Apple Inc News

In a statement today, Apple announced that director Jerome B. York has passed away following suffering a brain aneurism in his Detroit home last night.

CUPERTINO, California—March 18, 2010—Apple® is sad to announce the death of Apple Board member Jerome B. (Jerry) York. York, the chairman, president and CEO of Harwinton Capital, joined Apple’s Board of Directors in 1997. He was the former CFO of IBM and Chrysler, and former vice chairman of Tracinda. He is widely acknowledged for his contributions at Chrysler and IBM during their turnarounds.

“Jerry joined Apple’s Board in 1997 when most doubted the company’s future. He has been a pillar of financial and business expertise and insight on our Board for over a dozen years,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “It’s been a privilege to know and work with Jerry, and I’m going to miss him a lot.”

Jerry York was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1938. He graduated from the United States Military Academy, and received an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from the University of Michigan. Trained as an engineer, York worked his way up through Chrysler to become CFO.

Update: Apple has posted a nice message on apple.com 

The Apple Youth movement is in full effect according to a new post by the Loop.  Apple has set up three new programs for kids: For Families (workshops show kids how to improve their skills using all of the iLife and iWork applications); For Teachers and Schools (Field Trips from school to work on projects) and For Kids (“Apple Camp.” Bring your kid to an Apple Store and they'll learn how to use iLife and iWork and bring home a DVD with their creations.)

Registration begins in May.

Earlier this morning Frode Ersfjord sent Steve Jobs this message:

"When is Apple going to start consistently producing iMac displays without; yellow tinge, grey bars and horrible backlight bleeds?

I'm sick of calling Apple Care. I don't need perfect, just halfway decent."

Today, he got this response from Apple CEO Steve Jobs:

This problem is behind us. 

 -Sent from my iPhone

This seems to indicate that the 27-inch iMac issue is officially over, and Apple has confidently ruled out further iMac issues.  

Not that Apple didn't already cryptically acknowledge that there were some issues and they'd been fixed.

In case you are wondering, El Jobso still rocks a 3.1.2 iPhone.

Headers below..

If you want to be big in advertising, it helps to be close to New York City's Madison Avenue where a lot of big deals get done (You've seen Mad Men right?).  Main competitor, Google, houses most of its Ad people in its New York offices, for instance.  

Apple recently bought Quattro, a mobile advertising company/platform to enter into the advertising business and, as a recent job posting shows, is building up its New York presence.

We are looking for a Client Service Manager (CSM) to support its direct response advertising sales team. The CSM will be responsible for creating proposals, maintaining and growing client relationships. The CSM will work closely with the DR sales team during the pre-sales process and then will have regular contact with clients during advertising campaigns. We are looking for a detailed, process oriented individual who is eager to help continue Quattro’s rapid growth and leadership position in the mobile advertising space. This position will be based in New York.

From the Apple Job posting, it also looks like Apple might keep the Quattro brand alive as its advertising platform even as it advertises the job on the Apple.com website.

After a few minutes of this,

we got this:

Just in case you were wondering...

It seems that Apple has separated the iPod and iTunes websites on the navigation bar which is weird. When you go to those individual sites, they are almost identical except for a couple images. Why did Apple separated them? Wouldn't two separate tabs take more room on the navigation bar then one tab like before?  Also "Downloads" is now gone.  The whole site is still a bit wonky.  Refresh your cache people.

Safari 4.05 is out. Hit Software Update or go here to update yourself.  Best comment so far: "Still has flash...."

You'll need to do a restart(!).

After the initial screengrabs of Mac user interface elements and the subsequent blatant teasers, we've known this was coming for quite awhile.  Now a Mac version of Valve's Steam gaming platform is official with today's press release, below:

Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April

March 8, 2010 – Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve’s gaming service, and Source, Valve’s gaming engine, to the Mac.

From the AP, some better pictures of Steve Jobs at the Oscars (more below).

The iPad commercial aired at 8:53pm EST during the Oscars.  Also, Steve Jobs is in attendance and was spotted on the Red Carpet(below).

via 

This is getting a little silly isn't it? Apple reseller, Tosh Computers updated their MacBook Pro line yesterday with some pretty mouthwatering new computers.

Released in April(?!) 2010, these are somewhat believable specs for new Core i5 and i7 MacBook Pros which top out at 640GB HDDs or 256GB SSDs.  We especially like getting the Express Card slot back in the 15-inch model.  On the fake side, Nvidia can't sell 9400M chipsets with Core i5 and i7 processors.  Expect discrete Nvidia Optimus or ATI video cards on Intel chipsets similar to 27-inch iMacs. (Thanks commenter)

But alas, this is probably just a publicity stunt.  Anyway head over to New Zealand (updated w/Google cache, their site taken offline—weird!) for the latest in MacBook Pros from the future. 

BTW - This site was actually updated from Core 2 Duos here.