When Steve Jobs announced iTunes 7 I couldn’t reload the download page fast enough. I was anxious to try out the first whole number upgrade to Apple’s venerable jukebox application in almost a year. In the 10 or so days that I’ve been using the new iTunes I’ve had little or no problems with it. Unfortunately others haven’t been so lucky.
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

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Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Sony may have taken this one a little too far. The consumer electronic giant’s latest notebook looks like a blatant ripoff of Apple’s wildly popular MacBook.
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

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Almost every PC notebook vendor and their brother is hawking Core 2 Duo powered notebooks these days and Mac-heads are starting to get a little miffed. Understandably so.
Didn’t Apple jumped into bed with Intel because they had a great chip pipeline and they could deliver the silicon – fast? Yes and yes. This time Apple can’t blame their inability to ship on Intel, though. It’s their own doing.
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

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A nice feature of the new iPod update is support for games but the downside is that you can only buy them from Apple. There’s a movement afoot by the HomeBrew community to pry open Apple’s proprietary iPod game package (.ipg) format and reverse engineer a way to load third-party games onto the device.
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

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Apple’s new “enhanced fifth-generation” iPod (with video) comes with some pretty interesting new features and I want to take a look at which of them you can expect to work on the previous iPods.
The new iPod e5g comes with several software-based features including searching (pictured) via virtual keyboard, smart scrolling which allows you to scroll through your library at lightning speed, games and a brightness control.
The problem I have is that half of these new software features are available on previous iPods
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

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Apple announced upgrades to all three iPod lines (iPod, nano and shuffle), iTunes 7 with movies and gave a sneak peak at an Apple set-top box slated to ship in January 2007 at a media event at the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco.
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

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One side effect of announcing the new Core 2 Duo iMacs and faster Mac minis last week is that it effectively removes them from contention for debut at Apple’s media event tomorrow.
This combined with the company’s less-than-subtle “It’s Showtime” theme make predictions a little easier than usual, although there are some wild cards at the end. Without further ado, here’s what I think that Apple will announce tomorrow:
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

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According to MacNN Apple filed a patent in March 2006 for a “Multi-functional hand-held device, the patent was published on 7 September 2006 by the the US Patent & Trademark Office.
The new patent puts even more attention on Apple’s “It’s Showtime” media event scheduled for Tuesday 12 September 2006 as it implies that Apple is prepping an smartphone product (finally, the alleged iPhone?).
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

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Variety magazine is reporting that Amazon.com is preparing to enter the movie download market this week with a new service. The interesting part is that it claims that Apple’s service will only offer movies from Disney (at least initially)…
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

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Apple’s invitations to their 12 September 2006 press event (the un-keynote) feature a large Apple logo bathed in Hollywood-style search lights with copy reading “It’s Showtime” across the bottom. A thinly veiled reference to the movie download service that the company appears to ready to announce in six days.
“They’ve done really well in music, they’ve done well in music videos and they’ve done well in TV shows, so logically movies are the next area of focus,” said Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research who has a “buy” rating on the stock. “It’s a first kind of bigger step in the direction of movie content.”
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

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