Kelly Hodgkins at TUAW:

Apple is reportedly instituting mandatory weekend hours for some full-time employees and increasing the mandatory minimum hours for part-time employees. Under the new rumored rules, Friday will join Saturday and Sunday to become a weekend day. All full-time Family Room, Red Zone Specialists, Creatives and Geniuses may have to work two out of every three weekend days. Part-timers may have to work 24 hours a week, up from 16 hours. These new rules will supposedly go into effect on April 15.

The Apple stores have seen unbelievable growth, and the company has struggled to keep up. While these changes don’t sound like much fun, I suppose they shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Brooke Crothers at CNET:

There are a few troubling technical aspects of the new iPad that give me pause about the post-Jobs Apple.

I’ll skip the obligatory praise of the new iPad’s Retina display. And for those readers who want to call me a whiner, idiot, or Apple hater, go ahead, take your best shot.

Ok, I’m happy to oblige.

That said, the design decisions that led to this are a little worrisome and break – in my opinion – one of Steve Jobs’ cardinal rules: devices should get thinner and lighter, not bigger and heavier, as another review pointed out. Stay on this current trajectory and iPads become merely a better doorstop.

The iPhone 3G was thicker than the original iPhone. The iPod photo was thicker than the original 4th-generation iPod. The aluminum PowerBook G4 was thicker than the Titanium PowerBook

Steve Jobs was around for those products.

BOOM.

As brilliant as Apple is, it’s not primarily a chip company. That means it can make mistakes with silicon design. Neither Texas Instruments nor Intel is above reproach (and they’ve made their share of mistakes), why not Apple? Case in point, the A5X. Respected chip review site Anandtech found the chip lacking on some key performance metrics. And there are plenty of other examples of reviews that found that the new iPad isn’t faster than the iPad 2 in many applications. Another red flag, in my opinion.

iOS — and OS X, these days — hands off so many jobs to the GPU, that it is as important as the CPU in many ways. The new iPad may not be faster than the 2, but it’s just as silky smooth, with four times the pixels. I don’t see that as a problem.

Big battery. Too big? When the battery grows almost twofold but doesn’t offer better battery life, something is amiss. OK, so it’s necessary to drive the sophisticated display apparatus but, again, another red flag.

Know what sucks worse than the same battery life? Worse battery life. Is that a LTE 720p Galaxy Nexus with extended battery pack in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Oh, wait. I didn’t read far enough:

I’ll offer the disclaimer that the display could turn out to be so dazzling – as more applications tap in to all of those pixels – that the above bullet points are rendered immaterial. And, of course, the A5X chip may become more of a factor in those cases, too.

I’ll check back in a month or two.

After 430 words, I’m already tired of your argument, so don’t be offended if I don’t check back in.

Thomas Brand:

Mac OS X 10.6.9 might be right around the corner and with it comes rumored functionality to restore Calendar, Contact, and Bookmark syncing to Snow Leopard. Until that time comes use the instructions above to restore the synchronization capabilities lost on older Macs, and stubborn Mac users like myself, who were forced to upgrade to iCloud but refuse to install Mac OS X Lion.

Genius work here done by Brand.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. I try using it in apps like Mail all the time. I’d love to see it get implemented at the system level on iOS.

via The Loop

Poornima Gupta and Edwin Chan for Reuters:

Apple Inc and its main contract manufacturing Foxconn agreed to tackle violations of conditions among the 1.2 million workers assembling iPhones and iPads in a landmark decision that could change the way Western companies do business in China.

Good for Apple.