Apple's Notebook Market Share over 17%

According to NPD, Apple’s retail notebook market share for June 2007 was 17.6 percent, a 2.2 percent increase over the same period last year. Dell took the top spot with HP coming in second place of total unit sales. With Apple taking the number three spot, Gateway and Acer round out the top five.

Overall, NPD places Apple as the 3rd largest US computer manufacturer, with a 5.9% U.S. market share, up 1.1% from last year's numbers

Have iPhone Carriers for Europe Been Signed?

www.ft.com—17aa89d0-500b-11dc-a6b0-0000779fd2ac.html

The Financial Times is reporting that Apple has reached a deal with three different providers: T-Mobile of Germany, O2 in the UK and Orange of France Financial Times reports that Apple is getting 10% of the fee associated with calling and text features for every iPhone sold through these providers and that an announcement is expected sometime later in August.

(Some of) EA's Mac Games Now Shipping

www.apple.com—ea

The Apple store finally has some of Mac games EA promised . Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed Carbon, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Command and Conquer 3 are among the games that are now shipping. Tiger Woods and Madden are still missing from the lineup. EA says the Mac versions of these games will ship at the same time as their PC counterparts.

Adobe will support H.264 in Flash

labs.adobe.com—flashplayer9

Adobe will soon be releasing an update to their popular Flash Player 9 with support for the H.264 video codec. The updated support will allow Flash Player to take advantage of hardware acceleration provided in computer video cards and is also optimized for Dual-Core processors. According to Adobe, support for the H.264 standard will lead to more Web video content being available in high definition. Adobe says they are choosing to support the standard now because it is being adopted more by content producers and media distributors like cable companies. A public beta is available now at labs.adobe.com, with a final release expected in the fall.

What Happened to Skype!?

www.macworld.com—index.php

There was a massive Skype outage last last week that lasted for days. Skype is now talking about what happened and states that a similar outage should not happen again. Skype has attributed the outages to a “"perfect storm” of exceptionally high traffic through the service at the same time as the Windows Update process led to a shortage of supernodes in the service’s peer-to-peer network. On Aug. 16, there was a Wunear-simultaneous rebooting of millions of computers, as Skype users running the Windows operating system attempted to reconnect to the service after downloading a series of routine software patches from Microsoft’s Windows Update service.
Skype’s service relies on some of its users’ computers to act as “supernodes,” routing traffic for other, less well-connected, users. But as Skype customers tried to reconnect, many of those supernodes were themselves in the process of rebooting. The remaining supernodes were soon overwhelmed because a bug in the company’s software did not efficiently allocate the network resources available.

Apple Earns Silver

www.tuaw.com—apple-earns-a-silver-in-environmental-evaluation

Apple has been awarded 5 silver metals from EPEAT, a government operation created to approve computers before they can be purchased by other governmental institutions, and the organization gives product ratings based on a multitude of environmental criteria. Apple has earned five silver medals for several of its MacBook Pro systems, meaning that the company has passed 23 mandatory standards, and 14 of a possible 28 optional standards. The highest rank, gold, is rewarded to computers that have passed all 23 mandatory standards, plus 21 of 28 optional ones. For comparison, Toshiba has earned five golds, 15 silvers, and four bronzes, Dell has earned two golds and 12 silvers for its laptops,

MTV, RealNetworks and Verizon Team Up Against iTunes

biz.yahoo.com—mtv_mobile_music_service.html

MTV will merge its Urge music service into the Rhapsody offering from RealNetworks Inc., forming a new company called Rhapsody America. The new service will be accessible on computers and music players and integrated with Verizon Wireless's VCast multimedia service for cell phones. MTV will heavily market the Rhapsody America service starting in September and will provide music playlists and other programming.

Meebo Releases iPhone Web App for Instant Messaging

wwwl.meebo.com

If you're looking to IM on your iPhone check out meebo.com, iPhone portal where you can sign into any of Meebo's supported services - including AIM, Yahoo!, MSN and Google Talk - or you can sign in with an account you have already registered with meebo

AT&T To Stop Ultra Detailed Billing

www.tuaw.com—atandt-saves-trees

AT&T is texting iPhone accounts with messages saying: "We are simplifying your paper bill, removing itemized detail. To view all detail go to att.com/mywireless. Still need full paper bill? Call 611"

Refurbished iPhones now available at the Online Apple Store

Both 4GB and 8GB models are available for $399 and $499, respectively. This is $100 off their full retail price.