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Weekend news roundup, no talkcast this week
It's a quiet weekend here at TUAW HQ, as most of our US-based team is enjoying a well-deserved break over the Memorial Day holiday weekend. Since everyone's drinking mojitos by the pool, we're not doing a talkcast tonight (sorry!), but you can grab last week's show (featuring host Christina "C-Mac" Warren and the rest of the usual suspects) direct from Talkshoe or subscribe in iTunes.Here's a quick update on some of the stories making Mac and iPhone news this weekend: Daring Fireball's John Gruber weighs in on the upcoming iPhone refresh rumors, citing informed sources who tell him that the CPU and RAM upgrades for the next-generation handheld will deliver impressive performance boosts, making this year's model up to twice as fast as the iPhone 3G. He also backs up the expected addition of a magnetometer and a video-capable improved camera (alongside the long-rumored video editing tools on the phone). You can see a thorough roundup of the state of iPhone rumors over at Wired's Gadget Lab. Perhaps the upcoming iPhone refresh is behind the expected ramp-up in distributed support hiring noted earlier this week. Kwame Jones discovered a preliminary interface for renting and purchasing movies & TV shows on the iPhone and iPod touch, which should be loads of fun even though it will be limited to WiFi connections. MDN and other sites have noted a North Carolina effort to get Apple to build a major server farm in the Tarheel State, with up to $46 million USD in tax incentives available if the company reaches a $1B investment threshold in nine years. Seems a shame that lawmakers declared the scuppernong grape as the official state fruit a few years ago, doesn't it. Glenn Fleischman from TidBITS pointed out that the UVA freshman computing survey is out again, showing more impressive gains for the Mac platform year-over-year. UC Davis shows a tripling of share for the Mac over the past three years. In a very quick turnaround, Cartier sued Apple for two iPhone apps that it claimed ripped off its products -- and then promptly withdrew the action. Nicely done. The First Ascent team, videoblogging their way up Mount Everest using solar power and MacBook Pro laptops, reached the summit earlier this week. Congratulations! The long-admired Windows photo app ACDsee finally released a Mac beta this week; it's worth a look. More photos and inside views from the Zurich Apple Store opening via ifoAppleStore. Got something that's too good not to share? Give us a tip!
