MacRumors

Trademork notes that Apple has filed to extend their Apple trademark into new areas, covering:

Toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games

The filing took place on February 5th, 2008.

Apple's iPods have always contained a few built-in games, but in 2006, Apple extended this to allow 3rd party developers release downloadable games through iTunes. The trademark application, however, will certainly reignite rumors that Apple is seriously pursing its own game development or even its own game console.

Apple has been known to be recruiting game developers back in 2006, and has authored a number of the existing iPod games. In the mid 90's, Apple did launch a short lived game console called Pippin.

Update: Game Developer Job listing from Apple, via 9to5.

Video Game Design and Production. Successful candidate possesses a proven track-record of producing and designing great video games.

This may not mean much, as Apple has already written and released a number of iPod games.

9to5Mac believes that the iPhone and iPod touch will be seeing $100 price drops in the next two months, simultaneously discontinuing the low capacity models.

Their belief is that the 8GB Touch and 8GB iPhone will be discontinued, leaving a 16GB iPhone at $399, 16GB Touch at $299, and 32GB Touch at $399.

The move would be reminiscent of the $200 iPhone price drop and discontinuation of the 4GB iPhone that took place in September, 2007. The surprise iPhone price drop -- only 3 months after the introduction of the iPhone -- caused an outcry amongst early adopters. The outcry was so great, that Steve Jobs posted an open letter to explain the decision and gave existing iPhone owners a $100 Apple store credit.

Based on this experience, it seems Apple would be reluctant to make a similar move when they could have easily timed the price drop to coincide with iPhone/Touch updates last week. This being said, the iPhone is still expected to receive further updates this year with the introduction of a 3G model in 2008. It's possible that any future price drops could correlate with the introduction of the 3G iPhone. AT&T has already committed to expand their 3G network to more U.S. cities in 2008.

While 9to5mac had an excellent early rumor record, their record has not been perfect, with their recent claims of 5 million iPhones sold by Macworld failing to come true.

Computerworld notes that the latest Webkit nightly builds offer considerable performance boosts over the current public Safari build (3.0.4) -- with Javascript benchmarks over 2.5x faster in some instances.

While these performace boosts in Webkit date to at least November 2007, Weintraub speculates that the optimizations will find its way into the just-beta'd Safari 3.1.

Indeed, we've managed to track down Sunspider Javascript benchmark results from the same build that Weintraub used (r30090) vs Safari 3.1 (Beta) on a Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz. The results:

Shorter times are faster.

Webkit Build r30090: 3495.8ms
Safari 3.1 Beta: 3408.0ms
Safari 3.0.4: 9302.3ms (extrapolated)

Amongst other improvements, the latest Safari beta does seem to incorporate the speed optimizations found in the latest Webkit builds. Webkit is an open source project that serves as the basis for Apple's Safari browser. Webkit's nightly builds offer end-users access to the latest (potentially unstable) Webkit updates. A number of other browsers also use Webkit and will also benefit from these improvements.

Reports emerged today that Yahoo's board will be formally rejecting Microsoft's $44.6 billion takeover bid for Yahoo on Monday, according to "a person familiar with the situation",

Formal details will be revealed Monday but one of the claims is that the bid "massively undervalues" Yahoo. Analysts, however, say that the Yahoo board is obligated to reject Microsoft's first offer as a duty to their shareholders to get the best possible price for the company.

"You would expect Yahoo's board to reject Microsoft at first," Marlin said. "If they didn't, they would be accused of malfeasance."

Others speculate that Microsoft is prepared to up their bid from $31/share to as high as $35/share as part of the negotiation. This being said, its been no secret that Yahoo's co-founder and CEO, Jerry Yang, is reluctant for his company to join Microsoft.

If this rejection is final, however, Microsoft has the option of taking the matter directly to the shareholders, and bypass the board of directors entirely.

TUAW tentatively claims that Mira Mobile is hiring for an unannounced Apple event in the last week of February.

The company reportedly coordinates television services for sporting and other live events, including Apple's events. TUAW cautions that this is otherwise unconfirmed information, but speculates the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) may be the subject of a late-february announcement. We received a similar (the same?) tip earlier this month, but were unable to confirm it.

Of interest, it does appear that Apple contracts out to MiraMobile for their AV needs. A video documents the AV truck that was used at the 2007 Macworld San Francisco Keynote speech, which was stamped with MiraMobile's url:

Appleinsider has also heard whispers about an "unusual number of visual resources" being prepped for late February. Apple is due for a number of potential releases in the coming weeks: Apple TV software revision, MacBook Pro updates, and Mac OS X 10.5.2. The iPhone SDK, however, is the most likely to warrant its own event.

Update: 9to5 is chiming in, citing February 26th as the exact date.

Macenstein reports that Apple has decided not to exhibit at the 2008 National Association of Broadcasters conference which takes place from April 11-17 in Las Vegas, NV.

"Apple is participating in fewer trade shows this year," said Anuj Nayar, senior manager of PR at Apple. "Often there are better ways to reach our customers. The increasing popularity of our retail stores and Apple.com Web site allows us to directly reach more than 100 million customers around the world in innovative new ways."

The news follows an earlier announcement by Avid that they would also not be exhibiting at this year's NAB conference. We'd heard rumors that Apple would be pulling out of NAB and that the reason was primarily motived by the high cost of exhibiting.

In 2007, Apple even held a special event at NAB, announcing a number of updates to their professional video applications.

MacNN reports on a number of new patents from Apple, one of which involves an interesting use of "widgets" alongside streaming video that would allow for more interactivity.

The August 2006 filing introduces the possbility of incorporating Dashboard-like Widgets alongside video content in the Apple TV interface. The Widgets could be triggered by the video itself and could be contextual:

"For example, while the user is viewing a musical performance a ticket widget can be displayed over the content or elsewhere in the user interface, which can be access by the user to purchase concert tickets or receive other information related to the concert or performer," Apple said. "In the example shown (below), the widget could be triggered by a marker in the content which corresponds with a portion of the concert where the performer is not performing, or can be based on a period of inactivity (e.g., the DVD player is placed on "pause"). In some implementations, the widget can be displayed as part of a DVD menu system."

Beyond this commercial usage, the system could also be used to incorporate live video chat during an event or provide live sports stats during a game.

BBC's Mark Thompson responds to some criticisms about their Windows-only support for their iPlayer service, which allows users to stream and download videos to their computer. While Mac and other platforms have been able to stream shows, downloads have not been available.

Thompson explains that this is due to rights management issues and working with their limited resources. That being said, the BBC is planning on launching a download version of BBC iPlayer for Mac in 2008.

Another interesting possibility was previously raised in the same blog by BBC's Ashley Highfield, who felt Apple's refresh of the Apple TV along with rental model could introduce BBC programming direct to your TV.

..we can look to getting BBC iPlayer onto [the Apple TV] too, as we should be able to use the rental functionality to allow our programmes to be downloaded, free, but retained for a time window, and then erased, as our rightsholders currently insist.

On January 30th, Apple announced that the new Apple TV software has been delayed and will not be available for "another week or two".

Anandtech provides more standardized battery results for their 1.8GHz MacBook Air (HDD).

They setup 3 tasks of varying intensity with the MacBook Air's display set at just above 50% brightness, and not to go to sleep, though the hard drive was allowed to spin down if able. The tasks and battery life times are listed as follows:

1) Use Wifi to browse 20 pages in a loop, spending 20 seconds on each page, while playing MP3s in iTunes. 4hr 16min
2) Play a DVD image (off the internal hard drive) in a loop. 3hr 25min
3) Download 10GB of files, Web browsing loop from #1, play two 480p Xvid videos in a loop. 2hr 25min

As expected, the battery time varies greatly with use, and helps explain the discrepant battery life times seen by various users. Andantech summaries:

Apple's 5 hour claim is laughable but not as much as I expected. If I wanted to I suspect I could hit 5 hours by making the web browsing test less stressful, but my focus was on real world usage scenarios, not proving Apple correct. Regardless, 4 hours and 16 minutes doing what I consider to be the intended usage model of the Air is respectable. It's not great, but it's not terrible either.

Walt Mossberg weighs in on the Solid State Drive (SSD) vs Hard Disk Drive (HDD) debate. The issue has become relevant now that Apple offers a SSD option on the MacBook Air, and this feature will certainly trickle down to future Apple laptops.

An earlier comparison from Arstechnica was difficult to interpret due to differences in machines (1.6GHz vs 1.8GHz) and non-standardized testing.

Mossberg offers at least one piece of standardized data on the SSD vs HDD comparison in the MacBook Air. He compared two 1.6GHz processor MacBook Airs which only differed in the type of hard drive (SSD vs HDD) and ran a standardized test case: "turn off all power-saving software, set screen brightness to maximum, turn on the Wi-Fi and play an endless loop of music."

As always these tests come with some considerations. After some investigation, it appears that iTunes explicitly turns off Mac OS X's file caching, so the drives are being accessed with regularity in this test. This drive access, however, is small and sequential which does not take advantage of SSD's strengths (random non-sequential). With these notes in mind, the results of the test revealed almost no difference (5 minutes in favor of SSD).

Not all SSDs, HDDs and laptops are made equally, however. Mossberg also compared a Toshiba Portege R500 with a 1.8" HDD and a 1.8" SSD drive. In the same test, Mossberg found the Portege R500 ran 1 hour and 21 minutes (36%) longer with the SSD. Now, the reason for this large difference is unclear. Update/Correction: the Toshiba also uses the 1.8" drive, not the 2.5" drive previously reported here.

Similarly, MacLife found that the 32GB DVNation SSD drive installed in a MacBook Pro saw 55% increased write speeds and 88% increased read speeds compared to the stock HDD. They also saw similarly dramatic speed increases in "real world" tasks as well as a 14% battery life gain with the SSD drive.

As a result of these discrepant findings, the SSD vs HDD debate will likely be reintroduced with every new laptop introduced, as findings seem to vary by individual model and task. At this point, however, it seems the accepted advantages for the SSD drive in the MacBook Air is a more responsive user experience, and less vulnerability to data loss.

The wait for Leopard 10.5.2 continues, with a 1 digit build increment (9C31) seeded today. The latest developer build offers fixes to a networking connectivity issue, and reportedly has no known issues. Apple seeded build 9C30 just two days ago.

Meanwhile, in non-10.5.2 news, Apple has seeded a new build of Safari 3.1 to developers today. The new release seems to incorporate much of what has been implemented in the Webkit builds since the last major release.

New features include (links to Webkit.org descriptions):

- HTML5 audio and video tags: "The new HTML5 'video' and 'audio' elements add native support for embedding video and audio content in web pages. They also provide a rich scripting API for controlling playback."
- HTML5 SQL storage API: "The client-side database storage API allows web applications to store structured data locally using a medium many web developers are already familiar with - SQL."

- getElementsByClassName: "getElementsByClassName is one of the more common functions requested by JavaScript programmers (and added by JavaScript libraries); it works along the same lines as getElementsByTagName and getElementById in looking up elements of a web page by their properties."
- Downloadable fonts: "With font face rules you can specify downloadable custom fonts on your Web pages or alias one font to another." More details.
- CSS Transforms and CSS Animations

The latest beta builds of Safari also address a number of significant fixes. Safari is currently at version 3.0.4. For those interested in the cutting edge Webkit releases, you can download nightly builds -- though these may not be entirely stable.

Apple has posted an update to Quicktime bringing it to version 7.4.1 today. Updates are available for Leopard, Tiger, Panther, and Windows.

Apple reports the new Quicktime addresses security issues and improves compatibility with third-party applications. Specifically, the update addresses a possible vulnerability that could result in arbitrary code execution. This release is recommended for all QuickTime 7 users, and requires a restart.

Apple has released a number of small software updates over this past week.

AT&T announced today that they will be deploying third generation (3G) wireless broadband service to more than 80 additional cities as part of its 2008 wireless network expansion plans.

This will bring 3G services to nearly 350 U.S. markets by the end of 2008, including the top 100 U.S. cities.

This news is relevant, in that Apple users AT&T as their exclusive iPhone carrier in the U.S. and has a multi-year commitment with them. One of the main criticisms of the iPhone when it was launched was a lack of 3G networking, which is typically much faster than the EGDE network that is presently offered with the iPhone.

AT&T's CEO confirmed that the 3G iPhone would become available in 2008, confirming comments by Steve Jobs at the original iPhone launch that Apple planned on making "3g phones and all sorts of other amazing things in the future". The reason that 3G was not included in the original iPhone was due to concerns about excessive battery usage:

When we looked at 3G, the chipsets were not low-enough power for what we were looking for. They were not integrated enough, so they took up too much physical space. We cared a lot about battery life and we cared a lot about physical size. Down the road, I'm sure some of those tradeoffs will become more favorable towards 3G but as of now we think we made a pretty good doggone decision.

ArsTechnica compares the Solid State Drive (SSD) and Hard Disk Drive (HDD) versions of the MacBook Air to see if the SSD upgrade is worth the additional cost.

Their benchmark results are consistent with earlier benchmarks revealing that the SSD drive is slower at writing and sequential reads than the HDD. The SSD, however, is faster than the HDD at random (non-sequential) disk access.

This difference shows itself in "real world" tests such as Exporting a 60MB Quicktime, Compiling an Application or Unzipping an archive. As expected, the large file export, which performs a large sequential write to disk favored the HDD model. Meanwhile, building Webkit and Unzipping an archive showed off the speed advantage of the SSD.

Ars also looked at battery life of the MacBook Air and in their HDD review found that their Air averaged a paltry 2.5 hour battery life in their "real world tests". Questions of the validity of these results have been raised, with other anecdotal claims of battery life as long as 4-5 hours on the same configuration. Indeed, reports are varied:

Forums: 56% left after 2:15, 5+ hours?; Engadget: 2:25 watching movie, 3:35 light usage

Ars, however, is pretty confident in their battery life tests for their machine and felt it was consistent with some other reports. They found that the SSD didn't seem to offer a significant longer battery life (on average), however, their battery tests were not standardized and the SSD model had a faster processor. (Of note, MacLife found an SSD drive in a MacBook Pro brought a 14% battery life improvement.)

In the end, they felt the SSD upgrade was not worth the additional cost ($999), but noted the biggest advantage of the SSD was a lack of disk-access related slowdowns that they experienced on the HDD model.

Update: Several readers note that the SSD model had a 1.8GHz processor, rather than a 1.6GHz processor, so even equivalent battery life is likely an improvement. Also, another big advantage to SSD is durability -- with no chance of a hard drive "crash".