Published: 08:00 AM EST
Apple on Thursday announced that movies from several major film studios are now available on the iTunes Store in Australia and in New Zealand.
In total, more than 700 films are available for rent or purchase from studios that include 20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., Sony Pictures Television International and Lionsgate.
Among the titles are several new releases that can be purchase on the same day as their DVD release, including favorites such as "National Treasure 2," "Jumper," "27 Dresses," "Cloverfield," "Vantage Point" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World�s End."
"Movie fans in Australia and New Zealand can choose from a great selection of over 700 films for purchase and rent on the iTunes Store," said Eddy Cue, Apple�s vice president of Internet Services. "iTunes provides an incredibly easy and fun way for people to discover and enjoy movies, and has quickly become the world�s most popular online movie store with customers renting and purchasing over 50,000 movies everyday."
With iTunes Movie Rentals, once a movie is rented, it starts downloading from the iTunes Store directly to iTunes or Apple TV, and users with a fast Internet connection can start viewing the movie in seconds.
Customers have up to 30 days to start watching it, and once a movie has been started customers have 48 hours to finish it�or watch it multiple times. iTunes Movie Rentals also feature over 100 titles available in high definition.
Pricing in Australia starts at A$9.99 for catalog title purchases, A$17.99 for recent releases and A$24.99 for new releases. iTunes Movie Rentals are A$3.99 for library title rentals and A$5.99 for new releases, and high definition versions are priced at just one dollar more.
iTunes movies in New Zealand start at NZ$9.99 for catalog title purchases, NZ$17.99 for recent releases and NZ$24.99 for new releases. iTunes Movie Rentals are NZ$4.99 for library title rentals and NZ$6.99 for new releases, and high definition versions are priced at just one dollar more.
Apple last night pushed out another pre-release build of its upcoming Mac OS X 10.5.5 Update for the Leopard operating system, tacking on several more bug fixes to a list that swelled into triple digits a week earlier.
The new build, 9F13, arrives less than a week after Mac maker equipped developers with
build 9F9 and warned of a problem with some images that could cause its Aperture photography post production software to unexpectedly quit.
Wednesday's release, however, is the first since the company launched the
Mac OS X 10.5.5 Update beta program three weeks ago to arrive without the presence of known issues, people familiar with the software say.
Apple is reported to have made no changes to a list of two dozen core system components where developers have been asked to center the majority of their evaluation efforts.
Instead, the focus of build 9F13 gears towards maintenance and stability, harnessing ten more bug fixes aimed at strengthening the Leopard experience, bringing the total number of code corrections expected as part of Mac OS X 10.5.5 to an eye-catching 115.
Among the more notable tweaks are improvements to Power Management and Energy Saver settings for Mac notebooks, as well as a fix for MobileMe's DMNotification that has been causing the MobileMe preference pane to crash for some subscribers.
Also addressed in the latest build were problems with Mail Sync and Preferences syncing, multiple TCP connections and Application Firewall, and the BSD Kernel and HFS+ file system.
When Mac OS X 10.5.5 makes its debut in the coming weeks, Leopard users can also look forward to improvements to Safari's handling of PDF documents, fixes to Address Book's syncing of newly created contacts, improved Mail message storage, and tweaks to iCal Invitations and email invitations.
In its raw form, Mac OS X 10.5.5 Update currently weighs in at around 330MB.
Published: 12:00 PM EST
Former Apple general counsel Nancy Heinen has accepted a series of sanctions and agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle backdating charges filed against her, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Thursday.
Heinen, who was
charged at the federal level by the Commission last year, also agreed to be barred from serving as an officer or director of any public company for five years, and be suspended from appearing or practicing as an attorney before the Commission for three years.
In its April 2007 complaint, the Commission charged the former top Apple legal aid with fraudulently backdating two large options grants to senior company executives and altering records to conceal the fraud. As a result, the complaint alleged that Apple was forced to underreport its expenses by nearly $40 million.
In the first instance, Apple granted 4.8 million options to six members of its Executive Team (including Heinen) in February 2001. Because the options were in-the-money when granted (i.e. could be exercised to purchase Apple shares at a below market price), Apple was required to report a compensation charge in its publicly-filed financial statements.
The Commission alleges that, in order to avoid reporting this expense, Heinen caused Apple to backdate options to January 17, 2001, when Apple's share price was substantially lower. It also charged the former executive with having directed her staff to prepare documents falsely indicating that Apple's Board had approved the Executive Team grant on January 17.
"As a result, Apple failed to record approximately $18.9 million in compensation expenses associated with the option grant," the Commission said.
Separately, the Commission also alleged improprieties in connection with a December 2001 grant of 7.5 million options to chief executive Steve Jobs. Although the options were in-the-money at that time, Heinen � as with the Executive Team grant � caused Apple to backdate the grant to October 19, 2001, when Apple's share price was lower, according to court documents.
As a result, the Commission said Heinen's actions caused Apple to improperly fail to record $20.3 million in compensation expense associated with the in-the-money options grant. The Commission further alleges that Heinen then signed fictitious Board minutes stating that Apple's Board had approved the grant to Jobs on October 19 at a "Special Meeting of the Board of Directors" � a meeting that, in fact, never occurred.
Heinen consented to settlement offered by the SEC without admitting or denying the allegations, however. Of the 2.2 million she agreed to pay, $1,575,000 was a direct disgorgement representing the in-the-money portion of the proceeds she received from exercising backdated options, and $400,219.78 was the interest on that sum to date.
The court order she agreed to also imposed a civil penalty of $200,000.
Apple's former General Counsel, Nancy Heinen, and former Chief Financial Officer, Fred Anderson.
Last April, former Apple chief financial officer Fred Anderson settled a similar case with the SEC by agreeing to a fine of $150,000 and the
repayment of about $3.5 million in illegal options gains.
Like Heinen, Anderson agreed to the deal without admitting any wrongdoing. In a statement that followed the settlement, he largely
shifted the blame for his involvement in the backdating scandal back to Jobs.
Published: 01:00 PM EST
A small percentage of iPhone 3G users who say their phones are plagued by poor 3G network reception may soon see their connectivity problems rectified by a software update, a new report claims.
Although there has been no admission by Apple or its broadband chip suppliers that any such issues exist with the 3G technology included in the new iPhone,
a report by Nomura analyst Richard Windsor earlier this week set off a chain reaction of media reports filled with speculation on the matter.
For instance, a report by Sweden's engineering magazine Ny Teknik,
covered by the Associated Press last night, cited 'unnamed experts' as saying the 'most likely cause' was a defective adjustments between the iPhone 3G's antenna and an amplifier that captures very weak signals from the antenna.
For his part, Windsor speculated that an "immature" chipset solution from Infineon could be to blame for the sporadic issues experienced by users across multiple continents. Yet another theory from iSuppli analyst Francis Sideco fingered any of a number of parts, "from the phone's antenna and amplifier and the radio frequency transceiver to the baseband that processes the digital signal and sends it to the speaker or screen."
The
most recent report on the problem arrived Thursday courtesy of BusinessWeek's Peter Burrows, who cited "two well-placed sources" as saying the reception issues are tied to the iPhone's Infineon chip and will be addressed via an upcoming software update -- likely
iPhone Software v2.1 -- rather than through a more disruptive step, such as a product recall.
The problem is said to to be affecting between 2 percent to 3 percent of iPhone traffic, which compares with a dropped-call rate of around 1 percent for all traffic on AT&T's U.S. network. "This is a problem, but it's not a catastrophe," one of Burrows' sources is quoted as saying.
Another source said: "Apple programmed the Infineon chip to demand a more powerful 3G signal than the iPhone really requires. So if too many people try to make a call or go on the Internet in a given area, some of the devices will decide there's insufficient power and switch to the slower network�even if there is enough 3G bandwidth available."
BusinessWeek added that the problems have been isolated to high density areas such as Boston, the San Francisco Bay area, and several locales overseas. The reason the problems are just now manifesting is due to the increasing number of activations with each additional day the iPhone 3G is on the market, the report claims.
"Two sources say Apple will likely issue a software update by the end of September�if not by the end of this month�to resolve the issues," Burrows wrote. "Apple and Infineon are currently testing the fix, which will be included in a broader update of the iPhone's software."
Published: 06:55 PM EST
With Intel's Developer Forum just days away, an apparently leaked presentation for the event indicates where the chipmaker's processors are headed over the course of the next four years.
The
slides obtained by French tech site CanardPlus start off by recapping the imminent launch of
Nehalem, which is now officially labeled Core i7 and is the first big break from Intel's traditional architecture. As is increasingly well-known in tech circles, i7 will switch to a new point-to-point bus architecture and return the Pentium 4's Hyperthreading feature, which can sometimes mimic a second core by running more than one code thread at the same time. The technology is already set to be discussed in-depth at the Developer Forum and will launch in the fall with new Core and Xeon desktop processors.
It's here, however, that the presentation veers into largely unfamiliar territory. Apart from planning a chip die shrink to 32 nanometers for i7 due later in 2009, known as Westmere, Intel's next big change in architecture is now set to take place in 2010 with a technology known as Sandy Bridge.
While lightly discussed in the past, Sandy Bridge is now said to focus heavily on vector math -- an important component to certain 3D and movie operations and once the strongest selling point of PowerPC-based Macs. The processor design will introduce support for new programming features known as Advanced Vector Extensions, or AVX, which will not only be much more complex with 256 bits of data versus 128 for today's SSE equivalents but will support as many as three or four calculations in one instruction depending on the task at hand.
The overhaul of Intel's chip design will also be built with the capability to handle at least eight cores on a single chip and will have much less Level 2 memory cache than today, at just 512KB per core, in return for 16MB of Level 3 to be distributed among all the cores. This architecture will be shrunk sometime in 2011 when it's known as Ivy Bridge, according to Intel.
For future processors, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has less detail but vows a breakthrough at least as significant as Sandy Bridge. Nicknamed Haswell, it will have "revolutionary" power management, an all-new approach to caching, and the option of dedicated vector coprocessors in a package separate from the main processor. It will also be the first Intel chip to support Fused Multiply-Add instructions that, as the name suggests, include math with both additions and multiplications in a lone instruction.
Intel isn't expected to confirm at least some of these details for either Sandy Bridge or Haswell ahead of the Developer Forum, which starts August 19th in San Francisco. With both processor generations not due for at least another two years, though, the presentations made at the event will, for now, be the best look at where mainstream computers will be in the future.
Published: 07:45 PM EST
The developer of desktop software that lets users listen to their iTunes libraries from any broadband Internet connection now has a similar tool for the iPhone and iPod touch that eliminates storage limits.
Called SimplifyMedia (
