Apple Stuff

As well as Mark Gurman, Mikey Campbell on AppleInsider also had the same information from Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities and as well as the updated tech mentioned above, also tells us that there could be a "Smart Flash" that uses white or yellow LEDs to ensure high-quality photos. AppleInsider apparently contacted Kuo and there is some more information concerning shipment dates. Alleged dates, that is.

And the latest story on this arrived on Tuesday from Rene Ritchie with the suggestions that not only will there be an iPhone 5S in August, but that a new iPad could be with us next month (April). This report does not cite the earlier rumours but instead, "sources". We think we can read between the lines with this one and loop it back somehow.

On other rumours, I might have missed the story, but The Loop linked to an article by Peter Burrows & Olga Kharif with the header, Bloomberg bullshit and a comment beneath, "I wonder whether AAPL price will go up or down on the news that one unannounced product will be more profitable than another unannounced product."

As before, my opinion on this iWatch thing is, We shall see. I have my doubts due to the nature of the watch market, but who knows if Apple is working on another device that may be wearable and may integrate with already-existing Apple hardware. As for the Apple TV: this has been rumoured ever since Steve Jobs died and the comments appeared in Walter Isaacson's biography. He may have "cracked it" but the time in putting the theory into some practical form suggests that the dominoes have not all been lined up.

Also joining this party (sources are afraid of being left out) is Electronista who cite a claim on The Verge that the watch will run a version of iOS, which (if it exists) should be obvious, bearing in mind the background know-how, but there are apparently battery problems, sources say. But then, at the end, this also refers to the Bloomberg report (above) which had Jim Dalrymple cross (and he would know).

Also on headlines and dubious articles, Jim Dalrymple joined Rene Ritchie in a podcast this week to talk about (among other things) stupid Apple headlines going mainstream and journalistic responsibility - things I have mentioned more than once. The show notes link to a number of related items, including that Apple bites Man headline and the Macalope column, both of which I included on Monday. There: I must be doing something right.

Now here's a rumour I can deal with, although I hope it is not true. Ashraf Eassa on Seeking Alpha, has put 2 and 2 together and come up with 5.25. A reduction in the price of the 13" MacBook Pro, along with price reductions on the MacBook Air, along with the arrival of the Intel Haswell processor suggests to him that the lines are merging (no mention of the disks used: disk in MacBook Pro, more expensive SSD in MacBook Air) so perhaps the MacBook Air will disappear.

As he points out early in the article, the two machines are aimed at different groups of users, and with the ability to use up to 750 GB in the MacBook Pro, the limited nature of the SSD is not appealing to some users. I have been asked of late about additional storage by two MacBook Air users; and for both I suggested a solution like the pocket-sized 500 GB Imation disk I have. However, see the item on Seagate in Other Matters (below).

As the 13" MacBook Pro is a possible replacement for my current 15" device, the only solution with SSD for me would be Apple's Fusion Drive and this is not available (as yet) for the MacBook ranges. [My link to the article came from MacDaily News.]

With recent attempts by Wall Street to get its hands on that cash that Apple has, one of the problems that I have mentioned a number of times is that much of the cash is abroad and subject to a 30% levy if Apple were to bring that home. However, Dan Gallagher on MarketWatch, the way Apple has been stating its figures it may now be able to repatriate some $24 billion of that cash without the penalties being charged. It would seem that this may put even more pressure on Apple to give it all away. [My link for this story was from MacDaily News.]

But, not so fast. . . . Mike Schramm on TUAW reports on the comments of Warren Buffett who is not considered to be a spendthrift investor. Appearing on CNBC this week, he must have had some Wall Street analysts in tears as he made some suggestions about Apple which are in complete contradiction to what passes for thinking in Wall Street. He says that Apple should keep making money (which it does quite well of course) and thinks Apple should ignore David Eindhorn and "run the business in such a manner as to create the most value over the next five to 10 years"

Buffett also mentioned that Steve Jobs ignored his earlier advice to buy some stock back (when it was cheap) and with some homespun advice suggests to Cook, "If you could buy dollar bills for 80 cents, it's a very good thing to do" as in the end Apple and the shareholders will benefit.

Not the Wall Street naysayers.

Well not all. A local correspondent sent me a link to an article on Seeking Alpha. I used to subscribe to the Apple info on that site, but it was all too depressing, especially around the time of the last Quarterly financial report when most saw gloom from the record figures. It has been all downhill from there and many of the Wall Street experts have got their fingers burned: big losses. Serves them right. Jacob Steinberg, however, does think differently and is critical of the general Wall Street approach: those whom he calls "trend followers". Among the positives he sees are the citing of Apple as the most admired company (again), customer loyalty, iPad sales, market share, profitability, and the sense that something will be coming, whatever it is. He ends by calling Apple one of the best investments in the market.

One of the constant plaints from Wall Street (and other ovine followers) has concerned Tim Cook's suitability as CEO of Apple, ignoring the point that for much of the last 5 years he was running the show anyway. Wall Street could not control Steve Jobs, but once he was gone, Cook was seen as "other" and thus liable to fall. Almost as soon as he was officially in the chair, the wailing and gnashing of teeth began with some focussing on his soft spoken nature, his poor presentation skills - compared to Steve Jobs almost anyone has poor skills in this field, most notably the CEO of Microsoft (and his predecesor too).

As with most such memes, like the Apple is doomed idea, this has taken on a life of its own and Rocco Pendola points out (in a 2-page article on The Street) that "reality means nothing to Wall Street, the financial media and public opinion" adding that "Tim Cook has lost control of the conversation." Even Pendola has reduced confidence in Cook as has MacDaily News from where I linked, but then MDN has never really supported Cook and has made a couple of sharp comments in the past, although in the comments this time is supportive, but suggests that Apple does need to up its game. Against all that Wall Street (and High Street) chatter?

As Apple products are sought after - I have lost count of the number of times students (and others) have asked me to buy them an iPhone or iPad - Kevin Bostic reports for AppleInsider on a survey by the Yankee Group (I guess this is in the USA) that informs us that of those asked, almost half (47%) wanted the iPad. Next was an Amazon thing with 7%, and Samsung below with 6%. So much for Samsung advancing on Apple as some headlines had recently with the facts revealed in the texts below.

As a note, Samsung is planning on a big push, hoping to double its sales to 40 million for the year. How many iPads did Apple sell last quarter?

On Tuesday I followed up on comments about iMac availability here when I found that the Apple online store had revised the delivery dates for the iMac. That should please some people. Less pleased, Steven Sande on TUAW reports, are owners of older iMacs who have the NVIDIA GeForce GT 130 video card installed in their machines. Since OS X, 10.6, there have been consistent kernel panics and these have been proved to be down to a new kernel extension that was released during the lifetime of Snow Leopard and has not been fixed. Running Windows on these machines is fine as the drivers there are compatible. Apple's response - owners upgrade to a newer Mac - is about as good as Phil Schiller's comments on the iPhone 5 aluminium scratches: they all do that.

I had a Twitter response from Steve Sande myself this week when he asked about clearing space on an iPad. I had put out an item last November on how this was done for my iPhone so sent the basic information: use iTunes. Look in the apps section of the specific device and scroll down to the part that shows a panel that lists those apps that are available for sending data to (or from). By going through each of these apps in the list, it is possible to clear out a lot of unused data.

MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, Mac mini: all have been updated in recent times. But apart from a processor change, the Mac Pro has been left basically unchanged for far too long, prompting one user to come up with a FaceBook Community: We Want a New Mac Pro. Writing on MacWorld this week, Dan Frakes suggests that despite all the chatter about new products that may or may not come into existence, the Mac Pro is in need of a new model, sooner rather than later, and does not even have the rumours about it that other products (real and imaginary) do. He puts forward the idea of a mini tower form and examines the possibilities and reasoning at some length.

On Monday I linked to a story about the Lightning HDMI adapter and there was a follow up to that a few hours later when someone writing on Slashdot as Anonymous Coward explained how the adapter was developed and that Apple and Airplay were not involved. The information in the text is really quite useful and explains the technical shortcomings that had to be overcome. Anonymous Coward may actually be someone who works at Apple, but cannot post under their own name.

On the day that the iPhone was announced, I was with a few thousand others in the Moscone Center, San Francisco. An amusing moment came when, to demonstrate features of the device, Steve brought up a map with Starbucks locations and selecting one, the number was dialled. On the loudspeakers the voice of the girl who answered the phone was heard announcing Starbucks then, to great laughter, Steve ordered 4,000 lattes to go. And he ended the call. The joke has not ended yet as Allyson Kazmucha reports on iMore that Hannah, the barrista who took the call, still gets calls asking for the same order, but they did not figure it out until another news source, Fast Company, made enquiries.

I like to include tips and hints as they appear and this time Ted Landau on MacWorld has some ideas about troubleshooting the Print function, because sometimes it doesn't. Of course, his article does not include a situation like I face every day as we have a Sanyo printer at work that someone bought a few years back. Although several in the office now have Macs, this printer does not have any drivers for OS X, so they either switch to a PC or (like I do) give the file to a secretary on a thumb drive and waste her time.

While I use iCloud for certain features that it provides with the applications and devices I use, there are some shortcomings. To get round some of these, I use Dropbox, especially with the WriteRoom software that I have for the Macs and the iOS devices. I also transfer a lot of files from home to make sure that they are there on the office iMac when I arrive. Michael Grothaus on TUAW reports on the comments of Dropbox CEO Drew Houston who is critical of proprietary cloud solutions. He was particularly scathing about iCloud and on Samsung's initial approach: now they work with DropBox. That is the only way I could share a file from the Mac or the iPhone to an Android device.

Half and Half

Other Matters

I also saw later that, accepting the trend towards SSD, Dong Ngo reports that Seagate has shipped its 3rd generation hybrid drive, that it calls SSHD which like Apple's Fusion Drives has a disk and SSD incorporated into the same unit. Also unlike the Apple solution, the Seagate disk only carries 8 GB of flash so would not be able to operate as a Fusion Drive, although the prices are quite good.

Local Items

I copied the links from that spurious Delta email - there were five in all - and these showed the following:

• http://dollyparadise.dollsky.com/wps.php?v20120226
• http://www.parolamia.com/wp-content/plugins/zoaouohnkee/b.php?v20120226
• http://golfingcenteronline.com/wp-content/plugins/zbebusulear/wps.php?v20120226
• http://distrimedia.com.ua/wps.php?v20120226
• http://emulationcraft.com/wps.php?v20120226

I did not try any of these, nor do I suggest that anyone else does; but this is the sort of thing we are being asked by these criminals to link to. As a side note, I see that the USA has crept back up to the top in the latest Sophos Spam report according to H-Security. So despite all the laws and the hands on hearts about criminals in other lands, most of the spamming comes from the Land of Stuxnet.

For the second time in under a week I was in the Siam Discovery Centre this week where I found I had no 3G signal. A few days ago, I was able to link to the DTAC Wi-Fi, but on my second visit, although it was visible to the iPhone, the speed was so poor that it took several minutes to make a connection then the login page would not load correctly. I am sure I am not alone in using (or trying to use) these services there, so I later phone DTAC and let them know. I will try again next Saturday.

My own MacBook Pro has begun to creak with some of the ways I am using it, especially now that the Nikon D7000 produce larger images than the D70. Aperture has slowed to a crawl and at times has me pulling my hair out. Since late last year I have been trying to find some more memory but most stores blink and tell me, No. Only the iStudio in Central Pinklao has shown any positive approach, although they were having problems. Last week I spoke to the manager who said, "RAM", as soon as he saw me. He took me over to a MacBook Air and showed me a website that would sell me what I wanted. When I had it, he said, he would put it in. Do not go to Fortune Town, he said, Order over the phone.

The technician at work contacted Memory Today for me and ordered 2 x 4 GB modules of the 1066 MHz DDR3 RAM I needed. It had to be paid for by depositing money in a bank account (no online stuff here, eh?) and DHL would make the delivery. I am hoping it will be in my hands by Wednesday. The alternative was a new Mac; but that might happen anyway. I just saw also that the company does SSD drives.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.