MacRumors

Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry has made a number of outlandish predictions when it comes to Apple, and his latest claim is that Apple is preparing to enter the 3D printer market. Chowdhry shared his thoughts with Benzinga, outlining his belief that Google is pursuing a 3D printer project based on its expectations that Apple will be making a similar move.

Chowdhry provides little to no details on Apple's 3D printing plans, citing only the company's experience in hardware and its intellectual property covering the technology as substantiation for his prediction.

"It's either Apple or Microsoft [that inspired Google]," Chowdhry told Benzinga. "But developers feel that Apple is probably the focus for Google because Google considers Apple to be its prime competitor, not Microsoft. And Google really sees Apple to be a strong competitor, not Microsoft, because Microsoft has a lot of issues to worry about." [...]

"Apple does have intellectual property [in that space]," said Chowdhry. "And they often have more expertise in hardware development than, say, Microsoft has."

Chowdhry also points to Apple's acquisition of PrimeSense last year, with that firm's 3D sensors made famous for their role in the original Microsoft Kinect perhaps playing a role in Apple's 3D printing ambitions.

As for timing, Chowdhry doesn't specify anything for Apple but speculates that Google could announce its 3D printing intentions this June or October with product launches coming a full 12-18 months later.

As if the unsubstantiated claims and seemingly nonsensical predictions weren't enough to essentially dismiss the report as fanciful thinking, Chowdhry has a history of making grandiose claims. Freshest in many people's memories is his claim earlier this year that Apple had 60 days to introduce the iWatch or the company "will disappear" as it proves itself unable to innovate in the post-Jobs era. Chowdhry's deadline comes next Monday, with no sign of an imminent iWatch announcement.

In a world where mobile devices are becoming thinner and thinner and in some cases being worn on the wrist or other parts of the body, graphene may be the wonder material of the future, with properties that make it stronger than steel, more flexible than rubber and more conductive than most metals. As a result, the material could initiate a new wave of innovation in hardware design and manufacturing that may lead to incredibly thin and flexible devices. According to Bloomberg, it also may become the next battlefield for Apple and Samsung.

Graphene is graphite, the material in pencils, arranged in a layer that is one atom thick. The arrangement of the carbon molecules makes the material stronger than steel and even diamonds. It also is flexible, conductive and so transparent that is nearly invisible to the naked eye. It can be applied to other materials, potentially allowing for the creation of flexible displays and bendable devices.

Apple, Samsung and Google are allegedly in an arms race to acquire patents and other intellectual property to cover the design and use of the material in both mobile and wearable devices. With global mobile device sales predicted to reach $847 billion by 2016 and wearable technology to explode to a $19 billion business in the next five years, the development of graphene may be critical to a company's ability to compete in the future electronics marketplace.

The biggest hurdle for the widespread adoption of graphene is the high cost of production. These technological and manufacturing issues are being addressed by Seoul National University professor Hong Byung Hee, who owns a patent for mass-producing graphene-based displays.

To unlock that potential, the world’s biggest electronics makers are turning to researchers such as Hong Byung Hee, a professor at Seoul National University, who’s developed a patent for mass-producing graphene-based displays.

"Global technology companies are facing innovation limits in hardware and design, and in order to step over to the next level, they need to adopt new materials like graphene," Hong said in an interview. “Our key graphene technology is receiving considerable interest from firms including Apple, Samsung and even Google."

Apple has been silent on its own research into the use of graphene, with Apple spokesperson Kristin Huguet declining to comment to Bloomberg on Hong's patent and the company's interest in the material. Unlike Samsung, Apple's own publicly available patents and applications addressing graphene are scant, but it seems the company is at least exploring what the material might be used for.

Following reports last week that Apple had purchased Beats Electronics, it was thought the deal would be finalized and announced this week. However, Re/code is reporting the deal may not be finalized until next week.

Apple’s planned deal to buy Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion may not be finalized until next week, according to people familiar with the transaction. That’s a longer timetable than some people expected as recently as a few days ago.

Once the deal is completed, Beats co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine are expected to take on senior roles at Apple, with Iovine potentially becoming Apple's new music chief. In addition, Iovine and Dre's first official appearance as Apple employees is expected to take place at June's Worldwide Developer Conference.

With the next iPhone widely expected to be available in larger screen sizes, Canalys reports that a third of all smartphones sold worldwide in the first quarter had screen sizes larger than five inches, a full inch larger than Apple's 4" iPhone 5s screen. The five-inch market -- some 90 million units in the quarter -- was the fastest growing portion of the smartphone market in the first quarter.

Internal documents released during the Apple v. Samsung trial show how Apple has been aware of consumer interest in larger screened smartphones for quite some time, and the iPhone 6 is expected to have 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch options to compete in this market.

Smart phones with 5" and larger screens grew 369% - a substantially greater rate of growth than the overall market. Worldwide, they represented just over a third of shipments (34%), and in Greater China the figure hit 39%, and 43% in Asia Pacific.

"This is still a market segment led by Samsung, but the trend is unmistakably toward larger-screen handsets at the high end of the market. It held a 44% share of devices with displays of 5" and above, and 53% if the view is narrowed to look at 5.5"-plus displays," said Canalys Analyst Jessica Kwee.

[...]

Consumers now expect high-end devices to have large displays, and Apple’s absence in this market will clearly not last long. It is notable that 5" and above displays featured on almost half (47%) of smart phones with an unlocked retail price of US$500 or more. Of the remaining 53% of high-end smart phones, 87% were iPhones.

Only 12 percent of smartphones sold had screens of 5.5-inches or larger, with 22% between 5 and 5.4-inches and the rest smaller than 5-inches, including all iPhones.

The iPhone 6 is widely expected to be launched this fall with a a 4.7-inch option, perhaps at 1704x960 pixels, and a larger 5.5-inch version that may launch later due to supply constraints.

Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen today announced plans to return Flappy Bird to the App Store in August in a new interview with CNBC's Kelly Evans. According to Nguyen, the new version of Flappy Bird will be a multiplayer title that is "less addictive."

Back in February, Nguyen unexpectedly pulled Flappy Bird from the App Store after it became wildly popular, due in part to the attention he was receiving. "Please give me peace," he tweeted just a week before removing the app from the App Store. At the height of its popularity, the game was generating approximately $50,000 per day in revenue from in-app ads, causing a media frenzy.

In a March interview with Rolling Stone, Nguyen confessed that the reason he pulled the app was in part due to the overwhelming amount of attention he garnered from the media, but also because of troubling messages he received from Flappy Bird players about the game's addictiveness. One woman told him he was "distracting the children of the world."

Nguyen noted that he had trouble in school in his own youth because of an addiction to video games, and admitted to feeling guilty that Flappy Bird was an "addictive product."

After Flappy Bird was removed from the App Store, hundreds of other Flappy-style apps flooded the App Store as developers attempted to clone some of Nguyen's success, and at one point towards the end of February, one-third of new games released over a 24-hour period were heavily influenced by Flappy Bird.

Though the prominence of Flappy Bird clones has died down in recent weeks, fans will likely welcome the return of the original game. As Nguyen has said, "People can clone the app because of its simplicity, but they will never make another Flappy Bird." While Nyugen has mentioned multiplayer as one new aspect of the game, it is unclear how he plans to make it "less addictive."

During today's interview, Nguyen also relayed some details about his next game, which is said to be a jumping game where players control a character that leaps from building to building.

There is a long-standing problem with lost iMessages for select users when they switch from an iPhone to another device. Apple allegedly is aware of the problem and not able to provide a fix, claims former Lifehacker editor-in-chief Adam Pash, whose iPhone was affected by this message delivery problem.

After disabling their iPhones, some users experience an issue where iMessages sent from other iPhone owners are routed to the now-disabled iPhone and not forwarded as a text message to the active phone. The recipient never receives the text message, creating a situation that is frustrating for both people involved in the conversation.

Pash spoke to Apple's customer support after he stopped receiving messages from iPhone-owning friends when he switched to an Android phone. The support personnel confirmed "this is a problem a lot of people are facing" and "added that engineering team is working on it but is apparently clueless as to how to fix it."

In the meantime, Apple has completely hijacked my text messaging and my phone number portability (portability between devices, not networks). No one can fix this but Apple because it’s a problem at the device level, which means people in my position have no recourse but to wait for Apple to figure out what the problem is. But Apple isn’t offering any public support on the issue that I’ve been able to find (and it’s worth repeating that proper support is behind a $20 paywall for most people who’ve switched devices, who would also be the most commonly affected by this problem)

This issue with iMessage has been reported as far back as 2011, shortly after the messaging service debuted as a flagship feature of iOS 5. iPhone owners are advised to disable iMessages before they deactivate their phone in order to remove the device from Apple's system and allow messages to be forwarded properly as text messages to their new handset. This precautionary step of disabling iMessage apparently works for some, but not all iPhone owners who switch to another smartphone platform.

With an expected transition to a larger screen on the iPhone 6, MacRumors forum member pgiguere1 has taken a look at how non-optimized apps would appear on a rumored 1704 x 960 display that would move from the current "2x" pixel doubling technique to achieve Retina quality to a "3x" technique.

In Apple's earlier transition to 2x Retina displays, it was relatively simple for non-Retina assets to be scaled up using automatic pixel doubling techniques to represent a single non-Retina pixel as a 2x2 grid of Retina pixels until developers could get up to speed. But with a potential move to 3x (or 1.5 times current Retina), many have wondered if that transition would be awkward.

As pgiguere1 shows, while developers will undoubtedly want to optimize their apps with new 3x graphical assets, automatic scaling of current 2x assets will look considerably better on this new iPhone display than non-Retina assets did during the transition to 2x.

Keep in mind however that unlike with the @1x -> @2x transition we had in 2010, this time we’d only have a 50% enlargement rather than 100%.

The thing is, a 50% enlargement with interpolation doesn’t look worse than a 100% enlargement with pixel-doubling, despite the loss of details due to the interpolation. [...]

As you can see, older non-@3x-optimized apps would actually look better on an @3x iPhone than non-@2x-opitmized apps did on an @2x iPhone. Add to this the fact that the screen's pixel density would be higher this time around, and the perceived image quality difference would be even smaller.

While Apple is unlikely to announce a new resolution for the iPhone 6 at next month's Worldwide Developers Conference, the company is likely to begin providing more tools and encouraging developers to speed a push toward resolution-independent vector graphics and other changes that will facilitate a smooth transition to denser displays. But for those developers who are not ready by iPhone 6 launch day, their users are likely to still have a decent experience with unoptimized apps.

Apple's next generation iPhone 6 may adopt a higher resolution display, jumping from the current iPhone 5s resolution of 1136 x 640 to a sharper 1704 x 960 resolution, reports 9to5Mac. On the rumored 4.7-inch model, this would result in a display with 416 ppi and the same 16:9 ratio of the iPhone 5/5s/5c, while a 5.5-inch model at the same resolution would carry a density of 356 ppi.

With Apple's rumored move to larger displays in the iPhone 6, much discussion has been centered around what resolution Apple will use and how any changes would affect developers. Some speculation had suggested Apple might simply maintain the same resolution as on the iPhone 5s, making a seamless transition for developers. This stretch process would, however, drop the pixel density of the display below Apple's criteria for a "Retina" display.

Alternatively, Apple could boost the resolution to maintain or increase the pixel density, although this move would require work from app developers to maintain compatibility with the new devices. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested last month that Apple would maintain the current 326 ppi density, which could be achieved by bumping a 4.7-inch display to 1334 x 750, and we previously explored how that might work.

But according to 9to5Mac, Apple may adopt an even higher-resolution display that triples the base number of pixels of the iPhone screen in both length and width. This "3x" mode would take the base "1x" resolution of 568 x 320 and expand it to 1704 x 960. Using this method, Apple would retain the Retina branding at 416 ppi and keep the current 16:9 ratio of the iPhone 5/5s/5c.

This means that Apple will likely be tripling the aforementioned “base resolution” (568 x 320) of the iPhone screen in both directions, and that the iPhone screen resolution will be scaled with an increase of 150% from the current 2X resolution of 1136 x 640. Of course, Apple tests several different iPhones and display technologies, so it is possible that Apple chooses to take another route for display specifications for the 2014 iPhone upgrade.

Apple has allegedly been testing this 1704 x 960 resolution and while the design specs for the iPhone 6 are undoubtedly complete, it is not known for sure if Apple has elected to proceed with this resolution. Apple may be preparing to launch the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 sometime this fall with a faster A8 processor and improved camera technology.

Following the leak of a simple case for the rumored 5.5-inch iPhone 6, Nowhereelse.fr today pointed to [Google Translate] a pair of posts on Rocket News 24 sharing photos of a physical mockup of the larger iPhone 6 model alongside an iPhone 5s. While there have been numerous renderings, cases, and physical mockups of the rumored 4.7-inch iPhone 6 in recent weeks, this is one of the first comparison shots of the 5.5-inch version.

The resin-based mockup was printed on a MakerBot Replicator 2 3D Printer using design drawings published earlier this year by MacFan. The comparisons show just how much larger the 5.5-inch device is than the iPhone 5s, with the mockup measuring 157 mm in length, 77 mm in width and just 6.7 mm in thickness. It is longer and wider than the iPhone 5s (123.8 x 58.6 x 7.6 mm), but has a thinner profile that matches more closely to the iPod touch fifth generation (123.4 x 58.6 x 6.1 mm).

The mockup adopts the iPod touch-style curved edges, which are markedly different from the hard corners of the iPhone 5s, and elongated volume buttons. Unlike previous high-quality mockups of the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 model, this mockup is relatively crude, providing few details beyond the basic form factor.

Apple is rumored to be preparing a 4.7-inch version of the iPhone 6 for release in the fall, while the 5.5-inch version may debut several months later due to production issues that may have delayed its release.

GBA4iOS, the popular Game Boy emulator for iOS, has been removed by its creator Riley Testut on GitHub after Nintendo filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown request, reports The Next Web. First sharing the news through his Twitter, Testut stated that the emulator will continue to function normally on iOS devices, as in-app ROM downloads will be "temporarily suspended."

GBA4iOS saw its last major update in February, which added iPad support, controller skins, iOS 7 controller support, Dropbox integration, and an in-app web browser that could used to download Game Boy games from any ROM website. The emulator was also notable for bypassing Apple's App Store restrictions as it could be installed directly on an iOS device by visiting the project's official website and tapping a download link.

Traditionally, Apple has taken a strict stance on emulators in the App Store, which has caused apps like GBA4iOS to seek alternative methods for user downloads. For instance, open emulators such as iMAME and iDOS have made their way onto the App Store only to be pulled a short time later likely because of potential legal issues.

Despite the removal of GBA4iOS, the 'NDS4iOS' Nintendo DS emulator for iOS devices released last month remains available on its respective web page. However, it is unknown if Nintendo will file a similar takedown notice in efforts to prevent potential piracy.

Apple will look to restrict vacation days for its German retail employees this September ahead of a likely launch for the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and other products, reports German site iFun.de (Google Translate). The move will likely also be enacted at the company's other stores across the globe, and follows a similar move last year in which Apple restricted vacation time for AppleCare employees from September 15 to 28 for the launches of the iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c, and iOS 7 in that time period.

The majority of rumors throughout the past few months have indicated a September release for the 4.7-inch iPhone 6, with the larger 5.5-inch version of the device to launch towards the end of the year or in early 2015 due to production issues. However, this latest report contrasts a rumor from earlier this month that stated Apple will launch the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 in August and the larger 5.5-inch version in September, which would be a different strategy compared to past iPhone launches that have traditionally come in the fall for the past three years.

In addition to a larger display, Apple's next-generation iPhone is said to feature a thinner profile, a faster A8 processor, and an upgraded rear-facing camera in the form of either optical or electronic image stabilization.

The report also gives an update on the progress of Apple's upcoming retail store in Hanover, Germany, which is now on track to open sometime this fall. A previous report in March estimated that the store would open sometime in April, however multiple structural problems and mold have resulted in a delay for Apple's move into the location. When the store eventually opens, the location will mark Apple's 14th in the country, following stores in Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Frankfurt.