So it was that Apple changed the shape to something less slippery.

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Reitzes sees China as the key battleground for the larger form factor, not the USA, so how Apple and its rivals shape up outside America will be key to his idea that Apple stands to make a substanttial gain from a phablet.

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At the turn of the 21st century, Apple was in rough shape.

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Technology stocks were in the worst shape, with Apple off 1.4% as investors reacted to a major management shakeup Monday.

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Or, dare I say it, whatever glitch it was in the system that allowed Apple to patent a rectangular shape with rounded corners.

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My guess is that even if Apple went with a tall shape instead of the squares that most other speculative designers have been imagining, it might not go as extreme as the 16:9 proportion Simeonov has created.

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He searches for the origins of the domestic apple in Kazakhstan to tell an evolutionary tale which explains how every eating apple in the world is a direct descendent of apples in the Tien Shan forest (the bitter taste of apple pips is cyanide, their shape adapted to slip through the guts of a marauding bear unharmed).

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In fact this is the likely shape of the future of Apple.

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We've all known that iPad prototypes of every shape and size reside inside Apple's design lab, but few of us believed we'd ever see one on store shelves.

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Despite bearing a resemblance to Apple's iPod -- both in shape and size -- Sim said the company had purposefully avoided making the product too small.

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Nowadays that seems self-evident: Apple's iPod and Motorola's Razr succeed as much for their shape as for their innards.

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For example, Apple has been granted a patent on a mobile device which is rectangular in shape and has rounded corners.

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The shape of the handset market in late 2013 largely hinges on whether Apple finally makes its move to the budget segment or not.

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Soon after joining Apple in 1998 he was in a meeting trying to get its dreadful supply chain in shape.

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