Gizmodo:

Giz reader Manoj took his iPhone to the Genius Bar to have it looked at because it was dropping calls left and right, and AT&T swore stuff was totally kosher on their end, so he thought something was wrong with his phone. After doing a stat dump, the Genius showed Manoj that his iPhone had actually dropped 22 percent of calls.

The jawdropper: The Genius told Manoj that’s actually excellent compared to most people in the New York area, where a 30 percent dropped call rate is the average. There was nothing Apple could do for Manoj. His phone was totally fine. Which means there’s nothing Apple can do for rest of us.

Damn.

Wired:

It doesn’t exactly rival Moore’s Law, but Apple has doubled the number of iPhone app downloads in about half the time it took to reach 1 billion. But unlike the fanfare which attended the 1 billion mark, we don’t know who downloaded the 2 billionth app or what it was — and this time nobody wins anything.

Apple announced Monday in a brief press release that it the 2 billionth iPhone app had been downloaded. It didn’t say when, exactly, but it’s a little more than five months since the 1 billionth was retrieved from the iTunes Store cloud. And that was nine months after what is now the largest application store in the world first opened its virtual doors.

On that occasion, April 24, we learned that 13-year-old Connor Mulcahey of Weston, Connecticut, had downloaded the billionth application, earning him tens of thousands of dollars in Apple hardware and software and the developer of the app, Bump Technology, a guaranteed spot in the next edition of Trivial Pursuit.

We asked Apple about the who’s and what’s of the 2 billionth transaction, but they replied that they were not going beyond the release. So all we know is that they’ve reached another milestone, and that download activity continues to grow. A lot. “The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering 2 billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, in the four-paragraph statement.

BusinessWeek:

But now, Jobs thinks the time is right to report on what Apple has accomplished. The company has finished a multiyear data-mining project to fully understand its environmental impact on the planet and has published data that may stir up controversy. Apple takes issue with studies that hand accolades to rivals such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard for cutting emissions at their facilities. Apple’s research suggests that those emissions make up only a small slice of a company’s larger environmental impact—a mere 3% in Apple’s case. Far more of the carbon footprint, he says—53%—is generated by Apple’s products. “Everyone focuses on whether you have motion detectors in the conference room” so the lights will go off when it’s unattended, says Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook. “But making products cleaner involves real engineering. It’s about innovating, and it’s hard work.”

I think it’s a great approach.

Mashable:

Still, the agreement has had its benefits (larger margins, more creative freedom, better coordination, less carriers to deal with), and if Apple can find a long-term monetary justification for extending the agreement with AT&T, it will. However, as it stands today, AT&T remains the iPhone’s biggest barrier to mass adoption, and Apple knows it. So does AT&T.

That’s why Friday’s MMS launch is so important. It may very well be AT&T’s last chance to prove to Apple that it deserves to renew its extremely lucrative exclusivity contract. If AT&T slows or crashes during the influx of MMS, AT&T will have dug itself into an even deeper perception hole. It won’t have another shot to prove that it can handle the stress that more iPhones will bring, and Apple would likely bow to customer pressure and strike deals with other carriers.

However, if AT&T can keep afloat, despite millions of iPhone users sending MMS messages at once because of the novelty, it will have demonstrated that its recent upgrades were successful and that it could very well support the iPhone’s growth into the future. It will also be on the path to reconciliation with its many less-than-thrilled customers.

I totally agree. If AT&T botches the MMS rollout today, there are going to be even more unhappy iPhone customers.

At the end of the day, Apple needs their customers to be happy far more than they need their service partners to be happy.

AT&T, via Facebook:

We know you’ve been eager for this service so we wanted to offer a quick update on the launch plans for MMS on Friday, Sept. 25. Late morning, Pacific Time, on Friday, the new carrier settings update enabling MMS should be live and ready to download through iTunes. We’ll provide the steps and all of the details you need right here at that time.