Apple pays $21M for clock design

Apple shells out many millions of dollars to license the iconic Swiss clock-face design it apparently adapted for use in iOS 6, says a news agency report.

Apple's iOS 6 clock and an official SBB watch from Mondaine.

Quality Swiss-made timepieces don't come cheap. Just ask Apple.
The company shelled out a $21 million "lump sum" to license a clock-face design from the Swiss Federal Railway service, French news agency AFP reported, citing a Swiss paper.
In September, the railway service, also known as SBB, objected to the clock-face design in iOS 6, saying it too closely resembled a trademarked design created in 1944 by SBB employee Hans Hilfiker and used in train stations throughout Switzerland.
Hilfiker's design has been honored by both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the London Design Museum and has become a symbol of Swiss punctuality, according to the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs' swissworld site. It's also licensed to Mondaine, a Swiss watch manufacturer.
SBB reached a licensing agreement with Apple last month, but at the time, an SBB representative said the amount of the licensing fee and other details of the deal would remain confidential.
source:CNET

Apple could transform headphones into loudspeakers

In a new patent filing, the company sketches out headphones that can double as external speakers.

Apple has cooked up a design for headphones that can also serve as external loudspeakers.
A patent filed today with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office describes a "dual-mode headphone" that could deliver sound whether you wear them around your ears or place them on a surface, according to Patently Apple.
The headphones would include circuitry to detect their position. They'd sense when they're around or near your ears so that you're not blown away by the sound.
A built-in amplifier would pipe up the audio to deliver higher output when the headphones are acting as external speakers. In that mode, audio ports could also transmit the sound away from the surface so that it better fills up a room.
The user would also be able to manually change the headphones between the two modes.

The patent was originally filed last year by its sole inventor Edward Hyatt, Patently Apple added.

The invention sounds like a neat idea, sparing people from having to carry around both headsets and external speakers. But since it's just in the patent stage, there's no way of knowing when or if it may come to fruition.

Google Matches Apple With 700,000 Mobile Apps

     On Sept. 12, during its iPhone 5 event in San Francisco, Apple announced one of those big, round numbers it’s so fond of trotting out during new product showcases: 700,000 apps available for download on the iTunes App Store.
That’s an impressive number, and one Apple stressed again at its iPad mini event last week, pointing out the strengths of its mobile device ecosystem over others. But that metric is a bit less potent today, now that it’s been matched by Apple’s archrival in the mobile OS space.
There are now 700,000 apps available for download on Google’s Android operating system. That’s 25,000 more than it offered just a month ago, and enough to tie Apple for bragging rights on “world’s biggest app ecosystem.” So, one more point of differentiation gone between the two fiercest competitors in the mobile device space, and an ever-widening crevasse separating them from stragglers like Research In Motion, Microsoft and Nokia.