Apple

According to a report from Business Insider, Apple Inc has more money than the US government. The media portal said that "the world's largest tech company has more cash than the world's largest sovereign government."

Apple recently announced its financial results for the third quarter that revealed the company had $76.2 billion (£46.8bn) in cash and marketable securities at the end of last month.

A new survey by PriceGrabber revealed that 1/3 of American consumers want to buy an iPhone 5.

"Our survey data confirms the strong following Apple has built around its iPhone, with more than one-third of consumers planning to upgrade to the latest model only a little over a year following the release of the iPhone 4," said Graham Jones, general manager of PriceGrabber.

A top HTC executive stated this week that the company will still appeal against a preliminary decision by the International Trade Commission in a case brought by Apple.

Winston Yung, a Chief Financial Officer at HTC, said Wednesday that the company has not yet considered a settlement in the case, though he would not rule out any possibilities.

"We are going to appeal. We are confident that we have a strong case," said Yung.

On July 15, the International Trade Commission (ITC) made a preliminary ruling that HTC infringed on two of Apple's patents.

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Books and Kobo have removed their links to web-based stores from the applications for the iPhones and iPads. In fact, Google Books has removed the whole application itself.

The booksellers removed their links in line with an edict issued earlier this year by Apple that demands all apps offering content for sale or subscription to do so through the App Store, and not through external links to the seller's web store. Moreover, following its usual money making policy Apple require a 30% commission from all such sales.

Samsung decided not just to tease but to irritate Apple with the launch of a precise clone of the Cupertino’s Smart Cover for iPads. For its Galaxy Tab 10.1 the South Korean firm started selling absolutely similar covers with even similar name “Smart Case.”

On Thursday a fourth-quarter report will be posted by Microsoft. The company will report a 9% increase in its profit while investors are not satisfied as they believe the Redmond company will never again recapture its old growth rates.

Microsoft’s shares have grown by 10% over the past month but they still remain in the mid-$20 range, a level they have circled since 1998, adjusted for splits.

China Telecom Corp Ltd will offer its customers the Apple iPhone by the end of the current year, report the sources familiar with the matter.

The introduction of the Jesus Phone is expected to help China Telecom, which is the smallest operator in China, attract more 3G users.

"The reason telecom operators are fighting for the iPhone business is because everybody is trying to grab as many 3G users as possible," said Jane Wang, an analyst at UK-based research firm Ovum. "The only way to keep costs down is to build up such a user base."

Some sources report that Apple will release its new series of MacBook Air laptops on the base of Sandy Bridge chips. The report says that Apple will enable a keyboard highlight again.

Apart from Thunderbolt interface the laptops will reportedly feature NAND micro chips with Toggle DDR 2.0 interface.

AppleInsider.com reports that the Cupertino company is developing four models of MacBook Air: two 13.3” models and two 11.6” models.

This week Toshiba introduced its Thrive tablet that comes with a spacious 10.1-inch touch-screen display and version 3.1 of the Google Android (Honeycomb) operating system. Besides, the device features a dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, and 1GB of RAM.

A tablet that is aimed to compete Apple and Samsung in the market comes with 1280x800 screen resolution, a rear-facing 5.0 mega-pixel camera, a front-facing 2.0 mega-pixel camera for video chat, SWYPE input, USB and HDMI ports, integrated GPS, memory expansion via microSD. Moreover, the tablet will support Adobe Flash.

Apple Inc has cut its rates for iAd mobile advertising by as much as 70%. An industry source reported that some major clients of the company left it for competing ad platforms.

Thus, Citigroup and JC Penney who paid $1 million and more to order campaigns on iAd at the platform launch, no longer wish to advertise there, reported Bloomberg. So, now Apple is offering campaigns for as little as $300,000.

Apple plans to introduce its next generation tablet computer iPad 2 with an HD screen. FBR Capital Markets analyst Craig Berger said that the new model will come under the name iPad 2 Plus.

In an investor’s note Berger cited "indications from the supply chain," saying that Apple sent out requests for quotes to different suppliers for the new tablet. The analyst noted that the iPad 2 Plus will come by the end of the year.

A bug was disclosed in Apple’s software that could be exploited by criminals to gain control over iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices.

On Wednesday the website www.jailbreakme.com released code that Apple customers can use to modify the iOS operating system through jaibreaking. Many Apple customers jailbreak their devices so that they could download and run applications that are not approved by Apple or use iPhone phones on networks of carriers that are not approved by Apple.

According to some speculation in Japan's Macotakara site Apple’s revised MacBook Air will be equipped with very fast and very small new flash memory chips from Toshiba. The story in the Japanese website reports that Apple is set to use flash built on a 19nm process and transferring data at 400Mbit/s using the Toggle DDR2.0 interface.

As of today only Toshiba manufactures 19nm NAND, the smallest process in the world, with a 64Gbit, 2-bit multi-level cell (MLC) chip announced in April. This chip uses the Toggle DDR2.0 interface.

Apple suffered a cyber attack on its servers resulting in the data breach. Hackers attacked the Cupertino company in the frame of their “Antisecurity” program. The attack is attributed to the hackers of Anonymous and retired LulzSec groups.

A new unknown group AntiSec alleges it has discovered a number of flaws on the website of Apple exploiting which leads to get access to the database of user names and passwords of the iPhone, iPad and iTunes users.

An expert Paul Hochman noted at a conference Forward with Ford 2011 that the closed ecosystem that brought billions of dollars to Apple would kill the company after all, reports CNET.

The analyst believes that Apple made a big mistake by having chosen a closed system because it would lead the company to the collapse.