Kryptonlogic.com

Home’s been with us as a concept for quite some time now. Since early 2007, actually. And here we are, in August 2008, and it’s still not out. Will it ever come out? Yes. Will it be out this year? If you’d have asked us that last week, we’d honestly have said “eh, probably not”, but now, the prognosis is a little more up-beat. Martijn Van der Meulen, a member of Home’s development team, has told IGN “it is a 100 percent guarantee that Home will be released by the end of this calendar year”. 100%? Dude seems pretty certain. There’s no wiggle room in 100%.

GC 2008: Home Update [IGN]

Tris, the free version of Tetris for the iPhone that we loved (’cause it was free!) is being pulled from the App Store. Apparently, The Tetris Company called up Apple and it no likey. Its creator, Noah Witherspoon says that while he thinks their copyright claim is thin—and would be thinner still if he called it “Trys”—he doesn’t really have the resources to fight it in court, so he’s removing it from the store on Wednesday. Download it while you can folks! Another depressing reminder why we need the iPhone app black market. [Two Finger Play]

The claim comes after Reuters discussed the upcoming Friday launch with an anonymous spokesman who isn’t attributed to any one company but is implied to work for Orange’s Polish branch.

“We have these fake queues at front of 20 stores around the country to drum up interest in the iPhone,” the representative states.

It’s not immediately evident what concerns might exist that would prompt a staged introduction, though the news organization speculates that the subscription cost of the iPhone might deter some customers.

Discovering the truth behind the claim, however, is difficult. Orange hasn’t published its Polish iPhone 3G prices or rates, even the day before launch, and at press time redirects all visitors from its main company website to the generic iPhone page with a placeholder image.

Some of that dissatisfaction may be evident in the plans for Orange’s Polish iPhone rival, Era. While its base plan at $43 per month is relatively affordable with 150 minutes of calls, 450 SMS messages, and 500MB of data, the next step up immediately boosts the price to $88 per month for 350 minutes, 1,050 messages, and 2GB of data; a premium customer would have to pay as much as $156 per month even while limited to 800 minutes of voice, 2,400 messages, and 5GB of Internet bandwidth.

Accordingly, Era’s stores — which don’t appear to be following in Orange’s footsteps — are reported as free of lineups as of Thursday evening.

Hubble, without a doubt the most spectacular digital camera in the solar system, has completed its 100,000th orbit. To celebrate, scientists pointed the telescope to NGC 2074, a spectacular star birthplace 170,000 light-years away, right next to the Tarantula nebula, where Ming of Mongo is probably building a weapon of mass destruction. Like always, the image—taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2—is breathtaking, especially the high resolution version:

Via CBS5:

CUPERTINO (CBS 5 / AP / BCN) ― A three-alarm fire burned Tuesday night at the Apple campus in Cupertino, according to the Santa Clara County Fire Department.

The fire department received a report of smoke at about 10 p.m. at 20605 Valley Green Drive, at a building known as Valley Green 6.

The fire was contained by 12:30 a.m. Wednesday. Some stubborn flames under an air conditioning unit burned for about an hour more.

No injuries were reported and the building was cleared, according to a fire dispatcher.  Officials said the fire was finally put out after about three hours.

The fire department said the fire scorched the roof and the second level at one of the six buildings on the company’s northern California campus in Cupertino. 

Senior Communications Dispatcher Rafael Salcedo says the fire was “not very big, but there is going to be a lot of smoke damage.”

Our prayers go out to everyone and hope no one got hurt in this. And hopefully all those Apple products are safe

Hey everyone, I’ll be away for a family event in Puerto Rico from Thursday, August 7th thru Monday, August 11th. I will have very limited access to the internet, so you won’t see many updates. I will be twittering from my iPhone, so stay tuned and subscribe to the Kryptonlogic.com twitter feed to see “what’s up”. Have a great weekend everyone!

-Jose Castillo

• Kryptonlogic.com re-designed with “You” in mind! #

NPD Group released the top leading music retailers for the first half of 2008. The list was based on purchases of CDs or digital music downloads.

1. iTunes
2. Wal-Mart (Walmart, Walmart.com, Walmart Music Downloads)
3. Best Buy (Best Buy, Bestbuy.com, Best Buy Digital Music Store)
4. Amazon (Amazon.com, AmazonMP3.com)
5. Target (Target and Target.com)

Apple’s iTunes remains number one amongst all retailers. Apple took the number one spot in April, overtaking Wal-Mart. 

Amazon, however, saw a rise in ranking from #5 to #4, which NPD attributes to both strong CD sales as well as Amazon’s introduction of their MP3 music store. The digital rights management (DRM) free solution provides iPod users a convenient and compatible alternative to Apple’s iTunes.

Via electronista

The going price for a Mac notebook is now over twice that of a typical Windows model, according to data collected by The NPD Group. While the average selling price of a Windows notebook has dropped from $877 in June 2006 to $700 today, the average cost of an Apple system has remained consistently above $1,500 and has only dropped $59 in the past two years. Differences in desktop pricing are more extreme still and have Macs selling for approximately $1,000 more than a common Windows desktop, which sells for about $550.

 

Specifications often vary sharply for these systems, with Apple often focusing on faster processors than some rivals in notebooks but at the expense of memory and hard drive space. Its insistence on using mobile processors and custom designs fordesktops, however, has created feature discrepancies where a Dell Inspiron 518 tower nearing the $700 mark features two more processor cores, three times as much memory, and twice the hard drive space of an $1,199 entry-level iMac despite both coming with near-equivalent LCDs.

While the average price for Windows-based systems is described in the NPD data as having largely flattened and unlikely to drop further in the near future, the disparity between these and Macs has only widened in the last few months, according to eWeek. Apple’s general policy of refusing to alter prices until its next hardware revision has reduced the value of its systems relative to Windows competitors.

Apple has until now had little pressure to follow suit. Gartner analysis shows the company’s US retail market share having climbed to 8.5 percent despite the price gap, and the computer builder has often traded on the uniqueness of its experience. Troubles with Windows Vista and a lack of marketing response from Microsoft until recently have also driven customers to Apple, many of whom are willing to pay more for a non-Windows experience.

This may soon have to change, eWeek says. Concerns both about sustaining sales momentum as well as a renewed Microsoft campaign are thought to be motivating factors behind Apple’s mystery product transition, which will instigate a major cut in gross margins from 35 percent to 30 percent. Such steep drops ’strongly suggest’ price cuts and may reveal that Apple is aware of a point at which its traditional approach will no longer work.

“If Apple is going to continue its market share gains, or simply maintain that 8.5 percent U.S. share, prices must go down and configurations bulk up,” eWeek notes. “The math is simply undeniable.”

Readers interested in new Apple Cinema Displays may have to wait just a bit longer. 

Apple has not significantly updated their Cinema Displays in years. Apple currently offers 20″, 23″ and 30″ monitors at $599, $899, and $1799, respectively. While Apple has introduced routineprice drops and minor spec improvements, the displays have remained largely unchanged since June 2004. 

MacRumors has heard that Apple is prepping for Cinema Display refreshes for the Macworld San Francisco 2009 conference which takes place between January 5th-9th, 2009 at the Moscone Center. The new Cinema Displays are expected to incorporate LED backlights to fulfill Steve Jobs’ promise that Apple would completely eliminate flourescent-backlit displays. The transition timeframe depended on “how fast the industry [could] transition to LED backlighting for larger displays.”

While LED displays as large as 30″ are commercially available, they still appear to be cost prohibitive with Samsung’s 30″ LED display priced at $4735. We’re uncertain how this price discrepancy with Apple’s current displays will be reconciled.