Apple

A correction was made to this story. See below for details.

Updated at 2:54 p.m. PDT with with additional information about the volume of NAND chips Apple is reportedly purchasing and its effect on the number of units the company could ship.

Apple has reportedly ordered 100 million units of 8-gigabit and 16-gigabit NAND flash chips, with the bulk of its order coming from its main iPhone chip supplier, Samsung, according to a research report released Monday by a Lazard Capital Markets analyst.

The majority of the sizable order is expected to be applied toward the 16-gigabit NAND, … Read more

Steve Jobs may be down, but he is by no means out, according to a report Saturday in The Wall Street Journal.

Apple's CEO has been on medical leave since January, but sources tell the Journal that Jobs is still running key parts of the company from his home.

He was, for example, specifically involved in the user interface for the latest version of the iPhone operating system, continues to review products, and is working on future projects, sources told the newspaper. He has made no public appearances this year.

Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook is running day-to-day operations … Read more

Apple is approaching the 1 billion mark for applications downloaded from the App Store, and plans to give out a host of Apple gear to the lucky billionth customer.

The company put up a countdown Web page Friday as it gets closer to the mark: as of this writing, about 928 million applications have been downloaded from the App Store since it went live last July, according to the counter. Whoever manages to download the 1 billionth application will come away with a pretty good haul: a MacBook Pro, a 32GB iPod Touch, a Time Capsule, and a $10,000 … Read more

At some point, clever marketing can backfire.

It's been quite a run for Microsoft of late. After sleeping for nearly three years while Apple successfully bashed it every night on network television with the Mac vs. PC ad campaign, Microsoft has sobered up and taken the offensive over the last several months with a series of marketing messages comparing the relative prices of Macs and PCs made by Microsoft's partners.

Make what you will of Lauren and Giampaolo's sincerity, there's no denying that the ads have struck a nerve. For years, fanboys of various stripes have … Read more

Microsoft is back touting the "Apple Tax" that it says Mac buyers are paying, this time filling out a fake tax return listing all of what it claims are the extra costs of opting for Windows' leading rival. But I'd argue that this time Microsoft is in danger of being audited.

The document, posted on Microsoft's Windows Blog on Thursday, compares the cost of a PC and Mac purchase, making the case that buyers can save more than $3,000 in buying two Windows PCs as opposed to two Macs. The "tax return" is … Read more

Apple has apparently begun to acknowledge the existence of small white cracks in older plastic MacBooks, according to a report.

AppleInsider says Apple service providers started receiving notices last month that the plastic chassis on the white 13-inch MacBook released in 2006 can crack in four different spots. Apple had previously helped out users who had noticed hairline cracks around the trackpad on the top of the notebook, but did not acknowledge cracks in other places as a design flaw, according to AppleInsider.

Now the company is telling its service agents to inspect any white plastic MacBooks they receive for … Read more

Apple believes it has a patent that could potentially throw a wrench into an effort to develop a Web standard for updating widgets.

Last month Apple disclosed the patent (No. 5,764,992) to the W3C Web Applications Working Group, which is trying to come up with a standard entitled "Widgets 1.0: Updates," as spotted by MacNN. Apple's patent is for "A software program running on a computer automatically replaces itself with a newer version in a completely automated fashion, without interruption of its primary function, and in a manner that is completely transparent to … Read more

Google has released a new Web-based version of Gmail that gives iPhone and Android phone users a more sophisticated version of the online e-mail service, including access to messages that's faster and that works even when offline.

Google demonstrated the Web-based mobile version of Gmail last week and announced its availability Tuesday on the Google Mobile blog. "You'll notice that it's a lot faster when performing actions like opening an e-mail, navigating, or searching. And if the data network drops out on you..., you'll still be able to open recently read messages and to compose … Read more

Apple unveiled an updated version of its Xserve server Tuesday, adding Intel's latest server processors.

The Xserve is possibly the least-promoted product in Apple's lineup, but the company has certain educational and creative-professional customers that like to run a Mac OS X environment top to bottom. Still, the Xserve accounts for a fraction of Apple's revenue, although it caused a few problems for future iPod and iPhone chief Mark Papermaster upon his departure from IBM.

The new models come with the option of one or two of Intel's quad-core 2.26GHz Xeon processors and 3GB of … Read more