Apple

Apple's iPhone has topped Microsoft's Windows Mobile in U.S. market share of smartphone operating systems for the first time, putting it in the No. 2 spot, according to a report from ComScore released Thursday.

In February, 5.2 million respondents to ComScore's survey reported using Apple's iPhone, while 6.8 million reported using phones running Microsoft's Windows Mobile, according to a report on FierceDeveloper. ComScore, a market research firm, averages results in a three-month period.

In May, Apple's number rose to 5.7 million, then 6.6 million in July, and finally to a high of 8.9 million for October, the most recent period for which results are available. In comparison, Microsoft rose in May to 7 million, dropped in July to 6.6 million, and went back up in October to 7.1 million.

The highest market share numbers in the survey go to Research In Motion's BlackBerry. It registered 9.6 million in February, 12.2 million in May, 13 million in July, and 14.9 million in October.

It's interesting to note that Palm's number rose from 2.3 million to 2.8 million in 2009, and Google's Android operating system rose to a high of 1 million by October.

The survey asked U.S. mobile subscribers, who had to be over the age of 13, what type of phone they use. ComScore then figured out what operating system they were using and calculated the data for the report.

Raw photo files from Canon's new 1D Mark IV now can be seen in Mac OS X.

(Credit: Canon USA)

Apple released one of its routine Mac OS X updates on Wednesday to let its computers handle raw images from a handful of new Nikon and Canon SLRs as well as from Canon's newer high-end PowerShot G11 compact camera.

The update lets Mac OS X 10.6 as well as Apple's iPhoto and Aperture software handle the raw image files taken directly from the camera's sensors without in-camera processing. Raw photo formats offer more quality and flexibility at the cost of convenience and file size.

The update supports Canon's new professional EOS-1D Mark IV and high-end EOS 7D SLRs. Among Nikons, the support ranges from the entry-level D3000, the higher-end D300S, and the professional D3S.

Windows relies on camera makers to supply software to decode the raw images. Adobe Systems and Apple write their own modules to decode the proprietary raw formats.

Updated 7:31 a.m. PST December 18 to clarify that the update expanded existing raw support.

Story Copyright (c) 2009 AllThingsD. All rights reserved.

Apple's delay in shipping the 27-inch iMac may have more to do with the sheer volume of sales than any problems with the graphics chips, according to numbers from market research firm NPD.

(Credit: Apple)

Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, told CNET on Monday that for October and November, Mac desktop sales were up 74 percent over the same period last year. While NPD did not break the numbers down by desktop model, it's clear the iMac is a top seller.

In fact, the 27-inch iMac appears to be selling so well, it could account for the shipping delay that Apple apologized for on Sunday.

"It's not surprising Apple would be having problems supplying them [iMacs]," said Baker. "I can't imagine in their wildest dreams they would have thought they would sell like this."

Reports over the weekend suggested Apple was delaying shipments of the 27-inch iMac due to reported problems with the graphics card. While those issues remain, it may not be the root cause of the delay.

The surge in Mac sales was not limited to the 27-inch model. Baker said that the 21.5-inch iMac and the Mac mini are also doing very well.

Piper Jaffray financial analyst Gene Munster estimated in a research note to clients on Monday that Apple could sell 2.9 million to 3 million Macs for the current quarter, according to a report on AppleInsider. Munster cautioned that approximately 50 percent of all Mac sales for the quarter happen in December, so that number could change.

Mac notebooks saw a 5 percent increase for October and November, while iPod sales were down 11 percent year-over-year for the same time period.

Apple on Sunday apologized to customers amid reports of shipping delays of its recently introduced iMac computer.

(Credit: Apple)

"The new iMac has been a huge hit and we are working hard to fulfill orders as quickly as possible," an Apple spokesperson told CNET. "We apologize for any inconvenience or delay this may cause our customers."

Apple declined to comment on what's causing the delay, or if it's the display problems that have been widely reported in the last week. A support thread on Apple's Web site has 81 pages of comments and complaints from users with various iMac display issues.

Computerworld is reporting on a new Web site that has been setup by Web designer Scott Pronych to track the problems of the 27-inch iMac. The Web site tracks problems from flickering displays to hard drive failures and even has a category for those with no issues.

Pronych also has a Flash testing application on the site, allowing users to independently test their displays to see if there is a problem.

Currently, Apple's online store lists shipping times of two weeks for both 27-inch iMac models. The two 21-inch models ship within 24 hours. Online retailer MacMall appears to be out of 27-inch models, with a message to call for shipping dates. The 21-inch model at MacMall ships with next day shipping.

Apple did not say when iMac shipments would return to normal.

Many people I know are frightfully attached to their iPhones. They treat them as if they were a peculiar and exotic lover, one they can hardly believe they have managed to seduce.

The finely calibrated minds at Strand Consult have taken this analysis to a particularly simple conclusion: iPhone users are, the consultants say, really quite nuts.

The Strand thinkers released an opinion entitled "How will psychologists describe the iPhone syndrome in the future?." It focuses on the sorts of people who buy into Apple's great success.

Here's a flavor of the somewhat-skeptical nature of Strand's feelings: "Apple has launched a beautiful phone with a fantastic user interface that has had a number of technological shortcomings that many iPhone users have accepted and defended, despite those shortcomings resulting in limitations in iPhone users' daily lives."

The consultants' likening of iPhone buyers to kidnapped hostages may raise more than the eyebrows of many an Apple fanboy (fanperson?). Indeed, it already has the Mac world aflutter.

Is this evidence of an iPhone hypnotising a user?

(Credit: CC Gonzalo Baeza Hernandez/Flickr)

"When we examine the iPhone users' arguments defending the iPhone, it reminds us of the famous Stockholm Syndrome--a term invented by psychologists after a hostage drama in Stockholm. Here, hostages reacted to the psychological pressure they were experiencing by defending the people that had held them hostage for six days," Strand declared.

The implication is surely that Apple has mugged millions of people with its beauty, dragged them off to a very dark cellar in some barren land, turned them into slightly bonkers Barbarellas, and then recruited them as soldiers for the cause.

This is the sort of thing of which the Church of Scientology is normally accused. But for some strange reason, it's a rather chilling but pleasant shower to read something that isn't mere worship.

Strand claims that it closely analyzes the financials of mobile operators. And if you also happen to order its wonderfully free report "The Moment of Truth, a portrait of the iPhone," you will discover the 10 great myths about the iPhone. Here are just two: it doesn't attract new business for operators, and it is not a technologically advanced mobile phone.

I know you'll be rushing to read these fine tracts, and I feel sure that a couple of you might wish to drop Strand Consult a note. To encourage you a little, I'll warn you that Strand also seems to believe that some of you Apple customers are, well, liars.

The consultants put it quite sweetly: "In reality, the iPhone is surrounded by a multitude of people, media, and companies that are happy to bend the truth to defend the product they have purchased from Apple."

Apple customers are liars? The media too? Surely not.

Most college professors will tell students to put away their iPhone or iPod once class starts. But not Ken Joy. His class requires them.

Professor Joy teaches ECS 198H, Introduction To iPhone Application Development, to undergraduates at the University of California at Davis. On the first day of class in late September UC Davis became one of a growing number of schools that are tailoring classes and focusing academic resources on the making and selling of applications for Apple's popular mobile platform.

A professor for almost 30 years, Joy has mainly researched computer graphics and visualizations, until he and a former grad student came up with the idea to offer a class that teaches to the iPhone SDK (software development kit). Joy didn't have much experience in mobile platforms, but he was game for teaching something "relevant" that would keep his students motivated.

"Nothing is more relevant than the iPhone or iPod Touch right now," Joy said in an interview this week.

One of the apps developed in Professor Joy's first iPhone app making class.

(Credit: Sunny Dhillon and Fei Li)

He's not the first to teach this class to undergrads. Stanford University has offered the class for a year, as have Florida's Stetson University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

But while those schools have taken advantage of Apple's iPhone Developer University Program--which provides free access to the SDK, Apple hardware, and Apple employees as teachers--Joy's course is a bit more of a grassroots effort.

ECS 198H wasn't approved as a university course until 10 days before the fall quarter started in September--in other words, students already had their class schedules set. But less than four hours after Joy placed it in the registration guide, the class was filled to its 35-student capacity, with another 40 people staking out wait-list spots.

"I saw the e-mail (about the class) and I thought, 'Oh gosh.' I jumped right on my computer and signed up for the class as soon as I saw it," said Kip Nicol, 22, a computer science and engineering major. "It was a pretty hot class."

Jules Houts, 21, also studying computer science and engineering, jumped at what looked like a "fun" class, he said. "It seemed better than operating systems or something like that."

Besides room on their schedules, students also had to provide their own iPhone, iPod Touch, or Mac that can run the SDK, thanks to the UC system's well-publicized budget problems.

"We had no choice; students had to find resources themselves," said Joy.

And they did. So did several faculty and university employees who chose to audit the class, or sit in without getting a grade, illustrating much of what we already know: the App Store is popular. Apple's online marketplace for iPhone and iPod Touch programs has been bombarded with submissions from developers in the year and a half it's been open for business. There are more than 100,000 applications currently for sale and 8,500 new and updated programs submitted every day. And its competitors want a piece too: Research In Motion, Google's Android, Palm, Nokia, and Microsoft's Windows Mobile have followed suit, opening up application marketplaces, though none has university professors teaching courses about them. Or at least not yet.

Granted, squeezing the entire learning and development process into a 10-week academic quarter was a challenge. The first five weeks were spent learning the SDK, some Objective C programming language, and making simple apps like an RSS reader, while the last five weeks they split into two-person teams building their apps.

Joy said he is impressed with what his newbie iPhone developers came up with: an app for properly tuning a piano, one for tracking location of the GPS-equipped UC Davis student-run bus system, and one application for all UC Davis students, including information about student groups, maps of the campus, class locations, to name a few. That one will be in the App Store next quarter, Joy is already predicting.

The class was deemed a success, but it's unclear if it'll be back on the schedule come next fall. "We hope to offer it next year, but with the budget problems of the University of California system, no one quite knows what's going to happen."

Either way, Joy says teaching to the SDK is one of the most hands-on real-world classes he's ever taught to undergrads.

"We got to develop some apps for the real world. Students got to see a really good SDK...This is something we normally don't get in a university," Joy said. Most classes "tend to solve limited problems and don't really deal with real world that much. These that do, trying to develop bigger applications, get the students closer to the experience of industry. Which is very good."

"It was one of the funnest classes I've taken because it was project-oriented, and it created a community of developers," said Houts, who created the piano-tuning application.

But besides teaching the programming language to build iPhone apps, Joy's class also included business how-tos for those who may want to create their own iPhone app developer companies.

Some students, like Houts, are already thinking that way. As a member of UC Davis' lacrosse team, he plans on making an iPhone game based on his sport, a market he believes has some good potential.

"There's nothing except for a lacrosse stats (app) on the App Store. I want to make a little lacrosse game, and be the first to get on that market. There's a new lacrosse Xbox game that just came out, so it's still a new market right now."

If all goes well, Houts said he could see himself starting an iPhone app-making business. "I think I'll submit the first couple apps under my name, and if they're successful then I might start something."

(Credit: Apple)

A new patent application from Apple dug up by AppleInsider reveals ways in which the company's products could be fitted with a simple label or tag that provides evidence of tampering. If the strip is compromised, it gives Apple leverage to void your warranty.

Apple's patent application notes that it is in the best interest of an electronics manufacturer to be able to know when a device has been "compromised" and opened, thus voiding its warranty. Unauthorized tampering with an electronic device can destroy it, and without evidence of such tampering, a manufacturer may be obligated to support its warranty. Apple's technology, the company said, could save manufacturers "substantial" costs.

In another patent filing, Apple is looking to broaden the role of the accelerometer in its portable devices, noting that motion could be used to navigate and control the device itself. For example, users could shake the device to play a song or flick it to scroll through menus. That idea has been tossed around before, as I recall, so it's not really all that surprising. Perhaps it's just a ploy to get us to buy more iPods as more movement will likely result in more drops, tosses and smashes.

(Credit: Apple)

This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.

Adobe Systems is dropping support for Apple's older PowerPC G3 hardware in its Flash Player, the company said Thursday.

The news came in a note on its support Web site alerting users to an updated version of the Flash Player that fixes several security issues. Adobe said the next version of the product, Flash Player 10.1, will be the last to support PowerPC-based G3 computers. The new Flash Player is expected to be released in the first half of 2010.

Adobe's move will probably not affect very many people. The last PowerPC-based G3 was produced in the summer of 1999, when it was replaced with the Power Mac G4.

Dropping support for older products is something companies do regularly, in part because it enables them to take advantage of new technologies and push their products forward. Indeed, Adobe said in the support note that it is dropping support for the G3 "due to performance enhancements that cannot be supported on the older PowerPC architecture."

Adobe already requires a multicore Intel processor in order to run its flagship product, Creative Suite 4, so the company is no stranger to dropping support for older Apple machines.

Apple itself dropped support for all PowerPC-based computers with the latest version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard. Even Apple's iLife consumer product no longer supports the G3 processor.

Apple began the transition to Intel-based processors in 2005, when Steve Jobs said during his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote speech that the company would be moving away from PowerPC.