Apple

Apple has signed a five-year deal with LG Electronics to secure a supply of LCD displays.

Reuters reports that LG has received $500 million as a down payment on the deal, which LG disclosed in a filing to the Korea Exchange. The two companies are not exactly strangers; one analyst in South Korea estimated that LG already provides around 70 percent of Apple's flat-panel displays.

The deal appears to be somewhat similar to long-term supply deals that Apple has cut with flash-memory companies like Samsung, Micron, and Toshiba. Apple agreed to pay $1.25 billion in 2005 to five … Read more

The Consumer Electronics Association has confirmed plans to host a Mac-centric area at CES 2010, but Apple has still not commented on whether it plans to participate.

Jason Oxman of the CEA confirmed Saturday that the group "dedicated a special area at the 2010 CES to Apple-related CE manufacturers." That immediately sets up an alternative for companies thinking about exhibiting at Macworld 2010, which will not have Apple present for the first time in 12 years.

"We decided to create this special area based on discussions we've had with companies regarding 2010 show participation. We are … Read more

A report that Apple is planning a visit to CES next year had eyes rolling Friday morning from Las Vegas to Cupertino.

Cult of Mac reports, citing a source with "friends at Apple," says that Apple is planning to "go large" at CES 2010, now that Macworld is out of the way. The source called it a "done deal," noting that since Apple is really more of a consumer electronics company these days, the Consumer Electronics Show makes more sense.

Too bad nothing else in this report makes sense. Apple has never liked to … Read more

A middle-aged man in a faded NeXT T-shirt raised his hand for the microphone. If IDG wanted to save Macworld, he said, it should hold a "schwag-fest," where Macolytes could bond over swapping tchotchke from Macworlds past.

The Mac community had its say Wednesday night, at least for one evening. Whether IDG, the organizer of Macworld, takes up the suggestion is another question.

IDG World Expo vice president and general manager Paul Kent hosted the discussion, which saw several hundred people pack into a room at San Francisco's Moscone Center to discuss the future of the event.… Read more

Apple awarded three key members of its executive team with $100,000 raises to kick off its 2009 fiscal year.

Chief operating officer Tim Cook, chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer, and senior vice president of Mac hardware engineering Bob Mansfield will have a little more cash in their pockets this year courtesy of Apple's board of directors, the company revealed in a proxy filing Wednesday. Cook now makes $800,000 a year, while Oppenheimer makes $700,000, and Mansfield makes $600,000.

This was the first raise for Cook and Oppenheimer since October 2005. Mansfield received a raise just … Read more

Macworld Expo will go on in 2010 without Apple's participation, but what will it look like? And will anybody show up?

We might get an idea Wednesday evening, when IDG World Expo plans to hold a town-hall style meeting open to Macworld attendees to solicit ideas for the future of the show. Apple stunned IDG in December with its decision to pull out of the show completely. It also pulled CEO Steve Jobs from his usual starring role and had Phil Schiller deliver what was widely considered one of Apple's most lackluster Macworld keynote speeches in years.

A … Read more

It's a long-established truism in technology journalism: That stories about Apple are pretty much guaranteed to do better than just about any other subject.

And why? It's certainly not because of the total size of the user base of Apple products. Rather, as has been very well chronicled in newspapers, magazines, online and in books, the passion felt by the community of Apple users far outstrips its size.

Now, with the release of MacHeads, you can add movies to the roster of media documenting the full fervor of the Mac faithful and their particular brand of do-it-yourself brand … Read more

Though the addition of DRM-free music is grabbing the most iTunes headlines, there was more music news at the Macworld 2009 keynote on Tuesday.

Apple Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller also announced that beginning Tuesday iPhone users will be able sample and wirelessly download iTunes tracks over AT&T's 3G network or EDGE. Previously, iTunes song downloads, unlike apps, were available only over a Wi-Fi connection.

The process works relatively well, though we encountered a couple of hiccups. Like with the iTunes Apps store, you must use Wi-Fi or a wired connection to your computer … Read more

With its launch of iPhoto 09, Apple has begun showing some reasons why it's worth enduring the hassle of geotagging your photos.

It's generally not easy right now to label your photos with information about where you took the pictures--the process usually is done with special software to marry the photos with location data taken from a separate GPS receiver.

Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, demonstrated what you can do with iPhoto at the Macworld 2009 keynote Tuesday.

iPhoto 09 works best with photos that already have been tagged. That's getting more common, as GPS hardware support becomes less of a rarity. For example, Nikon's Coolpix P6000 has a built-in GPS receiver, and Nikon has begun selling its GP-1 GPS receiver, which can plug into its SLR's flash mount so location data is embedded in the photo. Apple's iPhone can geotag its own photos, and camera manufacturers say GPS support in cameras has become a matter of when, not if.

But the software also can help you tag your own images. Clicking a photo flips it over, letting you type in a location, then showing the spot using a map. (Google supplies back-end mapping services). Helpfully, iPhoto then can spread that location data to other photos with similar time stamps, and they can be bundled together into a group called an event.

OK, but what can you do? Once you have geotagged photos, what can you do with them?

For one thing, sift through them geographically using iPhotos' new Places interface. Viewing an iPhoto event can show an associated collection of pushpins on a map, and clicking each pin shows the photo.

For another, you can search for photos based on where you took them, not on whatever filing system you might use. iPhoto can handle geographic hierarchies, so if you labeled a photo with "Eiffel Tower," it'll find it with a search for "France" or "Paris." … Read more