MacRumors

One of the controversial changes in the upcoming iPad OS 4.2 was the change in functionality of the iPad's Orientation locking switch to a Mute switch.

...the physical switch on the iPad's side for locking the screen orientation has been repurposed as a mute switch. The change has been confirmed by posters in our forums.

With the change, screen orientation locking is now accomplished within the multitasking tray as on the iPhone under iOS 4.

According to a reader email from 9to5Mac, Steve Jobs reports that this will not be user selectable.

Q: In IOS 4.2 for iPad is the switch on the side going to be the mute and not screen orientation lock from now on?
Steve Jobs: Yep.
Q: Are you planning to make that a changeable option?
Steve Jobs: Nope.

Bloomberg reports on AT&T's preparations for the loss of iPhone exclusivity in the United States, which has been claimed by some sources to be coming at the end of the year. According to the report, AT&T's recent announcements regarding the addition of a plethora of new Android and Windows Phone 7 handsets is being accompanied by a significant retraining of its staff to handle the shift from the iPhone focus to a broader platform of offerings.

AT&T Inc., facing the possible loss of its hold on the iPhone, is adding handsets at an accelerating clip and retraining store staff to help reduce reliance on its top-selling smartphone during the holidays.

The company's lineup this year will have ballooned by about 10 smartphones ahead of the holiday season to more than 20, including ones running Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. software. Yesterday, AT&T reported the effort is showing early success, saying more than half of new customers chose a device other than the iPhone last quarter, up from 36 percent a year earlier.

The shift comes just as AT&T approaches Verizon's subscriber base. AT&T announced yesterday that it had ridden the strength of the iPhone 4 to a net gain of 2.6 million subscribers during the third quarter, giving the company a total of 92.8 million subscribers. Verizon, meanwhile, added just under 1 million new subscribers to reach 93.4 million customers.

As we previously noted, Apple's new MacBook Air is shipping without Adobe's Flash plugin pre-installed, requiring users to manually install the software if they wish to view Flash content. Engadget now reports that Apple has issued an official statement on the matter, noting that it prefers that users download the software themselves in order to ensure that they are running the most up-to-date version.

We're happy to continue to support Flash on the Mac, and the best way for users to always have the most up to date and secure version is to download it directly from Adobe.

Apple spokesman Bill Evans also noted that the company is transitioning all of its Macs to ship without the Flash plugin pre-installed, although obviously plenty of units with Flash included remain in the company's distribution channels.

Apple has occasionally taken some flak for shipping outdated versions of Flash with its operating system updates and new hardware, and thus seems to believe that putting the onus of initial installation on the user will ensure that they receive the latest version and make Adobe responsible for alerting users to future updates.

The perspective is very similar to that shared by Steve Jobs just yesterday regarding the discontinuation of Apple's own Java distribution, in which he pointed to Apple always being "a version behind" the official releases from Sun/Oracle. By shifting the burden for updates back to Oracle, users can be sure to receive the most up-to-date versions.

Apple is set to open its new Lincoln Park retail store in Chicago tomorrow at 10:00 AM, an event that will mark the debut of a yet another of Apple's "significant" stores that are meant to provide an iconic presence for the company. ChicagoNow and ifoAppleStore offer a sneak peek at the new store and the unique arrangement that has seen Apple construct a public plaza and refurbish a run-down subway station next door to the tune of nearly $4 million.

As ChicagoNow notes, the new Lincoln Park store offers three entrances, suiting the building's siting on a triangle of land.

At the North Avenue entrance - conveniently on the north side of the building, it's all about retail. That's where you go in to see every single product Apple sells. The south entrance is the Clybourn entrance, and it's there you go to learn via One To One or a workshop. And then there's the center entrance facing the CTA station and new public space which features a courtyard with tables, benches, a fountain and Wi-Fi.

ifoAppleStore points out that the store offers a few hidden elements, including stockroom and other support functions being hidden away in a basement, along with a green roof.

The building has a green roof that helps keep the interior cooler and generates a little oxygen for Chicago. The roof also serves another purpose: it collects rainwater that is used to water the landscaping in the plaza. Signs within the plantings warn visitors not to drink the runoff.

As for the train station next door, Apple has paid to spruce up the 1940s-era building inside and out, refocusing the station's pedestrian flow to bring riders through the public plaza between the station and Apple store. In exchange for its contribution to the station's renovation, Apple has advertising rights within the station and on the platform, along with the right of first refusal should the Chicago Transit Authority decide in the future to sell naming rights to its stations.

DigiTimes reports on an article from the Chinese-language newspaper Commercial Times citing Concord Securities analyst Mingchi Kuo as predicting MacBook Air sales of approximately 700,000 for the quarter.

Apple's MacBook Air shipments in fourth quarter of 2010 are expected to reach about 700,000 units, accounting for more than 17% share of the company's 4.1 million Mac shipments, while the 11.6-inch model will account for 60% of the total MacBook Air sales due to its low price, according a Chinese-language Commercial Times report citing vice president of Concord Securities research department, Mingchi Kuo.

Kuo reports that the release of Mac OS X Lion next year should increase the attractiveness of the MacBook Air as a second machine for users, although it is unclear what specific features of Lion Kuo expects to boost that draw. In addition, Lion's projected release date of "summer" 2011 means that any such effects would occur in the relatively distant future.

Kuo was previously an analyst with DigiTimes' own research arm and was the first to reveal Apple's plans for an 11.6-inch MacBook Air back in mid-July.

As noted by 9 to 5 Mac, Apple yesterday seeded a new version of Mac OS X 10.6.5, termed Build 10H562, to developers. The new version comes only one week after the release of Build 10H555, but even so marks a rapid increment of seven build numbers.

According to reports, the latest build of Mac OS X 10.6.5 continues to cite no documented known issues and once again asks developers to focus their testing on 3D Graphics, Printing, QuickTime, Time Machine, and USB Devices.

Apple initially seeded Mac OS X 10.6.5 builds at approximately one-week intervals beginning in mid-August, but switched to two-week intervals in early September and used that schedule for the previous three seeds. The switch to back to a one-week interval suggests that Apple may be putting the final touches on the release in advance of a public release to support iOS 4.2 when that update launches next month.

In a brief piece outlining some of his thoughts on how the new MacBook Air may play into Apple's strategy for cloud-based media storage, All Things Digital's John Paczkowski notes in passing that he has heard that Apple is already considering doubling the size of its massive North Carolina data center to one million square feet, despite that fact that it hasn't even officially opened yet.

Steve Jobs says the MacBook Air is the future of the MacBook and the future of the notebook as well. But if that's to be the case, the machine - and Apple's ecosystem - needs to evolve a bit more to appeal to that strata of user tethered to the high capacity hard drives that the Air has summarily dispatched.

This being Apple we're talking about, that evolution is likely already well underway and perhaps - perhaps - being engineered at the company's massive new North Carolina data center. With its 500,000 square feet of data center space (currently, sources tell me that Apple is considering doubling that) that facility has been built for something. And what better use to put it to than the cloud services that might completely eliminate the need for high capacity hard drives and give the Air storage to match its performance characteristics.

Apple announced in July that the new facility, which is already five times the size of its existing one in Newark, California, will open by the end of this year, and the company made a hiring push earlier this month signaling that the company appears to still be on track.

Apple's announcement that they would be ceasing future development of their version of Java for the Mac has generated concern amongst Java developers. Apple posted developer documentation Thursday stating that they would not be supporting Java for Mac OS X in the future:

As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the version of Java that is ported by Apple, and that ships with Mac OS X, is deprecated.

This means that the Apple-produced runtime will not be maintained at the same level, and may be removed from future versions of Mac OS X. The Java runtime shipping in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will continue to be supported and maintained through the standard support cycles of those products.

One concerned Java developer from Portico Systems emailed Steve Jobs asking about Apple's future plans for the Java programming language and platform on Mac OS X. Jobs' reply was:

Sun (now Oracle) supplies Java for all other platforms. They have their own release schedules, which are almost always different than ours, so the Java we ship is always a version behind. This may not be the best way to do it.

Oracle supplies Java for all other platforms except for the Mac. Due to differences in release schedules, Apple's implementation of Java is always a version behind. Jobs indicates "This may not be the best way to do it." He stops short of saying that Oracle will be stepping up to fill the void, but suggests that would be a better solution. Oracle has made no public announcements about their plans.

Silicon Alley Insider briefly reported earlier today that President Barack Obama was scheduled for a one-on-one meeting with Apple CEO Steve Jobs today following Obama's arrival in the Bay Area for a fundraising visit.

He's speaking at Google exec Marissa Mayer's house in Palo Alto this evening.

Before that, says a source familiar with the details, he may have a one-on-one meeting with Steve Jobs.

Bloomberg now follows up, noting that the two are scheduled to meet at a San Francisco hotel for about 45 minutes to discuss several topics, including issues related to technology and the economy.

Obama and Jobs are scheduled to meet for about 45 minutes at a San Francisco hotel for a discussion on the economy and technology issues, Gibbs said.

"This is a meeting the president was interested in having," Gibbs told reporters traveling with Obama. "He's eager to talk to him about the economy, innovation and technology, education."

According to the report, Jobs and Obama last met in 2008 during the presidential campaign.

Note: Due to the inevitable political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

iFixit has wasted no time in getting its hands on a new 11.6-inch MacBook Air and beginning to disassemble it to see what's inside. While the leaked prototype image offered an idea of what the innards would look like, iFixit will almost certainly find some additional tidbits of information.

Some notes of interest:

- The case is screwed shut with 5-point Security Torx screws, suggesting that Apple does not want consumers disassembling the machine.
- The battery consists of six separate cells offering a total of 35 watt-hours of power.
- The machine's 64 GB of flash storage is composed of four 16 GB Toshiba chips together with a controller chip on a custom removable board. The SSD weighs in at 10 grams, down from 45 grams for the hard drive used in the previous generation. The new drive is also less than half the thickness of the platter-based hard drive.
- The new MacBook Air uses the same Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip as in the current MacBook Pro.
- RAM is soldered onto the logic board and thus not user-upgradeable.
- iFixit gives the new MacBook Air a repairability score of 4 out of 10, with the low score due to the difficulty of opening the machine and the proprietary nature of the components inside.

Gear Live confirms that Apple's new iLife '11 suite retains the 32-bit codebase found in earlier versions, squashing hopes that the company would make the transition to 64-bit code for the release.

So we figured that one unannounced "feature" would likely be that the iLife suite had been converted to 64 bit. After all, Snow Leopard has had more than enough time to mature out in the wild, and it seems that developers left and right have jumped onto the 64 bit bandwagon. That's why we were sorely disappointed when we launched Activity Monitor and found that, unlike just about every other process and application we are running on the Mac Pro, the iLife apps are still labeled as "Intel" rather than "Intel 64 bit."

While speculation regarding a shift to 64-bit for iLife has floated around for some time, the first specific claims of the change surfaced in July alongside claims that the release would ship in August for $79 and would see a revamp of iWeb, the disappearance of iDVD, and a new "mystery" application, none of which came to pass.

The claims were fed earlier this month by the appearance of listings for new iLife '11 books on Amazon's German site, although we noted at the time that the relevant book description appeared to be taken almost point-by-point from the earlier rumors rather than from any inside knowledge.

As related by MacNotes.de, Apple's new FaceTime for Mac beta application contains several security issues that could easily result in a user's Apple ID and iTunes Store account being compromised by individuals with physical access to the user's machine.

The primary issue appears to be FaceTime for Mac's display of account information, which reveals the user's date of birth and security question and answer for their account once signed in with their Apple ID, with no secondary request for password authentication. Consequently, anyone with physical access to a user's machine could view that information, which can then be used to reset the password for the account without requiring any email or other confirmation. The password can also be reset directly within the FaceTime application without a requirement that the current password be entered.

And while a user should in theory be able to address this issue by signing out of their account in FaceTime, the application automatically remembers the account details for the last-used account and pre-populates them the next time the application is opened or a sign-in is attempted.

Obviously there are any number of ways that sensitive information could be viewed or compromised by individuals with physical access to a user's machine, but the FaceTime application seems to make such actions remarkably easy, making private account reset information plainly visible at any point after initial log-in to the service.

Update: Apple appears to have addressed the issue on its end, as users are reporting that attempting to select the "View Account" option in FaceTime for Mac's preferences now briefly takes them to a blank window before bouncing them back to the selection page and offering no ability to view the account information.

A number of readers have pointed out that Apple's developer documentation for its Java updates for Mac OS X released yesterday reveals that the company appears to be ceasing future distribution of its custom-ported Java packages.

Java Deprecation

As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the version of Java that is ported by Apple, and that ships with Mac OS X, is deprecated.

This means that the Apple-produced runtime will not be maintained at the same level, and may be removed from future versions of Mac OS X. The Java runtime shipping in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will continue to be supported and maintained through the standard support cycles of those products.

It is not entirely clear what the move means for the future of Java on Mac OS X, as Apple has long been criticized for moving slowly on releasing updates to Java and it is possible that Oracle could roll out its own Java packages (as it does for Windows and Linux) on a more timely basis.

On a possibly-related note, Apple has noted in the guidelines for its forthcoming Mac App Store that applications using Java and other deprecated or optionally-installed technologies will not be accepted. Developers are of course free to distribute such applications through other means, but the move appears to be another sign of Apple opting to de-emphasize certain third-party technologies in its products.

Apple's long-standing issues with Adobe Flash are of course well-documented, with the company opting not to support Flash on its iOS devices and now even shipping its new MacBook Air without Flash pre-installed.

Several MacRumors readers have pointed out that Apple's promotional materials for its forthcoming Mac App Store show that the company may be planning to offer applications from its iLife and iWork suites on an individual basis. Supporting that notion is the demo offered by Apple's Craig Federighi during yesterday's media event in which he showed how a user could purchase and install Pages from the Mac App Store.

Based on Mac App Store screenshots posted on Apple's pages, it appears that the company is planning to offer portions of its iLife suite (iPhoto, GarageBand, and iMovie) for $14.99 each. It is unclear whether it will also offer iWeb and iDVD, the other two components of the suite that now retails for $49, as standalone purchases.

Apple similarly lists individual components of iWork (Pages, Keynote, and Numbers) for $19.99 each. Interestingly, this would result in a total price of $59.97 for the three applications purchased individually, below Apple's $79 price for the entire suite.

In addition, Steve Jobs noted during the media event that applications purchased through the Mac App Store would be licensed for use on all of a purchaser's personal Macs. This would appear to represent a middle ground between Apple's current single-user software packages, which allow for installation on only one machine at a time, and family packs, which permit installation on up to five computers but for multiple persons in a single household.

Apple already offers its iPad versions of Pages, Keynote and Numbers as standalone purchases on the iOS App Store, priced at $9.99 each with no bundled suite even available. The same may be true for the Mac App Store, as Apple's promotional screenshots offer no indication that iLife and iWork suites will be available for download in bundled form. Presumably Apple will continue to offer the bundled suites on physical media, but it is unclear how long this distribution method will continue to be supported by Apple once the Mac App Store begins to take hold.

AT&T today announced its financial results for the third quarter of 2010, revealing that it activated a record 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter. The number was significantly higher than the previous record of 3.2 million activations set last quarter.

AT&T's third-quarter integrated device growth included 5.2 million iPhone activations, the most iPhone activations ever in a quarter. This is 62 percent more than the previous quarterly record of 3.2 million activated in the second quarter of 2010. Approximately 24 percent of those activations were for customers who were new to AT&T.

The share of iPhone activations going to new AT&T customers continued to decline, as it has over the past several quarters, presumably due to a shrinking base of potential customers who have not yet switched and a significant existing base of existing iPhone users who were ready to upgrade their handsets to the iPhone 4.

AT&T has noted in the past that "activations" reported during a quarter include previously-sold devices being reactivated by new customers, such as when an older-model iPhone is passed down to a relative or sold. Consequently, comparisons between AT&T's iPhone activation data and Apple's device sales numbers, which included a record-shattering 14.1 million iPhones for the quarter, are not valid.

Even beyond the iPhone, AT&T customers are continuing to shift to "integrated devices", handsets offering a virtual or physical QWERTY keyboard. AT&T reports that 57.3% of its postpaid user base is now on such devices, up from 42% just a year earlier.

Engadget revealed today that Apple's new MacBook Air doesn't ship with Adobe's Flash plug-in.

Amusingly enough, you know what's missing from the new MacBook Air models? Adobe Flash Player. While preloaded on Apple's past hardware, out of the box here it just says missing plugin, with no click to install option. To be fair, Flash doesn't come standard on a lot of machines, even for Windows, but we wonder if past models will continue to ship out with Adobe's plugin, especially once OS X 10.7 becomes de facto.

It seems Apple is continuing to distance itself from Adobe's Flash plug-in. The omission appears to be no accident with Engadget Editor Joshua Topolsky confirming with Apple that this is how the machine ships. Previous Mac OS X installations have shipped with Adobe's Flash plugin preinstalled.

Apple's dislike of the Adobe Flash plugin has been a very public debate. The controversy began when Apple first shipped the iPhone without support for Adobe's plugin. Over time, Apple has reiterated its stance against Flash in favor of HTML5 standards. Steve Jobs' open letter on Flash outlined his criticisms. While end-users are still free to install Flash on their machines, the removal of Flash as a standard component on the Mac serves to destroy the near ubiquity of Flash for the end user. This may further influence website owner's decisions to support HTML5 in addition to or instead of Flash over time.

With the announcement of the upcoming Mac App Store just a few hours old, Australian game studio Firemint has already announced that they will be delivering their award-winning game Flight Control to the Mac. They released the above screenshot which is said to be an actual screenshot of Flight Control HD running on a Mac.

Flight Control is an original iOS game that was released onto the App Store in March 2009. The game was a hit, selling millions of copies. It has since been ported to PlayStation Move and Nintendo DSi. The move to the Mac is natural given the common development tools between iOS and Mac OS X development. Still, it marks the first announcement of what we expect to be many in the lead-up to the launch of the Mac App Store.

Apple has posted the full video from today's "Back to the Mac" media event as a podcast on iTunes, and the stream is also available via a direct link to the .mov file. The stream was initially available for users on Safari for Mac OS X 10.6 and iOS, but users on other platforms now have options for viewing the broadcast.

Apple should also be making the stream available in multiple formats for access directly through its special event site, but the video is not yet appearing on that site for the alternative browsers and platforms.

Apple made a number of announcements and product introductions at today's media event, as we covered in earlier stories:

- Apple Announces New 13.3-Inch and 11.6-Inch MacBook Air Models with Flash Storage
- Mac OS X Lion Set for Summer 2011 Debut, Mac App Store to Launch Within 90 Days
- Apple Debuts FaceTime for the Mac, Beta Available Today
- Apple Announces iLife '11 With Updated iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand
- 15-Inch and 17-Inch MacBook Pros Receive 2.8 GHz Core i7 Option