Apple finally complies with latest UK ruling, apologizes for snarky letter, runs correct Samsung/Apple judgement

After posting a snarky “Apple products are cool” apology last week, Apple was told to remove the ad, apologize and follow the original court order. This morning, Apple’s UK website now is in full compliance including larger 14 point font.  Apple is also running ads in UK papers with the same copy.

If you haven’t been following, Apple lost a bid to remove Samsung Galaxy Tabs from the UK  based on trademarked design patents. Because of the negative publicity that Samsung received as a result of the accusations and trial, the court ordered that Apple clarify the situation both online and in newspapers.

Apple's New A6X iPad Chip Adopts PowerVR SGX 554MP4 Graphics

AnandTech reports on an examination of the A6X chip found in the fourth-generation iPad. The work, performed by Kishonti Informatics, reveals that Apple has adopted Imagination Technologies' quad-core PowerVR SGX 554MP4 graphics in the new chip.

The A6X retains the 128-bit wide memory interface of the A5X (and it keeps the memory controller interface adjacent to the GPU cores and not the CPU cores as is the case in the A5/A6). It also integrates two of Apple's new Swift cores running at up to 1.4GHz (a slight increase from the 1.3GHz cores in the iPhone 5's A6). The big news today is what happens on the GPU side. A quick look at the GLBenchmark results for the new iPad 4 tells us all we need to know. The A6X moves to a newer GPU core: the PowerVR SGX 554.

Unsurprisingly, the SGX 554MP4 represents a significant improvement over the quad-core SGX 543MP4 used in the A5X chip of the third-generation iPad and the triple-core SGX 543MP3 used in the A6 chip of the iPhone 5. 


A full suite of graphics benchmarks reveals improvements of 15-100% compared to the third-generation iPad, with frame rates in the Egypt HD benchmark jumping from 25 frames per second (fps) on the third-generation iPad to nearly 52 fps on the fourth-generation iPad.

Ultimately it looks like the A6X is the SoC that the iPad needed to really deliver good gaming performance at its native resolution. I would not be surprised to see more game developers default to 2048 x 1536 on the new iPad rather than picking a lower resolution and enabling anti-aliasing. The bar has been set for this generation and we've seen what ARM's latest GPU can do, now the question is whether or not NVIDIA will finally be able to challenge Imagination Technologies when it releases Wayne/Tegra 4 next year.

The A6X is one of several enhancements to the fourth-generation iPad, including a new FaceTime HD camera and Apple's new Lightning connector, although the device appears nearly identical to its predecessor from the outside.

iTunes Store Now Accepting Donations for Superstorm Sandy Relief

Apple has launched a new page on its iTunes Store allowing users to easily donate money to the American Red Cross toward Superstorm Sandy relief efforts. The donation page, which is accessible through the desktop iTunes Store as well as the iTunes and App Store apps on iOS, permits donations at the $5, $10, $25, $50, $100, and $200 levels.


Apple will transfer 100% of each donation directly to the American Red Cross, allowing users to have their donations seamlessly billed to their existing iTunes Store accounts. With Apple currently holding over 400 million iTunes Store accounts with credit cards attached, the company has a very significant customer base that can take advantage of the donation program.

Apple has conducted several similar campaigns in the past, most recently in March 2011 following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami and in January 2010 following the Haitian earthquakes.

Update: Apple has now added a link to the iTunes Store donation page on the main apple.com page.