MacRumors

Last week, Apple began offering customers the option of having their online orders shipped to their local retail store for pickup, a service especially valuable for those who have difficulty receiving shipments at their home or office. The "ship to store" option initially rolled out in the company's three San Francisco stores, and quickly expanded to include all sixteen Bay Area stores before the four New York City stores jointed the program earlier this week.

Apple has been said to be taking the service full-scale as of today as part of a series of retail enhancements that will also allow customers to use self-checkout for shelf-stocked items at Apple retail stores using the company's iOS app.

Evidence of Apple making minute-by-minute tweaks to the ship to store program is visible in Apple's online store, where just a short time ago customers had the option of using the service throughout the company's 51 California and four New York City stores.

The new expanded program did not last long, however, as Apple now appears to have completely shut down the ship to store option, with all stores listing online-only items as "unavailable for pickup". Items stocked in-store can still be purchased through the system, with California and New York City stores listing those products as "available now".

Apple is said to be viewing in-store pickup and self-checkout as major changes for the future of its retail stores, expecting that the majority of its customers will utilize in-store pickup as their default delivery method for Apple purchases.

Digitimes claims that Apple is going to "completely overhaul" its product lineups in 2012. The site specifically lists the iPad, iMac, iPhone and MacBook Air lines.

It's not clear if this is an all inclusive list or not. Notably absent are the MacBook Pro, Mac mini, Mac Pro and iPod lines.

Apple plans to completely overhaul its product lineups, including iPad, iMac, iPhone and MacBook Air, in 2012 and is expected to finalize order volumes for key parts and components for the next-generation iPad in December, according to sources in the upstream supply chain.

We interpret the report to mean new designs for the listed product lines.

The iPhone seems the most likely of the bunch to get a full redesign. In fact, we may have already seen a glimpse of what the next iPhone might look like. Tapered iPhone 5 case designs leaked in China flooded the market in mid 2011, leading to the belief that Apple would be releasing such a design this fall.

Apple ended up releasing the iPhone 4S instead, which shares the same design as the previous generation iPhone 4. Based on Apple's release pattern, however, it seems certain that the 2012 iPhone will receive a new external design.

The iMac design has remained relatively stable in design over the past few years. Given the constraints of the design, we're not sure how drastic a change we could see in the iMac.

The iPad has only seen two releases, each with a slightly different design. Again, the basic design constraints will limit it to a 9.7" display, but another report has suggested the 2012 design will be an even thinner design.

Finally, the MacBook Air. While we're certain that the MacBook Pro will see new design next year, how it integrates with the MacBook Air line remains to be seen. Rumors of a 15" Air-like design have been circulating since July. We expect that the Air and Pro lines will have to eventually merge into one. Intel believes that the Air form factor will dominate the consumer market in the near future.

When Apple launched OS X 10.7 (Lion) to the public in July, most of the media focus was on the user-facing changes, such as the iOS-like Launchpad, or trackpad scrolling direction. In Lion, Apple also made a number of under-the-hood changes in their security model that may start affecting Mac App Store customers in the near future.

Amongst the many new features in Lion, Apple included a more robust sandboxing system that can prevent 3rd party applications from causing unintended damage. In their Lion review, ArsTechnica explains how sandboxing works in general:

Running an application inside a sandbox is meant to minimize the damage that could be caused if that application is compromised by a piece of malware. A sandboxed application voluntarily surrenders the ability to do many things that a normal process run by the same user could do. For example, a normal application run by a user has the ability to delete every single file owned by that user. Obviously, a well-behaved application will not do this. But if an application becomes compromised, it may be coerced into doing something destructive.

Developers of these sandboxed applications must take special measures to break up their application into individual processes that only are able to do exactly what they need. Apple still allows user initiated actions to perform as expected and override the sandbox, but app-initiated actions in sandboxed applications will be restricted. This means that system wide file access and inter-app scripting and interactions will not be allowed.

Apple had originally told developers that sandboxing would become a requirement for Mac App Store apps as of November, 2011. Tonight, however, Apple emailed developers that the Sandboxing requirement will now go into effect on March 1, 2012.

As of March 1, 2012 all apps submitted to the Mac App Store must implement sandboxing.

While sandboxing will increase the security of Mac App Store apps, there have been concerns that the restrictions will stifle features and innovation on the Mac platform.

In October, Macworld published a pair of articles from Jason Snell and Andy Ihnatko expressing their concerns about the new restrictions.

Snell reported that he had heard that some Mac developers will be removing features from their apps or reducing their functionality to fit them in Apple's sandbox.

Not only does this approach risk turning the Mac App Store into a wasteland of arcade games and one-trick-pony apps, it risks dumbing down the Mac app ecosystem as a whole. While developers can always opt out of the Mac App Store, they’re reluctant to do so.

Examples of Mac Apps that will be affected include iTunes controllers (Tagalicious, CoverSutra), inter-app communication (Fantastical), apps that browse the file system (Transmit), system-wide keyboard shortcut utilities (TextExpander), file syncing, and backups utilities.

While Apple is offering developers some short term exceptions to get around sandboxing, the company promises that those exceptions will be temporary. Some developers have said there is a lot of uncertainty around how long Apple will allow these apps in the Mac App Store after the deadline. With the new delay until March, some developers are holding out hope that Apple may be trying to come up with a better solution than simply pulling these apps off the Mac App Store.

As Snell points out, developers can choose to distribute their non-sandboxed apps outside the Mac App Store, but those developers would be giving up a huge distribution point.

On-again, off-again, industry publication Digitimes is claiming that Apple's next iPad will enter mass production soon and will launch in March 2012. The catch is that according to their sources, this new iPad product is not seen by Apple as an iPad 3, but instead an upgraded iPad 2. Instead they say "the real iPad 3" won't be launched until the 3rd quarter of 2012 at the earliest.

The publication provides no distinction as to what qualifies as a "real iPad 3", but does claim that this interim iPad 2 upgrade will be thinner than the iPad 2 and offer longer battery life.

The most obvious distinction, though not mentioned in the article, could come from the use of a ultra-high resolution Retina display. Talk of a such a display has been ongoing for months, but the most recent reports indicate that Apple's suppliers are finding it challenge to produce such high density displays.

Digitimes has been particularly prolific in the past year with their rumors, but have become particularly spotty in their accuracy. While plans could have obviously changed, their previous iPad 3 report claimed a Fall 2011 launch. So, take this new report with some skepticism. That said, an ultra high resolution iPad-sized Retina display could easily be the production bottleneck for Apple's plans.

Apple has issued Beta 2 of iTunes 10.5.1 to developers tonight to provide further testing for the upcoming iTunes Match service:

iTunes 10.5.1 beta 2 is now available and includes a number of important stability and performance improvements. iTunes Match is also now available for testing on Apple TV.

iTunes Match stores your music library in iCloud and allows you to enjoy your collection from anywhere, any time, on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, computer and now your Apple TV.

iTunes Match is Apple's $25/year subscription service that will match your existing iTunes library with 256-Kbps versions in the iCloud. The service was expected to be launched at the "end of October", but has since missed that target.

Apple has provided no new estimate for a launch date for the iTunes Match service.

Apple issued a statement to The Loop's Jim Dalrymple about customer complaints of poor battery life with the new iPhone 4S and iOS 5:

A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices. We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks.”

There have been a litany of complaints about iPhone 4S and iOS 5 battery life ever since their release last month. A number of solutions have been proposed by the community for this problem, including turning off Time Zone detection, Bluetooth and others.

Apple has already seeded developers with a 5.0.1 beta that is said to address the issue.

Apple just released iOS 5.0.1 beta to developers. The build number of 5.0.1 is 9A402.

iOS 5.0.1 beta contains improvements and other bug fixes including:
- Fixes bugs affecting battery life
- Adds Multitasking Gestures for original iPad
- Resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud
- Improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation
- Contains security improvements

iOS 5.0.1 beta introduces a new way for developers to specify files that should remain on device, even in low storage situations.

The last note about files addresses an iOS 5.0 issue raised by Marco Arment.

There’s no longer anywhere to store files that don’t need to be backed up (or can’t be, by the new policy) but shouldn’t be randomly deleted.

The iOS 5.0 policy introduced issues for apps that wished to store offline data. Apple appears to have addressed this issue in 5.0.1.

With the release of the new Siri intelligent assistant on the iPhone 4S, some users have been curious about how much data the feature uses given that most users are on limited data plans and that Siri must communicate with outside servers in order to function. Ars Technica has now taken a look at a set of common Siri tasks, determined that those specific queries used an average of 63 KB of data.

The testing was broken down into two groups of queries, with the first being local queries requiring data only to interpret the spoken input. Data usage on those queries came in at an average of approximately 36.7 KB.

We performed six tasks that would be considered to be local tasks. These queries included things like, "Set an alarm for 3 hours from now," "Make an appointment for 2pm on Friday" (and then telling Siri to cancel the task), "Remind me to file expense reports when I get home," and "What is the contact info for Ars Technica?"

These tasks added up to a total of 220KB of data usage, or an average of 36.7KB per query. The actual numbers ranged from 60KB down to 18KB, and we believe this is correlated to the complexity of the specific query and language we used to perform it.

For more complex queries bringing results back from the Internet via Wolfram Alpha or Google, the average was 94.7 KB, with a range of 23 KB to 187 KB.

Summing up the data usage, Ars Technica calculated that a user performing all eleven of the sample queries via 3G every single day would consume approximately 20 MB of data in a month. Informal surveys of typical Siri usage revealed that even high-use customers tend to come in at about fifteen queries per day, which would represent in the neighborhood of 30 MB of data per billing cycle depending on complexity of requests.

Most carriers offer customers easy ways to check their current and historical data usage, helping them gauge how much cap space they typically have as they consider how Siri usage will affect their data needs.

The Bookseller reports that Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Steve Jobs easily topped the best-seller list in the United States and United Kingdom during its first week of availability. Citing Nielsen's BookScan data for U.S. figures, the report claims that the book sold 379,000 copies, outselling second-place The Litigator by John Grisham by more than three-to-one.

Despite being on sale for just six days in the US, Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography is already the 18th bestselling book of the year. It sits one place ahead of John Grisham's The Confession (Dell) and one place behind Rick Riordan's The Son of Neptune (Hyperion) in the year-to-date BookScan US bestseller list.

The report notes that the debut was also the strongest for any book since November of last year.

Nielsen BookScan tracks book sales volumes at their points of sale, developing a picture that encompasses the vast majority, although not all, U.S. sales including those through major online retailers such as Amazon. BookScan data does not, however, include sales of eBooks.

Amazon announced just after the book's launch that it was poised to become the best-selling book of 2011 despite a release late in the year, and the title currently ranks #3 on Amazon's chart for 2011 sales.

Sony Pictures has already acquired the movie rights to the Jobs biography, and is reportedly courting Aaron Sorkin to write the screenplay.

Bloomberg briefly reports that Czech carrier Telefonica/O2 has apparently announced that it will cease selling all iPhone models, objecting to Apple's "business terms".

Telefonica Czech Republic AS won’t sell Apple’s new iPhone 4S and will end sales of all Apple’s models because of Apple’s business terms, Hospodarske Noviny reported, citing Telefonica’s local spokesman Hany Farghali.

No additional details on the reasons behind the fall-out have been made available in the Bloomberg report, and the original report from the Czech newspaper does not yet appear to be available online.

Dow Jones Newswires reported last week that Telefonica Czech Republic AS and Apple were still trying to reach a deal for the iPhone 4S, talks that have apparently ended without an agreement being reached.

"We haven't agreed with Apple on mutually acceptable conditions yet," Hany Farghali told Dow Jones Newswires in a telephone interview.

...

Telefonica Czech, majority owned by Spain's Telefonica SA (TEF), is unlikely to add the iPhone 4S model to its pre-holiday offering, said a person familiar with the local mobile market who asked to remain anonymous.

Instead, the company will focus on already much higher volume sales of smart phones based on rival operating systems, including Google Inc.'s (GOOG) Android and Nokia Corp.'s (NOK) Symbian.

Telefonica is not the only iPhone carrier in the Czech Republic, as both Vodafone and T-Mobile are also offering the device through their Czech units. Consequently, customers looking to obtain the iPhone in the country will still have options, but Telefonica's departure is an interesting one given the efforts other carriers around the world are making to win the right to offer the device.

The legal battle between Apple and Samsung continues to rage in a number of different countries, and Samsung is going on the offensive with recent attempts to obtain testimony from Apple senior vice president Jony Ive and other designers, as well as to receive access to the iPhone 4S source code and the detail of Apple's agreements with carriers in Australia.

Samsung's planned depositions of Ive and Apple designers Doug Satzger, Shin Nishibori, and Christopher Stringer are part of the U.S. proceedings, with the testimony originally scheduled to be taken by November 1st. But due to scheduling conflicts and other issues, Samsung has filed a motion seeking to extend the timeframe until December 1st. From the motion:

Mr. Satzger is a former Apple employee represented by separate counsel. He is unable to sit for deposition before November 1 because, during the month of October, his lawyer has a full deposition schedule in a separate class action matter.

Mr. Nishibori is unable to sit for deposition before November 1 because he currently is on a voluntary leave of absence from Apple.

Mr. Ive is unable to sit for deposition before November 1 for personal reasons.

Mr. Stringer is unable to sit for deposition before November 1 because of work and scheduling conflicts.

Meanwhile, ZDNet reports on Samsung's legal request to have sales of the iPhone 4S banned in Australia, an effort that has seen the company seek access to the iPhone 4S source code and Apple's specific agreements with Australian carriers in order to make its full case before the court.

In particular, Samsung is keen to find out the amounts of subsidies paid by Telstra, Optus and Vodafone to Apple for selling the iPhones on plans.

[Samsung lawyer Cynthia Cochrane noted:] "If subsidies [are] given for the iPhone 4S, there are less to go around for my client's products."

...

[Apple lawyer Cameron] Moore also claimed that because Qualcomm developed the baseband chip in the iPhone 4S — the Qualcomm MDM6610 — and had licence agreements in place for Samsung patents, these agreements would apply to the iPhone 4S. Cochrane said that Samsung experts would need to see the source code for the iPhone 4S firmware to see how the chip interacts with the rest of the phone to determine whether the company's patent is being infringed.

Apple will certainly not give up the requested information willingly, viewing the source code and legal agreements as proprietary information. The judge in the case is Annabelle Bennett, who had previously awarded Apple an injunction barring the sale of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia and is now being asked to rule on a similar request from the other side.

Yesterday, we noted that Apple senior vice president for retail Ron Johnson had been removed from Apple's list of senior executives, in line with his previously-announced departure to become CEO of department store chain J.C. Penney. The transition occurred with no announcement from Apple regarding Johnson's successor.

Cult of Mac now reports that Steve Cano has been elevated to the position of senior vice president for retail, heading up the successful division as part of the executive leadership team.

Apple’s new retail boss boss isn’t just some suit, though. He’s one of the first retail employees Apple ever hired, a California surfer dude who has climbed from the sales floor to the very top rung of Apple management.

It’s a real rags-to-riches story that should be inspiration to every stressed out Apple Store sales associate or overworked Genius: your work can be noticed, and you too can go to the very top.

According to our source, Apple is replacing Johnson with his long-time lieutenant, Steve Cano.

According to the report, Cano began his career at Apple ten years ago as manager of the Palo Alto retail store, later moving to open the SoHo store in New York City. Consistent with previous reports of Apple looking for a candidate with international retail experience, Cano has spent the last seven years working on Apple's international retail efforts, first in Japan as manager of the Ginza store in Tokyo and then as regional director there. Cano then moved to London, where he has been serving as senior director of international retail for the last several years.

Update: Apple has issued a brief statement to Cult of Mac indicating that the search for Johnson's successor is still continuing.

Apple has gotten back to us a statement, reading: “The search for a replacement for Ron Johnson continues, and Apple has nothing to announce about this subject at this time.”

Last week, we noted that PBS is set to premiere a new documentary about Steve Jobs tonight, offering interviews with a number of prominent personalities with connections to Jobs. The documentary will also include brief clips from a rare 1994 interview in which Jobs talks about his views on life.

PBS has now released a pair of clips from the show ahead of its premiere, offering a glimpse at what viewers can expect later today.

In the first clip, author and Jobs' friend David Sheff describes a birthday party for Sean Lennon, son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, where Jobs presented Sean with one of the first Macinstoshes to roll off the production line. While the revolutionary computer was a hit with many of the high-profile attendees at the party, Scheff focuses on artist Andy Warhol, who spent a few minutes with the machine under the instruction of Jobs.

The second clip sees The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg and tech columnist and early Apple employee Robert X. Cringley discuss the complex relationship between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, focusing on the historic All Things D interview that saw the two men on stage together back in 2007.

Airing on PBS stations around the United States under the title Steve Jobs – One Last Thing, the documentary is scheduled to premiere at 10:00 PM Eastern and Pacific, although viewers should check their local listings for details. The documentary will also premiere tonight in the UK on Channel 4 at 11:05 PM under the title Steve Jobs – iChanged the World.