MacRumors

There's been increasing chatter in the rumor mill about the possibility of a smaller 7.85" iPad that could be introduced sometime in 2012.

The rationale behind the smaller form factor is for Apple to better compete against the new 7" Kindle Fire tablet from Amazon. Amazon's new Kindle line seems to be an early success with over 3 million sold over the first three weeks. Amazon doesn't break down the numbers for individual models but calls out the Fire as "the most successful product we've ever launched".

Apple's never been one to try to compete spec for spec against their competitors. The iPhone, for example, has kept the same basic form factor across 5 different generations, despite a proliferation of different sizes amongst its competitors. While we're not sure what makes a smaller iPad different, we've heard it frequently enough that we believe Apple is in late prototyping phases for such a device.

The supply chain has actually been very specific about the screen size of this rumored iPad. According to Chinese manufacturers, Apple is buying up 7.85" screens for this upcoming mini iPad. So, we asked our friends at CiccareseDesign to put together these mockups of what a 7.85" iPad would look like in comparison to the existing 9.7" iPad.

They also created this "actual size" PDF that can be printed out so you can play with one yourself in real life.

Simply print the PDF at 100% size on your printer, and you too can see what a 7.85" iPad feels like in hand. If you don't have a printer handy, you can view it in actual size in an iPad web browser. If you save it as a web icon on your home screen, it will then launch without a menu bar so you can fully appreciate the size.

The 7.85" iPad actually feels a lot smaller than the existing iPad. The user interface elements, however, don't feel that far out of place. Icons are smaller than the 9.7" iPad, of course, but still bigger than the icons found on the iPhone. The on screen keyboard also seems quite usable at this size. Other elements, such as Safari's location bar, do scale down but, again, are no smaller than what we've seen on the iPhone.

We should point out that Steve Jobs had been adamant that a 10-inch screen is the minimum necessary for a tablet, and in a conference call said that he didn't believe a 7-inch tablet was a good user experience:

We're not not making a 7-inch tablet because we don't want to hit a lower price point. We just believe it's too small to hit the user experience people want. When we make decisions, it's not about cost, it's about value when you factor in the software. We're all about the best products at aggressive prices.

So, based on that stance, it might seem unlikely that Apple would produce such a device, but they've been known to change their mind before.

Intuit today sent out an email to its Quicken for Mac customers providing an update on the company's efforts to develop a version of Quicken 2007 compatible with OS X Lion. We noted earlier this year that Intuit was looking for a way to make Quicken 2007 compatible with Lion following Apple's discontinuation of Rosetta support for PowerPC-based applications like Quicken.

According to today's email and a newly-posted FAQ, Intuit is now promising that a Lion-compatible version of Quicken 2007 will be available by "early spring".

As you may know, Quicken for Mac 2007 does not currently work on Apple's latest operating system, Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). I understand the frustration this may have caused you and have put a team in place to address this issue. I am happy to announce that we will have a solution that makes Quicken 2007 for Mac "Lion-compatible" by early spring. There are still details to be worked out, so I ask your continued patience as we work through these.

Intuit is also reassuring customers that it has increased the size of its Mac development team as part of a renewed effort to support the platform.

Quicken 2007 was a popular personal financial management application for Mac, but instead of building upon the popular application Intuit elected to rebuild the application as a stripped-down Quicken Essentials for Mac. The new version was widely panned by reviewers for its considerable loss of functionality compared to Quicken 2007.

Consequently, many Quicken owners continued use the 2007 version, but with Lion's dropping of support for the Rosetta framework needed to run Quicken 2007, users have had to decide between upgrading to Lion or abandoning Quicken 2007.

With that dilemma in mind, many customers have already dropped their usage of Quicken and migrated to competing products such as iBank or Mint.com (now owned by Intuit), although each solution offers a slightly different set of tools that may or may not be suitable for a given user's needs.

Quicken is clearly hoping to win back some of those lost customers and keep others from defecting to competing products with a reinvestment in the Quicken for Mac platform, beginning with getting Quicken 2007 up and running on Lion machines. It remains to be seen, however, whether Intuit has moved quickly enough for many users.

Earlier this month, we noted that developer builds of OS X 10.7.3 were showing evidence of AMD's forthcoming "Tahiti" graphics card family, the first to be built using 28-nanometer technology. The evidence suggested that Apple was at least preparing for the possibility of the cards being used in a Mac Pro update next year, an update that is reportedly still in question given uncertainty about the future of the line.

In the wake of those findings, AMD today officially announced the high-end Radeon HD 7970 from the Tahiti line, billing it as the world's fastest single-chip graphics card.

With the arrival of the AMD Radeon HD 7970, AMD has unleashed its revolutionary new Graphics Core Next Architecture that enables new levels of gaming and compute capabilities – realizing an improvement of over 150% in performance/sq mm over the prior generation. Engineered with support for PCI Express 3.0 and AMD CrossFire technology, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card arrives prepared for the next level of gaming.

Engadget has a nice roundup of reviews of the new card, with testers generally reporting significantly improved performance over the current generation of equivalent AMD cards and other high-end competitors such as NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580. On the negative side, reviews cited the card's $549 price tag and significant noise under high load.

The Radeon HD 7970 will launch on January 9th, and AMD is also reported to be preparing to launch a slightly scaled-down model in the form of a Radeon HD 7950 card.

With new Xeon processors from Intel launching in the first quarter of 2012 and AMD's new graphics card offerings lining up for a January launch, parts do appear to be coming together for a significant upgrade for the Mac Pro, which has not been updated since July 2010. What remains to be seen is whether Apple will continue to invest in its professional-level workstation line.

Reuters reports on new data from research firm Kantar Worldpanel showing strong sales for the iPhone over the last three months in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, driven by the debut iPhone 4S. The company has, however, seen weaker sales in much of continental Europe in the face of economic difficulties and strong competition.

"In Great Britain, the U.S. and Australia, Apple's new iPhone continues to fly off the shelf in the run-up to Christmas. However, this trend is far from universal," said Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director.

Apple's market share in the 12 weeks to end-November rose to 36 percent in the United States from 25 percent a year earlier and in Britain to 31 percent from 21 percent, Kantar said.

However, in France its share slipped to 20 percent from 29 percent and in Germany to 22 percent from 27 percent. Similar drops were seen in Italy and Spain.

The iPhone 4S debuted midway through the reporting period in most of the countries mentioned, although it did launch two weeks later in Italy and Spain. Consumer demand for the iPhone eased in the months leading up to the debut of the iPhone 4S amid high anticipation, but sales obviously surged with the release of the new hardware.

Kantar Worldpanel also reports its data as market share, and with the global smartphone market growing extremely quickly, iPhone sales are likely still rising in countries where Apple's market share has dropped due to the influx of Android-based devices from a variety of manufacturers.

For the holiday quarter, Apple is projecting blockbuster revenue and earnings, with analysts pushing their iPhone estimates for the quarter into the range of 30 million units. That performance would shatter Apple's current record for iPhone sales of just over 20 million units sold during the second calendar quarter of this year.

Last month, Samsung released a revised Galaxy Tab 10.1N design in Germany in hopes of avoiding an injunction barring the sale of the device under its original design over claims of infringement from Apple.

Arguing that the design changes did not go far enough, Apple quickly filed suit in an attempt to bar the new design as well. But according to Bloomberg, the judge in the new case does not seem inclined to support such an injunction, giving customers credit for being able to distinguish between the devices.

The Dusseldorf court that banned sales of the Galaxy 10.1 on Sept. 9 is unlikely to grant Apple an injunction against the Galaxy 10.1N, Presiding Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann said at a hearing today. Samsung has changed the device’s design sufficiently to distance it from the iPad, she said, adding that the view is preliminary. [...]

“Consumers are well aware that there is an original and that competitors try to use similar designs, so buyers are vigilant when looking at products,” Brueckner-Hofmann said. “We don’t think that someone buys a Samsung to make his table neighbor at the coffee house believe he owns an iPad.”

A final decision on Apple's request is scheduled to be released on February 9.

After several early wins in its efforts to bar sales of Samsung's tablet devices, the tide has begun to turn against Apple in a number of locations. In Australia, where an injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has been lifted, Samsung is now using the legal fight to promote its device, calling the Galaxy Tab "the tablet Apple tried to stop".

The Recording Academy today announced the winners of its annual Special Merit Grammy Awards, with Steve Jobs being named a recipient of a Trustees Award for 2012. The Trustees Award category is designed to recognize those who have made significant contributions to music in areas other than performance.

As former CEO and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs helped create products and technology that transformed the way we consume music, TV, movies, and books. A creative visionary, Jobs' innovations such as the iPod and its counterpart, the online iTunes store, revolutionized the industry and how music was distributed and purchased. In 2002 Apple Computer Inc. was a recipient of a Technical GRAMMY Award for contributions of outstanding technical significance to the recording field. The company continues to lead the way with new technology and in-demand products such as the iPhone and iPad.

A ceremony honoring the winners of Trustees Awards, Lifetime Achievement Awards, and Technical Grammy Awards will be held on Saturday, February 11th, with special recognition also being made during the main Grammy Awards ceremony the following day.

Jobs is one of several recipients, including Brazilian composer and arranger Antonio Carlos Jobim, spoken word soul performer Gil Scott-Heron, and audio engineer Roger Nichols, who will be honored posthumously.

TouchArcade has spotted the appearance of a free MAME game emulator on the App Store called iMAME. MAME is a popular arcade machine emulator that will run thousands of arcade games if you have the original ROMs.

iMAME ships with nine "less than stellar" ROMs to play, but apparently can load arbitrary ROMs using a 3rd party utility such as iExplorer without jailbreaking:

It seems that the same method used to get games into iDOS also works in iMAME. Twitter user @mattlukens mentions, "Yep, add a .zip rom to the Docs folder through PhoneView and it works perfect! Just tried Crime Fighters!" He also provided a screenshot. The clock is really ticking now on Apple pulling this down

Apple has had a bit of a spotty history with emulators on the App Store. While a number of individual emulators do exist on the App Store, Apple has been more restrictive about these open emulators, presumably due to potential legal issues. For example, a full DOS/Windows 3.0 emulator appeared in the App Store at one point but was quickly pulled by Apple.

iMAME is currently available as a free Universal application on the App Store. [Link]

Update: It took Apple two days to get around to it with the holidays, but iMAME has been removed from the App Store.

Yesterday, we noted that Apple had launched a new "Complete My Season Pass" feature for TV shows purchased through the iTunes Store, offering users who purchased individual episodes of a TV show season the ability to upgrade to a Season Pass at a discounted rate based on the amount of their individual purchases.

Apple today posted a new support document outlining an FAQ for the new service and explaining what content is and isn't eligible for the program. But in addition to the the Complete My Season Pass document, Apple also posted an updated version of its "Complete My Album" support document that offers a beneficial change for consumers.

Until now, users have generally had a window of 180 days from the date of their first individual track purchase from a given album within which they could upgrade at the discounted rate using the Complete My Album program. The current iTunes Store terms and conditions still make reference to that limit:

COMPLETE MY ALBUM ("CMA")

In some circumstances, you will have no more than 180 days from the time you acquire your first CMA-eligible song or video from a particular CMA-eligible album to accept that CMA offer, and upgrading previous purchases to iTunes Plus does not affect any such time limits.

But the updated support document posted by Apple today reveals a different answer, and it now appears that the 180-day deadline has been removed entirely.

How long do I have to take advantage of Complete My Album?

When you buy individual songs from any qualifying album, you can complete the album at any time, as long as the album is available for sale on the iTunes Store.

Many users taking advantage of the Complete My Album program obviously already do so within the previously-imposed 180-day window as they decide that they like certain songs enough to purchase the entire album. The lifting of the restriction will, however, still be of use for those who decide much later that they want to upgrade.

Following Apple's lead in pulling out of Macworld Expo several years ago, Microsoft today announced that next month's keynote presentation at CES in Las Vegas will be the company's last at the major consumer electronics show.

In its announcement, Microsoft cites many of the same factors addressed by Apple as reasons for its ending of trade show participation. Most notably, trade shows have become less relevant for new product announcements given the increasing connectedness and interactivity offered by the Internet and social media, and in many cases the scheduled nature of trade shows imposes undesired rigidity on timeframes for new product announcements.

Our industry moves fast and changes faster. And so the way we communicate with our customers must change in equally speedy ways. To ensure it does, we constantly challenge our assumptions. For example:

- What’s the right time and place to make announcements?
- Are we adjusting to the changing dynamics of our customers?
- Are we doing something because it’s the right thing to do, or because “it’s the way we’ve always done it”?

Microsoft points to its own media and developer events, social media tools, and even its retail stores as venues for connecting with customers that provide better opportunities than trade show keynotes.

Microsoft will maintain a presence at CES going forward with its employees attending the event, but the company will no longer participate in the opening keynote as it has routinely done, and will not sponsor a booth on the exhibition floor after 2012.

Several times earlier this year, we covered Apple's work on "HiDPI" modes in OS X Lion for supporting ultra high-resolution displays offering greater pixel density with a similar increase in image quality to that seen with the iPhone's transition to a "Retina" display.

With new claims that Apple is set to release a new 15" MacBook Pro offering a resolution of 2880x1800 early next year, Apple's work on its HiDPI software support has also been gaining renewed attention. By doubling the resolution in each dimension over the existing 1440x900 MacBook Pro, Apple would achieve four times the number of pixels and provide developers with an easy way to scale existing artwork.

Evidence of Apple's continued work on HiDPI has shown up in developer builds of OS X 10.7.3, with the "Get Info" window for applications seeing the addition of an "Open in HIDPI mode" checkbox. But while that checkbox would presumably automatically use higher-resolution fonts and graphics that would display at the same absolute size as existing elements, it has not been functional in developer builds where it is present.

With yesterday's release of Build 11D36 to developers, Apple has now removed that checkbox from the "Get Info" window entirely. While its removal may suggest a step backward in Apple's implementation of HiDPI support, it is routine for Apple to activate and deactivate portions of features as it works on them. Consequently, the mere change in the checkbox's visibility in the new build indicates that Apple is indeed likely actively working on the feature.