Wow, it’s hard to believe that another Friday is here and with Halloween behind us, everyone is looking ahead to the holiday season already. Apple is likely done with the exciting releases for the year (aside from iTunes Match and a few software updates), but that hardly means the internet is quiet -- just the opposite, there’s plenty to chatter about for this Friday, November 4, 2011.
New York City’s Fifth Avenue Apple Store is easily one of the most iconic of them all, and today was the grand unveiling of their new look after months of construction. According to 9to5Mac, Apple had a grand re-opening at 10am Friday for the newly-designed $6 million cube, now made up of 15 larger, more seamless pieces of glass instead of the 90 panes used the first time around. MacRumors also posted a video of the event from YouTube user patjem2 which you can see embedded in all its glory right here!
Apple has been widely rumored to be working on an ad-based TV streaming deal to compete with the likes of Hulu and Netflix, but few details have leaked out -- until now. According to GigaOm, CBS CEO Les Moonves turned down an ad-based video streaming deal for the Apple TV, which he let slip during the company’s quarterly earnings call. CBS has long held their ground where streaming is concerned, the lone holdout of the four key networks to throw their hat into the Hulu ring, for example. That could change in time -- CBS-owned network The CW just inked a deal with Hulu that is now bringing popular shows like 90210 and Nikita to the ad-based Hulu and Hulu Plus, which only happened after some significant licensing fees were paid out to the network first. In the meantime, most CBS shows get posted the day after airing on the company’s Flash-based website, so… there’s that.
It’s barely been 48 hours since Apple unleashed their first beta for iOS 5.0.1, and already the company has pushed out a second one, according to MacRumors. The new seed, with a build number of 9A404, supposedly addresses activation issues that a number of developers were having and is available as an over-the-air update for everyone else who managed to successfully get activated in the first place. Apple has promised iOS 5.0.1 “within a few weeks” for the common folk to address some significant battery drain issues reported by users.
Google Android may be activating more devices, but Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. According to Forbes.com, Apple is now earning “more than half of all industry profits among mobile handset OEMS” -- 52 percent, claims Canaccord Genuity technology analyst Michael Walkley. That’s a five percent increase from this time last year, when Apple’s share was at 47 percent. By comparison, cell phone giant (and Apple patent combatant) Nokia held 67 percent of the operating profits back in 2007, when Apple first launched the iPhone with a mere four percent. So how much operating profit does Nokia have today? Ironically, the same four percent Apple once held during its first year in the mobile business. That’s gotta hurt...
It’s been a busy week for developers, with new builds of iOS 5.0.1 and iTunes 10.5.1 with iTunes Match, but that’s not all -- on Thursday night, Apple quietly slipped out a new seed for Safari 5.1.2. According to Cult of Mac, the build “brings a fix to the embedded PDF viewing and print issues that were present in previous versions of the browser” as well as squashing a “known bug” causing extensions to crash. Sounds like a worthwhile -- if not terribly exciting -- update, which we hope to see on our systems soon.
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(Image courtesy of 9to5Mac)
