Apple

The Sony Walkman outsold Apple's iPod in Japan last week, the first time in more than four years, according to a study by Japanese electronics research company BCN.

Sony's slice of the market for digital music players in Japan rose to 43 percent for the week ending August 30, narrowly beating Apple's 42.1 share. The survey didn't include sales results for the iPhone because that device also serves as a cell phone.

Sony achieved its victory through pure sales volume and number of players, said BCN. Apple's 8GB iPod Nano hit the top of … Read more

Apple has built a potentially dangerous downgrade into Mac OS X Snow Leopard, according to a security expert.

When Apple's updated operating system is installed, it downgrades Adobe Systems' Flash to an earlier, less secure version. Sophos security expert Graham Cluley said Wednesday in a company blog post that Apple installs version 10.0.23.1, which has not been upgraded to protect users against the latest threats.

"Mac users who have been diligent enough to keep their security up-to-date do not deserve to be silently downgraded," Cluley said in the blog. "We know that hackers … Read more

Vonage announced Tuesday that its mobile voice over Internet Protocol app has been approved for use by Apple on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The Internet telephone service provider said it's conducting a beta test of the app and that general availability will be announced at a later date.

Last week Apple confirmed that Vonage's request for app approval was being held up by technical issues with the Vonage software. An Apple spokesperson told CNET News at the time that Apple was working with the developer to resolve the issue but would not elaborate on the nature of … Read more

Apple's $29 operating-system upgrade, Snow Leopard, is for most users a straightforward and worthwhile upgrade. But some are regretting their haste in upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6. Little incompatibilities with existing apps are causing headaches and slowing down work flow.

It's not the current versions of the big apps that don't work, of course. The latest version of Photoshop still runs. Even the current versions of the close-to-the-metal virtualization applications Parallels and VMware Fusion work in Snow Leopard. Apple's own apps--Mail, Calendar, and iTunes--all work great. And Firefox runs fine, even though Apple has its own competing browser, Safari.

But many little things don't work, and the niggles are frustrating. Dealing with them makes the Mac experience very un-Mac-like. For some users who have spent time tweaking their Mac setup, the operating-system upgrade means a step backward in the pleasure and smoothness of using the platform. They feel a hit in productivity. For people like me, it's the little hacks that make the Mac experience uniquely personal and help me paper over some of the Jobsian UI dictums of which I'd rather not be reminded.

Necessary disclaimer: Apple and third-party developers deserve much credit for ensuring that so many major apps work well in Snow Leopard, since it is such a major under-the-hood upgrade.

Most incompatibilities will be fixed, of course. Apple released Snow Leopard earlier than expected, and developers are scrambling to update their apps. But even some of the big developers have fallen behind the cycle here -- Microsoft's Live Mesh sync and backup product doesn't yet work, for example.

You can see a big list of Snow Leopard compatibility issues at the famous Snow Leopard Wikidot page. For the record, here are some of the small incompatibilities that are driving people where I work up a tree:

iStat Menus, a Mac system monitor, does not work. Developer Marc Edwards said he's been working on the 2.0 version of the product, but that Apple's timing derailed his plans. "We expected that version 2 would have been ready before 10.6 was out," he wrote to me, "but the early release meant that wasn't possible."

The preferences pane for Growl, the universal-app pop-up notifier, doesn't work. The developers say they will update the app as soon as they can.

… Read more

The version 1.1 release of developer Bjango's iStat application for the iPhone last week was marked with disappointment.

To maintain the application's availability on the App Store, Bjango had been told by Apple that it had to remove what was arguably the most compelling feature of version 1.0: Free Memory, which enabled people to clear wired and inactive memory to increase the iPhone's battery life. It also improved the device's performance.

Bjango, which focuses on developing apps for the iPhone, felt that it had no other choice but to create a new version sans the Free Memory feature. iStat 1.1, $1.99, offers only iPhone monitoring. Among other things, users can see battery life calculations and how much memory and disk space remains.

"Apple would not say why we needed to remove the 'Free Memory' feature," Tori Gale, support manager at Bjango, wrote in an e-mail. "(Apple) simply demanded that it was removed, or (it) would delete (version 1.0 of) the app from the store...Nothing iStat did violated the terms of the developer contract, as far as we know, and Apple didn't say that it did."

When pressed for more insight over Apple's ultimatum, Gale had, much to her chagrin, little to say. "Apple really hasn't given us any information," she said. "We simply don't have much we can say."… Read more

Google released an update for Chrome to fix compatibility problems with Snow Leopard on Monday, which along with other fixes shows the gradually maturing state of the Mac OS X version of the browser.

Chrome 4.0.203.4 for the Mac is only a couple notches up the version ladder than the version 4.0.203.2 it replaces, but there are some significant changes in the developer-preview software. For Snow Leopard compatibility, programmers fixed a garbled text bug, said Jonathan Conradt, a Chrome engineering program manager, in a blog post Monday.

Google began Chrome on Windows but has … Read more

As expected, Apple has officially confirmed that it will host an event next Wednesday, September 9.

Invitations went out Monday. The music-themed event in San Francisco will be held at 10 a.m. at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which is next door to Moscone Center, where Apple's much-larger Worldwide Developers Conference takes place every June.

Based on the image of the classic iPod advertisement art and the tag line, "It's only rock 'n roll, but we like it," this will be the company's annual music-focused event. Apple has hosted a new product … Read more

Apple began shipping Snow Leopard on Friday, but the true importance of the Mac OS X update likely will emerge well afterward.

That's because Mac OS X 10.6 begins a longer-term Apple attempt to get ahead by cracking a problem facing the entire computer industry: squeezing useful work out of modern processors. Instead of stuffing Snow Leopard with immediately obvious new features, Apple is trying to adjust to the new reality in which processors can do many jobs simultaneously rather than one job fast.

"We're trying to set a foundation for the future," said Wiley Hodges, director of Mac OS X marketing.

Apple shed some light on its project, called Grand Central Dispatch, at its Worldwide Developer Conference in June, but most real detail was shared only in with programmers sworn to secrecy. Now the company has begun talking more publicly about it and other deeper projects to take advantage of graphics chips and Intel's 64-bit processors.

The moves align Apple better with changes in computing. For years, chipmakers such as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices had steadily increased the clock rate of their processors, and programmers got accustomed to a performance boost with each new generation. But earlier this decade, problems derailed the gigahertz train. … Read more

The gadget industry is waiting in suspense, wondering if you're going to buy an Apple tablet. Because if you do, they're going to flip the production line's on switch.

Apple has a knack for creating new categories of devices. The iPhone arguably created the high-end smartphone segment and the design was parroted by dozens of device makers and carriers. The MacBook Air inspired the ultrathin laptop category.

The expected--and highly anticipated--Apple tablet would do the same. Manufacturing companies in Asia are eager to find a new category of devices to fill up their factories, according to an … Read more