Apple

In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring "the kitchen is closed" seems a quaint relic of an earlier era. It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence. A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation's epidemic of obesity - and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it. Just eat your cake - or better yet, an apple - earlier.

Apple's dominance of the mobile PC and tablet market continued through the first quarter of 2012, according to a new forecast report. Apple towered over the tablet sector with the iPad while also keeping a strong hold at the top of mobile PC shipments, which include notebook PCs.  The iPad continues to be the most-sold tablet, accounting for nearly 63% of market share and seeing year-to-year growth of 162% for the first quarter, according to NPD DisplaySearch's report.

The wait for tables is getting longer at Buck's, a popular breakfast spot for the tech elite and a weather vane for the Silicon Valley economy. Here, like everywhere else, Facebook is the talk of the town. "Charles Schwab was in the restaurant the other day, and I asked him to hook me up with some Facebook shares," said Jamis MacNiven, owner of Buck's, in the wealthy suburban enclave of Woodside. "He told me even he can't get Facebook shares. " The new tech boom officially gets underway Friday when Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg rings Nasdaq's opening bell remotely from the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, launching the largest initial public offering of stock in Silicon Valley history.

Jonathan Ive, Apple's senior vice president of industrial design, said that despite the iMac, iPhone, iPod or iPad, Apple's current project is its best. Ive, who was in England this week for his knighting Wednesday, told that to The Telegraph after being asked which project he would like to be remembered for if he could only pick one. “It’s a really tough one.

If you think Bluetooth is a rare dental condition and an app is what you eat before the entree, you might not be a candidate for today's high-tech, whiz-bang smart phones. Instead, you might be happier with a mobile phone geared toward seniors. Those phones typically don't have Web-surfing capability, GPS maps and video games. Instead they have large buttons, oversized digital readouts and hearing-aid compatibility, along with a relatively simple calling plan. Although senior-friendly phones aren't new, their lower prices and variety are. A recent price skirmish among wireless companies means seniors can get an easy-to-use cellphone and cheap service to go with it, said Mac Haddow, senior fellow on public policy for the independent and nonprofit Alliance for Generational Equity.

Thrifty consumers who bought an iPad 2 from Best Buy in the last couple of weeks have been riding an emotional roller coaster that has ranged from smug elation to hesitation to frustration. It started off well: On Feb. 25, Best Buy launched what sounded like a great deal--dropping the price of its entire line of iPads by $50. So the starting price of the 16-gigabyte, Wi-Fi-only iPad 2 was down to $449.99 from $499.99 and the most expensive iPad, 64 gigabytes with Wi-Fi and 3G capability, was down to $779.99 from $829.99.

With Apple expected to announce the iPad 3 on Wednesday, we're on rumor patrol here at the Technology Blog. The latest buzz is that Apple will not raise prices for the highly anticipated tablet and will keep its current pricing structure for all iPad 3 models, according to 9to5Mac . “Even better, some countries with currencies doing better than the U.S. dollar should expect to see marginal drops in prices,” the blog said. That's good news for the hordes of shoppers expected to line up for the tablet once it's released and is in line with Apple's usual approach of keeping prices the same even as it updates popular products.

Sprint is opening to selling a 4G LTE version of Apple's iPhone, whenever Apple builds a phone running on the latest cellular technology. Joe Euteneuer, chief financial officer at the nation's third largest carrier, said Sprint is free to sell a 4G LTE iPhone, but wouldn't say whether Apple was planning on building such a device, according to a Dow Jones Newswire report. Currently, Sprint doesn't offer LTE service (though it does offer its 4G WiMax service). But the carrier will launch its faster, newer 4G network by about the middle of this year in a handful of cities.

Apple's " antennagate " is finally coming to an end, with $15 going to each qualifying iPhone 4 owner who claims a share in a class-action lawsuit over the fourth-generation iPhone's infamous antenna problems. The settlement terms, announced Thursday with the launch of a website , will issue $15 in cash to owners of the iPhone 4 "who have experienced antenna or reception issues," "been unable to return their iPhone 4 without incurring any costs" and "been unwilling to use a case or free bumper for their iPhone 4. " Apple has been giving away free "bumper" cases to iPhone 4 owners since July 2010 , after consumers complained that the phone could lose its cellular signal if held certain ways.

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

Apple is testing two versions of the sixth-generation iPhone, both of which include a longer display that brings the smartphone near a 16:9 screen ratio, according to a report. Both of the phones have a new 3.999-inch display, which has been the hot rumor this month. Apple will keep the current width of the iPhone's screen, but it will add 176 pixels to the height of the screen.

The heads of Apple Inc.and Samsung Electronics Co. will sit opposite each other in settlement talks this week, even as the rival smartphone makers continue to blast each other with patent infringement claims. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook was scheduled to participate in a mediation conference with Samsung Chief Executive Gee-Sung Choi in front of a San Francisco judge Monday and Tuesday to discuss how to speed the resolution of a high-profile U.S. patent case. The 13-month-old case in the U.S. District Court in Northern California is one of many around the world that are amounting to a bruising patent war. The two companies have repeatedly accused one another of copying the look and function of their rival's tablets and smartphones.

The sixth-generation iPhone is expected to have a larger screen, and several iOS developers say they would receive that change with a warm welcome. Rumors began earler this month saying the next iPhone, expected to arrive in October, could come with a 4-inch screen. Since its launch in 2007, Apple has never messed with the 3.5-inch size of its phone screen.

Scott Forstall, one of the Apple Inc. executives behind the company's blockbuster iPad and iPhone, cashed in his products' successes last week to the tune of $38.7 million. The sale represented 95% of his Apple stock holdings, leaving his very lucrative cupboard bare — for the time being. Apple stock's meteoric rise has hit some bumps lately, with shares down 5.4% over the last month. The stock hit a bigger skid starting in mid-April, dropping 13% before it rebounded after Apple's huge earnings release last week.

Barnes & Noble Inc.'s prospects against rivals Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. in the fast-growing digital reader business just got a big lift thanks to a $605-million investment from Microsoft Corp. For the nation's No. 1 bookstore chain, the infusion will help its Nook business better compete against the top-selling Kindle e-reader and iPad tablet computer and relieves some of the pressure on Barnes & Noble to turn a profit on the Nook. It's also a good deal for Microsoft, which is spending barely 1% of its $60-billion cash reserve to gain a bigger presence in the e-reader and tablet markets ahead of the widely anticipated launch of its Windows 8 operating software later this year.

Desperate? Clever? Too little, too late? It's hard to know what to make of the news that Research in Motion, the company behind BlackBerry, has taken credit for the "WAKE UP!" "protest" that took place outside an Apple store in Sydney, Australia, last week. "We can confirm that the Australian 'Wake Up' campaign, which involves a series of experiential activities taking place across Sydney and Melbourne, was created by RIM Australia," the company told The Age. Even before it was revealed who was behind the "protest," caught on video by Australian video blogger Nate Burr and viewed around the world, it was clear that it was a marketing stunt.

Apple Inc. halted sales of the iPhone 4S at its retail stores in mainland China after a massive crowd waiting outside its Beijing flagship turned unruly, pelting the windows with eggs, hitting a mall employee and refusing police orders to leave. It was the first day of sales in China for Apple's latest smartphone, and throngs of hopeful shoppers -- many of them migrant workers who had been hired by scalpers to purchase the phones for later sale on the gray market -- had waited overnight in freezing temperatures.

How do you make a book about Apple interesting if it isn't about Steve Jobs? Adam Lashinsky, a senior editor at Fortune magazine, has taken on that difficult-sounding mission, with somewhat predictable results. Published by Business Plus, his effort to explain how the Apple machine really functions is like trying to lift the veil on a master conjurer's secrets: The humdrum mechanics that lie behind the tricks can never be as interesting as the magic. Yet even if it doesn't have the allure of Walter Isaacson's recent bestselling biography of Jobs, this book, "Inside Apple: The Secrets Behind the Past and Future Success of Steve Jobs's Iconic Brand," still starts out with a worthwhile goal.

Re "Apple's profit nearly doubles," Business, April 25 The article describing the profits of Apple is but one of several such announcements of record profits in many industries that appear in newspapers regularly. This at a time when most of our citizenry is struggling to keep their heads above water. The discrepancy is so apparent that one wonders at the bewildering confusion of voters during this electoral season. Russell Blinick Encino

Apple Inc.'s stock hit a rough patch earlier this month, but with the shares springing up nearly 9% on the heels of strong earnings, things seemed to be smoothing out. Though the stock had been down about 13% since mid-April, the tide turned after Apple's announcement late Tuesday of a quarter during which it sold 35 million iPhones and close to 12 million iPads. A major chunk of the company's revenue for the period came from China, one of Apple's fastest-growing new markets. Before the earnings announcement Tuesday, Apple shares dropped 2% in regular trading, pulling down the Nasdaq composite index while the Dow Jones industrial average rose.