Apple in fire

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Apple building suffers extensive damage in fire :Three-alarm blaze at Apple's Cupertino campus damages building
The fire broke out around 10 p.m. Tuesday in the area of a heating and air conditioning unit on the roof of the two-story Apple Six building at 20604 Valley Green Drive, Santa Clara County fire captain Daron Pisciotta said. Construction crews had been working on the unit when the fire started, he added.

No one was injured but smoke and water damage to the west wing of the 120,000-square-foot building was extensive. Firefighters controlled the blaze in about three hours but remained on the scene until 7 a.m.

Worry not, Apple lovers. The blaze that damaged a building on the tech giant's Cupertino campus Tuesday evening may have sparked quite a commotion, but apparently won't cause a shortage of iPods, iPhones or laptops.
No firefighters or Mac-savvy employees were injured in the blaze.
The fire, which started around 10 p.m., caused significant damage to a 120,000-square-foot building located at 20705 Valley Green Drive, according to Santa Clara County Fire Battalion Chief Kendall Pearson.
Pearson said the fire was limited to the attic and roof and was difficult to battle. Inside the gray, two-story building - which has two wings and is separated by a center atrium - firefighters found a typical office setting: workstations, cubicles, iMacs.
"My guess is for the near future, that one wing of the building will probably be unusable," Pearson said.
Early today, it was difficult to tell that the fire - which gained national media attention - had even occurred. Streams of sudsy water flowing into the street were the only remnants of the blaze. Fire crews had gone home by 7 a.m., and heavy Apple security prevented any closer look.
A few Apple employees, who were going to work across the street at many of the other Apple buildings, declined to speak publicly. News of the fire buzzed on Silicon Valley blogs, computer gadget Web sites and even garnered a brief mention on the "Today" show.
An Apple spokeswoman confirmed only that a fire had taken

"The cause appears to be accidental and related to construction," Pisciotta said

place and would not provide any more details, referring all calls to the Santa Clara County Fire Department.
Tuesday night, the fire created a stir for employees and passersby. Heavy smoke was visible in the area, and some onlookers watched firefighters battle the blaze and snapped pictures on their iPhones.
Investigators believe the fire was caused accidentally by construction work taking place to a rooftop air conditioning unit. Workers at the site reported the fire and Apple security evacuated the building before firefighters arrived to the scene.
It took about 50 firefighters more than 3 1/2 hours to get the blaze under control. Pearson said finding the fire in the attic spaces was difficult, even with the help of a thermal imaging camera.
"Our ability to get to the fire under the roof was problematic and it took some time," Pearson said. "There was not a lot of active, visible fire. There was quite a bit of smoke for quite some time."

Steve :60m iPhone Apps Sold

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Just one month since the store went live Apple CEO Steve Jobs have revealed an incredible 60 million applications - a mixture of both free and paid - have been downloaded so far producing in excess of $30m in revenue or around $1m per day.


Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Jobs declared "it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time" and admitted he had "never seen anything like this in my career for software." He also believes (quite rightly in my opinion) that while "phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that" that software is becoming the key factor.

The App Store has taken in about $1 million per day since it opened, according to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. He's also confirmed the existence of a so-called kill switch -- a feature embedded in the iPhone that gives Apple the ability to destroy an app in a user's phone remotely. Jobs described the inclusion of the kill switch as a safety measure in case a secretly malicious program ever got passed around.

iPhone and iPod touch users have downloaded over 60 million applications from the company's App Store in the 30 days since it opened, according to CEO Steve Jobs. Although a great deal of the applications in the App Store are free, users have purchased US$30 million in software since the store's opening, Jobs said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

"I don't think those numbers are shocking," Joshua Martin, a Yankee Group analyst, told MacNewsWorld. "It's a good sign for Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) , especially with [somewhere between] 6 and 8 million iPhones out there at this point, it's about 10 apps per phone."

While apparently popular with iPhone users, the App Store has received criticism for its handling of certain applications. Though Apple reserves the right to inspect and approve of any program before it's made available, the company has backtracked on a handful of applications and pulled them from the store after initially allowing them to be distributed. Those apps' developers say they've had a difficult time obtaining an explanation from Apple as to why the programs were pulled.

Jobs also confirmed the existence of a so-called kill switch a developer discovered embedded in the iPhone's code last week. The inclusion of the kill switch, Jobs told the Journal, is to give the company the ability to monitor and remove software from the device in the event that malicious software makes its way onto the iPhone.