MacRumors

Alongside today's quiet MacBook Pro refresh, Apple has also updated its iPad 2 Smart Cover offerings, perhaps most notably discontinuing the orange polyurethane cover and replacing it with a new dark gray cover.

Other changes include:

- Interior color now matches exterior color. The interior side of the Smart Cover facing the iPad screen had previously been a uniform gray color on all models with the exception of the (PRODUCT) RED version. All Smart Covers are now a consistent color inside and out.

- More vibrant colors for polyurethane covers. Aside from the replacement of the orange cover with a dark gray one, sources indicate that the colors on the polyurethane models are now more vibrant. Polyurethane Smart Covers come in blue, green, pink, light gray, and dark gray.

- Color adjustment on navy leather cover. Apple offer five different leather Smart Covers, and sources reports that Apple has slightly tweaked the color on the navy version to make it "more navy" than the original version. All other colors (tan, black, cream, and red) remain unchanged.

Pricing on the Smart Covers remains the same, with polyurethane covers coming in at $39.00 and leather covers priced at $69.00. While Apple's store pages have been updated with the new colors, the company's Smart Cover page does not yet reflect the changes.

Apple is making plans to roll out a new pilot program that will allow customers to pickup orders placed through the company's online store at one of their local retail stores. The program, reportedly known as Sherwood, will include any product available through the online store, including custom-configured Macs, engraved and gift-wrapped products, and the full slate of third-party accessories.

Customers placing online orders will be offered the ability to select an Apple retail store for pickup, with standard configurations and accessories generally being available on a same-day basis as store stocks allow. Other items may take a few days to be delivered to the store.

In-store pickup of items purchased online will reportedly require proof of purchase and an ID, with one major benefit of the program being the ability to designate one additional person to be eligible to pick up the order. One of our sources also notes that the program offers the benefit of being able to avoid home delivery of holiday gifts that might otherwise reveal the nature of the gift during the upcoming holiday period.

With the rollout of Sherwood, Apple retail stores will also begin accepting returns of eligible online orders, streamlining the return process so that customers do not necessarily have to deal with return shipping issues.

Apple already offers some integration of online shopping and its retail stores, offering users the ability to reserve products from available retail store stock. The company has also expanded that program during certain busy holiday shopping times to include gift wrapping of standard-configuration Mac and iPod products.

The Sherwood pilot program will reportedly be initially available only through select retail stores, with company planning to expand it across the retail store chain in the future.

Apple today quietly released a minor update to its MacBook Pro line, offering upgraded processor, and in some cases graphics and/or storage options at the same price points as the previous models. Portions of the improved specs had been leaked to 9to5Mac by reliable source Mr. X late yesterday.

Among the key changes:

13-inch MacBook Pro:

- Processor options move from 2.3 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 and 2.7 GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 to 2.4 GHz and 2.8 GHz options.

- Hard drive options offer increased capacity, moving from 320 GB in the low-end configuration and 500 GB in the high-end configuration to 500 GB and 750 GB respectively.

15-inch MacBook Pro:

- Standard processor options move from 2.0 GHz and 2.2 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 to 2.2 GHz and 2.4 GHz options. The high-end custom processor option at 2.3 GHz has now become a 2.5 GHz option.

- For discrete graphics, Apple had previously offered the AMD Radeon HD 6490M with 256MB of memory on the low-end configuration and the Radeon HD 6750M with 1GB of memory on the high-end configuration. Apple has now moved the 6750M to the low-end configuration with 512 MB of memory and given the high-end configuration a Radeon HD 6770M with 1 GB of memory.

- The previous build-to-order option of a 500 GB hard drive running at 7200 rpm has been bumped to a 750 GB drive at the same speed.

17-inch MacBook Pro:

- Processor speeds have been bumped from a base 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 with a 2.3 GHz upgrade option to a 2.4 GHz base processor with a 2.5 GHz option.

- Graphics have been improved from the AMD Radeon 6750M with 1 GB of memory to the Radeon HD 6770M, also with 1 GB of memory.

- The previous build-to-order option of a 500 GB hard drive running at 7200 rpm has been bumped to a 750 GB drive at the same speed.

The Steve Jobs biography is now available in the U.S. on Apple's iBooks. The book had been rolling out across the world and is now available in all regions.

The book is an authorized biography by Walter Isaacson that has received positive reviews as many facts have leaked in the days before its official release. Steve Jobs, himself, reached out to Isaacson to suggest the author write a biography on Jobs. At the time of the initial offer, Isaacson was unaware of Steve Jobs' declining health. Isaacson had asked Jobs prior to his passing why he had agreed to participate:

In order to mask my emotion, I asked the one question that was still puzzling me: Why had he been so eager, during close to 50 interviews and conversations over the course of two years, to open up so much for a book when he was usually so private? “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

Jobs passed away on October 5th from pancreatic cancer.

The book is also available in hard copy at Amazon.

The Steve Jobs biography is officially launching on October 24th and it's become available around the world as the local clock hits midnight. So, we expect it to be become available in the U.S. iBooks at the same local time (midnight Eastern).

Early Kindle customers, however, have started receiving the book a little early. Several people are now reporting their pre-orders are now available on their Kindles. The image above from a reader in Florida.

Thanks @davidj

Apple has posted a video from the Steve Jobs memorial/celebration held on Apple's campus on October 19th, 2011. The 80 minute video is available on Apple's site. All of the retail stores were closed during the event so that everyone could watch. Apple CEO Tim Cook opens the video:

The last two weeks for me have been the saddest in my life by far. But I know Steve. And Steve would have wanted this cloud to lift for Apple and our focus to return to the work that he loved so much. So it's with that spirit, that we wanted to get the entire company together today to celebrate Steve's extraordinary life and many accomplishments he had across his life.

Update: It seems to not be working for some. (Note that streaming video requires Safari 4 or 5 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard or Lion, Safari on iOS 3 or later, or QuickTime 7 on Windows.)

CBS has posted the full 60 Minutes interview with Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, including a number of extras that weren't included in the broadcast piece. The double-length interview promotes Jobs' authorized biography which goes on sale tomorrow in the United States, and is already available on iBooks in some parts of the world.

Part 1:

Part 2:

The Steve Jobs Family photo album:

What did Steve Jobs say about his rivals?:

Embedded videos require Flash. View Part 1 and Part 2 on YouTube.

The much anticipated Steve Jobs biography is officially launching on Monday, October 24th. Despite the official release date, many copies have already started circulating. The image on the right is from a book delivery from late last week (thanks Ernest).

The New York Times provides a positive review and nice overview of the book which was authored by Walter Isaacson.

“Steve Jobs” greatly admires its subject. But its most adulatory passages are not about people. Offering a combination of tech criticism and promotional hype, Mr. Isaacson describes the arrival of each new product right down to Mr. Jobs’s theatrical introductions and the advertising campaigns. But if the individual bits of hoopla seem excessive, their cumulative effect is staggering. Here is an encyclopedic survey of all that Mr. Jobs accomplished, replete with the passion and excitement that it deserves.

Several other interesting tidbits have emerged from the early copies of the biography. We've covered some of the big revelations in previous articles, but here are a few others that are notable.

- Jobs viewed textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He met with major publishers about it. Jobs also discussed 4G data capacity in a recent board meeting in August. - NYTimes
- Jobs described Microsoft as "mostly irrelevant" due to being run by salespeople. He didn't believe Microsoft would change as long as Steve Ballmer was in charge. - NYTimes
- "Jobs confided in Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore he needed to accomplish things quickly so that he would make his mark on Silicon Valley history. " - Huffington Post

Walter Isaacson will be interviewed 60 Minutes tonight and is also said to be showing interview tapes of Steve Jobs.

The book is available on Amazon and iBooks.

Ten years ago today, Steve Jobs took the stage and introduced the first iPod.

The portable music player is seen as being largely responsible for Apple's dramatic comeback over the past decade. It also led Apple down the path into the consumer electronics market. While the iPod has diminished in importance over the past few years, Apple's bottom line is now dominated by devices such as the iPhone and iPad.

Macworld provides a nice story detailing how the iPod came to be:

Behind every successful product lies a problem in search of a solution. The inspirational problem, in the iPod’s case, involved the pitiful state of the young MP3 player market in the late 1990s.

Portable MP3 players had been around since the mid 1990s, but Apple found that every one on the market offered a lackluster user experience. Steve Jobs had a strong term for gadgets like that: “crap”. Everyone at Apple agreed.

Initial reaction to the iPod wasn't entirely favorable. Slashdot's famous reaction was "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." MacRumors was also around at the time as well, and much of the reader reaction was also negative. One commenter wrote:

All that hype for an MP3 player? Break-thru digital device? The Reality Distiortion Field™ is starting to warp Steve's mind if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off.

Of course, ten years later, the iPod has sold over 304 million units.

Rumors of an Apple television set have been circulating for years, but the company has repeatedly expressed doubts about the feasibility of entering the market. Steve Jobs himself noted that the current environment of "balkanized" cable operators controlling everything through their own set-top boxes makes it difficult to envision a go-to-market strategy for Apple.

But Walter Isaacson's forthcoming biography of Jobs suggests that Apple may have developed a solution to those ideas, stoking optimism for an Apple-branded television set. Jobs' comments were revealed in an excerpt published by The Washington Post.

“He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant,” Isaacson wrote.

Isaacson continued: “‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.’”

The report notes that it is not clear what Jobs meant by having "cracked" the television problem, but it seems to focus on leveraging Apple's new iCloud service and potentially existing iTunes Store content, all within an easy-to-use television set.

Just yesterday, 9to5Mac claimed that a debut of updated MacBook Pro models was "likely" to occur next week, offering a minor speed bump refresh to carry the line through until the launch of Intel's Ivy Bridge platform next year. AppleInsider now reports, however, that the MacBook Pro launch will likely not occur until "early next month".

[One source] said that the notebooks' planned introduction in late September was put on the back burner once the release dates for iOS 5.0 and iPhone 4S were solidified, as Apple pooled all available resources to support the launch -- the largest and most rapid yet in the Cupertino-based company's history.

Since then, the launch date for the Late 2011 MacBook Pros has reportedly been a moving target. However, a second person with proven accuracy in predicting Apple's product launch dates says the Mac maker is now advising its partners not to expect availability of the new models until the first week of November.

The reason for the continued fluidity in launch timing is unknown, although Apple's primary MacBook Pro and MacBook Air aluminum case supplier, Catcher Technology, has been forced to temporarily shut down its factory over over pollution concerns. Digitimes reported today that Catcher is investing $2-3 million to address concerns at the plant, aiming to resume production next month.

Apple has reportedly already ramped down production of its current MacBook Pro models, a situation that will likely lead to increasingly tight supplies heading into the refresh. Third-party resellers are already experiencing shortages and stock-outs of the MacBook Pro, although it is unclear if the shortages will also spread back to Apple's own channels, which understandably maintain highest priority for distribution.

Potential Mac Pro customers have been long awaiting updated models from Apple, with the last update to the line having come in July 2010.

Anticipation regarding an updated Mac Pro was heightened back in June as several claims of an imminent launch surfaced. Part numbers claimed to be for new Mac Pro models surfaced a few weeks later, but they instead ultimately turned out to be for new Mac mini models and the Apple Thunderbolt Display.

With the wait for new Mac Pro models continuing, hope surfaced once again in early September amid reports that Intel was planning a November 15th launch of new Sandy Bridge E processors and their Xeon E5 equivalents suitable for the Mac Pro.

But hopes for a Mac Pro launch before the end of the year appear to have been dashed, as Intel is now targeting an early 2012 release for the new chips. The news, first reported last month, has recently been confirmed with additional timeline information from CPU World.

In September, during Intel Developer Forum event in San Francisco, new information came to light implying that Xeon E5 launch is postponed until the first quarter 2012. Indeed, according to the latest Intel roadmaps, all Xeon E5 processors are going to be delayed by one quarter.

...

Xeon E5-2600, also compatible with socket R, is aimed at dual-processor workstations and servers, and contains 17 different dual-, quad-, six- and eight-core models with clock speeds up to 3.3 GHz. Both families will be released in Q1 2012. Despite the delay, there were no changes to E5-1600 and E5-2600 microprocessor line-ups.

Apple will almost certainly take advantage of the Xeon E5-2600 series in the next Mac Pro, likely targeting the E5-2620, E5-2650 and E5-2670 for the dual-processor configurations of the Mac Pro, offering options of 12 or 16 cores in those configurations. Single-processor configurations would likely also be made available using other chips.

Yesterday, we highlighted an Associated Press report on Walter Isaacson's forthcoming Steve Jobs biography addressing Jobs' views on Android being a "stolen product" and his commitment to "destroy" the platform at all costs.

The report contains a number of other tidbits from the book, but one other interesting one that has been gaining some attention is Jobs' disclosure that Apple design chief Jony Ive has nearly complete freedom to do as he sees fit, an organizational structure purposely set up by Jobs.

He called Jonathan Ive, Apple's design chief, his "spiritual partner" at Apple. He told Isaacson that Ive had "more operation power" at Apple than anyone besides Jobs himself -- that there's no one at the company who can tell Ive what to do. That, says Jobs, is "the way I set it up."

Ive, Apple's Senior Vice President for Industrial Design, has been at Apple for nearly twenty years, the last fifteen of those as design chief. In his role, he has been responsible for essentially all of the iconic product designs that have come out of the company over that time. At the end of Jobs' tenure as CEO earlier this year, Ive was one of seven senior vice presidents at Apple to report directly to Jobs.

Ive's team is said to operate out of a secretive high-tech lab on Apple's campus where he is given ultimate flexibility in his work, a standing earned through his team's creation of numerous iconic products and a plethora of design awards. And while Ive's design work ultimately must mesh with the hardware requirements coming out of Apple's engineering groups under Bob Mansfield, it's clear from Jobs' comments that Ive is free to pursue his own design solutions for Apple products. That freedom ultimately helps to guard against a watering-down effect that could occur if his designs were subject to the approval of and revision by others in the company.