We are still a few weeks away from Apple’s big product announcements for the iPad Mini, iPhone 5 and their lineup for the upcoming year. Historically, the announcement has been shrouded in secrecy. Every year has been filled with a ton of new surprises to look forward to. Sure a few general upgrades may be known about but this year it we’ve been given a lot of information early and unless they have something huge up their sleeve we aren’t going to be seeing any huge surprise products this time around.
To start with the iPad Mini is going to be one of the largest of the new release announcements from the tech giant. Generally when a new product is announced from Apple it’s on their big announcement date that we find out all of the details. It’s really quite surprising with how much of the iPad Mini that has already been leaked to the press. According to Bloomberg the iPad Minis are going to use non-Retina displays that are being manufactured by AU Optronics and LG. While AUO has created screens for MacBooks in the past this is the first time they will be supplying them for an Apple mobile device. According to insiders at Foxconn, who are supplying a lamination coating for the device, its measurements will be 7.85 inches diagonally and be 9.7 inches long. On top of that according to Marco it looks as if all of the evidence points to the iPad Mini having 512 Meg of ram and other insides similar to that of an iPad 2. It will not have the power to have a Retina display though. None of the details are set in stone and are from early reports but the display and sizes look to be accurate coming directly from the manufactures.
Speaking of new things from Apple there is a new beta of iOS 6 out in the wild and The App Store has had a few noticeable updates show up in it. The main thing that stands out from the changes is searching for a new app has been completely redone and is now in the new tile format as shown in the video above. The other aspect that has been added is a Genius recommendation that will see what you’ve downloaded and suggest other applications based off of it. Also the ability to search for podcasts has been re-added into The App Store. The new release of iOS 6 is scheduled for this fall.
The final piece of good news for Apple comes from GigaOM and is that their latest iteration of OS X, Mountain Lion, has gotten some great traction. While iOS pretty much forces you to do updates OS X is a purchased upgrade that not everyone opts in for. According to statistics though 1/10 desktops out there have already been updated to Mountain Lion which is a quicker adoption rate than previous versions.
It’s not all good news for Apple though and two things have popped up to bring a frown to their faces. The Wallstreet Journal brings us the first piece of bad news and that is that one of the three developers of iPhone 5’s displays are running behind on production. While Japan Display INC and LG are both already shipping displays it looks as if Sharp hasn’t been able to get a single shipment set for Apple yet. They were initially scheduled to start shipping displays by the end of August though have had manufacturing delays and are unsure when the order will be filled. With a possible one third of the iPhone 5 displays being unavailable this could mean a shortage for the company at a key time when they are competing against Samsung.
Speaking of Samsung Bloomberg has brought us the news that while Samsung may have been the loser in its first patent case with Apple in the United States they are the clear winner in Japan. Apple’s suit against Samsung on synchronizing music and video data with servers failed and Apple has to pay Samsungs court costs for the case. While this doesn’t negate the billion in damaged owed in US court it was enough of a win to bring Samsung’s stock right back to where it was before the trial.
