(All Things D)
Oh, the fun of digging through Apple's 10-K financial filing. All Things D's John Paczkowski points out that Cupertino has earmarked $7.1 billion for "nonretail capital expenditures," and speculates that it's to build out iCloud's network infrastructure. The key reason? iCloud's underlying networking is rumored to currently be built on the back of technologies from Microsoft and Amazon. There's keeping your enemies close, then there's keeping your enemies too close.
(Business Insder)
Speaking of rivalries, it seems that the top Apple brass is all for . According to analyst Ben Reitzes, who met with Messrs. Cook and Oppenheimer, the executives from Cupertino are sanguine about the Kindle Fire's prospects, since it further fragments Android. And, as we all know from Godzilla films, it's way more fun to stomp on many itty bitty buildings tablet platforms.
(DigiTimes)
The DigiTimes (remember, when you want sarcasm, turn to new SarcasmaQuotes™--SarcasmaQuotes: The name in sarcasm!) reports that Apple plans to "overhaul" all of its products lines in 2012.
- Though it's taken a couple of years, this action-adventure game that was first released for the PS3, Xbox 360, and Windows is finally available for the Mac, thanks to Feral Interactive. You play Batman as he battles the Joker, Bane, Scarecrow, and other villains at Arkham Asylum. $40.
- Devontechnologies has updated two of its apps and released one new one. First for the updates: Version 3.1 of Devonagent (the company's Internet search tool) gets a revamped See Also pane, a new contextual menu item for archiving online images, some new "search sets" (which group results from multiple search engines), and better tools for scanning online multimedia and video. The three editions of Devonthink (Pro Office, Pro, and Personal) get a variety of tweaks, from simpler search interfaces to integration with EndNote X4; Devonthink Pro irons out a few problems working with buggy RSS feeds, OmniOutliner, OS X's PDFKit framework, and AppleScript Editor. Finally, there's the new app: Grid is a freeware utility that helps you move, resize, and align windows from the keyboard.