Oppenheimer equity research analyst Yair Reiner told clients in a research report that the subsidy is more than 50 percent higher than most other smart phones, which are typically subsidized by about $200.
He said the abnormal concession on AT&T's part reflect the carrier's confidence in the iPhone's ability to grow its subscriber base and drive an overall increase in the average revenue it makes off customers through higher margin services and data plans.
The net result, according to the analyst, is a disproportionally stacked offense in Apple's favor that will leave rivals like Research in Motion and Nokia "scrambling" to hit lower price points at the expense of their respective bottom lines.
What's more, Reiner said he also believes that AT&T is paying Apple an extra $100 for each new subscriber to AT&T signed up through Apple's brick-and-mortar stores, for a total commission of $425. That data point alone suggests that the analyst believes AT&T is also paying Apple the $325 subsidy on phones Apple sells.
The net result, Reiner added, is that Apple will be generating the same amount of revenue through iPhone 3G sales that it did under its original deferred revenue share agreement with the nation's No. 1 carrier, only this time around the cash will be up front and on the table.
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Dutch GPS maker TomTom is still very much involved in developing its own GPS utility for the iPhone, the company's French press chief Yann Lafargue said in an interview on Friday.
Contradicting unofficial reports that the company had nothing official, Lafargue says that TomTom has been developing a version of its Navigator software for the iPhone ever since the release of the SDK and that the software works "very well."
Whether or not it will be releasable is still up in the air, he warns. The company could find itself blocked from offering the software through the App Store either as a potential competitor to Apple's own software or else as a rival to a chosen partner of the iPhone maker.
TomTom doesn't foresee a clause in the SDK guidelines against real-time tracking as affecting its development: Apple is simply protecting itself against legal threats from users who land themselves in trouble using navigation software, the representative claims.
Jobs' thin frame the result of treatment: report
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' "common bug" and resulting gaunt appearance at this year's WWDC may have been compounded by the steps taken to eliminate his pancreatic cancer years ago, Fortune magazine's Philip Elmer-DeWitt explains.
Jobs is believed to have received a special treatment, known as a Whipple, that cuts off the tumorous part of the pancreas and reattaches the rest to the small intestine while also connecting the bile duct and stomach in a new manner.
This allows the remaining pancreas to perform normally but has a number of potential side effects, according to doctors, including the tendency to lose between five and 10 percent of body mass regardless of the patient's diet.
Crucially, however, the loss is not a sign of a worsening condition. Proper exercise and diet can let these cancer survivors "live a normal life," according to Dr. Dilip Parekh of the University of Southern California.
Apple has never publicly described how Jobs' cancer was cured or whether it would produce adverse reactions.
Greenpeace raises concerns over iPhone 3G
When Apple pledged that it would illustrate its environmental improvements, the assumption was made that this would carry through to every new product. That wasn't the case with the iPhone 3G, Greenpeace tells ZDNet France.
The activist group's toxics campaign head Zeina Al-Hajj notes that Apple has been curiously silent on progress (if any) made in eliminating harmful substances in the new iPhone. It suggests that Apple hasn't evolved its design to be more eco-friendly, she says.
A lack of progress would be worrying to Greenpeace, as the organization found late last year that cabling in the iPhone contained toxic chemicals, albeit in small amounts.
Observers have noted that the iPhone 3G's plastic back is a step backwards in recyclability for the Apple handset, whose shell was originally made of the same aluminum that Apple has touted as being desirable for recycling.
Critics blast Apple's continued iPhone dev program backlog
Over the more than three months since Apple first began accepting applications for its iPhone development program, the company still hasn't shown signs of coping with the large number of applicants., according to observations by Rogue Amoeba's Paul Kafasis.
Although his company has a longstanding history of developing for Macs, it and "a number of other respected Mac software companies" still haven't been accepted as official developers and received the signing certificate needed to test code on an actual device and thus bring the software closer to completion.
The delay would be understandable given unprecedented demand but is simply frustrating given the inconsistency and lack of communication from Apple, Kafasis says. The Cupertino-based electronics maker has so far fast-tracked individual applications while leaving teams at larger companies without answers. Little if any communication arrives from Apple regarding the status of the projects, leaving prospective companies wondering whether they should continue development or back out earlier.
"We don't know if we should invest our time in a platform for which we may not even be allowed to release software," Kafasis says.
The software, labeled Mac OS X 10.5.4 build 9E6, weighed in at 55 megabyte -- just a fraction of the size of the recently released Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update's massive 420 megabyte package.
People familiar with the software say Apple has indicated to developers that there are presently no known issues with update, which address issues with iCal, digital camera decoding support, LEAP connections via AirPort, and sometimes missing HTTP headers.
More importantly, those same people say, is a fifth that will allow Creative Suite 3.0 users to once again properly work with files that reside on a remote server.
Immediately following Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update released last month, CS3 users flooded Apple and Adobe's support forums to report that they could no longer properly save files from InDesign, Photoshop, and other CS3 programs to a location on a remote server. The files would become corrupt, those users reported, rendering them useless.
In addition to evaluating the aforementioned fixes, Apple has also asked that its developers focus their testing efforts on a handful of system components once having installed build build 9E6. Among these are AirPort, iChat, print, ruby and samba.
On Tuesday, AppleInsider reported that Apple was preparing the first beta releases of Mac OS X 10.5.4 to arrive in developers' hands ahead of its annual developers conference which kicks off on Monday.
As Apple's public schedule for WWDC explained, "SproutCore is an open source, platform-independent, Cocoa-inspired JavaScript framework for creating web applications that look and feel like Desktop applications. Learn how to combine SproutCore with HTML5's standard offline data storage technologies to deliver a first-class user experience and exceptional performance in your web application."
The secrets of SproutCore first tumbled out of the bag last fall, when it was revealed that .Mac Web Gallery had been built using the framework. Originally developed by Charles Jolley of SproutIt for use in his online email manager named Mailroom, the SproutCore framework goes beyond other JavaScript frameworks because it is designed to build entire rich applications on the web rather than just adding some animation or sizzle to web pages.
Open Help for JavaScript.
JavaScript is a powerful language that, thanks to its bundling with all modern web browsers, is very widely deployed. However, there is a paucity of strong tools for building anything more than basic scripts to kick off web animations and other dynamic behaviors. That has opened the door for proprietary tools such as Adobe Flash, which is built around ActionScript, which is itself based upon JavaScript.
As outlined in the series Flash Wars: Adobe in the History and Future of Flash, Flash provides a large framework on top to handle things that aren't easy to do in JavaScript itself, but that also requires distributing a Flash plugin runtime. Web applications coded in Flash are no longer interpreted in the web browser itself, but in Adobe's plugin. That makes developers dependent upon Adobe, and also leaves platform vendors such as Apple reliant upon Adobe to provide suitable runtime plugins for their products.
Adobe's Flash plugin for the Mac has long been a second class citizen because Adobe has focused on its Windows version; Steve Jobs also stated that Adobe didn't offer a mobile runtime appropriate for the iPhone, only a Flash Lite version that wasn't capable of running existing desktop Flash content and a desktop version that wasn't suited to run on a mobile device, as described in Steve Jobs pans Flash on the iPhone.
In place of using Flash on its own website, Apple has been working with a number of open scripting frameworks such as Prototype and Script.aculo.us, which mentions Apple on the front page of its website as a high profile user. Those frameworks offer prebuilt code that has been polished to work on all browsers, making it easier for the developer to concentrate on what their web page should be doing rather than repeatedly reinventing the wheel for various low level functions. In that respect, open JavaScript frameworks can replace Flash without requiring any secondary plugin runtime because they are simply open JavaScript that runs in the browser directly.
Introducing SproutCore
Jolley's SproutIt decided to move past common scripting frameworks to develop an entire application development stack based on the Model View Controller architecture. In MVC development, Model data and user interface Views are tied together by discrete Controller logic. This is in contrast to typical web development tools that mix logic, data, and presentation together, resulting in code that is messy and difficult to maintain.
As explained on the developer's website, "SproutCore is a framework for building applications in JavaScript with remarkably little amounts of code. It can help you build full 'thick' client applications in the web browser that can create and modify data, often completely independent of your web server, communicating with your server via Ajax only when they need to save or load data. JavaScript applications are faster, easier to use, and a lot easier to write than complicated Ajax-driven applications. When you use a framework like SproutCore to help you, they can also be a lot of fun to write."
SproutCore pushes more of the application into the browser itself, resulting in the "thick client" designation. That enables a more responsive, full featured experience that feels and behaves more like a desktop app because it is actually running on the local computer rather than waiting for responses from a remote server. The capacity to do this is actually quite new; rapid advances in web browsers over the last year have finally made thick client JavaScript applications practical.
Cocoa for the Web
Apple didn't just use SproutCore, it also contributed major performance updates and added lots of new functionality. Apple's contributions have helped make SproutCore the ideal way to build web applications that work like desktop Cocoa apps, as noted in the article Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore. Both share a lot of the same conventions such as the use of bindings. SproutCore's bindings allow developers to write JavaScript that automatically runs any time a property value changes. Using bindings, very complex applications with highly consistent behavior can be created with very little �glue� code.
Apple has also been working on the other side of the client equation to improve its own JavaScript engine in Safari. Announced just prior to WWDC, WebKit's new SquirrelFish JavaScript interpreter will dramatically boost the performance of JavaScript applications like those built in SproutCore.
Those two factors combine to make SproutCore the natural heir to the Yellow Box or Cocoa for Windows, which has been bandied about as a possibility ever since Apple moved away from its cross platform Rhapsody strategy to develop Mac OS X ten years ago. Rather than requiring a Cocoa runtime however, users will only need a web browser with JavaScript support, including Safari, Mobile Safari on the iPhone, FireFox, or Internet Explorer 6/7.
Using SproutCore enabled Apple to deliver a new suite of online apps in MobileMe for a cross platform audience. The natural next step will be to expand those offerings to include others, for example, iWork productivity apps. Because SproutCore is offered under the open source MIT license, anyone can use it to develop their own highly responsive web apps. It also seems likely that Apple will at some point invite third parties to deliver MobileMe applications, either included as part of the subscription service, or with their own nominal fee. That would mirror the company's efforts in creating a mobile software market in the Phone Apps Store.
Until then, Apple is focusing MobileMe as a push messaging alternative to Exchange "for the rest of us," while also leveraging push support in iPhone 2.0 and in the upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard client apps to deliver an Exchange Server replacement in Snow Leopard Server.
There's more information about SproutCore on its official website. Apple also has more details on the new MobileMe, and SquirrelFish details are on the Webkit project site.
The group's focus will be to develop widespread standards for calculating "heterogeneous data" regardless of whether it's onboard a conventional central processor or on a new wave of video cards that can handle some specialized calculations in addition to their normal graphics duties. Like the OpenGL standard, any future standard would be publicly documented and royalty-free.
While the new development body has yet to settle on a standard, Apple is the first to propose a complete specification. Khronos highlights the Mac maker's new Open Computing Language (OpenCL) language as a first candidate; in its early form, the specification would "liberate" video chipsets from having to perform only visual tasks and would coordinate both graphics hardware and multi-core CPUs in improving overall system performance in the future.
Apple's format could lead to accelerating physics and image processing chores. However, the broader effort wouldn't be limited to full-size computers and could lead to faster handheld devices as well.
Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple is only just making its first tentative steps into heterogenous processing. The company first announced its intentions to develop OpenCL with the preview of Mac OS X 10.6 at this month's Worldwide Developers Conference but significantly lags efforts by AMD and NVIDIA in promoting standards themselves.
The two semiconductor designers this week unveiled a string of video cards and dedicated processors that all can greatly increase the speed of computing under certain conditions, such as scientific research or physics in games. NVIDIA's GeForce GTX series is the most conventional and processes both graphics and general work, while its Tesla line and AMD's comparable FireStream are meant solely to speed up certain computing jobs in workstations and servers.
To date, none of these devices support Mac OS X, although Apple is confirmed as being aware of NVIDIA's technology.
The change partly reflects a saturation of the market but is ultimately about the iPhone, Wolf says. At $200, the iPhone is now thought to almost certainly cannibalize a significant portion of iPod sales, especially for high end users who would otherwise have chosen one of Apple's more expensive stand-alone players.
That drop, in turn, will reportedly have a cascading effect on the iPhone itself. With more users buying the iPhone merely in place of an iPod rather than alongside it, sales of the handset in the long-term should also take a tumble relative to earlier predictions. While still positive, Needham now expects 8.5 million iPhones to be sold in the US this year and 14 million in 2009, leaving international shipments to play a major part in meeting Apple's 10 million-unit goal for 2008.
"Our previous shipment forecast was unrealistically high," Wolf says.
However, even with reduced early shipments and a lower price, Apple isn't expected to have any problem using the iPhone to grow its business. A cost analysis of the 8GB iPhone suggests that the company spends just $175 to produce and sell an iPhone 3G, leaving Apple with a roughly 60 percent margin on each unit that it sells to AT&T at an estimated $400 unsubsidized price.
The margin is twice as much as Apple is believed to have made on the original iPhone and would help soften the blow from the absence of monthly carrier revenue.
Apple's switch in pricing strategy also has the potential to increase share independently of the price. As the phone maker is no longer tied to a particular subscription model, roughly 15.6 million iPhones could sell outside of the US in 2009, including to customers on prepaid services that are more popular in some areas.
American share could also go up as other carriers are given access to the phone through the new model, which specifically detaches Apple from AT&T. "In a world where the iPhone is subsidized just like other smartphones, AT&T no longer brings anything unique to the table," Wolf says.
This also discounts the wildcard of the App Store, which could drive more users to the iPhone but is described as impossible to gauge with the store still under wraps until July.
The presence of the iPhone should also create a second halo effect that Needham analysts hadn't previously anticipated, Wolf explains. While the decline of the iPod will mitigate some of the impact, relatively few iPhone owners outside of the US are likely to already own iPods and will thus be exposed to Apple's products for the first time, filling in where the iPod stopped short.
Such added exposure leads Wolf to boost his very long term estimates for Mac sales, which could now climb to as many as 44 million computers by 2017 and could already create an upside as early as 2009, when the iPhone's effect should first become clear.
