MacShrine

Not much is known except it’s going to be released some time in May, come in Black, White, Red, Lime, Pink, and Dark Blue and retail for $50 for the 1GB model. We can also safely assume it’s shaped like a small stone.

MacRumors report that Apple is working on an advanced version of iWeb Pro (if it appears it won’t have ‘i’ in it’s name). Seems plausible as iWeb is the only iLife component that doesn’t have a “Pro” counterpart.

“iWeb Pro” is said to offer an easy to use web authoring interface for small to mid sized companies. While the current version of iWeb is more of a complementary tool to .Mac, “iWeb Pro” is said to be a complete stand alone product. That said, tight integration with Apples iLife suite remain an important feature, allowing easy publishing of multimedia content.

We got hacked and the site was turned into a bank phishing scam. Fear not, we’re back! This is the 5th time we’ve been hacked, our password is now 64 characters long! Why us, oh, why us.

Apple released their second quarter 2007 financial results today. Apple posted revenue of $5.26 billion and net quarterly profit of $770 million, or $.87 per diluted share. This compares to revenue of $4.36 billion and net profit of $410 million in the year-ago quarter (Q2 2006). Apple shipped 1,517,000 Macs and 10,549,000 iPods this quarter, representing a 36% increase in growth in Macs and 24% increase in iPods.

“The Mac is clearly gaining market share, with sales growing 36 percent — more than three times the industry growth rate,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re very excited about the upcoming launch of iPhone in late June, and are also hard at work on some other amazing new products in our pipeline.”

Following last weeks leak at the French iTunes Store, Apple today officially released their new iQuiz game for the iPod.

Get your trivia fix with iQuiz, the fast-paced entertainment trivia game designed in a portable format. Put your pop culture knowledge to the test with questions about music, movies and TV shows.”

Hello everyone, welcome back! We trust you had an enjoyable Easter. We just did some small changes to the site, it’s been the same for practically a year! There is a new slogan, new option on the side called “Random News Story” which does as it says - takes you to a random story, a new category on the side called “Advertising” - because we need the money; and another new category called “Random Stuff” at the bottom which has random MacShrine related stuff which can be quite interesting.

Timbland bumps to the top of the Billboard and iTunes Chart with “Give It To Me”. Avril also jumps up to number 3 with the Dr. Luke produced “Girlfriend” and Gwen Stefani enters her “Sweet Escape” at number 10.

United States Top 10:

1. Give It to Me - Timbaland (Ft. Justin Timberlake & Nelly Furtado)
2. I Tried - Bone Thugs-N-Harmony
3. Girlfriend - Avril Lavigne
4. Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin’) - T-Pain (Ft. Yung Joc)
5. Glamorous - Fergie
6. Beautiful Liar - Beyoncé & Shakira
7. Before He Cheats - Carrie Underwood
8. What I’ve Done - Linkin Park
9. Don’t Matter - Akon
10. The Sweet Escape - Gwen Stefani

AppleInsider claims that Target stores will begin carrying Apple’s new Apple TV at retail locations by the end of the month. Target will reportedly mimic Apple Stores with a full demonstration unit connected to a widescreen HDTV. No further details on the size of the launch are available, but Target already offers the Apple TV for sale on their online store.

French iTunes Store users have spotted a new Apple game for the iPod. It basically sounds like a rehash of the current music quiz game but now with fancy graphics. It’s not out on any other stores yet.

“Test your entertainment knowledge with iQuiz, a timed question-and-answer game for your iPod,” it reads. “Test your knowledge of the songs, artists and albums present on your iPod and take on the challenges of questions about movies, music and television. Create your own personalized Trivia Packs and play those created by others.”

Update: The game has now been removed from the French iTunes Store. Seems it was a mistake!

AppleInsider are repoting that American Technology analyst Shaw Wu believes that Apple and AT&T are considering offering a $50-$150 rebate or subsidy on the upcoming Apple iPhone. We doubt this is true as a rebate will devalue the iPhone in the eyes of the consumer.

“We are hearing rebates of $50-150 that will be offered by AT&T to lower the price points for iPhone (currently $499 for 4 GB and $599 for 8 GB) and to entice customers to sign longer term voice and data contracts,” the analyst wrote. “From AT&T’s perspective, a rebate is a great marketing tool and small sacrifice to make to entice a customer to sign up for 2-year voice and data cell phone plans that cost about $75-100 per month (before taxes and fees), meaning $1800-2400 in ‘guaranteed’ bi-annual revenue.”

Apple’s WWDC Pages have been updated with a block set aside for the WWDC Keynote address. The 2007 Worldwide Developers Conference Keynote will take place on Monday morning, June 11th 2007 and start at 9am Pacific. According to the published schedule, the keynote is blocked off for a lengthy 3 hours (9am-12pm). Bring it on!

Update: Oh well, Apple has now changed it to 9am-10.30am so just 1.5 hours. We guess we’ll get an hour about the iPhone *yawn* and just 30 minutes on Leopard. Oh Apple, oh Apple.

Urban Myth dictates that Friday 13th is a very unlucky day. This year, MacZOT.com proves it once and for all. Today, for 24 hours beginning at 12:00 am PST, MacZOT will offer 13 Mac applications for a total price of $13.00. The catch, “Most people who hear about this will be unlucky (proof of the myth) because the offer will only be good for a total of thirteen minutes of the entire day,” says founder, Brian Ball. The few who are able to purchase the bundle will likely refute the myth, since getting a bundle of Mac software valued at over $300 is certainly not unlucky.

Apple today released the following statement regarding delaying the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard from WWDC this June to October.

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

Today the MacShrine team are taking their Easter breaks. No new news will be posted until the 20th April when we return. Hope you all have a happy Easter and we’ll await your return in 2 weeks!

Update: We’re back to normal now!

Apple today announced that EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes Store worldwide in May. DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for $0.30 a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today - 128kbps AAC encoding with DRM - at the same price of $0.99 per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.