Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 13, 2007 by CyberNet.

The rumors were right, Leopard has been delayed again. This time, until at least October. Apple’s official announcement says:

“The iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS® X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.”

You can definitely tell where Apple’s priorities are right now. Maybe that shift in focus came when Apple dropped “computer” from their name back in January. When Apple released their first quarter results in January, 48% of their sales came from the iPod alone.  Add in iTunes sales, and the soon to be iPhone, and their computers will definitely be last on the totem pole.

Their focus tends to point towards potential new customers that they’ll scoop up in the future instead of an equal focus on both the past loyal customers who are just waiting for new software, and the new ones.

If you’ll recall, Leopard was originally supposed to ship before Vista, and then it got moved to right around when Vista was going to get released.  After that didn’t happen, it was pushed to Spring 07’, and now at the earliest, it will be an October 07’ release.

What’s also ironic is that two weeks ago, rumor had it that Leopard was going to be pushed back to October 2007, but because of Vista.  It was said that Apple wanted the new operating system to support Vista through an integrated version of Boot Camp.  But then a week later, Boot Camp 1.2 was released to work with Vista. The rumor was at least half correct.

Or maybe there is more truth to that.  Users are reporting problems with the new Boot Camp 1.2 software, even though it’s supposed to support Vista.  It sounds to me like there’s a lot going on that Apple needs to iron out before Leopard will be ready for its grand entrance.

Also funny: Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet says that if she were Microsoft, she’d start a new campaign – “Cupertino, start your photocopiers!” This of course, mocks Apple’s previous campaign, “Redmond, start your photocopiers.”Their excuse is that they pulled their engineers from Leopard to the iPhone project, much like what caused the Vista delay when Microsoft pulled engineers to work on XP Service Pack 2.  Their campaign would go something like, “Who’s copying who now, huh? We thought of the not-enough-engineers excuse way back in 2004!”

Source: eWeek.com (Thanks for the tip CoryC)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

First Leopard was delayed, now iPhone too?Mozilla Updates The Firefox 2 Release ScheduleVista vs. LeopardCyberNet’s Year in Review: September-OctoberThis Just In: Vista & Leopard Both Suck!

This week’s Gadget Lab podcast is all about touchscreens. That’s how you know you’re really living in the post-PC era.

Special guest Duncan Geere of Wired UK joins Dylan Tweney to talk about this week’s big news from Hewlett-Packard. The hardware giant on Wednesday launched its answer to the iPad, the TouchPad, which has a 9.7-inch touchscreen, a dual-core processor, a front-facing camera for video-conferencing, stereo speakers, a gyroscope and accelerometer sensors, Bluetooth compatibility, and support for Adobe Flash.

Despite that list of compelling features, Duncan can’t imagine buying one for one reason: the lack of apps. Plus, Apple’s iPad 2 is probably right around the corner.

HP also launched two new smartphones, the Veer and the Pre 3. Both phones include a 5-megapixel camera and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and both include support for Flash. The smaller Veer has a 2.6-inch touchscreen, and the bigger Pre 3 has a 3.6-inch display.

We move on to another tablet OS: Android Honeycomb. Due for release this year, Honeycomb specializes in 3-D acceleration to drive hardcore gaming and snazzy user-interface features. Several manufacturers have already signed up to make Honeycomb-powered tablets.

Duncan closes the podcast with his experience using the iPhone in Britain. It turns out that back when the iPhone was just on one carrier, reception was terrible there, too, but it’s much better now that it’s shared on multiple networks.

Maybe that gives us hope in the United States, as the Verizon iPhone just went on sale Thursday, officially ending AT&T’s exclusive grip on Apple’s handset.

—

You can listen to the audio-only version of the show here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast #103
http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio0103.mp3

Or download the OGG version of Gadget Lab podcast #103.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our unholy on-camera talent, subscribe to the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds

Bloomberg is citing — you guessed it — “people who have been briefed on the plans” as saying that Apple is hard at work on taking the iPhone downmarket with a new model that’s roughly one-third smaller than the existing iPhone 4, possibly with the intent on delivering it midyear using mostly carryover components from the iPhone 4 to keep pricing down. Thing is, Bloomberg says that Apple is looking at launching the “cheaper” model at $200 off contract, which would be the same as the 16GB iPhone 4 on contract currently. Let’s not understate the fact that $200 off contract is dirt cheap by modern smartphone standards, which means Apple would have to be using every scrap of its enormous economies of scale to pull that off. In all likelihood, in fact, it’d have to abandon the 3.5-inch Retina Display — it might be too big for a “smaller” model anyhow. The pub goes on to say that the device could’ve been delayed or scrapped altogether since its source saw the device last year, but it’s something to keep an eye on; after all, Apple’s probably leaving money on the table right now by failing to go after the midrange with a current-generation handset, so this could be its golden opportunity.

Moving on, they’re also saying Apple’s working on a dual-mode iPhone that’d work on both CDMA and GSM — not a surprise at all, really (if anything, it was a little surprising to us that Apple didn’t kill off the existing GSM iPhone 4 and replace all SKUs with CDMA / GSM ones when it announced the Verizon model). There’s no mention of whether this model would have any manner of 4G support, but CDMA, GSM, and LTE in a single phone — with at least five bands, if not more — would be pretty wild indeed.

Finally, Bloomberg says (and our own sources have corroborated) that Apple’s working on a so-called “Universal SIM” technology that would eliminate physical SIMs altogether and make using the iPhone on different networks a simple matter of provisioning, not unlike American CDMA networks today. Of course, this rumor’s been through the mill before — and has already been killed off — so it’s hard to say whether this is something Apple is actively working on or has been shelved. The device independence afforded by the SIM has been one of the chief advantages of GSM networks around the world over the past twenty years, and we’d hate to see Apple succeed in killing that off in favor of some sort of locked-up iTunes nonsense, but let’s be honest: if anyone could pull off that kind of coup, it’d be Cupertino. More on all these rumors as we hear it.

Bloomberg: Apple working on ‘cheaper, smaller’ and dual-mode iPhones, trying to kill SIMs along the way originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Bloomberg  | Email this | Comments

Apple has made a new version of iOS available for download. iOS v4.2.6 doesn’t bring new newspaper subscription payments, or fix AirPlay to work properly with third-party apps. It doesn’t add gestures to the iPad. In fact, it does almost nothing, unless you are the lucky recipient of the new Verizon iPhone which officially arrives today.

Apple’s release notes are infamously sparse, and this is no exception. Here is the entirety of the “What’s new” section on MacUpdate:

Fixes a bug to ensure Personal Hotspot data usage is accurately reported (for Verizon iPhones).

The update, previously available as a direct download to patch review units, should be ready for you when you plug in your new Verizon iPhone 4 today and is, as ever, free.

iOS 4.2.6 [MacUpdate]

See Also:

• Hands-On With Verizon iPhone Hot Spot
• Verizon iPhone's Chipset Hints at Unified Network Support
• IOS 4.2 Update 'Delayed,' Despite No Official Launch Date
• Apple iOS 4.2 Arrives, Makes Find My iPhone Free

It’s February, and we still haven’t seen the iPad 2. Given Apple’s traditional one year product release schedule, it seems crazy to suggest that the iPad 3 might actually hit store shelves before this holiday season, but there you have it. While the rest of us are still obsessively examining leaked photos of iPad 2 parts, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber is heralding the release of its successor. 

Writing in response to yesterday’s HP Touchpad announcement, Gruber states, “If my theory is right, they’re not only going to be months behind the iPad 2, but if they slip until late summer, they might bump up against the release of the iPad 3.”

Gruber clarified his statement in a followup post, writing, “my gut feeling is that Apple will move the iPad to a September release schedule, alongside the iPods. But they wouldn’t want to wait over a year and a half from the announcement of the original iPad to announce the second one–not with these stakes, and not with so many serious competitors trying their best to catch up.”

The words “gut feeling” are important here. As Gruber states earlier in the post, “when I say I’m guessing, I’m really guessing.” These are speculations of a blogger who doesn’t claim to have any special insight into this release schedule. It’s an interesting concept, nonetheless, with the company announcing two separate iPads in the same year to correct what he sees as a faulty release schedule.

According to this theory, the iPad 2 will ship in April. It will be thinner and lighter with more RAM, more storage, and a front-facing camera. iOS will be announced in March and shipped in June.

The iPad 3, meanwhile, will start shipping in September, alongside a new iPod touch. Gruber thinks the third version won’t kick the iPad 2 out of the line–instead it will be a high end version of tablet, sort of the MacBook Pro to the iPad 2’s MacBook, perhaps with a higher resolution display.