Apple Inc has seen its profits surge an impressive 88% for the second quarter of the fiscal year compared to earnings this time last year. In the second quarter of last year (the second quarter of the fiscal year ends on 31st March) Apple managed a turnover of $4.36 billion giving it a profit of $410 million. However, this year it managed a revenue of $5.26 billion and profits of $770 million, which equates to $0.87 per diluted share. During the quarter Apple shipped 1,517,000 Macs and 10,549,000 iPods - a growth of 36% and 24% respectively compared to a year ago. Read on for Apple's press release.

Anyone who thought that the new Windows Vista search features were based off of Mac Spotlight will be interested to hear that someone is suing Apple for ripping off their technology. That someone is a small-town company called IP Innovation. IP Innovation, the plaintiff, is alleging that the widespread use of tabs in OS X Tiger is infringing on a patent they've had since 1987. If the lawsuit somehow succeeds, Apple will have to throw $20 million USD at IP Innovation, and then take Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger off the shelves. Apple has no comment on the situation at this time.

Apple today released its fourth security update of the year for the Mac OS X 10.4.9 operating system, with 25 new patches making it to the front this time around. None of the patches are critical, though a few of them do fix flaws that were brought to light during the Month of Apple Bugs. The Security Update 2007-004 can be downloaded from the company's security update page.

Apple plans to launch new iPods featuring Wi-Fi in the second half of 2007. USI will produce the Wi-Fi modules and Foxconn will perform as the OEM system assembler. USI will begin shipments later in April, while Foxconn may do so in the third quarter. Wi-Fi equipped players stand a chance of becoming the mainstream for all portable music models.

CUPERTINO, California-April 9, 2007-Apple today announced that the 100 millionth iPod has been sold, making the iPod the fastest selling music player in history. The first iPod was sold five and a half years ago, in November 2001, and since then Apple has introduced more than 10 new iPod models, including five generations of iPod, two generations of iPod mini, two generations of iPod nano and two generations of iPod shuffle. Along with iTunes and the iTunes online music store, the iPod has transformed how tens of millions of music lovers acquire, manage and listen to their music.

Fastmac today announced the first & only Blu-Ray optical drive upgrade for Apple's PowerBook, iBook & MacBook Pro computers. The new slimline, slot loading drive uses one of the fastest & most compatible Blu-ray mechanisms to provide up to 50 Gb of storage on 1 disk, without sacrificing compatibility with standard DVD & CD recordable media. Fastmac's Blu-Ray optical drive upgrade is scheduled to ship within 10 days and is available for pre-order from www.fastmac.com for a special introductory price of $799.95. Each drive carries a 1 year warranty and a 30 day money back guarantee .

It's been two weeks since Apple released the Apple TV. Unfortunately, it's been getting a lot of criticism. It runs Mac OS X, yet it is very limited. The Inquirer boldly claims that the Apple TV is "limited and produces poor quality video content". A bunch of hackers seemed to think so, hence, they decided to fix Apple TV the only way they knew how; crack the thing like an egg. They first managed to install a full version of OS X, and then went on to figure out how to install a bigger hard drive, enable SSH/Apache (big for server people), start a remote desktop service, and plug in a full keyboard/mouse. The main reason that these guys are able to do so much is because the Apple TV is a lot more of a PC than Apple would like us to think. The hackers are busy working on more hacks, and their site gets over 500,000 hits a day.

If you judge by the title of this story alone, you might think that the European Commission (EU) is punishing Apple and EMI for getting ready to offer music sans DRM's (Digital Right Management). The EU's complaint is much simpler than that. Apparently, Apple would only be applying these costs in some parts of the iTunes store. So, a song can cost less in one European country than another. This violates a very important article of the EU, and so Apple may incur a 10% fine if they do not change things soon.

For those of you curious about the shenanigans going on between EMI and Apple: The two companies have proudly announced a strategic partnership, and EMI will be sending Apple all their music without DRMs, which is a bold move. It is risky from a business standpoint, but very welcomed from a customer standpoint. Proof that EMI will be pioneering DRM free music can be found here in their press release.

Last month, techPowerUp reported that Apple had accidentally listed an 8-core Mac Pro on its website, and although it was quickly removed, the new machine genuinely has been launched now. The new Mac Pro comes with either two quad-core 3.0GHz "Clovertown" Xeons or two dual-core "Woodcrest" Xeons running at up to 3.0GHz, and it will also accommodate up to 3 terabytes of storage with up to 16GB of RAM. When it comes to graphics cards you can chose between an NVIDA GeForce 7300GT (up to four of those actually), an ATI Radeon X1900XT or an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500. The most basic model starts at $2,200, but if you want the 8-core version with 3TB hard drive space and 16GB of RAM you'll be spending at least $10,292 - and even then you only have a 256MB GeForce 7300GT. At least the shipping's free.

This comes just after the release of Adobe's new Photoshop CS 3, which is likely in an effort to attract any professional image editors who are looking to upgrade with the new software, although it could quite expensive if you like to have the best machine available.

Apples newest offering - the Apple TV, costs a mere $299 US Dollars with a better graphic card than the Mac Mini and is actually a Intel based PC. Some talented coders have now managed to run the current OS X version on the hardware. There are also clear instructions, if you want to do so yourself.

Cingular is confirming that the release date of Apple's iPhone will be June 11. That date is no coincidence. It's the first day of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, scheduled to be held in San Francisco from June 11th through June 15th. The Apple iPhone features mobile OS X, integrated iPod MP3 player, true push e-mail via Yahoo Mail, a 2-megapixel camera, and a 3.5-inch display with higher resolution(320x480 at 160 ppi) than any current iPod. The phone capabilities include quad-band (MHz: 850, 900, 1800, 1900) network support, up to 5 hours battery life when talking. The iPhone will be available in 4GB and 8GB configurations for $499 and $599 respectively.

Apple has updated its Boot Camp software, adding official support for booting Windows Vista.

There's support only for 32-bit Vista, not 64-bit, but there are a few other things added into the release. There are numerous driver fixes, including added support for the iSight webcam and Apple Remote, Apple TV and Apple HiFi.

There are also driver updates for the graphics chips (including Intel integrated) and audio drivers.

Additionally, there is now a 'Boot Camp Tools' icon in the system tray, to allow quick access to fiddle with the cross-platform functions.

Apple is beginning to ship its Apple TV set top box. The unit was originally slated for February of this year but was pushed back two to three weeks into March because of last minute adjustments to the product's operating system. The Apple TV is shipping now for the price of $299 USD. Apple supplies a remote, the Apple TV itself and a power cord. The Apple TV is equipped with a 40GB hard drive, Wi-Fi 802.11 wireless adapter, 10/100 BASE-T Ethernet and built-in universal 48-watt power supply. The system connects to a local network via Wi-Fi or by wire, allowing users to stream movies and media onto their large screen TV. Beyond movies, the Apple TV also allows sync and playback of music content from an iTunes library. Users are required to have a TV with at least RGB component input, but a TV with HDMI or DVI input is preferred. There is an optical output for multi-channel audio but no coaxial SPDIF. The free shipping begins now and you should have your Apple TV in three to five business days from the day of the order.

The latest version of Mac OS X is now 10.4.9, meaning that this update is probably the last before Leopard is released. Apple improves "graphics drivers, Bluetooth, networking, image handling, font management, sync services, Dashboard widgets and Rosetta, Intel-based Macs' PowerPC compatibility mechanism" in this version of Mac OS X. Applications also load faster in this version of Mac OS X. All of the various updates available for Mac OS X can be grabbed here.

Yeah, you could see a Mac Pro with whopping 8 CPU cores at the British Apple Store this morning. After they realized the mistake (or did it happen intentionally?) they took the wrong offering down.



The story behind that is quite simple. When the current Apple Mac Pro was introduced in August last year it was quite a performer around the Macs. Featuring two Dual Core Xeons (Xeon 5100 aka Woodcrest, up to 3GHz, 4 MByte shared L2-Cache), support for up to four PCI-E graphics cards (no SLI or Crossfire though) and a solid storage/network base it was very competitive compared to the PC workstations as well. But soon afterwards (in mid November) Intel revealed the Quad-Core-Xeons ('Clovertown').
Now it's finally time for Apple to unveil something new - obviously a Dual Quad-Core workstation, this time hopefully with full SLI or Crossfire support.
To add another theory, Apple will reveal a Quad-Core desktop Mac at the same time. At the moment the iMacs are based on Core 2 Duos (Merom) and that's it. I think there is plenty of room for a Kentsfield Mac...

Yes, this is just a rumor, but it comes from the same analyst group that guessed that Apple was making a cell phone. According to the analyst Shaw Wu, Apple is definitely interested in putting flash-based hard drives in their notebooks. This would save power, increase speed, and be much quieter. If Apple really is making these flash-based notebooks, we will start hearing about them/seeing them in Q2 2007.

Apple has recently been doing quite well for themselves recently. In the browser department, Safari is gaining users while Firefox is losing them. However, every rose has it's thorns. Safari has been often criticized with having a memory leak problem. A system can lose up to 76% of system performance just by having Safari open in the background. There have even been articles published detailing how you should shut down Safari when running anything else. Fortunately, Apple began working on a fix to this problem as soon as they heard about it. Anyone who runs Safari should grab the update.

Steve Jobs announced that he really wants to see DRM go away, much like the rest of the music industry. At the Digital Music Forum East conference, Steve Jobs was made to look like a bit of a hypocrite. While he may want DRM free music, every song (and possibly video) featured on iTunes comes with some form of DRM protection. They claimed that if Steve Jobs really wanted DRM-free music, he would have done away with the DRMs in iTunes as soon as he could. They also said that Apple's proprietary version of DRM is giving the rest of the music world a lot of pain. This falls back on the original music industry's agreement that they need to either do away with DRM's, or all use one version of it.

The AppleTV may do to the television world what the iPod did to the MP3 player. It allows for the streaming of video content from a Macintosh or Windows computer, and then does everything a standard DVR does. It also can read a lot of other video/audio formats, and can natively output over an HDMI signal. The unit also sports a 40GB hard drive to store content locally. It also uses the latest WiFi standard, 802.11N, to connect to the internet (the very same one Apple is charging $2 for Macintosh customers to use). We can expect to see the £199/$299 unit in mid/late March.

Apple at CeBIT - for the first time since 1999

In the year 2000 Apple Computer, Inc. let the world know, that after 10 years attending CeBIT it won't exhibit anything at the show anymore. Now, seven years later, they finally agreed to have their own booth at this year's world's biggest exhibition.

Update: Surprisingly the situation changed a little, Apple won't have a booth but will be part of the lifestyle@CeBIT event.

Ever since Apple introduced its iPhone, lawsuits against the product have going on. Happily for Apple, it has managed to reach an agreement with Cisco Systems. The networking company had held the iPhone name since 2000, and was a bit miffed at the new product - but it seems the two companies can share after all.

Late on Wednesday afternoon, Cisco and Apple officially announced an end to the feud over the trademark. That's right, iPhone-gate is over without a single shot being fired, no loss of life, and (oddly enough) both companies able to use the brand name.

The companies publicly stated a cessation of all litigation over the dispute in a joint statement, and promised to allow each enterprise to market its product worldwide. The financial terms for the agreement were not disclosed, but one can bet that it wasn't cheap for Apple. In what is likely a nod of favor to Cisco for dropping the suit, the statement also talked about a new partnership between the two firms, with Apple working to provide better integration with future Cisco products.

Apple has joined this list of companies that have popular tech not ready for Windows Vista. Earlier this week, they announced that iTunes was not ready for Windows Vista. Apparently, all of Apple's software cannot be run on Windows Vista. This is quite a setback, considering how many Quicktime files there are on the internet, and how many people who own iPods.

The two companies previously agreed the deadline was on Thursday, but on Thursday evening( the 15th of Febuary ) Cisco extended the deadline nearly another week. I see this as an interesting strategy, Cisco seems to be aiming at at achieving a settlement here.

Apple Inc.'s CEO, Steve Jobs, has published an open letter on the Apple website giving his views on Digital Rights Management for music - in other words, the copy protection that stops people easily sharing music purchased over the internet. Jobs wrote that the problems caused by DRM are down to restrictions set in place by the music industry, and he would be willing to go along with an abolishment of DRM, saying Apple would "embrace it in a heartbeat." He claims that Apple is not in control of the DRM restrictions used by iTunes, and that the big four record labels are to blame for the inconvenience. If Apple breaks these restrictions, it has just a few weeks to fix the problem before the record labels withdraw their music. His reasoning behind Apple refusing to use the FairPlay DRM technology (which is supported by a number of companies) is that if problems were found with the music, all companies involved would have a huge task to change all software and firmware to support any modifications required to fix the issue.

Corsair, a worldwide leader in high performance computer products, today launched Mac Memory, their first memory DDR2-667 SODIMM products to support Apple PCs. Three products were announced today, the 1GB upgrade module, the 2GB upgrade kit (two 1GB modules) and the 3GB upgrade kit (one 1GB module and one 2GB module). The 1GB upgrade module and 2GB upgrade kit are compatible with the MacBook family, MacBook Pro family, and Intel-based versions of the iMac. The 3GB upgrade kit is compatible only with the MacBook Pro family and those models of iMac's supporting up to 3GB of system memory.