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Steve Jobs, Apple (AAPL) Inc's iconic leader has made TIME Magazines Most Influential People in the world list for the third straight year. Jobs was listed at No. 95.
In TIME's online polling where readers can rate the Influential People, Jobs came in at No. 11 with 27,484 votes.
AppleInsider has the scoops on the eagerly anticipated Ultra Portable MacBook which they claim will come later in 07 - early 08.
Here's what AppleInsider claims to be fact so far:
More commentary and rumor at their site!
According to Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research, Apple 's (AAPL) iTunes is close to landing the Beatles onto it's virtual shelf. Now just about everyone who purchases music online realizes that the Beatles and possibly Led Zeppelin are the last hold outs in getting their music online.
Gartenberg does state that music fans that want Beatles music on their iPod will just go out and buy the CD. He also acknowledges that the announcement of the Beatles finally releasing the material to digital downloads wouldn't be earth shattering for consumers as this move is more important for digital music services more than anything else.
So will iTunes get the Beatles before everyone else? No one is sure, but there is speculation that Apple Corp, the record label that holds all Beatles recordings will release it to all digital download services including iTunes at the same time.
Listen to the interview with Michael Gartenberg here.
Ever since Apple (AAPL) Inc's stock broke 100, it seems to keep breaking it's 52 week records each day. Today it touched 110 before edging down a bit to end the day at 109.36.
How high will Apple go? Well, with the iPhone set to debut shortly, WWDC in the wings, Leopard Beta or Release shortly and probably a few other products not even on the radar... we think Apple is poised to do quite well in the market.
Just like waiting for the iPhone to arrive... we'll wait and see.
Interestingly the "step-up" model in white is priced at $1299 has the exact same features as the "top of the line" model in black EXCEPT for a slighly larger HD (160 gigs compared to 120 gigs) at $1499. So if you want black, you'll pay a premium for it. We still think that the extra $200 is worth it for the larger drive and exclusive black color.
Other than that, the ultrathin, ultrabright widescreen wonder is unchanged and it can be yours TODAY! These models are beginning to look so attractive that I just may upgrade my MacBook Pro (core duo) unless Apple upgrades the MacBook Pro line soon....
ah we'll just wait and see.
iTunes just annouced today that they'll be selling Paul McCartney's latest album, "Memory Almost Full", when it's released on June 5.
What's the big deal you ask? Well the prolific Beatle's tunes haven't existed in the digital realm unless you've either ripped it yourself or got them from a "different" source.
iTunes customers who pre-order the album will get a bonus music video, "Dance Tonight", as well as the albums first single, "Ever Present Past". The album will also come with a digital booklet.
In addition to the new album, McCartney's entire catalog of 25 solo albums will also be available for purchase. We believe these will all be DRM free since the holding company is EMI.
"Paul McCartney is one of the greatest musicians of all time, and we're extremely excited to offer his first digitally distributed album on iTunes," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.
"'Memory Almost Full' is a very personal album for me, and I'm thrilled to let fans experience it in a whole new way," said Paul McCartney. "There's no better time to make this music available through iTunes."
It's a good thing I've switched from Freehand to Adobe Illustrator because Adobe finally gave the axe to it's brother, Macromedia Freehand.
Adobe acquired Macromedia a while back and during that time there was speculation of which products would be saved and which would never see the light of day again. Since the companies competed with each other previously, there was bound to be product overlap and sadly one of the applications was bound to go.
I've been using Freehand since the early 90's when it first came out. It was very intuitive an easy to use compared to Adobe's Illustrator. But ever since Adobe acquired Macromedia, they've let the app sit out a while with no updates at all and eventually it became unreliable to use. I forced myself to use Illustrator, although it wasn't fun, it was doable... since there really was no alternative!
For those of you who will need to make the change, Adobe has made a "migration guide" for Freehand devotees.
Farewell Freehand!
PiperJaffray analyst Gene Munster estimated that Apple (aapl) may come up short in iPod sales this quarter. Munster calculated that the iPod maker would sell approximately 9.5 million iPods, which is below the 9.8 million expected.
Munster states that the coming of the iPhone is probably of more importance to investors right now than the small drop in sales of the iPod.
Munster then stated that Apple's upcoming WWDC conference in San Francisco is a wild card but he's expecting a few things:
- Full demonstration of Leopard, including a demo of how Leopard will integrate Windows interoperability
- New MacBook Pro's. Munster stated that Apple is overdue for an update to the beloved MacBook Pro line.
"On average the pro-level laptops are updated every 182 days," Munster says. "And the current models were launched 209 days ago."
- New iMac? The analyst also stated that the iMac was due for a refresher. Other rumor sites have stated a new iMac form factor / enclosure back in March, but nothing has materialized to give it substance until today.
Munster also thinks that the iPhone will not be debuting at WWDC, but rather at a totally separate event. This would make sense, since it is the most anticipated product in a long, long time.
Just in case you missed it, Apple posted a Leopard Server sneak peak a while back but we felt it's a good time to start taking another look at whats to come in the next Server edition of OS X.
Seems that Leopard server is going to be chock full of new services including: iCal Server, Wiki Server, Spotlight Server, Pod Cast Producer, iChat Server 2, OpenDirectory 2, and it will also be 64 bit!
A few of our friends got to see a demo the other day and were quite impressed. We're hoping that Apple also addressed a lot of security issues, especially with the daemons like ftp and upgrading to Apache2. We can only hope that these come pre-installed out of the box with a GUI that makes security easy to manage.
UBS analyst Ben Reitzes stated Apple (AAPL) had impressive laptop sales figures for the month of April. Apple did 94% more than what it did last year in April, which is just about three times the sales growth of PC notebooks.
He also noted that iPod sales were down 3% compared to April of last year but what do you expect when there hasn't been a significant update for a long time? Not to mention the anticipation of that shiny new iPhone!
Mr. Reitzes suggests the increase in laptop sales is due to "momentum" of Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro. The latest update to the MacBook line will surely help Apple's bottom line as well.
We're getting reports that some Apple retail stores have blocked the popular social networking site MySpace in order to reduce loitering in Apple Stores.
We're not sure how true this is but we'll go to one of the local stores today to confirm it. We're curious what they're using to block MySpace at the stores. In the meantime, if you're reading this at an Apple Store and you are indeed blocked from MySpace, you may want to try a proxy site to get around it. Something like this just might work!
UPDATE 9:56am HST: Yep it's true. MySpace banned in all Apple Retail locations!
From News.com:
A statement from Apple Friday confirmed this. "Nearly 2 million people visit Apple stores every week," the statement read. "We want to provide everyone a chance to test-drive a Mac, so we are no longer offering access to MySpace in our stores." According to an Apple representative, the News Corp.-owned MySpace is the only site that has been blocked.
Steve Jobs (Apple Inc.) and Bill Gates (Microsoft) are scheduled to do a joint interview tomorrow night at the fifth edition of D: All Things Digital. Walt Mossberg (Uncle Walt) and Kara Swisher will be doing the honors for this event.
The interview is said to be a no-holds-barred question and answer session. We're thinking that Mossberg and Swisher are the right people to interview Jobs and Gates and we're hoping for some great Q&A! We can't wait!
Symantec warns of an unpatched Windows sharing security hole:
Hackers can attack Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X by exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in the open-source Samba file- and print-sharing software that's included with the operating system, Symantec Corp. said today. [...] "The DeepSight Threat Analyst Team successfully exploited the heap corruption vulnerability on a fully patched Mac OS X 10.4.9 system running the default Samba 3.0.10 application," said Symantec, in an alert to customers of its threat network. "Exploitation differs from what has been demonstrated in public exploits; however, it is likely that other researchers would be capable of quickly overcoming the technical quirks associated with the platform."
Although Mac OS X doesn't turn on Samba by default, Macs that share a network with Windows PCs could be at risk, Symantec warned. Because Apple has not released a Samba update since 2005, users must upgrade to the latest, and secure version, themselves.
Best thing to do is to disable and wait for Apple to patch it, or patch it yourself.
Recently, I turned on the firewall on a clients OS X Server 10.4 installation because there were many attempts to hack into it. I went through and configured the firewall so that any necessary ports were open, and walked away thinking all was well.
Well it wasn't. There were a few clients who couldn't connect via ftp or ftp took a long time to respond after connecting. I realize that ftp is an insecure way of transmitting information, but this client had his hands tied since many of his users don't have an sftp client.
After a bit of troubleshooting, I discovered that the reason the clients were having a hard time connecting to the ftp server: You need to open more than ports 20 and 21 for ftp to work through a firewall.
So what did we do to make things work again? Read more after the cut.
Continue reading "Mac OS X Server, Firewall and ftp problems... and a solution" »
Just as expected, Apple today released iTunes 7.2 which allows users to purchase DRM free music from participating labels. Music sold without DRM will have a higher quality encoding and no limitiations.
"The first time you buy an iTunes Plus song, you specify whether to make all future purchases iTunes Plus versions (when available). You can change this setting by accessing your account information on the iTunes Store. If you already have iTunes Store purchases that are now available as iTunes Plus downloads, you may upgrade your existing purchases. To do so, visit the iTunes Store and follow the onscreen instructions."
Get it here:
iTunes 7.2 Macintosh
iTunes 7.2 Windows
We're not saying that anyone that reads MacNewsBlog does this, but for those of you who do trade files be aware that just because iTunes plus music have no DRM, it doesn't mean you can't be traced.
Yep, thats right... embedded in each AAC iTunes Plus track is your iTunes user ID. Sure there are many ways to get around this but let be blunt: don't waste your time. Keep your music to yourself! Keep yourself and your friends honest... buy what you listen to! It's good karma!
Last night Steve Jobs breathed new life into iTV by simply showing off the fact that you'll soon be able to view YouTube content via iTV. This will probably happen with some software/firmware update. iTV owners will be able to do this in mid-June, and a handful of YouTube content will be available for viewing at that time. By the fall, YouTube's entire catalog will be available.
Stevie J. also announced a "new" version of iTV with a bigger hard drive. The updated iTV will sell for $399 and come with a nice 160 gig drive built in.
Analyst are chomping at the bit over this as they imagine what "other" content will be able to be streamed via iTV. Is the iTV the sleeper hit? Maybe. Imagine TV shows ON DEMAND... streamed via iTV with no commercials, totally bypassing those pesky cable networks. Ah yeah.... slow and tiny steps... thats the key to the future.
This page contains all entries posted to MacNewsBlog in May 2007. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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