iTunes

According to numerous European readers, the lowest App Store price tier has just changed from €0.79 to €0.89 (to put that in rough perspective, imagine the U.S. base price going from $0.99 to $1.12). Whether that reflects updated exchange rates or other factors of doing business in Europe, including taxes and other charges, is unknown at this time.

If you're seeing higher prices in your local App Store, let us know what they are, and what the difference is.

UPDATE: Federico Viticci of MacStories has confirmed price changes in 15 countries, and a switch to local currencies in 8.

Buried among the numbers at yesterday's iPad and Mac event, Tim Cook announced a new version of iBooks with a few new features. From the beginning I'd heard the iPad mini was about removing weight and cost as barriers of entry to iPad sales, and about taking the ebook fight to Amazon and, as Ryan Block of GDGT aptly terms them, their Kindle line of consumer content appliances. Yet the event came and went without Apple matching the Kindle on pricing, or challenging Amazon on ebooks. Why?

I've argued for a while that iTunes was the tip of Apple's sword. Being able to take payments and sell content in more countries than anyone else let them push the App Store farther, faster than any of their competition. Now, years later, no one else is even coming close, and when viewed as an ecosystem play, there still isn't any viable competition. To make matters worse, Apple's model allows them to sell the iPad (and soon, the iPad mini in 90+ countries. And, because they make their money off hardware, they can even sell it where there's still no or limited iTunes support. That lets them seed the market so hardware is in hand when iTunes eventually, and inevitably follows.

By contrast, Amazon's content appliance strategy with its heavily discounted hardware doesn't allow them to sell the Kindle Fire line in any country without an Amazon content store to subsidize it. They literally can't afford to. That means no seeding, and since Amazon has been nowhere nearly as successful as Apple in pushing their content store internationally, very limited distribution.

Here's why that matters...

Since the release of iOS 6, our forums and tip lines have been buzzing with issues relating specifically to iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match. Issues seem to range from iTunes Match expiration notices, sync issues with ringtones and text tones via iTunes, and slow performance when it comes to streaming music.

Microsoft has launched a new music service which it hopes will offer significant competition to Apple’s hugely successful iTunes service. The new Microsoft music offering will be called Xbox Music and will debut on its own Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 devices initially but will also be rolled out for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch a well as certain Android devices too; very soon afterwards.

With iOS 6, Apple has totally changed the way search results appear in the on-device App Store app. With the old App Store search, five results were immediately visible in a list view, and you could vertically scroll or flick quickly through large amounts more. With the new iOS 6 App Store search, only one result is visible at a time, and you whether you scroll or flick, you only ever get one result more at a time. And that's not good.

iOS 6 was the first full iOS update offered over-the-air (OTA) using Apple's bit-differential, update-in-place iCloud system. That should make for faster, more convenient updates for current devices, and easier migrations to new devices. But the thing is, when pushing around billions of bits, things can and will go wrong. Storage has errors, power and connectivity fails at the worst times possible, and files get corrupted.

We've gotten reports from a few readers who are having trouble with backups at the moment, so it's worth going over the key strategy again -- local, online, and redundant.

Apple has update the terms and conditions of iTunes and the App Store tonight, and it seems to have caused a recursive bug for some users -- the TOC pops up again and again, in an infinite loop, and you just can't get past it.

Only hours following Apple CEO Tim Cook's open letter to customers regarding Maps on iOS 6, Apple has added a featured box in the App store for users to "find apps for your iPhone" that takes you to a section devoted to maps apps.