Apple Latest News and Developments

In a conversation with TV Tokyo, a Foxconn recruiter mentions that the company is hiring more workers right now to prep for the iPhone 5 launch. “It seems like it will go on sale around June,” he said. The manufacturing giant is apparently looking to add 18,000 souls to its assembly lines to build something.

The interview was seemingly conducted at a distance with the camera filming from a good distance away. There’s a solid chance that the recruiter didn’t even know he was being interviewed nor that he has official information. It should also be noted that recruiters will generally say anything to get people in the door. Come build the iPhone 5, he could say knowing full well that this batch of inexperienced workers will be stuck making Cisco routers instead.

A hacker has rejigged Apple's voice-activated personal assistant Siri to control a TV, with some interesting results.

The hacker, Tood Treece has posted a short blog and a video of Siri in action, which can change channels and switch the TV off with just voice commands. However, some additional hardware has been introduced for the system to make it work.

Siri responds to questions such as, "Siri, can you change the channel to the History channel?" and it responds with information about what's playing on that channel and asks the user to confirm the switch.

Apple has formally announced its upcoming media event after months of rumors and speculation. The event will take place on Tuesday, October 4 at 10am Pacific Daylight Time on Apple's campus in Cupertino—just as the latest rumors predicted—and will be led by Apple's new CEO Tim Cook.

Apple's invitation graphics (shown above) include four iOS app icons (Calendar, Clock, Maps, and Phone) along with the quote "Let's talk iPhone." Apple doesn't usually get this specific when sending out its invitations, but apparently it's trying a new, more direct approach this time around. (As an aside, the icon choices are quite clever. The calendar says October 4, clock says 10:00, map points to Apple's campus, and the phone icon shows one phone call.)

Apple continues to sell lots of its iPad tablets but the company is now reportedly cutting the number of orders made to companies that make the parts for the device. Bloomberg reports that according to a new note from JPMorgan Chase, Apple has cut the fourth quarter numbers to several of the iPad's supply chain vendors by as much as 25 percent. The note did not give a reason for such a drastic reduction in the parts orders.

The report claims that such a cut could affect the unit sales of vendors such as Hon Hai Precision Industry. However, JPMorgan U.S. analyst Mark Moskowitz believes that even with this cut, he expects Apple to stick to its previous iPad units sales projections. The report currently has Apple shipping between 10.9 million to 12 million units of the iPad in the third and fourth quarters of 2011. Apple has yet to comment on this new report.