MacRumors

Apple has been working for over two months to upgrade the iconic glass cube and surrounding plaza at its flagship retail store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, with the company switching to larger panes of glass for the cube to make for a cleaner appearance as the total number of panes is reduced from 90 to 15.

TUAW notes that deliveries of the new glass panes have begun at the site, with workers utilizing a large crane to work through the night unpacking the large panes for installation.

According to Justin Parmer, who shot photos and brief video of the unloading process, the glass panes are roughly two inches thick. Based on the dimensions of the original cube, the new panes should check in at about 32 feet high by a little over 10 feet wide.

Apple is continuing its major push of retail store openings, with three more coming this week in three different countries. With these grand openings, Apple will have opened 14 retail stores over the space of four weeks as it moves toward its goal of opening a total of 30 stores during the July–September quarter.

- Mapleview Centre (Burlington, Ontario, Canada): Apple's 21st Canadian store, Mapleview Centre is located in Burlington, Ontario west of Toronto along the Lake Ontario shoreline. The store will be the eighth in or near the "Golden Horseshoe" region of Ontario wrapping around the western end of Lake Ontario.

- City-Galerie (Augsburg, Germany): City-Galerie will be Apple's sixth German store and the second in Bavaria in the southeast of the country. The new store will join the existing Munich store just under 50 miles away.

- Campania (Caserta, Italy): Apple's seventh retail store in Italy, the Campania store is located in the province of Caserta and is the first to open south of Rome. It is located approximately 25 km north of Naples in the Centro Commerciale Campania along the main Autostrada A1 motorway that serves many of Italy's major cities between Milan in the north and Naples in the south.

Just yesterday, we noted that Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president for Internet services, had been responding to customer emails redirected to him via Tim Cook. 9 to 5 Mac now notes that Cue has been officially promoted to a senior vice president position, reporting directly to Cook.

Cue has already received his own page on Apple's list of senior executives, which now includes nine senior vice presidents under Cook. From an internal Apple email sent by Tim Cook:

Team,

It is my pleasure to announce the promotion of Eddy Cue to Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services. Eddy will report to me and will serve on Apple’s executive management team.

Eddy oversees Apple’s industry-leading content stores including the iTunes Store, the revolutionary App Store and the iBookstore, as well as iAd and Apple’s innovative iCloud services. He is a 22-year Apple veteran and leads a large organization of amazing people. He played a major role in creating the Apple online store in 1998, the iTunes Music Store in 2003 and the App Store in 2008.

Apple is a company and culture unlike any other in the world and leaders like Eddy get that. Apple is in their blood. Eddy and the entire executive management team are dedicated to making the best products in the world that delight our customers and make our employees incredibly proud of what they do.

Please join me in congratulating Eddy on this significant and well-deserved promotion. I have worked with Eddy for many years and look forward to working with him even closer in the future.

Tim

In addition to overseeing the iTunes Store, App Store, iBookstore, and iCloud, Cue will also take over leadership of the iAd mobile advertising group at Apple. iAd had been led by Quattro Wireless founder Andy Miller, who came to the company with Apple's acquisition of Quattro last year. It was revealed several weeks ago that Miller is leaving Apple to take a position with a venture capital firm.

Cue's promotion may be the first move in a reshuffling of Apple's leadership following Tim Cook's ascension to the CEO position. There has been speculation about what Apple might do to fill the currently-vacant Chief Operating Officer position previously held by Cook, and Ron Johnson's position as senior vice president for retail will soon be vacant as he leaves to take the CEO position at department store chain J.C. Penney.

Back in July, word surfaced that Apple might be planning to release a white version of its iPod touch for the first time later this year. Several photos of white front plates for the iPod touch have surfaced since that time, although there have been suggestions that these plates were either knockoff parts or for a white version of the current-generation model that was never released.

Japanese site Mac Otakara has now spotted a white headphone jack claimed to be for the fifth-generation iPod touch being offered by Chinese repair site Luna Commerce (via AppleInsider). The jack sports the same slanted profile as found in the current iPod touch, necessary to fit the device's tapered design.

Headphone jack parts for the iPhone 5 or 4S appeared in both black and white back in mid-August, with those parts carrying the flat profile needed for the current iPhone 4 design. A tapered iPhone 5 as has been rumored would presumably require a slanted headphone jack, leading to speculation that the flat parts are intended for the cheaper iPhone 4-based model informally known as the iPhone 4S.

Parallels has announced version 7 of their popular virtualization software that allows Mac users to run Windows on their machines alongside Mac OS X. The new version is said to include 90 new features and enhancements including:

- Lion integration and support, including Launchpad and Mission Control for Windows programs
- Shared iSight and FaceTime HD cameras in both Windows and Mac
- Up to 1GB of video memory, for ultra-high resolutions
- Improved graphics performance, up to 45% faster 3D
- 60% faster resuming Windows
- Windows on Demand - purchase and automatically install Windows on your Mac from Parallels Desktop 7 in the U.S.

Parallels 7 supports running OS X Lion as a "guest" operating system under virtualization, meaning you can run a completely separate copy of Lion within your main copy of Lion. In July, we reported that Apple had changed the license agreement in OS X Lion that allowed users to run up to 2 additional copies of Lion on a single machine without the need for extra licenses.

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With the release of the iTunes Match Beta to developers earlier week, there has been a lot of confusion about whether or not the service was "streaming" or not.

Early hands on videos seemed to show that iTunes Match was a streaming service for both the Mac and iOS devices. Music would play over the internet, but not appear to be permanently downloaded to your device.

Apple, however, later denied that the service was actually streaming. Instead they described it as "a simultaneous listen and download". We labeled the distinction one of semantics and still considered it streaming based on what had been observed in the early build.

With the release of iOS Beta 7, however, Apple is right and iTunes Match (for iOS) is a listen and download service, and not a streaming one. InsanelyGreatMac put together a new video of how things have changed with this latest release.

Songs that are played are now permanently downloaded to your iPhone, iPod or iPad library. Even if you skip past a song, the entire song is saved directly to your device. That means as you listen to music, songs are pulled from the iCloud and stored. The main distinction is that users may have to manually free up space over time. Once a song is deleted, it will again be available for download once again in the same manner.

As a result, the original impression of streaming may have just been an iOS user interface bug or simply an oversight by Apple. What makes us think it was not just an interface bug is the fact that songs are still streamed in iTunes Beta for Mac. Even with the newest iTunes beta release from tonight, users can reportedly stream songs from iTunes Match and those songs are not saved permanently to their Mac. Mac users must explicitly press the iCloud button to download and save songs locally -- of course, this could change.

Apple's clearly continuing to tweak and make changes to iTunes Match, and we hear there remain a lot of bugs in the interface itself. We should know more for certain when the software seeds stabilize as we approach the expected launch this fall.

Earlier today we posted an image to our iOS blog from Apple's upcoming Photo Stream instructions that seemed to show an unusual looking iPhone icon. We had initially dismissed it as possibly being a generic artist rendition, but upon further consideration, it does seem too coincidental that an icon closely resembling circulating rumors would appear in an official Apple release.

The icon can be seen in context above. There isn't a whole lot of detail with the icon, but on overview, it seems to show an iPhone-like device with an enlarged screen and possibly an elongated home button at the bottom. This matches up nicely with many of the circulating rumors about the iPhone 5.

Here we've enlarged the icon and put it alongside our designer's layout of what the iPhone 5 might look like based on the leaked case design documents. We previously posted fully rendered versions of images based on the design. There's been some debate about what size the iPhone 5's screen might be with a recent report claiming it would be less than 4".

As pointed out by one of our readers, Apple tends to be very precise with their artwork, even at small icon sizes.

Thanks NICKPR0

Apple has released the seventh beta version of iOS 5 to developers as an Over-the-Air update. The delta release, which only downloads changed code, is a lighter one, weighing in at around 70MB, compared to 144MB for beta 6.

We'll be on the lookout for new features and changes in this release, which comes just 12 days after beta 6 was released. In addition to iOS 5 Beta 7, Apple has pushed Xcode 4.2 Developer Preview 7, iTunes 10.5 beta 7, and Apple TV Software beta 6.

An Apple employee has lost a prototype iPhone at a bar, again. The iPhone was lost in late July at Cava 22, a Mexican restaurant and bar in San Francisco's Mission District, according to CNET:

A day or two after the phone was lost at San Francisco's Cava 22, which describes itself as a "tequila lounge" that also serves lime-marinated shrimp ceviche, Apple representatives contacted San Francisco police, saying the device was priceless and the company was desperate to secure its safe return, the source said. Still unclear are details about the device, what version of the iOS operating system it was running, and what it looks like.

Apple tracked the iPhone to a home in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood. San Francisco police and Apple investigators reportedly spoke to a man in his twenties about the device, but he denied knowing about the lost phone. After a search, they found nothing. There is no word if Apple ever got the phone back. A spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department told CNET that Apple did not file a police report about the missing phone.

Readers will remember that last year Apple lost an early prototype of the iPhone 4 at a bar in Redwood City near the company's headquarters. That device was picked up by another customer and sold to tech site Gizmodo. That sequence of events triggered a criminal investigation which ended just this month.

A late-July iPhone in field testing would presumably have been the upcoming iPhone 5 or perhaps the low-cost iPhone 4.

(Image of Cava 22 courtesy James Martin/CNET)

Update: Some doubts have been raised about this story.

Yesterday, we noted that new Apple CEO Tim Cook has been taking time to respond to the many emails coming his way congratulating him on his new position, wondering if he might follow the precedent of Steve Jobs and be willing to engage directly with customers via email as the contacts turned more toward questions and complaints than pleasantries.

Evidence of Cook's engagement in addressing more substantial issues comes today by way of a report from iPhoneinCanada.ca noting that Apple is planning on bringing its iTunes Match service to Canadian customers "shortly". The revelation came after a customer emailed Tim Cook, who apparently forwarded the question to Apple's vice president for Internet services, Eddy Cue. Cue quickly responded to the customer, sharing the news that Apple is working hard on bringing the service to Canada.

Hi Sheldon,

We’re working on adding Canada and hope to do so shortly after the US launch.

Eddy

The news is certainly welcome for Apple's Canadian customers, and should offer hope to users in other countries still waiting for word on the service making its way to their markets. As with any content offering from Apple, iTunes Match requires highly-localized contracts to be negotiated with the content rights holders, complicating the process of making such services available in all markets in a timely fashion.

While emails to Steve Jobs have sometimes resulted in follow-up contacts from members of Apple's support staff, it is still encouraging to see emails to Tim Cook being quickly passed along to be answered by appropriate personnel, even including other executives.

Update: Another MacRumors reader has let us know that he emailed Tim Cook to ask about iTunes Match coming to the UK, and he similarly received a reply from Eddy Cue promising that Apple is working on launching it shortly after the U.S. debut.

Hi Stuart,

We're working on adding more countries and hope to add the UK shortly after the US launch.

Eddy

Hardmac reports that Apple has made an internal announcement that it has completed work on tools that will allow support technicians to utilize remote diagnostics on iOS devices, receiving key information about device state. The report notes that the tools will allow Internet and telephone support staff to provide enhanced device support without customers having to bring their devices in to an Apple store or service center.

In effect, this systems operates entirely online. An email is sent to the device containing a URL (this can alsoo be entered by hand) and the device will connect via Mobile Safari and the telephone to start internal checks and sends the result of it to the Apple servers to which the service centres are connected.

The diagnostic system submits the Unique Device Identifier (UDID), device name, battery health and charging information, installed iOS version, and data on improper hangs and shutdowns.

As noted by AppleInsider, this tool sounds essentially identical to the existing iosdiags.apple.com site, which has been used for some time by Apple retail stores to wirelessly gather system information.

Currently, the Web application only works with an employee Apple ID and is not connected to an iTunes account. The data culled from the service reportedly provides an Apple Genius with the same information they would obtain plugging in an iPhone at the Genius Bar with a USB cable.

The system was said to have been put in place to make it easier to conduct mobile appointments away from the Genius Bar, in an effort to make it less crowded, AppleInsider was told. Using this tool in-store allows an employee to access diagnostic information wirelessly and quickly.

That iOS diagnostic functionality has been around for quite some time, first appearing as an OS X application for Geniuses known as Behavior Scan and used to read diagnostic information from devices connected via USB. That functionality later made its way to iOS in the form of the hidden iOS Diagnostics application, documented in our forums a year ago.

One of our retail contacts has told us that the iOS Diagnostics feature is currently not widely used in retail stores, as it is generally faster and easier to simply plug the device in at the Genius Bar. But it appears that Apple may finally be preparing to officially expand the remote diagnostics to allow users to take advantage of it upon direction from an Apple support agent. The expansion would offer a new method for remote support staff to receive information directly from a device rather than relying on the user to accurately track down and report the relevant details.