Apple says the next major version of its Mac operating system will roll out to consumers today. The news came tucked inside Apple's third-fiscal-quarter earnings release where Apple reported earnings of $9.32 per share on revenues of $35 billion. The company pulled the same announcement trick for OS X 10.7, announcing its next-day availability during a conference call last year.
Apple says it has resolved a problem that caused recently updated apps to crash when launched. The company said in a statement that only a small number of users were affected by the glitch. We had a temporary issue that began the other day with a server that generated DRM code for some apps being downloaded, Apple said. The issue has been rectified and Apple doesn't expect it to occur again. Users who experienced an issue launching an app caused by this server bug can delete the affected app and re-download it.
On June 11 Apple announced a couple of Thunderbolt adapters to provide Ethernet and FireWire connectivity to Thunderbolt-based systems, and issued a driver update for OS X to provide software support for these adapters; however, for a number of users the update resulted in the inability to boot. Apple has reissued a fixed version of this update, which should install properly without any issues.
Apple previewed iOS 6, introducing over 200 new features to the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, and released a beta version to iOS Developer Program members. iOS 6 will be available to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users this fall as a free software update.
Apple's iPad continues to lead the tablet market, while demand for Amazon's Kindle Fire has died down considerably, according to a ABI Research report. The tablet market in general grew 185 percent since last year, with the industry shipping 18.2 million devices in the first quarter of this year. Apple accounted for 11.8 million of those shipments, or 65 percent of the market. That's largely thanks to the launch of Apple's third-generation iPad and a price reduction on iPad 2 models.
Last week Apple pushed out a combined OS X Lion and security update. It’s still being pushed out through the Software Update service. While most third-party applications appear to be playing well with the update, a number of serious compatibility issues have been reported, including problems mounting external SATA drives and software RAID volumes.
Adding to a report from a popular Apple rumor blog, Bloomberg has also heard increased chatter of new MacBook Pros, saying they're coming next month. Apple's next generation of MacBook Pros will be unveiled at next month's Worldwide Developers Conference, according to a new report.
Accompanying yesterday's updates for OS X Lion client and server, Apple has released a number of other updates for its supported operating systems and OS X software. The first is a security update for Snow Leopard, which applies similar security updates for its components that were applied to Lion in the OS X 10.7.4 update. Apple has a knowledge base page on the security details of this update, but as of this writing the page is not loading from the Apple support site.
Apple yesterday released iOS 5.1.1 (build 9B206, 54.4 MB) for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. The new iOS contains a number of security fixes according to Apple knowledgebase article HT5278, including Safari vulnerabilities that allow maliciously crafted websites to be able to spoof the address in the location bar, execute cross-site scripting attacks and cause unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution.
Good news for Android users who've had to sit by the sidelines watching their iOS friends have all the Instagram fun. The company opened a sort of registration for Android users, giving them the chance to be "first in line" for the app made for Google's platform.