MacRumors

A report from the China Times (cited on the Japanese website Mac Otakara) predicts an October launch for an updated MacBook Pro model featuring Intel's new Haswell processors, which are already present in the new MacBook Airs, released last month at Apple's annual WWDC event. The report cites sources in Apple's lengthy supply chain and suggests that the new models will remain the same price as the previous ones.

The new range of Haswell processors (image above courtesy of ITPro UK) offer a slight boost in processor speed, but their major draw is a lower rate of power consumption compared to previous models. The MacBook Air now boasts an "all-day battery life" of up to 12 hours for the 13-inch model and up to 9 hours for the 11-inch model. The chips also offer support for the latest 4K displays, which offer a resolution 4 times that of standard HD displays. Currently, no Apple products feature the resolution.

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has a good track record when it comes to Apple rumors, originally predicted new MacBook Pros with Haswell processors at WWDC back in June, alongside a slimmer MacBook Pro with Retina display, though he later updated his prediction to suggest a mid-September release date for refreshed MacBook Pros.

There is some evidence that suggests Apple vendors may be trying to run down existing MacBook Pro stock. Both Best Buy and Amazon are currently offering significant back-to-school discounts on the MacBook Pro, offering the 13-inch base model (with 4 GB of memory and a 500 GB hard drive) for $999, compared to $1,199 in the Apple Store. Best Buy has dropped the price even further for students, with an additional $100 off.

The sales do not appear to be confined to the United States as Amazon UK is currently selling the same entry level 13-inch MacBook Pro for £904.95 ($1,395), instead of £999 ($1,539) in the Apple Store.

Yesterday, Mac Mini shipping times slipped to 5 to 7 days in the official Apple Store, suggesting that Apple may also be gearing up to introduce additional new products in the near future.

Marketing research firm Harris Interactive has awarded Apple the title of “Brand of the Year” in the categories of smartphones, tablets, and computers, as first reported by VentureBeat. The distinction comes after a poll asking 38,500+ Americans about the perceptions of their favorite brands, in which Apple was placed above other competitors such as Hewlett-Packard, Amazon, Samsung, and HTC.

"Americans continue to give Apple brands strong ratings," says Manny Flores, Senior Vice President at Harris Interactive. "And while their Consumer Connection scores are strong within their respective categories, what really stands out is that in all three of the categories Apple brands are measured - Computer, Tablet and Mobile Phone - its Brand Momentum scores are in the top 30 of all 1,500 brands evaluated in the study, showing that consumers see this as a brand of the future.

These awards come after BBC reported about a survey done by marketing group Added Value (AV), who claimed that Apple’s brand has become “less inspiring” among consumers.

Research firm IDC has released its estimates on worldwide mobile phone sales for the second quarter of 2013, showing Apple's iPhone growth slowing as it posted its second-lowest iPhone growth rate in four years with only 20% year-over-year growth compared to 52.3% growth for the entire market. However, Apple maintained a hold on the number two spot for smartphone makers behind Samsung, as other competitors LG, Lenovo, and ZTE failed to hit the 6% mark during the quarter.

Apple posted its second-lowest year-over-year iPhone growth rate in almost four years as some buyers presumably held off on iPhone purchases in advance of an expected next-generation device launch this fall. Nonetheless, the 31.2 million iPhones Apple shipped last quarter was impressive as its flagship iPhone 5 model, which has been in the market for three quarters, was faced with additional global competition in the form of Samsung's Galaxy S4 and HTC's critically-acclaimed One models. Apple's growth is likely to accelerate globally assuming it launches a lower-cost iPhone and continues to penetrate prepaid markets in the quarters to come.

Apple continues to benefit from the growth of smartphones, as it held onto its spot as the number three manufacturer in the world in looking at total mobile phone shipments. Apple’s overall unit shipments were up 5.2% from previous quarter, while overall market share rose 0.8% allowing the company to grab an overall 7.2% market share for the quarter.

Ahead of a "very busy fall" for Apple, Mac mini ship times on many Apple Online Stores have slipped to 5-7 business days.

All other Macs on the online store have shipping estimates of "within 24 hours". That said, most Apple Retail Stores do show availability for the mini, as does Amazon.com.

Apple sometimes does have temporary product shortages of computers mid-cycle, but they can also portend intentional drawdowns of stock ahead of a product refresh. The Mac mini is a candidate for an upgrade to Haswell processors, and it is coming due for a possible update according to the MacRumors Buyer's Guide.

Ahead of an upcoming import ban on older Apple devices, Verizon attorney Randal Milch has published an open letter via The Wall Street Journal, calling for presidential intervention in the case to veto the ban.

High-tech products can implicate thousands of patents. If the ITC finds that a product infringes even a single one, it can stop the product at the border. But that's basically it. The commission can't levy much in the way of a lesser penalty. In the end the consumer suffers when the use of such an enforcement tool is unwarranted.

The import ban was originally scheduled back in June, after the U.S. International Trade Commission reached a decision on an ongoing Apple vs. Samsung patent case. The ITC ruled that Apple infringed on Samsung Patent No. 7,706,384, entitled "Apparatus and method for encoding/decoding transport format combination indicator in CDMA mobile communication system."

A cease and desist order was issued on several Apple products, including AT&T models of the iPhone 3GS and 4, the iPad 3G, and the iPad 2 3G. The ban did not go into effect immediately, however, as such rulings are given a 60 day window for the White House to intervene.

Though Verizon is not directly affected by case as it pertains solely to AT&T products, Milch believes that such a ban would further encourage patent abuse.

What we have warned is that patent litigation at the ITC—where the only remedy is to keep products from the American public—is too high-stakes a game for patent disputes. The fact that the ITC's intellectual-property-dispute docket has nearly quadrupled over 15 years only raises the stakes further. Smartphone patent litigation accounts for a substantial share of that increase.

While a presidential veto on an ITC decision has not happened since 1987, Milch suggests that intervention is necessary when the patent holder is not using the technology (as is often the case with patent trolls), when the patent holder has agreed to license the patent on reasonable terms, or when the infringement is unimportant to the overall product. Apple's infringement on Samsung's patent falls into the third category.

"There are more than 250,000 patents relevant to today’s smartphones," Milch writes. "It makes no sense that exclusion could occur for infringement of the most minor patent."

Without intervention, the cease and desist order on Apple products will go into effect on August 5, 2013. Apple has filed for an appeal and has also requested a stay on the ban.

After being found guilty in federal court of conspiring to artificially inflate e-book prices, legal experts are estimating that Apple could owe as much as $500 million in damages.

GigaOm has shared a chart provided to the federal judge in the case by the Texas attorney general. It shows how much in damages the five publishers have been found liable and how much they have paid in settlements. The remainder -- after damages have been trebled for willful violations -- works out to roughly $500 million.

The chart shows that the publishers have paid out over $166 million so far. Earlier this month, a lawyer from Hagens Berman — the class action firm in the case — told my colleague Jeff Roberts that Apple would likely face a liability payment of harm to consumers times three, minus the $166 million already paid out by publishers. On Wednesday, Law360 reported (paywall) the same thing, calculating that if Apple loses its appeal it would face about $490 million in damages. I annotated the chart above with those figures.

Apple has indicated that it will appeal the guilty ruling and it's likely that it will be many months or even years before the case is resolved.

While Apple is still working to bring its developer site back up a week after taken offline due to a security breach, the company appears to be experiencing another problem with its systems today, as a number of MacRumors readers have reported they are unable to activate their new iPhones. Other reports are showing up on Twitter as the problems continue.

According to one tipster who called Apple about the problem, the company's activation servers are currently down. Another AT&T employee has told MacRumors that AT&T has also confirmed the outage, and posts in Apple's discussion forum offer similar information.

Reports of problems began surfacing nearly three hours ago, and there is no word yet on when users can expect the issue to be fully resolved.

Last week, Ashton Kutcher took to Quora to explain some of the reasons why he decided to take on the role of Steve Jobs in the upcoming film JOBS, noting his admiration for Jobs, the challenge of the role, and his interest in the convergence of technology and entertainment.

With the film set for wide release on August 16, Kutcher is now beginning to hit the publicity circuit to talk about the film. He appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last night, where he discussed how he missed a chance to meet Steve Jobs six months before Jobs' death and how regret over that decision played a part in his decision to portray Jobs.

Kutcher also sat down with The Verge for a wide-ranging interview including some discussion of his portrayal of Jobs. In the interview, Kutcher describes how he felt almost compelled to take on the role of Jobs out of love for the Apple co-founder. Kutcher felt that if anyone was going to "screw it up", it should be someone should be someone who cared for Jobs.

To prepare for the role, Kutcher assembled a 15-hour SoundCloud compilation of Jobs' speaking voice, including both public presentations and more candid recordings that captured his habits outside of public life. "There were two versions of him, and I got this from a lot of friends of his that I talked to," Kutcher said. "There was the guy who went on stage and presented things, and then there was the guy who was in the boardroom, who was working on a product, who was having an intimate conversation. And I tried to find little snippets of stuff where he wasn't aware that he was being recorded or speeches that he didn't think anyone was going to hear, so I could get a little more of who he honestly was."

The relevant portion of the interview begins roughly 11:30 into the video.

A newly published patent application from Apple describes a "power management for electronic devices" system, which detects the usage patterns of a mobile phone and estimates the required energy needed to run the phone between charges. The abstract of the patent application, No. US 2013/0191662 (via AppleInsider), describes the system as:

A method for modifying one or more characteristics of a mobile electronic device in order to save or reduce power consumption of the device.

Closer inspection of the document reveals that the system automatically turns certain hardware features of the mobile phone (such as Wi-Fi, location services or Bluetooth) off in order to try and increase the device's battery life.

The patent application, which was first filed back in January 2012, lists Michael Ingrassia, a senior software engineer at Apple who has worked the iPod nano and iPod classic (including the Radio, iPod Out, and Voice Memos features on the iPod nano), and Jeffrey T. Lee as its inventors.

In making its case for the need addressed by the described invention, the document describes a situation all too familiar to many smartphone users:

A user may charge his or her device prior to leaving for work, and while at work may use a global positioning system (GPS) for turn-by-turn directions to attend a business meeting, watch one or more videos on the device, and make multiple phone calls, all without charging the device for a number of hours. In this case, the power source may be drained before the user has the chance to recharge the device and thus cease operating.

The system described by Apple remembers charging locations where a user would typically charge their device (such as their home or place of work) as well as typical device usage (the type of power source, typical charge time and typical travel time to and from locations) by using "an on-board GPS radio", then automatically builds a power management profile based on the user's usage patterns.
As always with Apple patents, the technology described here may not make it into a final product, but given the limitations on battery capacity imposed by the slim mobile devices in use today, it would certainly be welcomed by many people looking to extend the battery lives of their devices.

European regulators have accepted a promise by the British media group Penguin and German media conglomerate Bertelsmann to scrap deals on electronic books, also known as "e-books", with Apple which were found to be in breach of European competition policy.

Penguin was not the only company in the firing line. Back in December 2012, the Commission criticized the practices of four large publishers, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Holtzbrinck and Harper Collins, of working with Apple via an "agency model" whereby the publishers set the retail price and the distributor takes a fee (30% in Apple's case).

Under the "wholesale model" in place before Apple entered the market, publishers sell their goods to distributors for fixed prices and allow the distributors decide the final retail prices. The agency model came under fire for causing a rise in retail prices of e-books compared to the wholesale model championed by Amazon and Google. Under Apple's "most favored nation" contract clauses, it was allowed to match lower pricing by other retailers, and with the support of the major publishers effectively forced the entire industry to switch to the agency model, raising antitrust issues in a number of regions.

Joaquín Almunia, the European Commissioner for Competition, said in a press release from this morning:

After our decision of December 2012, the commitments are now legally binding on Apple and all five publishers including Penguin, restoring a competitive environment in the market for e-books.

The development comes after a district judge in the United States, Denise Cote, said that Apple played a "central role" in helping to fix the price of e-books. Court documents show that Apple, along with five other publishers, "conspired to raise, fix, and stabilize the retail price for newly released and bestselling trade e-books in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1 ("Sherman Act") and various state laws". Apple has steadfastly claimed that it has done nothing wrong and will appeal the decision.

The European Commission is well-known for imposing large fines on companies who fail to follow practices designed to protect consumers against anti-competitive behavior. In 2009, Intel was handed a record-breaking €1.06 billion ($1.45 billion) fine for the abuse of its dominance in the computer chip market and in 2004, Microsoft was fined €497 million (around $795 million) for offering Windows Media Player standard with its operating systems as well as providing no information about competing network software to interact with Windows desktops and servers.