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Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook doesn’t see success in Microsoft’s strategy to have Windows 8 power everything from notebooks to tablets to hybrid transforming devices, comparing their convergence to a refrigerator with toaster functions tacked on the side.

In a bid to slow iPad adoption by enterprise customers, Microsoft has created an add-on licensing fee for tablets running virtualization programs to access Windows applications.

That’s the claim from Digitimes’ sources in Taiwan, who say that Microsoft will hope to achieve that goal with 32 Windows 8-based tablets this year.

Originally posted at News – Microsoft

Supposedly, Redmond intends to push iPad market share below 50 percent, according to the often-wrong Digitimes. The same report says Microsoft expects 32 Windows 8-based tablets this year.

Originally posted at News – Microsoft

Activist group Greenpeace today issued a new report entitled How Clean is Your Cloud?, targeting major Internet companies including Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft over their heavy use of coal-derived power for their massive data centers.Given the energy-intensive nature of maintaining the cloud, access to significant amounts of electricity is a key factor in decisions about where to build these data centers. Since electricity plays a critical role in the cost structure of companies that use the cloud, there have been dramatic strides made in improving the energy efficiency design of the facilities and the thousands of computers that go inside. However, despite significant improvements in efficiency, the exponential growth in cloud computing far outstrips these energy savings. Companies must look not only at how efficiently they are consuming electricity, but also the sources of electricity that they are choosing.The study covers 14 Internet companies, but singles out Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft as the biggest offenders. According to Greenpeace’s data, Apple is the only one of the 14 companies to derive more than half of its data center power (55%) from coal. Apple also ranks third in the share of its power needs coming from nuclear sources.

Greenpeace acknowledges Apple’s work to build a 20-megawatt solar farm and 5-megawatt fuel cell facility at its new data center in Maiden, North Carolina, but downplays their significance by claiming that the facilities will cover only 10% of the site’s power needs. Greenpeace specifically takes Apple to task for its decision to locate its data center in North Carolina, which reportedly maintains one of the dirtiest power grids in the country. In particular, Duke Energy is continuing to invest in coal and nuclear power options while investing “very little” in renewable energy. A similar situation exists in Prineville, Oregon, where Apple has announced plans for another data center.To deliver iCloud services, Apple has dramatically expanded its data center infrastructure. It has invested at least $1bn in an “iDataCenter” in North Carolina, one of the world’s largest data centers, and just announced another facility to be built in Prineville, Oregon. Unfortunately, both of these investments are powered by utilities that rely mostly on coal power. Given the lack of transparency, siting policy or a clear commitment to power the iCloud with renewable energy, Apple is finding itself behind other companies such as Facebook and Google who are angling to control a bigger piece of the cloud.Apple maintains a significant environmental section of its website, including disclosures on its Maiden data center, which the company believes is the only data center of its size to achieve a LEED Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. But while Greenpeace gives Apple some credit for its steps, the organization continues to give Apple poor marks for a lack of complete transparency about its data center power demands and publicly-available policies regarding the energy considerations for its projects.

While Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft take the brunt of Greenpeace’s criticism, Yahoo and Google receive high marks for their policies prioritizing renewable energy in their projects and for promoting policies to increase investment in renewable energy. Facebook also receives high marks for its recent commitment to renewable energy, including its latest data center in Sweden that can be powered with 100% renewable energy.

Update: In a statement issued to The New York Times, Apple discloses for the first time that the current data center in Maiden, North Carolina consumes roughly 20 megawatts of power, meaning that the 25 megawatts of power planned for the solar farm and fuel cell facility at that location should be sufficient for at least this phase of the project. Apple’s long-term plans include eventually doubling the size of the data center with a second building, and it seems unlikely that the 20-megawatt number includes those plans.In a statement issued in response to the report, Apple disclosed for the first time that the data center would consume about 20 million watts at full capacity — much lower than Greenpeace’s estimate, which is 100 million watts. In territory served by Duke, a million watts is enough to power 750 to 1,000 homes.

Kristin Huguet, a spokeswoman for Apple, added that the company is building two large projects intended to offset energy use from the grid in North Carolina: an array of solar panels and a set of fuel cells.Update 2: Greenpeace has responded with a blog post questioning Apple’s statements about energy usage at the Maiden data center.While it is good to see Apple acknowledge it should reveal more details of the energy consumption of its data centers, the information they released today does not add up with what they have reported to be the size of the investment and physical size of the data center. [...] While Apple is well known for making more expensive consumer products, if Apple’s plans for the $ 1Billion investment only generates 20MW in power demand, that would be taking the “Apple premium” to a whole new level.

Microsoft and Apple Stores cheek by jowl? The more the merrier for consumers, and better for Microsoft, which needs to demonstrate it has competitive offerings too.

Originally posted at Nanotech – The Circuits Blog

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It’s Google CEO Larry Page in the blue (and red and yellow and blue again and green and red again) corner, and Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson in the correct share of white corner in a battle for the ages — was Steve Jobs genuinely ticked over Google copying the iPhone for Android, or was that just a lot of sound and fury to rally the Apple faithful?

Page kicked it off with comments in a recent Bloomberg interview:

I think the Android differences were actually for show. [...] I think that served their interests. For a lot of companies, it’s useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe that it’s better to shoot higher. You don’t want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what’s possible and how to make the world better.

Using an “enemy” as a way to focus and motivate your troops is an age-old strategy, and it works. Of course, Android had to be looking at its competitors to shift from a BlackBerry and Windows Mobile Standard-style device to an iPhone-style device shortly after January 2007. But Isaacson cries foul on the spin as a whole. Speaking at the Royal Institution, Isaacson said it was a repeat of Microsoft and the Mac UI all over again. And it wasn’t just the copying of ideas but the “promiscuous” licensing of those copied ideas to others.

[The Microsoft Windows situation was] almost copied verbatim by Android. And then they licence it around promiscuously. And then Android starts surpassing Apple in market share, and this totally infuriated him. It wasn’t a matter of money. He said: ‘You can’t pay me off, I’m here to destroy you’.

Jobs previous quote read, in part:

I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this. [...] I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.

Steve Jobs passed away last year so can’t set the record straight, if indeed the record on something like this even needs to be set straight. Tim Cook runs Apple now, so he and his board and his executive team now determine Apple’s response to Google and Android. (Hint: He’s often said he’s in favor of competition, but prefers them to come at Apple with their own innovations.)

It is interesting to hear Page’s account, however. If nothing else, it shows what the person currently running Google wants us to think, and maybe that means a better relationship could once again be possible?

Source: Bloomberg, Macworld

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There are a number of iPad sketching applications on the App Store, with Penultimate clocking as one of the top 15 most purchased iPad apps ever.

Now there’s a new competitor that looks to take the iPad sketching world by storm. Paper is the first app by upstart development firm FiftyThree. A number of the employees spent time at Microsoft, developing Courier — a dual-screen digital notebook that was axed by Microsoft.

The Verge’s Ellis Hamburger spoke to the team about the app.


When you first open the app, you first see a panoramic view of all of your notebooks floating in mid-air. Each notebook looks like a premium Moleskine journal, fit with a stunning cover and pages that look soft to the touch. When you tap a notebook, you’re launched into a CoverFlow-esque page browser where you can thumb through sketches in your notebook. Tap a new page and your entire screen turns an almost white shade of vanilla, unadorned by faux binder rings or ripped edges you see in other apps.

Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to reveal your artist’s palette, and swipe down again to hide it. Paper comes with an eraser and just one tool to draw with, a fountain pen that’s unlike any fountain pen I’ve used. The faster you move your finger, the thicker the line gets. For $1.99 each, you can purchase four other tools, denoted not by their conventional names but instead by utility: there’s Write (ballpoint), Sketch (pencil), Outline (marker), and Color (watercolor paintbrush). Each of the five tools has its own unpredictable personality worth mastering, which makes these instruments so much more interesting than conventional digital pens and pencils you can find in other apps. The FiftyThree team chose these five tools because they encompass the five most common scenarios they encounter when mapping out ideas and art on a daily basis.


Check out The Verge’s lengthly article for much more about the app and the team behind it.

For those who want to jump in and try it out, Paper for iPad is a free download on the App Store. [Direct Link]