An investigation by the Fair Labor Association into factories operated by Apple supplier Foxconn in China found poor working conditions and worker abuse, leading Foxconn to pledge it will make improvements.
One good legal action deserves another. Bloomberg reports that Apple has filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission (ITC), seeking to block the imports of tablets and smartphones made by Samsung. The move comes a week after Samsung filed a similar complaint, attempting to block the import of Apple's mobile electronics devices.
International users impatiently tapping their feet and glancing at their watches in expectation of the iPad's arrival will have to twiddle their thumbs a little bit longer. In a statement issued on Wednesday, Apple said that it would delay the international launch of the iPad until the end of May.
According to a report in the Bloomberg news service, floundering handset maker Palm is shopping itself to prospective buyers that may include Taiwanese rival HTC and Lenovo.
Location services are the third background API. You can continue to get directions from turn-by-turn GPS apps, even while performing other tasks such as listening to music in the iPod app.
An unlikely combatant barged into the skirmish over the future of Flash on Tuesday: Virgin America. The airline unveiled its new website, which replaces the use of Adobe's technology with similar HTML-based capabilities.
The nature of cause and effect is sometimes surprising — at other times, it seems so blindingly obvious that all you can do is say "duh." If you'd ever predicted that raising the price of a product might cause some consumers to think twice before purchasing, then congratulations: a winner is you!
According to All Things D, Warner Music Group said during its earnings call on Tuesday that growth of digital music sales had decelerated in the past quarter. In fact, sales growth has been slowing ever since the music industry got its way and convinced Apple (and others) to introduce variable pricing in April 2009.
Could this be spun as a good thing? Sure, if you ask Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr. He argues that variable pricing has overall been a good thing for the company, though he also hedged by suggesting a 30 percent increase during a recession was perhaps not the brightest idea the music industry has ever had.
There comes a point in many epic stories where the hero must team with its erstwhile rival to take on an even greater threat. For Apple, that time may be now. A report in BusinessWeek on Wednesday suggested that Apple may be in talks with Microsoft to replace the iPhone's default search engine, Google, with Microsoft's own offering, Bing.
Apple is taking on Australia and New Zealand's largest supermarket, arguing its new logo looks a bit applesque.
Woolworths recently re-did its logo as a stylized "W". Apple contends that the new design is too close to its iconic logo and has asked IP Australia, the government agency in charge of trademarks, to deny the retail chain's application, which would have allowed Woolworths to put its brand on any product — including electronics.
Trademark disputes are part and parcel of any brand's identity. If you're not defending your trademark, there's a good chance that you could lose it — brand names like Xerox, Kleenex, even Google are all common usage these days, making it a hard sell for those companies to protect their brands.
Which is probably a good portion of the reason that Apple is trying to stop Australian company Woolworths from trademarking its logo.
As Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference nears, speculation over what's in store for the iPhone has reached an ear-splitting, glass-shattering pitch. In the wake of Apple's departure from Macworld Expo, WWDC is the last remaining annually scheduled event for the company, so expectations are high. Will Apple have some surprises up its sleeve? Or will eager fans and watchers have to "merely" be satisfied with what Apple's already announced — particularly when it comes to the next version of the operating system for its popular iPhone?
Apple has come under fire this week for working conditions at one of its Asian component suppliers.
This time, attention has fallen on Taiwanese company Wintek, which makes TFT panels for LCD displays; the company has also recently been rumoured to be involved in the construction of an Apple tablet device.
Accessibility is a problem for the iPhone. With the device's lack of physical controls, it's virtually impossible for somebody who is vision-impaired to use the phone. Other touchscreen smart phones suffer from the same problem, so a few smartypants engineers at Google have come up with a <a href="http://i.gizmodo.com/5196880/google-makes-it-easy-for-blind-to-dial-on-touschscreens">a clever way of dealing with the problem</a>.
It appears that the saga of Mark Papermaster has finally come to an end, as Apple announced on Tuesday that the former IBM vice president would officially be taking his post as senior vice president of devices hardware engineering, beginning on April 24.
The downside of being a company that gets as much press attention as Apple is that it cuts both ways: while even the most minor product release can grab headlines, less positive news gets amplified as well. So Steve Jobs's announcement on yesterday that he'd be taking a six month leave of absence for medical reasons has apparently caused more panic and consternation than Godzilla setting foot in Tokyo Bay.
Google has released an iPhone version of Google Earth.