By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit

Apple Stuff

This was carried by a number of online sources including Jordan Kahn on 9to5 Mac in which the letter is translated and the basic points of the changes being made are highlighted.

Needless to say, the Chinese media think this is wonderful and are now praising the decision and the man who made it, Tim Cook, Mikey Campbell reports on AppleInsider. That will of course pass by the pundits who will see weakness, when Apple has anlaysed, found a solution and the huge market that is China is open again. As I looked through the news feeds I saw that several other sources had the story as well including MacWorld, and Don Resinger on CNET.

This sort of apology is not new for companies that have to operate in China, Bloomberg reports in an article that examines some of the background and includes the interesting point about the disputed warranty work that, "Samsung Electronics Co. (005930), the world's largest maker of smartphones, repairs or replaces individual parts and will reset the warranty if it replaces the entire device within the initial one-year period, said Chris Jung, a Seoul-based spokesman." Instead of being a sign of weakness from Cook, this article seems to show understanding of the necessity for those who wish to operate in China.

Of course now that it has been proved that Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs once more, the analysts are aghast and of course, everyone went into a tailspin. The shares dropped - along with a lot of tech shares - April is, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "the cruellest month." That was followed by a reduction in its investment in Apple by Fidelity Contrafund by 10%, Neil Hughes reports on AppleInsider: from "11.56 million shares. . . at the end of 2012 to 10.43 million shares at the end of February."

Sooner or later, Apple shares will steady at a mid-range price and the company will get on with what it does best. Although with the panic-level interest that has been seen in the last few years, this is not going to happen without some pain. My concern, as I wrote a few weeks ago, is that the lower price of the shares - especially if they continue to be held down - could make Apple an attractive proposition for a corporate raider, or a large company that wants some form of street cred (say Samsung, or a reworked Sony) and all that would succeed in doing would be to break up the dynamic of the core of the company: the people.

In the meantime, we have the next quarterly financial results to get through and this will start all the analysts hand-wringing again as they already have judged Apple's gross margins will fall, even if income rises. Nonetheless, Mark Gurman reports on 9to5 Mac that Apple has announced the conference call for the Q2 2013 results will be on 23 April (St George's Day and Shkespeare's birthday) at 2pm Cupertino time which is about 4am here, so I will catch the reports when I wake up.

More details on this event are available on the Apple Investor Relations pages, including a link to the audio webcast.

I had to be quite careful with stories on Monday as it was 1 April and I almost got caught out with a couple, like the IBM supercomputer that was being retired (that was true). Another story that appears to be true was online late Monday and concerned an apparent meeting between San Francisco's District Attorney George Gascón and Apple's government liaison Michael Foulkes over a theoretical "kill switch" that the DA wants to be included with all phones to reduce the number of thefts. In an article by Daniel Eran Dilger on AppleInsider, according to the information leaking out, Foulkes told the DA (who promptly blabbed) that the next two iPhone models were already in the pipeline and apparently preceded Tim Cook. If that is the case, Dilger argues, the case that Apple was rudderless the moment Jobs died, is actually a little thin. What else is to come? Dilger asks.

One story that I almost took up was on the Facebook page for "We want a new Mac Pro". Others were fooled by this, but it was too coincidental to run the risk. Stephen Shankland (who looks as if he did get caught) reports on the prank that suggested Apple was about to recruit former Mac Users who had switched to Windows, mainly in the aftermath of the changes made to Final Cut Pro, and enrol them in a Bounce Back Program. The spoof was perfectly balanced and had some real possibilities - the best jokes do - especially with the timing of Apple's new Final Cut Pro updates and the push with that application. AppleInsider also put their hands up to being caught out by this.

Not an April Fool's joke, but news arrived Tuesday evening via Alex Allegro on 9to5 Mac about a new range of NVidia high end graphics cards: the GeForce 700M series. There are 5 new cards and the suggestion is that these may find their way into new iMacs and MacBook Pro computers. The article has much more information and a copy of the press release.

When I first saw that item on NVidia, I wondered if this were something that could be used in the rumoured new Mac Pro - the real one, not the April Fool joke. Right now, Apple is in one of those lull times: we have some products updated, but we suspect that something (or some things) is on the way. We may of course expect to see iPhone, iPad, notebooks and other devices updated, but what about that next big thing that the pundits are saying Apple must do if it is to survive. Read the last part of that sentence again and just grasp the bad argument there: but this is what many are writing. One possibility for the next big thing has surfaced with BusinessWeek putting 2 and 2 together and thinking that maybe they have an answer. Patently Apple tells us that the recruitment of John Morrell from Yale University (formerly on the Segway team) last year made some people sit up: and the obvious question is, "But why?"

Why would an expert in robotics and machine interaction leave a successful academic career and go to somewhere like Apple. Maybe there was something of the "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?" put to him and he decided that that at Apple he might make a difference. Jack Purcher is sceptical, although one has to consider that these human interface experts (there are others) are in Apple's stable right now, and something will come of it, even if they are working on pure research currently.

Another report on this appeared on AppleInsider in an item by Neil Hughes who brings in some other technologies and ideas floating around: joining the dots?

As ever, once an update is out of the door, another one is being worked on. So as we now have 10.8.3 it is no surprise to hear, for example in an item by Mark Gurman on 9to5 Mac that 10.8.4 has been seeded to developers, but as yet there are not many details.

Developers? Ah yes, there is that conference later this year - probably June - when there are so few places for so many applicants that there are often tears. Or even anger. Last year with the way the process was begun as the clock passed midnight far in the East, that meant that many in the west were out of luck. And as a great many of those were in California, San Francisco even, and other parts of Silicon Valley, there was a lot of venting when they realised they had had no chance from the word go. This year, Apple is to change that, so Michael Collins writes on TidBits, with 500 seats reserved which will then be auctioned off. If I were a developer - particularly one from California - wanting to attend, I think I would still be less than satisfied with the way that the system works. Perhaps Apple should just put it all online at a specified time and leave the rest to chance.

At the last conference he who shall not be named (Sc**t F******ll) demonstrated a number of features of iOS 6 including the Maps app which works fine if you are in the Moscone Center, and Passbook. Not that I have been near an airport in the last few months, and there seem to be precious few coupons that I can scan into the iPhone here. However, Allyson Kazmucha on iMore has a few apps that might be of help for those who are trying to see if this app does what it is supposed to.

Something else that Sc**t F******ll had his sticky fingers on was Siri and although this was always designated, Beta, it has been in need of development. Now, Dara Kerr reports, Apple has posted a number of jobs that seem to point to a new effort on Siri. Note also that Apple was recruiting recently for people to improve the Maps app: another Sc**t F******ll gem.

As a note, both Apple Maps and the Google Maps app are hopelessly wrong for parts of Bangkok, not the least with the recent expansion of the BTS Skytrain service to my door. Both use satellite images that show a concrete ramp instead of the railway system that is running there; but when I looked closely I saw that the two apps are not using the same images. There are several differences particularly with traffic flows. Whatever: Google and Apple are using really old data for this area. I estimate about 18 months old or more.

There were so many rumours on the iPhone 5S (or 6 - we do not really know) this time which just repeat what I included on Monday: June announcement, summer release; a number also repeated the other rumour about a cheap iPhone. Nothing new hear, same rumours being recycled for the want of news (and need for hits?)/

More rumours appeared in a newsfeed link from John Gruber on Daring Fireball that he took from a Twitter feed service called Branch. The two particular items he liked - rumours of course - are that

• iOS 7 is running behind, and engineers have been pulled from OS X 10.9 to work on it. (Let me know if you've heard this song before.); and
• Regarding Jony Ive and iOS: Word on the street is that iOS engineers with carry privileges all have some sort of polarizing filter on their iPhone displays, such that it greatly decreases viewing angles, thus making it difficult for observers to see the apparently rather significant system-wide UI overhaul.

Things may be coming together for real now. Seth Weintraub on 9to5 Mac takes up that first Gruber comment and puts in some of his own links, including some input from MC Siegler.

As we reported earlier, it is expected that the data center that Apple has in Reno is to come online fairly soon an Daniel Eran Dilger has another report from the site, this time about the way Apple is providing a source of clean, reliable water: the site has a lot of underground water available and storage facilities are being constructed for this as it is drawn.

A hint on Messages, that Allyson Kazmucha calls iMessage. Sometimes there are problems with this especially account verification, so she looks at some of the ways this might be rectified.

A new movie biopic on Steve Jobs with Justin Long ("I'm a Mac") as Steve, is to be released on 15 April on Funny or Die. Called iSteve, there is a trailer for this available now.

Half and Half

A number of sites, including Electronista, are reporting that the rubber-banding patent that I thought was so novel when I saw it demonstrated at San Francisco - I got my hands on one of the first iPhones the day after the release and this was one of the things I tried: so original. Well, the US Patent Office doesn't think so. We reported a while back that they were intending to disallow the patent and now it is reported that there is a final decision. This of course had Samsung's lawyers running to Judge Lucy Koh to get damages reduced. Although Florian Mueller on Foss Patents has a lot mre detail on this I still cannot work out why the patent was rejected.

And a company called Hearpod is to sue Apple over the name "earpod", Patently Apple reports. Hearpod are a maker of devices for those whose hearing is not perfect.

Other Matters

Local Items

While I was trying to use the internet on Tuesday morning I was also busy writing an item on a new Photo App I had found the day before called, Handy Photo. Love this. Looks good; well designed; properly thought out; and with some useful tools.

When I came back from lunch and shopping it was fine: the Internet was sailing along as it is supposed to. However, in the evening, there was a slight shock when the newsreader that I use showed that there were some 600 or more new items to read. When I had a look, I saw that 540 were from the eXtensions site and the RSS feeds from back as far as the beginning of December 2011 up to January this year had all been refreshed. Had someone's cache somewhere on the web just been reloaded?

Late news

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.