Dive into OS X

We don’t usually cover Wordpress themes but we make an exception for two nice Apple related themes. The first is the Retro MacOS Wordpress Theme. Any old Mac user will like it. The second, more modern theme is the iTheme Wordpress Theme.

Wordpress, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is a very successful blogging engine which allows users to apply various themes to change the look of their blogs.

This week Apple confirmed that its long running rival productivity suite ‘AppleWorks’ has finally been put out to pasture. AppleWorks has been around some 23 years, beginning life as ClarisWorks before being taken over by Apple and renamed AppleWorks. AppleWorks was a great tool, and at one point it was the industry’s best-selling piece of software, beating even Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC.

AppleWorks was updated for Mac OS X and given a presentation maker, but it never received a Universal binary facelift after Apple moved its machines to Intel processor. In 2005, AppleWorks was shoved into the deep shadows as iWork debuted. AppleWorks had not been updated in three years and the news comes just nine days after Apple announced its successor iWork ‘08.

Apple has instantly removed all trace of AppleWorks from its site and redirected all AppleWorks queries to its new iWork suite and a search for AppleWorks returns iWork as the top hit. While AppleWorks does still come up on some of Apple’s foreign language stores, it seems safe to declare the suite terminated.

Although iWork is faster and more robust than AppleWorks, there doesn’t appear to be any upgrade discounts on iWork for existing AppleWorks customers, which is too bad.

Apple beats Microsoft at their own game by providing support for Open XML in iWork ‘08, something Office for Mac doesn’t have. Analyst Gregg Keizer says Apple are embarrassing it’s rival with the new office suite.Indeed it’s embarrassing for Microsoft since they, on top of this, recently delayed the release of their new Office suite until early 2008. And it’s funny that even a manager at Microsoft praised the new iWork:

“[iWork ‘08] reads the Office Open XML files with very high fidelity.”
Brian Jones, Program Manager, Microsoft

The very first iPhone Update, version 1.0.1, is now available for download. Apple seems to be patching some security holes of Safari and WebKit. You can find out more about the update at Apple’s website.

Apple announced Tuesday that more than three billion songs have been purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Store. The store has a catalog of over 5 million songs, 550 television shows and 550 movies.

The most significant thing about this is the growth curve and especially the pace at which Apple reached its latest billion-song threshold. It took the company a little less than three years to sell the first billion iTunes downloads. Then it took less than a year (11 months) to sell the second billion. Now, just over six months later, the store has passed the three-billion song mark.

Looking at it as precisely as possible, if we assume that the two and three billion song targets were hit the same day as the press releases went out (January 9, 2007, and July 31, 2007, respectively), that means it took 203 days to sell one billion songs. That means the Store had to average about 4,926,108 song purchases per day, or 205,255 per hour. Breaking it down even further, that’s 3,421 songs sold per minute, or an astounding 57 songs sold every second for those 203 days!

Regardless of the portion of the market that’s an extra 3 billion dollars revenue on the balance sheet (1 song = about $1.00). I believe Apple makes between 10 and 20 cents per song profit… So that’s 300 to 600 million dollars in profit. Thanks iTunes Store!

According to PC World, Symantec has upped the warning level to Mac users this week on a Samba exploit first discovered in May of this year after discovering the exploit has been uploaded to the Metasploit hacking framework. Despite Samba’s developers having released a fix a day after the discovery, Apple has yet to patch the hole.

The exploit can allegedly allow a hacker to gain root access to a Mac which is running Samba. Samba is turned on in Macs when a user checks the “Windows File Sharing” checkbox in the System Preferences’ “Sharing” panel. Symantec suggests Mac users uncheck that box until Apple releases a patch (not exactly the solution many of us on mixed networks would like to hear).

The Apple TV has finally been hacked to use a USB mass storage device, eliminating the need to open it up to install a bigger hard drive.

The hack is pretty straightforward. You’ll need one external USB drive, an Intel Mac or Intel-based Linux/Unix system and also SSH enabled on your Apple TV, so you can “dial in” over the network. After that, you need to install the patch, but that only involves typing one line in the Terminal, the Mac’s Unix command line application.After that, wait for the Apple TV to restart and you’re good to go. Plug in the USB drive and it will now be used as the main storage for music and movies.

Instructions

The patch was written for and, therefore, tested on Apple TV software version 1.0. The patch does not work on 1.1. However, it is possible to reverse Apple TV version 1.1 back to 1.0. You can perform a Factory Restore by holding down Menu and - (minus) for about 6 seconds and wait for the recovery screen to come up. That will get you back to 1.0. You will lose your data by doing this.

What you need:

• An ssh-enabled Apple TV. If you don’t have that enabled yet, you can refer to this post to get it enabled. For instructions on how to enable ssh without opening the case, refer to this wiki page.
• An Intel-Mac or Intel-based *nix. This is needed to run the script to patch the kernel on the Apple TV remotely. It maybe possible to run the install script under Windows using cygwin. However, we have not tried this.
• An installed version of Mac OS X 10.4 Intel. Or a full copy of the contents of the “/System/Library/Extensions” folder from one.
• An original, unmodified copy of the ‘mach_kernel.prelink’ file from the Apple TV. If the kernel on your Apple TV has not been modified yet, you can just tell the script to get it from there.
• An external USB drive formatted using “Journaled HFS+”. This is the format the Apple TV expects.

The Procedure

• Once you have all of the above, extract the zip file and READ THE README file. In it, you’ll find the instructions on how to run the script and what to do get the USB drive to work.
• IMPORTANT: Please please please please back up the content of your Apple TV first before running the patch script. If there is one important step in performing the patch, it is BACKING UP your Apple TV.
• Once you have your Apple TV backed up, run the script “install-atvrhd.sh” and follow the instructions. This process should take you less than 5 minutes. Once the kernel on your Apple TV is patched, the device will reboot.

Using it

• Turn on the Apple TV without the USB drive inserted.
• Wait for the intro sequence (flying TV screens, etc.) and insert the USB drive then.
• Once inserted, the content of the internal hard drive will be copied to the external hard drive. This process can take a very long time. To remedy this, we recommend that you erase the content of your internal hard drive first so that there is no need to copy the content.
• The Apple TV will restart automatically after the content is copied.
• At this point, your Apple TV will use the external drive as its primary storage.

Uninstall

Under Unix or Intel Mac, use “uninstall-atvrhd.sh” to uninstall the patch. It should undo the changes - however, if you get really stuck, use the “Factory Restore” feature on your Apple TV.

Download the Apple TV USB hack.

Apple just announced the . For $69, you can extend your repair coverage for an additional year, a total of two years from the original purchase date of the phone. If you have the Apple iPhone bluetooth headset, the plan covers it as well.

If you are residing in Alabama, Connecticut, Nevada, or Wyoming, you are out of luck since Apple is not authorized to sell protection plans in those states.

Read more at Apple.com.

Apple on Wednesday announced a profit of $818 million for its fiscal third quarter, which ended June 30, 2007. The company reported earnings of $5.41 billion for the quarter, with record-high Mac sales for the quarter.

Apple handily beat analyst predictions for the quarter. Analysts polled by Thomson First Call expected Apple to report $0.72 per share of $5.28 billion in revenue; instead, the company reported $0.92 per share.

iPhone sales

Apple only sold iPhones during the final 30 hours of the quarter, as they went on sale on June 29th. Despite AT&T’s recent news that it only activated 146,000 iPhones for the quarter, but Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer revealed that the company sold 270,000 iPhones through its stores and AT&T stores during those 30 hours.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs also revealed that he anticipates Apple will sell its one-millionth iPhone by the end of its fourth quarter - the first full quarter of iPhone sales. Apple COO Tim Cook said that based on the demand the company has seen thus far, Apple is confident it will sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. Oppenheimer noted during his preamble that it took Apple seven quarters to sell its first million iPods.

Apple will reveal who its international partners are for iPhone sales later this quarter, said Oppenheimer. Apple will expand iPhone sales first to Europe in the fourth calendar quarter, with Asia to follow in 2008.
Cook noted that Apple “saw absolutely no evidence” of iPod cannibalization during the quarter -no indication that users purchasing iPhones might otherwise buy an iPod.

iPod sales

Music products and services represented 40 percent of Apple’s total quarterly revenue, said Oppenheimer. The company shipped 9.8 million iPods for the quarter, up 33 percent year over year.

Mac sales

Oppenheimer said that Mac shipments in the U.S. grew 32 percent year over year — 2.5 times what IDC’s predicted industry growth rate for the quarter. Mac product sales represented 60 percent of Apple’s total quarterly revenue for the year — 1.76 million Macs were sold.

Sales of Mac notebooks - MacBook Pros and MacBooks, combined - accounted for 64 percent of all Macs sold, said Oppenheimer.

Store sales versus direct sales

Apple retail store sales saw 33 percent year over year growth for the quarter, said Oppenheimer. The company has remodeled 15 of its store and eight new stores -185 in total, worldwide. Apple expects to open 12 new stores for the current quarter -197 all told. Direct sales revenue represented 53 percent of Apple’s annual sales, versus 49 percent for the same quarter a year ago.