Apple stores: Here's how desperately cities want

According to a report, Apple gets hugely preferential leases just to open its stores in certain cities and locations. Why is anyone surprised?

It seems that Apple is retail's Botox.

The minute an Apple store appears in a shopping mall -- or, say, a vast famous New York railway station -- somehow the area becomes prettier and more devastatingly young.

The Next Web reports that Apple is continually offered ludicrously favorable incentives just to be the next shiny dance partner for a city or a shopping mall.

Apparently, authorities in Grand Central Terminal and Salt Lake City didn't bother with annoying complexities as some (or any) rent or share of profit in order to encourage Cupertino to erect a little more glass, white and silver in their vicinities.

ABC News suggests that the Utah city offered 5 years free rent.

This follows from a New York Post report that Apple is only paying $60 per square foot at its new store in Grand Central Station -- as opposed to a restaurant that has to pay $200. Apple isn't even reportedly required to share any of its profits, as are almost all other stores there.

Read Full Story...

iPhone Screen Size May Increase to at Least 4 Inches

Apple is looking to increase the iPhone’s screen size from 3.5 inches to at least 4 inches, according to a Wall Street Journal report, a move that’s presumably being made because of stiff Android competition.

This is not the first suggestion Apple will put a bigger screen on the iPhone this year. In fact, such speculation has been rumored for some time, yet Apple has consistently kept the iPhone display at 3.5 inches for every iteration of the device since its launch in 2007.

As the Apple hype machine is put in motion with just a few weeks until the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, talk about what the new iPhone will bring is intensifying. Since Apple didn’t do any radical changes to the iPhone design last year, a revamped look is expected to come this year.

The Wall Street Journal report does not give any specifics on how big the screen of the new iPhone would be, saying it would measure “at least 4 inches diagonally,” which indeed would be bigger than the current 3.5-inch display. But if it’s any indication, an earlier report from Reuters put forward the more precise diagonal measurement of 4.6 inches.

Read Full Story.... 

Apple adding photo sharing and social features to iCloud, report says

Apple will soon unveil an update to its iCloud storage service that will add photo sharing and social features, the Wall Street Journal reports.

While Dropbox, Box, Microsoft, and Google have dominated the cloud storage conversation in recent months, Apple has mostly stayed out of comparisons because it offers the dumbest (maybe “easiest” is the right word) cloud storage. It syncs your media across all iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), Macs, and PCs, but there is no way to manage what exactly goes where.

But with new functionality that is Apple is likely to announce at its.....

 Read Full Story....