MacRumors

With Apple's USB Power Adapter Takeback Program officially launching yesterday, the company has now posted prices for additional participating regions, boosting the number of countries where consumers may trade-in a third-party USB charger for a discount on an official Apple charger (via 9to5Mac). While Apple originally expanded plans for the program last month to countries beyond the United States and China with seven additional countries, the recent move brings the amount of countries supported by the program to 30.

Apple is maintaining separate information pages for several countries involved in the program, while pricing in the bulk of the countries is summarized on a separate "other countries" page.

First introduced last month following the electrocution of a Chinese woman using a counterfeit iPhone charger, the recycling initiative is designed to allow iOS users to safely replace and dispose of questionable third-party power adapters.

Under the terms of the program, Apple will accept and recycle any third-party charger at any Apple Retail Store or participating Apple Authorized Service Provider, and will also provide an authentic charger for $10 in the United States, a $9 discount from Apple's regular pricing.

Apple has begun showing the teaser video for the upcoming Mac Pro in movie theaters across the nation. First shown at WWDC during the initial debut of the Mac Pro, the video shows the sleek black curves of the product from multiple angles.

According to reports from several people who have seen the teaser, it ends with the line "Fall 2013," offering the first concrete hint of when the redesigned Mac Pro might launch. At WWDC, Apple gave a "later this year" release date.

The new Mac Pro is a fraction of the size of the previous model and housed in a radically redesigned tower. It will come equipped with Intel Xeon E5 processors with up to 12 cores, dual workstation AMD FirePro GPUs, and new PCIe flash storage.

According to Apple, it is 2.5 times faster than the current Mac Pro, though benchmarks of the 12-core Xeon E5–2697 v2 processor have demonstrated mixed results, with the latest offering evidence that the Mac Pro will certainly offer a significant improvement over its predecessor, especially during demanding multi-threaded tasks.

It remains unclear when Apple might debut the Mac Pro in the fall months. The company is expected to hold an event for the iPhone 5S on September 10, with an iPad event to follow, and the Mac Pro could potentially surface at either time. Apple has also not announced pricing for the product, which is currently being assembled in the United States.

Apple has launched a replacement program for the graphics card in some mid–2011 iMac configurations, reports 9to5Mac. According to a note sent to Apple Support employees, the AMD Radeon HD 6970 video cards in some 27-inch May 2011 iMacs have experienced issues, causing them to fail.

Apple has determined that some AMD Radeon HD 6970M video cards used in 27-inch iMac computers with 3.1GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 or 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processors may fail, causing the computer’s display to appear distorted, white or blue with vertical lines, or to turn black. iMac computers with affected video cards were sold between May 2011 and October 2012.

The affected iMacs contain serial numbers with the last four characters of DHJQ, DHJW, DL8Q, DNGH, DNJ9, DMW8, DPM1, DPM2, DPNV, DNY0, DRVP, DY6F, or F610. The errors have been previously noted on both the MacRumors forums and the Apple Support forums.

Apple will replace the graphics card of affected iMacs with the aforementioned serial numbers at no cost for up to three years from the date that the computer was purchased, which makes early adopters eligible until May 2014.

Replacements can be initiated through AppleCare, the Genius Bar, or Apple Authorized Resellers and iMac users that paid to have the graphics card replaced are also eligible for a refund.

Following last month’s iTunes update that included fixed syncing and iTunes Store sign-in, Apple has today released iTunes 11.0.5.

The update fixes a bug with iTunes in the Cloud where some purchases may download or play unexpected items.

This update corrects an issue with iTunes in the Cloud, where some purchases may download or play unexpected items.

The update is available through the Mac App Store, Software Update, and direct from Apple's Software Download Page. A Windows 64 version is also available.

Steve Jobs was able to strike an unprecedented revenue sharing deal with AT&T (formerly Cingular) due to his deep involvement with the iPhone, says Raj Aggarwal, a former telecommunications consultant who worked with Jobs on the deal.

In an interview with Forbes, Aggarwal details the history behind the deal, which saw Apple receiving a portion (approximately $10) of the monthly service charges that AT&T collected from each iPhone user. The revenue sharing agreement, which ultimately ended in 2008, allowed AT&T to offer the iPhone exclusively as other carriers, like Verizon, were unwilling to agree to the terms of the deal.

Under the terms, Apple also had control over pricing, branding, and distribution, in addition to getting AT&T to create a number of new features for the phone.

Aggarwal, whose Adventis consulting stint with Jobs occurred in "early 2005," said that Jobs was able to pull off the AT&T deal because of his personal involvement in the details of the iPhone, his efforts to build relationships with carriers, his willingness to make demands that others perceived as outrageous, and his nerve to bet major resources on that vision.

According to Aggarwal, Jobs was hands-on in a way that no other CEO was. He personally met with the CEOs of each carrier, and "got deeply involved in the details he cared about." Jobs, Aggarwal recounts, was willing to take risks to "realize his vision" and made "outrageous" demands that ultimately worked out in Apple’s favor.

Aggarwal also found Jobs unique in his outrageous demands. As he explained, "Jobs said, '$50 a month unlimited voice, data, and SMS plan — that's our mission. We should ask for and go after something unreasonable that no one has been willing to accept.' He would come up with these outrageous demands and fight for them — getting much more than he otherwise would have."

AT&T's exclusivity agreement expired in 2010, but the deal Jobs struck with the company earned both AT&T and Apple an enormous amount of money thanks to the iPhone's immediate popularity with customers.

Researchers from Georgia Tech submitted to the App Store and received approval for a malicious app, according to Technology Review. The researchers submitted an innocuous app that included inactive malware-type code hidden from Apple's app approval system.

When downloaded onto a test device after the app was approved, the app 'phoned home' and gained a variety of abilities that compromised the host phone.

This malware, which the researchers dubbed Jekyll, could stealthily post tweets, send e-mails and texts, steal personal information and device ID numbers, take photos, and attack other apps. It even provided a way to magnify its effects, because it could direct Safari, Apple’s default browser, to a website with more malware.

The researchers, including Long Lu, a Stony Brook University researcher who was part of the team at Georgia Tech, only put the app on the App Store very briefly and it was not downloaded by anyone other than research team members.

The team said that using monitoring code built into the app, they determined that Apple's app approval team only ran the app for a few seconds and that malicious code was not discovered by Apple's team. "The message we want to deliver is that right now, the Apple review process is mostly doing a static analysis of the app, which we say is not sufficient because dynamically generated logic cannot be very easily seen," said Lu.

Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told Technology Review that the company made some changes to the iOS operating system in response to the paper, though he did not specify what the changes were.

New photos of the rumored gold iPhone 5S have been published by the French site MacBoutic (via iPhon.fr). Similar images have appeared before and KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has offered accurate information on Apple's upcoming product plans numerous times, said yesterday the 5S would be available in gold.

Several days ago, BGR shared different images suggesting the color will be more subtle, calling it 'Champagne' and providing its own images of the volume and mute switches. Japanese blog Mac Otakara reported separately earlier this week that the iPhone 5S would have a gold option.

Oddly, MacBoutic claims they "deliberately blurred the "Apple" logo and the words "iPhone" on the back of the chassis", though there are no traces in the image of such blurring. It's possible that this is a preproduction sample and that sort of lettering was missing entirely, or possibly a knockoff part not manufactured for Apple.

The new iPhone is expected to be announced at a media event on September 10th.

Update: Rene Ritchie of iMore, who has had accurate sources in the past, echoes these rumors.

There are a bunch of rumors and speculation making the rounds about Apple adding gold to the color options for the upcoming iPhone 5S. I've heard the same thing, but probably from different sources.

Joshua Michael Stern's Steve Jobs biography JOBS launched in theaters today, and despite a vigorous marketing campaign that saw actor Ashton Kutcher attending a number of promotional events and interviews, the movie appears to be garnering largely mixed reviews for both its content and the performance of its title actor.

On movie review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, JOBS is ranked as "rotten" with a score of 25 out of 100. The Washington Post gave the movie 1.5 stars out of four, pointing out that the movie focuses heavily on Apple rather than on Steve Jobs himself.

Directed by Joshua Michael Stern ("Swing Vote") and written by first-time screenwriter Matt Whiteley, "Jobs" confuses the story of Apple, the company, with the story of its guru and guiding force, spending way too much time on backroom personnel dealings than on encounters that might help us understand, on a deep level, the title character.

The film is so thick with Jobs's career highlights and lowlights that there's little room for insights. What made this famously private man tick?

The New York Times offers a similar opinion of the movie, which it claims has "all the sex appeal of a PowerPoint presentation."

But Mr. Kutcher doesn't have the tools that some actors use to transcend weak material and either he didn't receive any help or didn't allow any real direction from Mr. Stern. Mr. Kutcher's tendency to cap so many emotional scenes with small, self-satisfied smiles is especially unfortunate because they can’t help but bring to mind his other career as a pitchman for digital cameras.

The greater blame rests on the filmmakers, who never find a way to navigate the "passions, perfectionism, demons, desires, artistry, devilry and obsession for control" that Walter Isaacson enumerated in "Steve Jobs," his 2011 authorized biography.

Several of Steve Jobs' former colleagues who were present during the events laid out in the movie also weighed in. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak gave a short review of the film on Gizmodo, where he commended the acting but noted that the film had left out important events and interactions.

I felt bad for many people I know well who were portrayed wrongly in their interactions with Jobs and the company. The movie ends pretty much where the great Jobs finally found product success (the iPod) and changed so many of our lives. I'm grateful to Steve for his excellence in the i-era, and his contribution to my own life of enjoying great products, but this movie portrays him having had those skills in earlier times.

Early employees Daniel Kottke (who was famously awarded no stock options) and Bill Fernandez gave their opinion on JOBS in an interview with Slashdot, pointing out the creative licenses that the film took when telling the story.

Kottke, who collaborated on the film, says that Kutcher was "very good," but that Wozniak was depicted inaccurately. "It portrays Woz as not having the same vision as Steve Jobs, which is really unfair," he says. While he was impressed with the way the movie captured some of the early scenes, such as the West Coast Computer Faire, he does point out that quite a bit of dramatic flare was added.

The early versions were painful. Really painful. I forwarded the first draft to Mike Markkula because they wanted his feedback, and Mike took such a bad reaction to it, he wouldn't have anything more to do with the project.

By the time it got to the fourth draft, it was okay. It wasn't making me cringe. But they still had a scene of me arguing with Steve, which never ever happened, but, you know, in the realm of artistic license. I mean, the dynamic of my relationship with Steve Jobs is he just completely stopped talking to me in about 1980. And that's not cinematic; arguments are much better on the screen.

JOBS is currently showing in theaters around the world, and according to Open Road Films CEO Tom Ortenberg, the movie will debut on Netflix in the spring of 2014. A second Steve Jobs movie, from screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, is also in the works for 2014.