The first of the demo units are also said to have been arriving at AT&T stores as early as today.
Updated: Gadgetomac posts additional photos of an iPhone 3G demo unit in Swiss retail stores.
Apple has announced the launch date and time for their MobileMe service. The revamped .Mac service will offer web-based email, calendar, addressbook, photo gallery and storage capabilities as well as "Push" sync services. Apple announced MobileMe at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference in early June.
According to their service status update when you log into .Mac, they detail that MobileMe will launch on the evening of July 9th:
MobileMe Launch
7/9/2008, 6pm-12am PT
As part of the MobileMe launch, www.mac.com will be taken offline at 6pm PT on Wednesday, July 9th.
Members will be unable to access www.mac.com or any .Mac services during this time with the exception of .Mac Mail accessed via a desktop application, iPhone, or iPod touch.
MobileMe will be available as soon as possible during this maintenance window.
The timing comes as little surprise as Apple must deploy MobileMe before 5am Pacific July 10th in order to accommodate the first iPhone customers in New Zealand. We also expect iTunes 7.7 to be released before this time as it is required for the iPhone 3G.
Existing .Mac subscribers should already be able to send and receive emails at their new @me.com addresses. MobileMe retails for $99/year, but iPhone 3G (or Mac) buyers will be able to pick up a year subscription for $69 on July 11th.
Numerous readers have reported that Apple's iPhone 3G commercial has begun appearing on a wide variety of U.S. television stations. The commercial, entitled Hallway, debuted during Steve Jobs' keynote speech at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9th and was posted to Apple's site soon after. However, the commercial has remained conspicuously absent from television broadcasts until now.
The iPhone 3G launches this Friday in approximately 20 countries, with an additional 50 countries scheduled to begin offering the new iPhone later this year.
AT&T had previously announced an 8 a.m. launch time for the iPhone 3G launch, but we had not had official word from Apple. 8 a.m. is earlier than either of the retail shops typically open.
AppleInsider offers some additional tidbits from the retail meeting that took place on Sunday night. Of interest:
- Valid ID required. Social Security Number for those who are new to AT&T.
- It remains unclear how existing non-iPhone AT&T will be processed.
- Business customers must go to an AT&T store.
- FamilyTalk plan buyers must purchase at least 2 iPhones, or have an existing iPhone to be used in the plan.
- More details expected throughout the week.
This morning the MacRumors forums crossed the 200,000 member threshold.
The rate of new registrations reached a peak of nearly 10,000 per month in January and February 2008, in the wake of the MacBook Air launch at Macworld San Francisco. While the rate decreased in the months following, it has recently spiked again to nearly 8,500 in June due in part to excitement over the iPhone 3G launch at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference.
Not all of these members are still active, of course, but it shows that the news, rumors, and discussions at MacRumors have continued to attract a larger and larger audience. Recently we celebrated our 8th birthday and over 5 million posts.
Thanks to our readers, forum participants, and MacRumors staff for making MacRumors the #1 Apple-centric website on the internet.
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AT&T stores are due to get iPhone 3G demo units starting tomorrow:
Beginning July 8th you will receive the new iPhone 3G demo devices at your store to enhance your sales process. These devices will be used the same as your 2G demo devices in your sales process but now you can demonstrate the additional capabilities of the iPhone 3G including the App Store
The leaked sales memo also details that employees are to download apps from the App Store on the morning of July 11th and that the phones are to be activated on July 10th. So, while, the demo units may be in AT&T stores tomorrow, they may not be available for public use until launch day.
Apple held their retail meeting last night, and details have been slow to trickle out. We've heard that more details will be available throughout the week but several employees seem to believe that they will open at 8am to mirror AT&T's launch time. (Apple apparently did not dictate an exact time so it may be left up to the discretion of the individual Apple stores.) As expected, iPhones will be activated in-store and must be paid for by check, credit card or gift card. Cash may be used to purchase gift cards, however, which in turn could be used to buy the iPhone. Credit checks, of course, will be performed at time of sale. A few of these details are also corroborated at Macenstein.
Update: We've heard conflicting tidbits about existing AT&T non-iPhone customers. To avoid confusion and delays, existing AT&T customers who do not currently own an iPhone should probably go an AT&T store (not an Apple Retail Store) on launch day to upgrade to the iPhone 3G. We'll post more updates as we hear them.
According to Segway forums, Segway Chief Technology Officer and designer Doug Field has up until now lead their entire engineering team is apparently leaving the company to become Vice President of Product Design at Apple.
Doug has been the driving force in making the Segway what it is today and will be sorely missed at the company. However, with every change comes good and bad. So while it's bad the rich history and experience of Doug is leaving, it's good in that perhaps the team will get a fresh perspective into possible engineering solutions for future versions of the Segway (or Segway-like applications).
And hey, what can be better than a gig at Apple? These days, in the design and engineering world, not much!!
We wish Doug all the luck in moving on!!
Developer Thomas Joos has ported Flash Lite to the iPhone as a stand-alone application, according to iPhone Atlas.
The port does not represent a Flash plug-in for Mobile Safari, but rather as a method for mobile application development. For more information on Flash Lite, see Adobe's website.
Adobe has previously stated that they have a version of Flash in development for the iPhone.
Vodafone sent out an email (screenshot) announcing that the iPhone 3G will be launching in New Zealand at a 12:01 am on the morning of Friday, July 11th at three Vodafone stores (Queen St, Lambton Quay, Columbo St) nationwide. Meanwhile, New Zealand's other Vodafone stores will begin sales at 9am. Their online store will also start accepting orders at 12:01am.
A 12:01am launch means that New Zealand customers will be the first in the world to get the new iPhone 3G by a large margin. This corresponds to times of 5:01 am Pacific, 8:01 am Eastern, and 1:01 pm London time on July 10th.
Meanwhile, the U.K.'s O2 announced that they have started accepting pre-orders for the iPhone 3G today. The iPhones will be sold on a first-come first-serve basis and will be only available for individuals signing up for a contract. A PAYG option will be coming later. Those who order now will get their iPhone 3G delivered to them on July 11th and existing customers will be able to activate their new iPhones via iTunes at home.
Update: O2's website now states that they have sold out of iPhones and instructs users to come back on July 10th for more information. Based on experiences from individuals in our forums, it appears existing iPhone owners were unable to complete the ordering process.
Apple has been rumored to be working on new aluminum MacBook Pro designs that will adopt features of the current iMac and MacBook Air.
While the photo is consistent with rumors, we are always reluctant to believe that anonymously leaked photos are legitimate. More often then not, they turn out to be fake fan-created images, though there have been some legitimate leaks from Chinese sources.
FridgeDay reports that the Me.com mail servers are now online. This means that you can actually send mail from your @me.com email address.
The outgoing mail server is "smtp.me.com" and the incoming server is "mail.me.com". Otherwise, you enter your usual credentials (username@me.com) and password.
Incoming me.com email addresses have been working for incoming mail since last week.
iPhone Alley posts a suggestion on how to convert an upgrade ineligible AT&T account into an upgrade eligible one to take advantage of the discounted iPhone 3G pricing.
At the heart of the matter is that existing AT&T customers who recently bought a subsidized phone from AT&T may not be eligible to purchase the subsidized ($199/$299) iPhone 3G. Instead, these upgrade ineligible AT&T customers will be required to pay $399/$499 for the iPhone 3G. iPhone Alley suggests a procedure in which you could get around this issue, but does carry with it a number of assumptions, so we are not sure it will necessarily will work as advertised.
When AT&T launched the original iPhone in 2007, upgrade eligibility was not required because the original iPhone was an unsubsidized phone. As a result, there were early reports of individuals taking advantage of this situation by buying a subsidized phone and then immediately upgrading to the iPhone. Typically this action would trigger an early termination fee on your existing account, but it appears the original iPhone is (was?) an exception.
iPhone Alley suggests that an individual borrow a friend's iPhone and use their existing AT&T SIM card to activate iPhone service. This is said to replace your current phone service and suddenly make your account "upgrade eligible" since you are considered an iPhone customer. They believe that you can then use this iPhone-account to qualify for discounted iPhone 3G pricing on July 11th.
This procedure carries with it a number of assumptions that may or may not be true:
- AT&T is still not charging termination fees when upgrading to iPhone from an upgrade ineligible plan
- That it will not affect the upgrade eligibility of the person's iPhone you borrowed
- That they will only look to see an active iPhone plan on your account as verification
A quick look at the AT&T discussion forums reveal others plotting similar strategies to become iPhone eligible, including purchasing a broken iPhone for the sole purpose of activation prior to July 11th.
You're mileage may vary and we certainly don't recommend following these steps, but provide them for interest.
Intel's research blog recently discussed the direction that developers should plan for in the coming years.
Intel's Anwar Ghuloum describes how developers have been listening to Intel's announcements that they are increasingly heading towards multi-core processors in the future. At this point, they suggest that developers program for as many cores as possible, even if it is more cores than are currently in shipping products.
Ultimately, the advice Ill offer is that these developers should start thinking about tens, hundreds, and thousands of cores now in their algorithmic development and deployment pipeline. This starts at a pretty early stage of development; usually, the basic logic of the application should be influenced because it drives the asymptotic parallelism behaviors.
Multi-core processing has been an ongoing trend in modern processors. Each "core" acts independently from the others and can essentially be considered its own individual processor. All shipping Macs are now at least dual-core, while the high-end Mac Pro ships with 8 cores across two 4-core processors. Intel's forthcoming Nehalem processor will introduce up to 8 cores per processor. If combined into a dual-processor configuration, we could see a 16-core Mac Pro in the near future.
While each core acts independently of the others, a dual core processor is not necessarily twice as fast as a single core processor due to inefficiencies in splitting up tasks. In recognizing this trend towards multi-cores, Apple has announced that a major feature (Grand Central) of the next version of Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) will specifically focus on optimizing for multi-core processing.
As international pricing for the iPhone has been trickling out, customers in some countries are particularly unhappy about their rate plans for the upcoming iPhone launch.
Sweden's TeliaSonera rate plans, which started at 299 kr/month (~$50) for 100MB of data and a 199 kr/month (~$34) unlimited data add-on, were met with numerous complaints from their customers. In response, TeliaSonera is now offering the 199 kr/month ($34/month) unlimited add-on plan to any of their existing voice plans.
Potential Canadian iPhone customers have been particularly displeased with Rogers' iPhone rate plans announced 9 days ago. This resulted in an online petition attracting over 41,000 signatures. Rival Canadian carrier Bell Mobility appears to be taking advantage of the opportunity and will be offering the Samsung Instinct (an iPhone competitor) with a $10/month unlimited browser add-on data plan. The Samsung Instinct will be introduced in Canada on August 8th of this year.
Unconfirmed rumors suggest that Apple is displeased with Rogers and is reportedly diverting some of the Canadian iPhone stock to European launches.
Apple will be launching the iPhone 3G in 20 countries on July 11th. We'll provide ongoing coverage of the launch. MacRumors readers are organizing meetups around the world. One group has already started lining up at Apple's 5th Avenue store, but appear to be making a political statement rather than being particularly interested in the iPhone.
Apple Japan has posted a Japanese version of the iPhone 3G Guided Tour. No new information, but is surprisingly interesting to watch even if you don't understand the language. At one point the Chinese character recognition is demonstrated when they are showing off the international keyboards.
Engadget reports that a line has already formed at the 5th Avenue Apple Store. The motivation behind lining up so early doesn't seem to be to try be the first to get the iPhone 3G. Instead, it appears they simply want to break a world record for standing in line. In fact, based on the interview, I'm not even sure they know much about the iPhone.
Adobe released Flash Player 10 beta 2 via its Adobe Labs website this week. According to one of its developers, the new mac version promises to bring up to 3 times the performance for certain operations.
If you have followed GUIMark at all you will notice that this version of the player runs this benchmark substantially better on OSX than any previous Flash Player version. It should be up to 3 times faster.
In a separate posting written before the release, he points out one text animation that achieved 8.5 frames per second (fps) before the optimization and then 28 fps afterwards in Safari.
Lastly I want to mention that the Flash Player is optimized for both x86 and PPC. It always has been. But these kind of benchmarks are really useful for us to identify platform specific bottlenecks like in this case.
There is no firm timeline for Flash Player 10's release, however the developer indicates that development is beginning to wrap up. Flash Player 10 will add a host of new features including some GPU-based processing (similar to Core Image).
Apple has quietly dropped the price of the high end MacBook Air by $500.
The high end MacBook Air comes equipped with a 1.8GHz upgrade (from 1.6GHz) and a 64GB Solid State Drive (SSD). The total price for the high end laptop is $2598. Compare this to the original price of the 1.8GHz/SSD MacBook Air at $3098 just last week (Google Cache).
The base price for the 1.6GHz 80GB Hard Drive MacBook Air remains at $1799. The difference in price appears to be a combination of price drops in both the processor upgrade ($200 vs $300) and SSD ($599 vs $999).
Apple has emailed customers who have outstanding orders that are affected by the price drop:
To Our Valued Apple Customer:
Apple has announced a price drop for a component(s) of the MacBook Air that you recently ordered. We have automatically adjusted your order to reflect the new lower price.
For up-to-date information on your order, please visit our Order Status website at
Thank you for your shopping at the Apple Store.
Sincerely,
Apple Online Store Support
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