Apple has reportedly notified resellers that the white polycarbonate MacBook is now officially classified as "End of Life" and has been discontinued.

Lenovo as part of record results for its fall quarter clinched the top spots in key parts of the PC business. While it wouldn't give exact numbers, it mostly sided with IDC rankings that saw it claim 14 percent of the computer market worldwide, or second place. It was now large enough that it was the leader for shipments in work PCs of any kind as well as in home desktops....

Amazon has started running one of its first TV ads for the Kindle Fire this week in a conspicuous jab at Apple. The spot (below) recalls Amazon's earlier ads criticizing the poor readability of the iPad but, this time, has an answer to the regular Kindle's lack of features. The $79 Kindle, combined with two $199 Kindle Fires, lets a mother at the beach give herself and her children a device each at under the price of an iPad....

Cisco Systems filed its own letter to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute last week, backing Apple's position calling for "more consistent and transparent appellation of FRAND" licensing commitments among the standards body's members.

IGG Software, which is planning to release a version of its iBank financial software for the iPad sometime later this year, has teased a new feature of the unreleased app on its developer blog. The product now has a name -- iBank Access -- and will feature a new optional service to automatically keep bank records and the app in sync every time the app is launched. The new feature, which expands the number of institutions available, will be available by subscription....

If the home button on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch is unresponsive, calibrating it could help.

I admit I was late to the Tweetbot bandwagon. I was tempted by the initial reviews, but wasn't keen to spend the money. Yeah, it was $2.99. But, if I wanted to spend money on a Twitter app, I wanted to buy one and have that be it for awhile.

The free native Twitter app, which evolved from Tweetie, suited me until the overhaul in December. While there were some features I liked, others drove me up the wall. I found that I was using Twitter less and less because I didn't care for the redesigned iPhone app and web interface. So, I finally turned to Tweetbot, and I haven't looked back.

Steve Sande told...

The first iTunes Match royalties have arrived, and they're music to artists' ears. Elsewhere, one pilot's lawsuit against his airline may not have enough lift for takeoff, and an iOS-based social network apologizes for getting just a bit too social.






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An incidental rumor floated next to talk of a purported iPad 3 case back has raised the possibility that Apple's expected A6 chip isn't quad-core. Citing unnamed sources, The Verge claimed that it would stay dual-core but have a "significantly more powerful" graphics core. Although not mentioned, it's presumed the clock speed, architecture, or both would be upgraded with the new chip....

When it comes to forecasting the next big thing, we turn to our secret weapon: the TUAW braintrust. We put the question to you and let you have your go at it. Today's topic is Education and the iPad.

Last month, Apple introduced iBooks Author and expanded iTunes U. It was a big presentation and a big commitment to the textbook market.

The problem is, of course, whether the desire to embrace digital textbooks can live up to the costs and grim realities. Granted, Apple's probably going to start pushing the iPad to schools much more enthusiastically now that it's ceased educational sales of the MacBook, but putting an...

Social networking app Path issued an apology through its blog on Wednesday for the implementation of a back-end "feature" that uploaded a user's iPhone contacts list to the company's servers, and released an update to remedy the problem with new opt-in/opt-out settings.

redletterdave writes "Following the precedent set by commercial airliners, the U.S. Air Force plans to buy up to 18,000 iPads for its Air Mobility Command (AMC), replacing heavy flight bags with light and efficient Apple iPad 2s for the crews that fly cargo aircraft. The devices will reportedly be used by the crews on the C-5 Galaxy and C-17 Globemaster aircraft. There are several benefits to using electronic flight bags instead of physical versions. For one, the iPad can instantly update charts electronically, while the AMC would require flying charts get reprinted every 28 days to stay up-to-date. By cutting publication printing and distribution costs, and exchanging 70 pounds of paper for a 1.3-pound iPad, the Air Force can save some serious cash, including more than $1.2 million worth of fuel per...

Immediately after those purported iPad 3 back-shell photos broke loose, The Verge claimed Apple’s next-generation tablet would not include a rumored quad-core processor. The Verge‘s report contradicts findings inside beta builds of iOS 5.1 and a report from the typically accurate Bloomberg. While The Verge said the next iPad would be dual core, it also said the iPad 3 would sport an improved GPU. This new graphics processor would likely make the rumored huge Retina Display run smoothly. We deduced from...

Life is a bit difficult for Apple's Premium Resellers in Europe now that the company is expanding retail locations throughout the continent. A post by France's Les Echos profiles a complaint by eBizcuss, the largest and first authorized reseller of Apple products in France (through their ICLG subsidiary), about the impact that the popular Apple Stores are having on the company. TUAW first covered this story in December, when we noted that eBizcuss has filed a lawsuit against Apple.

eBizcuss saw sales fall 22 percent in the third quarter of 2011, and the company is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. The company has 200 employees and 15 stores throughout France, but has had its stock price drop by 50 percent in the last year.

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The U.S. Air Mobility Command (AMC) is looking for a few good tablets (with apologies to the Marine Corps) to replace bulky flight manuals and flight charts. The logistics arm of the Air Force announced that it will be purchasing up to 18,000 iPads or other tablets as part of its effort to reduce its reliance on paper manuals.

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The Globe and Mail:

In another blow to troubled Canadian smartphone maker Research in Motion, energy drilling giant Halliburton Co. says it will replace its company-issued BlackBerrys with competitor Apple’s iPhone.

A spokeswoman for the Houston, Texas-based firm says the plan will roll out over the next two years as it phases out 4,500 BlackBerrys from its operations.

Yesterday we told you that the Gannet newspaper company is handing out iPhones. We’ll hear more of these stories as time goes on.

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According to Chinese tech site DoNews (sketchy English translation here), Apple plans on bringing support for Mandarin Chinese to Siri as early as March of this year. Other dialects of Chinese, such as Cantonese, will remain unsupported for the time being. Support for Japanese and Russian is supposedly coming at the same time.

Although the source may sound somewhat suspicious -- a Chinese tech site that claims to have inside information from an Apple engineer working on Siri -- this information does align with Apple's own promise to increase Siri's linguistic acumen in 2012. Apple has also promised to bring support for...

Apple may have hitched its star to HTML5 with iOS-based devices like the iPhone and iPad, but Flash is still more secure, more available, and used for more multimedia overall.

Cool Material:

No guy looks forward to Valentine’s Day. Here’s what it would look like if guys wrote Valentine’s Day cards.

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Google wrapped up and posted the finished version of Chrome 17 for the desktop on Wednesday. The new browser update takes site prerendering beyond just search results to include autocompletion. If the autocompletion in the address bar is headed towards a likely web address, the browser will start loading content in the background to speed up the perceived load time. It can give the impression that favorite sites load almost immediately, Google suggested....

Today on TUAW TV Live I have a lot of hot new products to demonstrate, both in terms of hardware and software. Most of these items haven't been reviewed yet on TUAW, so you'll be getting a first glimpse at what's coming up soon.

Below, you'll find a Ustream livestream viewer and a chat tool. The chat tool allows you to participate by asking questions or making comments.

If you're driving somewhere and would like to watch TUAW TV Live while you're stuck in traffic, please don't -- keep your eyes on the road! However, if someone else is doing the driving, you can watch the show on your iPhone and join the chat by downloading the free Ustream App. It's a universal app and is wonderful on an iPad, both for viewing and participating in the chat.

We'll start at about 5 PM ET, so if you're seeing a prerecorded show, be sure to refresh your browser until you...

Just as it enjoys an initial surge of popularity, a new social networking site called Pinterest is also experiencing its first bout of controversy.







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Sigma on Wednesday both remade and added to its camera lineup. First off, the company's new CEO, Kazuto Yamaki, revealed that the high-end SD1 DSLR will be renamed to SD1 Merrill and get a very significant price drop, from $9,700 to $3,300. Yamaki said the reduction is due to the lower production costs of the 46-megapixel APS-C sensor, though no performance compromises have been made....

In a blog post from earlier today (via Ars Technica), the CEO of online music distribution service TuneCore announced some intriguing numbers on iTunes Match royalties it has collected for its clientage. While calling the payout “magic money,” CEO Jeff Price said his company collected $10,000 for a two-month period beginning at the launch of iTunes Match. While TuneCore’s artists have included the likes of multi-million album sellers like Nine Inch Nails in the past, Price said the royalties represent money most independent artists using the service would have otherwise never received:

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“A person has a song on her...

Xobni has released an update to Smartr Contacts for the iPhone adding several new features and enhancements including the ability to access linked e-mail messages from directly within the app. First released last month, Smartr Contacts provides a contact management solution primarily targeted at Gmail and Outlook users that…

Apple 2.0 editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt is back today with another fascinating Apple statistic: "[Apple] has gained nearly one Facebook in value since Steve Jobs died."

Elmer-DeWitt remarks that the share price of AAPL on October 4, 2011, the day before Jobs passed away, was US$372.50 and that the market capitalization of the company was about $347 billion. Now, just four short months later, the stock price is (as of this morning) $472.66, over $100 greater than before Jobs died. That puts the market capitalization of Apple, Inc. at about $440 billion -- over $90 billion of growth in just four months.

Those numbers are staggering. $90 billion is about nine-tenths of the value that Facebook has been given in advance of its upcoming IPO. Elmer-DeWitt notes that it's hard to argue that Apple is overvalued. He quotes Erik Savitz of Forbes noting that even after backing out Apple's $100 billion...

Tapbots revamped its signature Twitter apps in large form on Wednesday, starting with the surprise release of Tweetbot for iPad ($3, App Store). The new version both adapts to the bigger canvas of the tablet and shares its support for creating multiple timelines from one account and gestures to save time. Likewise, it can save content for later through Cloudapp, Instapaper, and Read it Later....

The U.S. Air Force's Air Mobility Command recently put out a notice that it plans to buy as many as 18,000 of Apple's iPad for use on cargo aircraft like the C-5 Galaxy and C-17 Globemaster.

Path, a unique social networking app for iOS and Android that allows users to share many aspects of their daily lives with others, has recently been revealed to be sharing even more: the user’s contacts list with Path’s servers. [Update: The developers of Path have issued an apology, deleted all data collected, and released a new version of its app that asks for permission before accessing your Address Book.]

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Fishlabs has released an update to Galaxy on Fire 2 HD, the high-performance version of its popular space adventure game adding the Kaamo Club and preliminary support for the upcoming Valkyrie HD expansion pack scheduled to be released in the coming weeks. Introduced to the standard edition early last…

Apple is attempting to stop the use of "standards essential" patents on 3G technology as legal bludgeons against smartphone competitors. To make its case, the company has gone directly to the standards body behind 3G wireless networking, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). In a letter to ETSI dated last November (but only recently uncovered by the Wall Street Journal) Apple suggested that patents offered as part of wireless networking standards...

Flurry has tracked the amount of app users on their smart devices over the course of Super Bowl XLVI and found that nearly 98 million users accessed apps, compared to 111 million of those who watched it on the big screen. They went on to conclude that the app users, or those who turned on the "second screen," were largely overlapping, though both metrics set records. The TV numbers were borrowed from Nielsen....

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has selected some of the best submissions from the Copyright Office's review of whether it should continue to be legal in the USA to "jailbreak" your devices in order to make them more suited to their needs. In this post, we hear from a deaf man who jailbreaks his phone so that he can use it as an assistive device at work; a military worker in Kuwait who jailbreaks his phone so he can quickly access the flashlight function to scare off dangerous wildlife near the base; and a nurse whose jailbroken device allows her to "track my performance, treatments used on

A Chinese version of Siri will launch next month, claims DoNews. The website quotes an Apple engineer said to be working on the project, who adds that the technology is already in internal testing, and will moreover be able to process information and navigation requests, something only US Siri users currently enjoy. General language support has so far been restricted to three different English accents, as well as French and German....

Siri is an AI-driven virtual assistant that launched last October as an iPhone 4S exclusive, and it currently speaks English (United States, United Kingdom, and Australia), French, and German languages. The official Siri FAQ from the onset made it clear that in 2012: “Siri will support additional languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish.”

9to5Mac discovered job openings last December indicating possible Siri enhancements, including a prettier interface and a Siri API to extend the functionality to third-party iOS programs. We also uncovered this...

A lot of us around the TUAW offices are big fans of everything that comes out of Tapbots, so when Tweetbot for iPhone came out we dutifully shelled out our bucks to get a decent Twitter app for our favorite phone. Just a little while ago we told you about version 2.0 of the iPhone app, and now we can spill the beans on the latest from Tapbots -- Tweetbot for iPad. We weren't expecting Tapbots to announce it quite so fast, but apparently they just could not wait a moment longer.

Gallery: Tweetbot for iPad

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Trio of updates for additional 2010 Macs enables Lion Recovery from an Internet connection. (Free, 3 MB)

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

The Deal Brothers found a deal on the refurbished 13” MacBook Pro 2.4GHz Dual-core Intel i5 for $1,019. This system was originally released in October of 2011, and it ships for free.

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Tweetbot was already a great Twitter client and the 2.0 update that rolled out today makes the app even better. Tweetbot 2.0 has several notable features including inline image preview and a single-tap link which automatically opens content inside the app.

If the page you request is text-heavy, new Readability integration will remove all the fluff and format the text perfectly for your screen. The overall look and feel of the app is also a bit more polished.

If you're a Tweetbot user, you can download the update for free from the iTunes App Store. If you're not, now might be a good time to check out Tweetbot. It's available for US$2.99. And if you follow the company on Twitter, they are hinting at...

Apple sold 267,000 Macs in the UK in the final quarter of 2011, increasing its share of the PC market in that country to 9.1 percent.







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John Brownlee:

Apple’s not serious about ditching Intel for the Mac, but even so, the next few years will be very interesting as ARM and Intel trade body blows. If Intel plays its cards right, come 2015, we could all be talking very seriously indeed about whether or not Apple will be putting Intel’s new mobile chips in the iPhone 8 and iPad 6.

Interesting rundown of the chips and what we may see.

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Consumer groups SumOfUs and Change.org are waging a war over the working conditions at Apple’s (and the rest of the electronics industry’s) main outsourced manufacturer Foxconn. The groups said that over 35,000 people signed their “Stop Worker Abuse” online petition in just 24 hours. Today, the groups announced they would deliver a quarter million petition signatures to Apple.

Furthermore, a protest will be staged tomorrow at 10 a.m. outside Apple’s new Grand Central Terminal retail store and representatives from both SumOfUs and Change.org promised to join the protesters. Change.org’s Mark Shields called abusive working conditions at Foxconn factories “appalling,” adding he was shocked to learn about them.

The two consumer groups are demanding that the iPhone maker release a worker protection strategy for...

Flavorwire:

In her Venus project, Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano remixes some of the most celebrated nudes of art history, giving them an extreme Photoshop makeover. The results are stark and varied.

Botticelli's Venus

I’ve seen several of these paintings in real life and it’s surprising that you don’t really think of them as being “nudes”. You definitely look at them as “great art”.

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Apple announced on Wednesday that it will be offering a free stream of Paul McCartney performing his new album, Kisses on the Bottom, through iTunes and the company’s Apple TV settop box. The performance takes place on February 9th at 10:00 PM EST, and will be streamed live from Capitol Studios.

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Virgin Australia Airlines First Officer David Kloster is suing his employer for almost one million dollars, claiming he hurt his back while lugging around almost 40 pounds of charts and manuals. Documents filed with the Queensland Supreme Court on Kloster's behalf state that the airline "...failed to have in place a system of work whereby charts and rules could have been left on board its aircraft or kept electronically on an iPad." The lawsuit has been reported by the Daily Telegraph in Australia.

Kloster said he was injured lifting his flight bag while getting on a bus in 2009. He is currently suing for future economic loss, medical expenses and other costs.

The airline has not officially responded to the suit, but spokesperson Emma Copeman has said "Virgin...

Macworld | iWorld 2012 has come and gone, but the new Apple accessories and apps keep on coming. Today on TUAW TV Live, I'll be demonstrating some innovative and useful tools for Mac, iPhone and iPad, and you're invited to join in on the fun. Who knows? There may even be another one of my Apple trivia contests today!

As usual, I'll be starting the show at 5 PM EDT (2 PM PDT / 10 PM BST) sharp, and we'll take a few minutes to chat before the demos start. To join in on the chat and watch the live streaming video, drop by TUAW about five minutes before the start time to get your instructions on how to participate. If you're unable to join us for the show, remember that you can always subscribe to the video podcast and watch the show at your leisure in iTunes or any other favorite podcatching app. The past shows are also available on the ...

Online pawn shop Pawngo really stuck its foot in it this week when it tried to make fun of the New England Patriots’ performance in the Super Bowl, and is paying for it – literally and figuratively.

Over 250,000 signatures from petitions on Change.org and SumOfUs.org will be delivered to New York City's Grand Central Apple Store on Thursday morning, according to an announcement. The effort is part of a campaign to push Apple to develop a "worker protection strategy," in light of stories of poor labor conditions at Chinese Apple suppliers like Foxconn. Employees are known to often work extreme amount of overtime for little pay, sometimes in dangerous conditions....

Reuters:

Next-generation software for BlackBerry’s smartphones is “ready to compete”, Research In Motion’s new chief executive, Thorsten Heins, told more than 2,000 technical developers on Tuesday, expressing confidence in RIM’s long-term future.

I hate to tell you this, but that train left five years ago.

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