Mac Pro Now Unavailable for Purchase from European Apple Online Stores

As noted by Mr.Source Code, the Mac Pro is no longer available for purchase from Apple's European Online Stores.

In late January, Apple informed its European distributors that sales of the Mac Pro would cease as of March 1st due to new regulatory requirements that go into effect on that date. At the time, Apple told resellers that it would accept orders up until February 18, a deadline that appears to apply to general consumers as well.


The Mac Pro is no longer able to be sold in Europe because it is not compliant with Amendment 1 of regulation IEC 60950–1. According to information from Apple, the issue has to do with the Mac Pro's unprotected fan blades. Compliance with the new regulation would require fan guards and increased protection of the ports on the electrical system.

Apple's Mac Pro is now unavailable in European Union countries, EU candidate countries, and the European Free Trade Association countries of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland.

Though the Mac Pro has been discontinued in Europe, resellers are still able to sell remaining product after the March 1st deadline. Apple plans to continue to support existing Mac Pro machines and will supply replacement parts.

Apple has also announced plans to offer a redesigned Mac Pro in 2013, following a minor update in 2012.

China to Hit 246 Million iOS and Android Devices in February, Becoming World's Largest Market [iOS B

According to a new report from Flurry, China is now the world's largest smart device market, passing the United States just after the Chinese New Year. The country has the most active Android and iOS smartphones and tablets.

China began catching up to the U.S. late last year and as of January 2013, the two countries had approximately the same smart device user base, with 222 million in the United States and 221 million in China.


Based on the number of devices per country in the first half of February and growth trends, Flurry predicts that by the end of February 2013, China will outpace the U.S. by a wider margin with 246 million devices compared to 230 million in the United States. China is expected to retain that lead due to population numbers.

The U.S. and China have a huge number of active smart devices compared to other countries, with almost five times more devices than the U.K, which represents the third largest smart device market. As of January 2013, the U.K. had 43 million smart devices. South Korea and Japan are the fourth and fifth largest markets, with 30 and 29 million respectively.


China in particular has experienced rapid growth, adding 150 million devices during the course of 2012, compared to 55 million new devices in the U.S.

During Apple's quarterly results call this January, the company reported a 67 percent increase in revenue in China, amounting to $6.8 billion during the first fiscal quarter of 2013.

China has become an increasingly important market for Apple, as its second largest region. CEO Tim Cook spent part of January in the country, where he emphasized Apple's plans to expand in the country.

Firefox 19 for Mac Now Available for Download [Mac Blog]

Firefox 19 is slated to be launched on Tuesday, but as noted by The Next Web, the latest version is already available for download from Mozilla's servers. The U.S. version of Firefox 19 for the Mac can be found in the aforementioned folder by accessing the Mac directory and then selecting "en-US."

Most notably, this update includes a built-in PDF viewer, making former PDF viewing plug-ins obsolete. The viewer was built using HTML5 and will provide a quicker, more secure way to read PDFs in the browser.

Firefox 19, which comes more than a month after Firefox 18, also includes remote debugging, bug fixes, and CSS improvements. While the official release notes have yet to be posted, the beta notes are available:

-Built-in PDF viewer
-Canvas elements can export their content as an image blob using canvas.toBlob()
-Startup performance improvements (bugs 715402 and 756313)
-Debugger now supports pausing on exceptions and hiding non-enumerable properties
-Remote Web Console is available for connecting to Firefox on Android or Firefox OS (experimental, set devtools.debugger.remote-enabled to true)
-There is now a Browser Debugger available for add-on and browser developers (experimental, set devtools.chrome.enabled to true)
-Web Console CSS links now open in the Style Editor
-CSS @page is now supported
-CSS viewport-percentage length units implemented (vh, vw, vmin and vmax)
-CSS text-transform now supports full-width
-Starting Firefox with -private flag incorrectly claims you are not in Private Browsing mode (802274)

The official launch of Firefox 19 will take place tomorrow, on February 19. The updated version of the browser will be available for download from the Mozilla website.