B103 iPhone 3G.

The server requests are said to come from the San Francisco Bay Area, near the Cupertino headquarters for Apple and Atlanta, AT&T’s home.

As the software appears to be internal, very little is known about what the minor update fixes. But AppleInsider appears to have got its hands on a screenshot (see picture).