I think we’ve all suspected this happens at some stores, but not doubling the price. At least I didn’t think they went that far.

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Market watchers were impressed by the results for Apple's June quarter, as iPhone sales came in higher than expectations and guidance for the September quarter was positive. But investors are still pinning their hopes on Apple's anticipated next-generation iPhones and iPads to be blockbuster hits.  ...

Image: wallsfeed.com

An analysis of Apple’s Q4 guidance by BTIG’s Walter Piecyk suggests that the company will launch new products in Q4, which ends on 28 September.

We don’t think that Apple can hit its newly issued revenue guidance for the September quarter unless it launches new products. After delivering $35 billion in revenue in the June quarter, management guided to $34-$37 billion next quarter. Revenue would more typically drop multiple billions if the company had no new products planned.

Piecyk says that the guidance on margins suggests that the product will be an iPhone … 

The margin...

Sprint has announced a new partnership with Raketu to bring their Wireless CapTel service to iOS devices on the network. The app allows users to read conversations in real time with word-for-word captions that appear on their wireless phone. For people who live with hearing loss the move will open up new options for using mobile phones.

Calls are placed the same way they always are, but when the number is dialed the app connects the device to CapTel's service. They can then listen along with the phone or read the captions of their conversation on their iOS screen. More information about the service, including rules and regulations, can be found at www.SprintCapTel.com. Sprint subscribers will need a Everything Data plan for the service to work.

Sprint to offer Caption Calling for iOS devices originally appeared on...

Art from JoyBits’ Doodle God 2, slated for release in summer 2014.

It hasn’t (yet) reached the scale of mobile-first sensations like Angry Birds or Temple Run, but JoyBits, the creator of the puzzle games in the Doodle God series, says keeping a loose focus on platforms has served it well.

Today, JoyBits is announcing that its series has crossed “100 million downloads worldwide,” but that number means something slightly different than it does for app franchises like Infinity Blade, with close to 50 million app downloads; Temple Run, with at least 340 million; and Angry Birds, with well over a billion. For starters, JoyBits’ announced milestone includes 20 million iOS downloads, 10 million Google Play downloads, and 1.5 million Windows 8 downloads.

But how did they get to 100 million? In addition to nearly 10 other,...

If the lucrative high-end of the smartphone market is nearing saturation as some observers have recently argued, Apple isn’t seeing it.

Reporting third quarter earnings Tuesday after market close, Apple said it shipped 31.2 million iPhones during the period. And while that number was down from the 37.4 million the company shipped in the second quarter of this year, it was up significantly from the
26 million it shipped in the year-ago quarter.

Indeed, according to CFO Peter Oppenheimer that 20 percent increase in iPhone sales from a year earlier beat Apple’s own internal expectations. And that’s a metric that belies — to some extent — concerns about just how much room for growth...

It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world.

You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here.

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Daily Update for July 23, 2013 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 24 Jul 2013 01:50:00 EST. Please see our...

Most new cars have an in-dash computer that displays all sorts of pertinent information about your car's location, speed and other similar parameters. For those who have an older car and an iPad, you can duplicate this dashboard display with the new Drive Assist app from Woo.do.

Drive Assist is a multi-function app that lets you map your trip, monitor your speed, watch the weather and listen to music while you drive. The biggest part of the app is the navigation and Google mapping feature that updates your location and provides driving directions as you travel along your route. You need a wireless connection to pull down the map data as you drive, but you can shut off the mapping function and replace it with a music player if you have a WiFi-only iPad.

Besides navigation, Drive Assist also monitors your speed and lets you know how long you have driven and how long you have been idle during a trip. The app can save your route...

Quark has let loose QuarkXPress 10, a massive overhaul of its cross-media publishing package for both Mac and Windows. QuarkXPress has been revamped from top to bottom, starting with an under-the-hood conversion from the Carbon to the Cocoa programming environment and ending with a new cutting-edge graphics engine and a refreshed user interface. More than 50 feature enhancements promise to streamline the design process and improve the user experience.

QuarkXPress 10 interface overview.

Several years in the making, this new version has updated a half million lines of code, added 350,000 new lines of code, added more than 500 new dialog boxes and palettes, and added 1300 new icons designed for Retina display resolution....

Apple released its Q3 2013 earnings report today, and yet Bryan Chaffin still has a new Apple Death Knell for you, #63. Writing for CBS News, one Dave Logan penned a piece titled, "Why Apple is a dead company walking." It should have been tited, "Why I don't understand Apple."

iTravelGo is a US$0.99 app that is limited in cities, but very deep in the information it provides about them. The app has been released today in the App Store.

The 36 cities include U.S. destinations Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and San Francisco, plus other popular places like Vienna, Madrid, Hong Kong, Rome, Beijing and many more. Information includes maps with driving directions, the best attractions, restaurants and hotels. Hotel rooms can be booked through Booking.com directly from the app.

I found the app quite complete. Almost all of the information you want is built into the app, except for map details and web links to hotels, and other ancillary web-based information. That's a handy feature if you are out of the country and don't want to rack up data costs.

I liked the handy phrases and a brief history of the cities, and detailed...

Today, Apple was awarded a patent for a dual-sensor imaging system that could find its way into new iterations of the iPhone, iPod, or even Macbook sometime down the road. As AppleInsider reports, the patent, titled "Dual image sensor image processing system and method," details a system consisting of two separate image sensors which capture and then compare two different versions of a photo.

The images are then scrubbed for flaws on a pixel-by-pixel basis. If an unacceptable level of corruption is found in an area of one of the sensor's images, it will be replaced by content captured by the second sensor. The patent notes that this technology would also apply to video capture.

Of course, the patent goes into a great amount of detail regarding the logic behind the replacement of each corrupt pixel, but the bottom line is your photos will...

In the last decade content sharing has become a major part of modern life. Our daily interactions are largely built upon recommending articles, pictures, songs, videos, and other digital artifacts. But what device do people do most of their sharing? Thanks to a study by ShareThis we know. iPhone users are the most active when it comes to social sharing of links across both mobile and desktop devices.

ShareThis should know. The company is a publisher platform that provides social sharing buttons for websites. According to their findings users are twice as likely to share content on a social network when they are using their mobile devices. Of those using mobile devices 12.4% of iPhone users, 7.4% of Android, and 6.3% of Blackberry users are more likely to share on their devices.

...

Apple's chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer detailed Apple's leading position in the enterprise and among government agencies, noting custom corporate app development, mass device deployments and a recent new security clearance.  ...

Apple has pushed out a small update to its Apple Store app, which lets users shop Apple's online store comfortably on their iPhone's screen.

There had been rumors that the Apple Store app update was going to see free giveaways via the app in order to entice people to buy more through the app, but as yet no free giveaways have surfaced in the app.

All the release notes say for the latest update is that there are "Various performance enhancements, including improved product search capabilities" that have been added.

Apple Store is a free download.

Apple Store iOS app updated originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 23 Jul 2013 18:35:00 EST. Please see our...

Ibrahim Balic’s Twitter image

Is Ibrahim Balic behind the hack that drove Apple to take its Developer Center offline for a few days and completely overhaul the security measures protecting it?

Balic, an independent security researcher, believes he is. And the timing and some of the data he has offered up in support of that claim does line up with the narrative so far.

But is he really the “intruder” that Apple says attempted...

During Apple's Q3, 2013 earnings report, the company's CFO, Peter Oppenheimer, provided additional details of  its Apple TV movie and TV episode sales. The numbers are, these days, in the billions of dollars, and are nothing to sneeze at. They have to be taken seriously even as rumors swirl regarding a new Apple HDTV initiative.

Apple has posted a detailed breakdown (PDF) of its third-quarter financial results, released earlier today. Segment data shows that while revenue from the Americas was up 12 percent year-over-year to $14.405 billion, the company saw drops in other regions -- for instance an eight percent decline in Europe to $7.614 billion. Greater China, in theory a market that should be growing for Apple, instead fell 14 percent to $4.641 billion....  ...

In somewhat of a surprise from Tuesday's quarterly conference call, it was announced that iTunes Software and Services generated $3.9 billion, which represents a whopping 25 percent increase compared to the year-ago period.   ...

Apple has formally released the results of its fiscal third quarter, which ended in late June. Although revenues rose slightly year-over-year to $35.3 billion, net income fell from $8.8 billion to $6.9 billion. In terms of EPS, Apple slid from $9.32 per share to $7.47. Gross profit margins likewise sank, shifting from 42.8 percent to 36.9 percent. To the surprise of analysts, iPhone sales were up significantly -- from about 26 million to 31.2 million, but Macs and the iPad fared less well. Mac sales declined from 4 million to 3.8 million, while the iPad dipped from 17 million units to 14.6 mil... ...

Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer started the company’s third-quarter 2013 financial results conference call by discussing Apple’s June quarter record for 31.2 million iPhones sold. Total revenue for Apple is up one percent from Q3 2012. The iPhone has experienced 66 percent growth in Japan. Oppenheimer called the drop in iPad…

AT&T, the second largest U.S. carrier by subscribership, posted its earnings for the second quarter of 2013 on Tuesday, meeting Wall Street expectations while selling a record 6.8 million smartphones.  ...

Apple has reported its financial results for its fiscal 2013 third quarter. The company sold 31.2 million iPhones, a June quarter record, up from 26 million iPhones in last year’s third quarter, and 37.4 million iPhones last quarter. Apple sold 14.6 million iPads in the third quarter, down from…

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2013 third quarter ended June 29, 2013. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $35.3 billion and quarterly net profit of $6.9 billion, or $7.47 per diluted share. Apple sold 31.2 million iPhones, which set a June quarter record. Apple also sold 14.6 million iPads and 3.8 million Macs during the quarter. “We are especially proud of our record June quarter iPhone sales of over 31 million and the strong growth in revenue from iTunes, Software and Services,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “We are really excited about the upcoming releases of iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, and we are laser-focused and working hard on some amazing new products that we will introduce in the fall and across 2014.”

Today, Apple announced its quarterly earnings for Q3 2013. In this latest quarter, Apple recorded revenue of $35.3 billion and quarterly net profit of $6.9 billion. International sales accounted for more than half (57 percent) of the quarter's revenue.

In all, Apple sold 31.2 million iPhones, up 20% year over year. The company also sold 14.6 million iPads and 3.8 million Macs in the quarter. These two numbers are down from the same quarter last year when Apple sold 17 million iPads and 4 million Macs.

We'll be starting our liveblog at 4:50 PM ET. Join us!

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Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

Sales of 31 Million iPhones Set New June Quarter Record

CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apple(R) today announced financial results for its fiscal 2013...

Senior vice president and Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer is on first today for Apple’s Q3 2013 earnings report and just provided some updates on the company’s iTunes sales, retail stores and much, much more. Not only did the App Store have its best week and best month last quarter, Apple added a ton of content to the iTunes store thanks to new additions to the Apple TV with HBO and WatchESPN. It also confirmed that it’s now at 320 million iCloud accounts, up around 20 million since WWDC in June.

Head below for a roundup of the updated numbers:

• Best month and best week ever for App Store billings. 2.4B for App Store.. total quarterly revenue of 4B from iTunes software and services.
• 60K movies, 230k tv episodes available
• customers downloaded more than 1B TV episodes, 390 million movies (800k tv episodes, 300k movies per day)
• 11 billion paid to developers, half in the last four quarters
• 320 million iCloud accounts...

With continued iPhone growth and a particularly strong performance from its iTunes and services businesses, Apple posted a slight increase in revenues in the June quarter, though lower margins led to a 20 percent slide in profit. Following the company's earnings release, Apple executives took part in a conference call to discuss the quarter, and notes of interest follow.  ...

Apple’s profits fell for a second consecutive quarter, even as the company enjoyed record iPhone sales for the April-to-June time period.

For its fiscal third quarter ended June 29, Apple reported sales of $35.3 billion, with net profit at $6.9 billion. That translated to earnings of $7.47 per diluted share. Apple’s revenue marked a record for the June quarter, ticking up 1 percent from the $35 billion Apple posted in last year’s third quarter. Still, profits fell 22 percent year-over-year, down from $8.88 billion in 2012. Apple also reported a drop in profit during its fiscal second quarter of 2013.

Apple’s performance for the third quarter topped analyst expectations. Analysts were looking for the company to earn $7.32 a share on $35 billion...

Rovio’s Bad Piggies ($1) — both the standard and iPad HD versions — have been updated to version 1.4. Bad Piggies now features 30 new Rise & Swine levels for players. Also included in the update are new power-ups including super glue, magnets, and turbo charges, plus the new…

Apple announced earnings for the June quarter (Apple's fiscal Q3) of US$6.9 billion on revenue of $35.3 billion. Apple's earnings per share (EPS) of $7.47 beat consensus estimates of $7.30 per share, while revenue beat estimates of $35 billion.

Apple investors steeling themselves for a disappointing quarter received a nice surprise instead — a slight beat.

Posting its fiscal third-quarter financials after market close Tuesday, Apple reported earnings per share of $7.47 on revenue of $35.3 billion. Both numbers beat Wall Street estimates. Analysts had been expecting Apple to post earnings per share of $7.34 on revenue of $35.18 billion.

Apple said it shipped 31 million iPhones for the quarter. That’s less than the 37.4 million is shipped in the quarter prior, but significantly more than the 26 million it shipped in the year-ago quarter, and well above the street’s expectations for 26 million. But it shipped only 14.6 million iPads. That’s down from the 17 million it sold in the year prior, and well below the 18 million analysts had been predicting. Mac sales also came in a bit low; Apple shipped 3.8 million units, slightly less...

Sprint has ported its Wireless CapTel service to iOS devices, according to an announcement. The service is built for the hearing impaired, adding captions to otherwise voice-only calls. Previously the option was limited to a handful of Android devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy SIII and HTC Evo 4G....   ...

Apple on Tuesday reported a profit of $6.9 billion for its fiscal third quarter. Revenue for the quarter was $35.3 billion, according to Apple. These results compare to revenue of $35 billion and net profit of $8.8 billion in the year-ago quarter.

AT&T said on Tuesday that it sold a record number of Android smartphones last quarter, helping fuel adjusted earnings of 67 cents per share on revenue of just more than $32 billion.

This was a solid quarter for revenue and customer additions across our key growth platforms,” CEO Randall Stephenson said in a statement, adding that the company’s LTE network deployment is ahead of schedule.

Among other data points offered up by AT&T:

- The company added 551,000 postpaid subscribers and 632,000 total subscribers for the quarter. That included nearly 400,000 wireless-enabled tablets.

- Total wireless revenues, including device sales totaled $17.3 billion, up 5.7 percent. Service revenue accounted for $15.4 billion of that, with data service totaling $5.4 billion, up nearly 20 percent from a year earlier.

- More than a third of customers are on LTE...

Apple and Motorola are set to appear in the U.S. Court of Appeals on September 11 to jointly attempt to get their patent infringement cases against each other reinstated after they were dismissed by Judge Richard Posner. The companies have been fighting over mobile device patent infringement claims, and other companies have an interest in outcome of this case since it could set a precedent for future SEP and FRAND patent cases.

This is really sad.

∞ Read this on The Loop

VoIP/messaging service Viber has been hacked by a group called the Syrian Electronic Army, known to support Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, reports say. During the attack, the SEA managed to obtain tracking information stored in Viber's database, namely the UDIDs and IPs associated with calls. Since-removed vandalism of the Viber support page suggests that Viber was targeted because it's an Israeli company allegedly spying on the public....  ...

This week at Apple's online store find reduced prices on refurbished MacBook Pro models. The 15.4-inch MBP with a 2.4GHz Intel quad-core i7 processor, 4GB of RAM and a 750GB hard drive has seen a $500 discount to $1,499. For $1,449 is the 15.4-inch Refurbished MacBook Pro with a 2.3GHz Intel quad-core i7 processor, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive....   ...

This week eCost.com has the 13.3-inch Retina MacBook Pro for the reduced price of $1,699. That's $599 off the list price of $2,299, and $200 less than the lowest price we have seen on this configuration anywhere else. Free shipping is included and sales tax applies for residents of California, Texas and Tennessee. This MBP features a 2.5GHz Intel dual-core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM and 512GB of flash storage with Intel HD Graphics 4000 and Mountain Lion pre-installed. Also included is a one year warranty on parts and labor from Apple....  ...

Increased competition in the tablet segment apparently hasn't stopped Apple's iPad from continuing to dominate, as a new study finds that the iPad accounts for nearly seven out of eight tablets active on the Internet in North America.  ...

Great news for the Internet. An appeals court this week upheld a lower court ruling that invalidated a pair of controversial patents held by Eolas Technologies. Those patents, which covered some of the technologies underpinning the Web, were asserted against Apple, Google, Amazon and a host of other companies back in 2009 by Eolas, sparking outcry from open Web advocates. Among them: Tim Berners-Lee, widely considered one of the fathers of the Internet, who argued that Eolas’ patent claims, if upheld, would “substantially impair the usability of the Web.” Good riddance to another patent troll looking for a big IP pay day.

The Hacker News is reporting that communications app “Viber” has been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, a “pro-Assad hacker group”. In addition, their support webpage was defaced before the company took the page down. Support.Viber.com currently leads to a “403 Forbidden” page.

The defaced webpage before it was taken down

The webpage placed by the SEA stated:

Dear All Viber Users,

The Israeli-based “Viber” is spying and tracking you

We weren’t able to hack all Viber systems, but most of it is designed for spying and tracking

Screenshot of a hacked system: [screenshot]

It is unclear if the SEA is planning on using this information or if their sole intention was to expose the tracking information stored in Viber’s database. Each record in the database stores the UDID and IP address of each call, however, one may presume this information is stored for purposes other than tracking...

Later today, Apple will hold its quarterly earnings conference call. The call will cover Apple's Q3, which ended on June 30, 2013. As always, TUAW is hosting a liveblog of the event, during which we'll provide commentary on the actual results, questions from the financial community, and thoughts on how the results are likely to affect Apple's share price, if at all. To get an overview of what the Street is expecting, check out the numbers here.

The call is scheduled at 5 PM ET today and our liveblog will begin at 4:50 PM ET. If you're an IRC user, we'll have a chat room set up on server irc.freenode.net, chat room #tuaw so you can converse with the TUAW team and others. You can also listen to a live audio stream of the event...

The word “scrapbooking” may conjure visions of arts-and-crafts sessions for children with paper, scissors, and glue. But if you’ve ever done research for a project that required you to save data like images, videos, and webpages from different sources, you’re already familiar with the adult version of this activity.

To that end, Realmac Software on Tuesday released Ember (Mac App Store link), a $50 app aimed squarely at professional users who need to build a library with all sorts of digital information.

Quite the lineage

Ember is the successor to LittleSnapper, which has been around for many years and developed quite a following; true to its past, the app continues to allow you to take screenshots and annotate them with...

What's not to like about an app that can grab a web page and let you save, organize and mark it up, then share it in more than a half dozen ways? Ember is a powerful but simple application for saving and sharing web pages, images or just about anything you can see online. There's a lot to love in this focused app from Realmac Software.

Once upon a time Realmac made an application called LittleSnapper, designed to grab web pages and the like and store them in a digital scrapbook of sorts. The app had some problems, and I never really quit using Skitch for marking up images and pages. Enter Ember, the successor to LittleSnapper, and a digital scrapbooking app that pretty much nails it in every way.

Ember isn't iPhoto or Aperture, however. Think of Ember as a place to store photos, bits of the web or perhaps any visual projects you're working on, and realize Ember gives you several simple ways to annotate those images...

F-Secure

Researchers have uncovered a family of malware that targets computers running both the Microsoft Windows and OS X platforms. Janicab.A, as the trojan is known, is also unusual because it uses a YouTube page to direct infected machines to command-and-control (C&C) servers and follows a clever trick to conceal itself.

The threat first came to light last week, when researchers from F-Secure and Webroot documented a new trojan threatening Mac users. Like other recently discovered OS X malware, Janicab was digitally signed with a valid Apple Developer ID. It also used a special unicode character known as a ...

Opera Mediaworks, the “world’s leading mobile advertising platform”, is out today with its report covering the state of mobile advertising for Q2 2013. Using data from the over 35 billion mobile ad impressions its platform handles each month, Opera Mediaworks gives some insight into Apple’s dominance with iOS and its huge lead over Android when it comes to revenue & impressions from tablets. Apple continued to lead as the top platform in terms of monetization, with 44% of all ad impressions and close to half of total revenue (49.36%). Its lead over Android is largely due to the success of the iPad, however, as removing tablets from the equation puts Android smartphones and the iPhone neck and neck:

However, when comparing mobile phones using iOS and Android the two OS are in a virtual tie for share of ad impressions, with just over 30% each. Late last year, Android inched ahead of iPhone with a...