MacRumors

Appleinsider republishes an internal email sent from Steve Jobs to employees reassuring them about the recent downturn affecting Apple's stock price.

"As you can see, we have outperformed many other blue-chip tech companies, including Google," he wrote, tacking on a stock performance comparison chart for illustration. "I continue to believe that our fundamentals - our remarkable people, our clear and focused strategy, our new product pipeline, our 200+ retail stores, our $18 billion of cash in the bank with no debt, etc., will serve us well in the coming months and years."

Steve Jobs reportedly remained upbeat, expressing confidence that "investors who stay with us will be rewarded as the market's confidence is restored over time".

Apple's stock price reached a peak of over $200 in late December, but has recently dropped down to $130 as of this writing.

SvenonTech.com claims to have tracked down an Apple representative at Macworld who was willing to speak about the reason why Copy/Paste has not yet arrived in the iPhone.

The validity of the comments are in question as it seems unlikely that an Apple employee with this knowledge would necessarily speak freely about it at Macworld. The claim is that iPhone Copy and Paste is being actively developed, but how exactly to implement the functionality appears to be up for debate.

The trouble it is having is implementation. How to easily call up a copy or cut option and then the paste action. Its probable that the zoom bubble (the one that brings up the edit cursor) is the issue as it has removed the obvious tap and hold position from Apple to use for a pop-up menu of some sort. Text selection is another difficulty to sort out. Certainly, the cursor could be added to the menu selection; however, Apple wants to keep this as simple as possible and that added step would not lend itself to simple.

Historically, Apple had already addressed a menu-less copy/paste in their previous touch-based handheld, the Newton. A description and video shows how Apple implemented Copy/Paste on the Newton, though it would conflict with the press-hold magnifying glass in the iPhone.

Other iPhone users have suggested alternate possibilities (screenshot, mockup video) but these also suffer from complexity issues.

Meanwhile, the Apple representative also claimed that "Apple's aware of the Exchange need" but stopped short of confirming that it was coming.

BoyGeniusReport claims that MacBook Airs have arrived at retail stores and will be placed on display starting Tuesday (update: maybe Wednesday).

Product banners and visuals will go up on Monday night in all Apple stores for the official launch on Tuesday, and the Genius Bar employees get their official training tomorrow.
....
UPDATE: Looks like it might be Wednesday now!

Steve Jobs had originally announced that the MacBook Air would be available starting 2 weeks after their announcement, which brings us to this Tuesday -- making this seemingly quite a likely claim. However, we have not heard independent confirmation, and BoyGeniusReport's reliability has been mixed.

Readers who have their MacBook Airs on pre-order are waiting in this discussion thread, ready to post photos when their MacBook Airs arrive. Meanwhile, for those waiting for the MacBook Pro updates, we've heard whispers about their imminent release.

Deutsche Telekom announced (via MacNotes.de) on Saturday that they had sold 70,000 iPhones in the 11 weeks following its launch in November.

This represents a much smaller number of iPhones sold as compared to the 70,000 iPhone sales in 1 month in France. Despite this, the head of T-Mobile Germany states that "the iPhone is by far the most sold multimedia device in T-Mobile's portfolio."

The German launch of the iPhone was marred by a legal battle, in which Vodafone won a temporary injunction against T-Mobile from selling the iPhone without an unlocked option. This injunction was later overturned. At Macworld, Apple announced that 4 million iPhones had been sold worldwide, and they are confident about reaching their 10 million goal by the end of 2008.

Amazon announced today that they would be rolling out their Amazon MP3 store internationally in 2008.

"We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S. They can't wait to choose from the biggest selection of high-quality, low-priced DRM-free MP3 music downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future," said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music. "We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year."

Amazon's MP3 store is presently the largest Digital Rights Management (DRM) Free selection of downloadable songs available for sale online. As of January, Amazon had managed to sign on all the major record labels to their service and will be launching a billion song giveaway during the Superbowl.

MP3s downloaded from the Amazon store are compatible with Apple's iTunes software as well as their iPods and iPhones. Amazon offers a list of bestsellers including a number of freely downloadable MP3 tracks. (U.S. Only at Present)

Apple appears to be working hard on Mac OS X 10.5.2, and has seeded yet another build to developers. Today's build comes in at 9C23 and offers a number of fixes to CoreGraphics, DVD Playback, File Systems, BackupCore and Web Content Filter. Apple again lists "no known issues" with this seed of Mac OS X 10.5.2.

Apple is expected to publicly release 10.5.2 imminently. The previous Mac OS X 10.5.2 build (9C20) was seeded to developers just 2 days ago.

Known features/fixes for the upcoming version of Mac OS X:

- World of Warcraft fix, No AirDisk backups
- Optional Transparent Menu Bar, DVD/CD Sharing
- List View in Stacks

Gizmodo provides a gallery of screenshots and video documenting the disassembly of the MacBook Air and shows that it is relatively easy to access the battery, which is held in by a number of screws.

Aside from the innards being well designed, the disassembly of the MacBook Air was surprisingly easy. Hands-down the easiest Apple notebook we have ever taken apart. There's basically only one step to get inside the machine, just unscrew the bottom casing.

Appleinsider claims that NVIDIA is working on bringing "general-purpose computing on graphics processing units" (GPGPUs) to the Mac.

GPGPUs are described as a new type of graphics processors that can perform complex computations typically reserved for the system's primary CPU.

The technology -- in Nvidia's case -- leverages a proprietary architecture called CUDA, which is short for Compute Unified Device Architecture. It's currently compatible with the company's new GeForce 8 Series of graphics cards, allowing developers to use the C programming language to write algorithms for execution on the GPU.

According to Appleinsider, the GPGPUs can be beneficial in a number of applications with complex mathematical requirements, such as raytracing, scientific applications, cryptography, and audio and image processing.

NVIDIA's $1500 Telsa card is the first example of this class of graphics card. When launched for Mac, these GPGPUs will likely be a high-end build-to-order option for Mac Pros.

First review MacBook Airs have arrived (80GB, HDD, 1.6GHz): Gizmodo, Engadget, Macworld

Some early notes:

- Wireless Remote disk details: can't play DVD media, can't burn a CD, can't listen to a music CD,
- The Novatel U727 (3G USB modem) won't fit in the MacBook Air without a USB extender.
- MacBook Air's MagSafe charger works in the MacBook/MacBook Pro and vice-versa but the regular MagSafe won't stay attached to the Air when it is sitting flat on a desk.
- Size comparison between MacBook Air and other laptops.
- Engadget provides some Xbench 1.3 benchmarks of the MacBook Air compared to a MacBook, MacBook Pro, and iMac, though with a mismatch of configurations. Unsurprisingly, the MacBook Air came in at the lowest speeds amongst the machines tested.
- Gizmodo provides some "real world" benchmarks in comparison with a MacBook (2GHz) and MacBook Pro (2.2GHz), and finds the performance of the MacBook Air to not be far off from the previous generation (2GHz) MacBook.

One of the most anticipated features of Mac OS X Leopard amongst the technical community was the port of Sun's DTrace utility for application and system profiling. DTrace is a powerful, low-level dynamic tracing framework that allows system administrators and developers to trace applications for tuning or troubleshooting purposes.

Recently, Adam Leventhal, one of DTrace's initial developers, discovered that Apple's implementation creates a way for a program to exclude itself from being traced. Namely, he was unsuccessful at tracing iTunes, and found that Apple had added a method of disabling probing on certain applications defined with the directive P_LNOATTACH.

Wow. So Apple is explicitly preventing DTrace from examining or recording data for processes which don't permit tracing. This is antithetical to the notion of systemic tracing, antithetical to the goals of DTrace, and antithetical to the spirit of open source. I'm sure this was inserted under pressure from ISVs, but that makes the pill no easier to swallow.

Since the initial publication of the blog entry last week, the story has begun to pop up around the mac web.

The practice is not entirely new to Apple. A commenter on Adam Leventhal's blog noted that Apple used the same directive to prevent GDB tracing on iTunes. Additionally, the implementation of this directive appears to be limited to iTunes (for the moment?), so many are speculating that the move is to protect Apple's FairPlay DRM.

To present an alternate view, Apple has extended Java, Ruby, Python, and Perl to include DTrace support, and Apple has built a GUI front-end called Instruments. Also the issue may eventually become moot with Apple's stated desire to move towards DRM-free music (though DRM video remains common).

The first reviews are in for the MacBook Air:

Wall Street Journal
- "beautiful, amazingly thin computer, but one whose unusual trade-offs may turn off some frequent travelers."
- "difficult to describe just how surprising this feels in your hands"
- "MacBook Air's screen and keyboard were a pleasure to use."
- felt speedy
- Limitations: Sealed in battery, no optical drive, no built in Ethernet jack
- Battery test: screen brightness at maximum, Wi-Fi on, playing endless look of music: 3 hours, 24 minutes.

Newsweek
- "When I slip it in the sleeve of my backpack where my six-pound MacBook Pro usually travels, the pocket still looks empty"
- "diminutive dimensions pretty much evaporate the eternal quandary of whether or not to take your computer along with you."
- Doesn't get as hot as other Apple laptops.
- Max hard drive space is 80GB; no 160GB option due to thinness of machine.

USA Today
- "remarkably sturdy-feeling machine, especially given its size and weight"
- Not ideal for everyone (due to known limitations, non-replaceable battery, limited ports, etc..)
- "Jobs told me last week that Apple considered [adding 3G mobile broadband] but that adding the capability would take up room and restrict consumers to a particular carrier. Through a USB modem, he says, you can still subscribe to wireless broadband with your favorite carrier."
- Battery test: surfed web, used Remote Disk, wrote: 3 hours, 40 minutes.
- don't expect Air to be someone's only computer.

Readers who have ordered a MacBook Air continue to wait in this discussion thread. Meanwhile, friend-of-Apple John Mayer already has one. One reader's MacBook Air has shipped and is due for delivery by Friday.

AlleyInsider reports that during their Q4 financial results, Netflix confirmed that they were hoping to have a Mac web-streaming video solution available in 2008. An earlier Netflix blog entry from August had reported the same expectation. The core issue has been a lack of an available Digital Rights Management solution for the Mac:

A key issue for delivering movies online is that the studios require use of DRM (Digital Rights Management) to protect titles. And that's our holdup for the Mac - there's not yet a studio-sanctioned, publicly-available Mac DRM solution (Apple doesn't license theirs). I can promise you that, when an approved solution becomes available for the Mac, we'll be there.

Microsoft's Silverlight video technology appears to be the most promising solution which will support cross-platform (PC and Mac) DRM-encoded video. Silverlight is available in beta for Mac from Microsoft.

Netflix recently announced that they were expanding their streaming service to allow users to download an unlimited number of movies per month for a flat $8.99 fee. Later this year, they also plan on launching a set top box to allow users to watch streaming movies on their television. In contrast, Apple's movie rental solution offers $2.99/$3.99/$4.99 24-hour rentals, and also offers a set-top box (Apple TV) to watch movies.

A few more tidbits on the coming Mac OS X 10.5.2 update.

- The latest seed reportedly fixes a known driver problem that affects World of Warcraft on PowerPC machines.

- Despite early hope that the 10.5.2 update would fix Time Machine's Airport Extreme + USB (AirDisk) drive backup incompatibility, the latest Mac OS X developer seed does not appear to fully address this issue. While AirDisk drives can sometimes now show up in the newest Time Machine, backup attempts to them have been unsuccessful. While these reports are based on beta/developer versions of the software and admittedly limited testing, Apple lists "no known issues" in their seed notes for this latest version. It's also conceivable that an Airport Extreme firmware update may also be necessary as well to fully implement this feature.

Apple had originally advertised Airdisk wireless backups as a feature for Leopard, but this feature was removed prior to its launch. Speculation has suggested that it may have been due to some unresolved security issues, but Apple has made no official statements. While there have been workarounds published, the announcement of Time Capsule raised hopes again that Apple would address this issue soon.

Update: Babygotmac posts their findings on what happens when they do try to backup to an AirDisk.