Apple reports record earnings for 3rd quarter

Apple Computer reported a $320 million profit for its fiscal third quarter on revenue of $3.52 billion, the highest in company history.

Revenue growth was up 75 percent year-over-year, while profits more than quadrupled.

Apple shipped 1.182 million Macs during the quarter (495,00 laptops and 687,000 desktops), the highest quarterly figure in four years. And 6.155 million iPods (it is believed that as many as 3 million of these were Shuffles).

The laptop sales were the highest ever in spite of no new updates during the quarter.

500 Millionth song sold on iTunes

Apple announced on Monday that Amy Greer purchased the 500 millionth song. The track was Mississippi Girl by Faith Hill

She won 10 iPods (her choice), a GOLD 10,000 song iTunes gift card, a trip for 4 to see Coldplay in concert with backstage passes

Apple updates rundown

DVD Studio Pro 4.0.2

Addresses isolated stability issues

iPhoto 5.0.3

Addresses issues with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger compatibility, Book and Print ordering, and Smart Albums.

AirPort 4.2 for Mac OS X 10.3.3 and Mac OS X 10.4.2

Fixes connection problems and resolves security issues with WPA2 wireless networks.

Upcoming Apple Retail Store Openings

Apple opened 2 new US Stores on July 16th.

Northbrook, Illinois and Portland, Oregon at Pioneer Place

Apple plans to open a flagship retail store in Zurich, Switzerland

Apple extending store hours

According to ifoAppleStore, Apple plans to extend store hours by 46 percent from 62 hours a week currently to 90.5 hours.

New planned hours of 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mon-Fri, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturdays, and 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Sundays.

Japanese iTunes Music Store coming in August

Major Japanese music label Avex has reached an agreement with Apple, according to financial news agency, AFX News Limited.

AFX states that Apple will launch its Japanese iTunes Music Store service in August.

Early reports indicate Mac OS X Intel boxes are fast

equipped with a 3.6 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with 2 MB L2 Cache, 800MHz front-side bus, 1GB of 533MHz DDR2 Dual Channel SDRAM, and an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900

One developer reports that it's, "Faster than [Mac OS X] on my Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5." In addition to booting Windows XP at blazing speeds, the included version of Mac OS X for Intel takes "as little as 10 seconds" to boot to the Desktop from when the Apple logo first displays on screen.

Good reports on Rosetta too. Said running applications in Rosetta is even more seamless than running apps in Classic.

Rosetta apps seem to run at 65-70 percent as fast as the same apps recompiled as Universal binaries.

Reports that some PowerPC apps run with no speed hit. Firefox was one example.

Web browsing overall is being reported as much faster on OS X Intel. "As snappy as IE on Intel".

Possible new iBooks today

Think Secret is reporting that reliable sources say an iBook revision is coming soon and maybe announced as early as today.

The details of the specs are unknown, but one thought is we may see widescreen iBooks.

If you have Tiger, don't use TechTool from your AppleCare CD

From listener Brian

It's not compatible and it will mess up your system

Can fix it with Alsoft Disk Warrior

www.alsoft.com—DiskWarrior

Apple refunding money and working on iTMS Shuffle issue

Listener Jose reports he was able to get his money back for so tracks that wouldn't play on his Shuffle

Apple also said in an email response

"...We take the quality of our products very seriously and will be investigating the issue you reported. Rest assured that if there is a problem with any of our songs or audio books we will replace it on the ITunes Music Store immediately.

Please do not attempt to download this title again within the next two weeks..."