According to Mercedes-Benz, the German auto manufacturer has recently announced the closure of Maybach.

Daimler’s upmarket division that was resurrected in 2002 to compete against BMW’s Rolls-Royce and VW’s Bentley subsidiaries, failed to meet sales expectations with its 57 and 62 core models. The decision was also facilitated by the breaking down of the deal with Aston Martin to aid in the development in future Maybachs. The Maybach brand never took off in the way Mercedes hoped and sales never rose anywhere near four figures.

Chief Executive Dieter Zetsche made the announcement on Saturday during an interview with a German newspaper in which he said that he had lost patience with Maybach and with no more models being developed, stocks are expected to deplete by late 2012.

Merc is expected to develop a new range of top-end next generation S-Class models including a new, range-topping S600 that brings back the Pullman moniker.

source: car magazine

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Apple is a retail behemoth in this country, and it’s exerting its power in the lease for its newest flagship New York City store. According to the New York Post, for the Apple Store set to open next week in Grand Central Terminal, the company has secured one of the lowest rents of all other retailers in the building, and will not pay its landlord the Metropolitan Transportation Authority any percentage of its sales, resulting in a situation that’s being called “unique.”

Apple will pay $60 per square foot for the 23,000 square-foot space. It’s apparently the best lease held among all other retail stores open for business in the transportation center. According to the Post:

Critics likewise note that Apple’s $60-a-square-foot lease is well below what many other tenants are paying — including a future Shake Shack burger joint that will be shelling out more than $200 a square foot, according to the leases, copies of which have been obtained by The Post.

That’s a sign that Apple drove a hard bargain with the MTA — despite the fact that the public agency’s budget squeezes are pushing up fares for subway straphangers and suburban commuters across the region.

Apple will also not be required to share any of its profits with the MTA, which differs with the lease agreements of every other Grand Central tenant with the exception of a Chase bank ATM, according to the report.

To give an idea of how much extra Apple will be able to keep under this arrangement, consider that Apple does about $400 million in sales in its other flagship NYC store on 5th Avenue, which is 10,000 square feet and open 24 hours a day. With the standard arrangement in place to pay a certain amount in proceeds to its landlord for that store, Apple has paid $15 million on that $400 million. The Grand Central store will have more than twice the square footage of the 5th Avenue location.

This is sort of like how wealthy celebrities are the ones constantly being given a bunch of free stuff: Even though they can afford to buy what’s being given away, brands want to give them stuff because the allure of a famous person using your product can bring other benefits to the brand. The MTA is saying it’s happy with the deal, because it will “generate significant new traffic” for other retailers when shoppers wander in to find the Apple Store.

But it’s also yet another way to gauge the kind of power and influence Apple wields in retail. In 10 years Apple stores have gone from being predicted to fail to bringing in more revenue per square foot than any other major retailer, and being the must-have store for major retail complexes.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ceiling

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Welcome to another installment of Tips and Tricks, the series that aims to teach you something new about your Apple stuff. This time, we’ll be taking a look at Siri on the iPhone 4S and how changing one or two words in your query can produce completely different results.

Dateless reminders

Sometimes, you might want to use iOS 5′s new Reminders app as more of a checklist, rather than being reminded at a certain time for each item. Using the normal Siri query, Remind me to…, you’ll be asked to give a time or place to be reminded. In order to add a ‘dateless’ reminder, you can say one of two things. Either use Add … to my … list, which will add the item to the named list, if you have one set up, or you can use Remember to… to add the reminder to your default list without giving it a date.

Stop Siri tripping over words like Christmas

When setting up reminders, Siri can get a bit confused if your reminder contains words such as ‘Christmas’ or ‘Easter’. Instead of setting the reminder up for the date you say, it’ll ignore that date and set it up for 9 AM on the day you mentioned. However, after a bit of playing around with word order, it turns out that this only happens if you mention the holiday day before the date on which you want to be reminded.

Say Remind me to buy Christmas presents on December fifth, and Siri will create a reminder for Christmas day at 9 AM. However, say Remind me on December fifth to buy Christmas presents, and your reminder will be created exactly as intended. As long as you tell Siri the date for the reminder first, you should have no problems.

Distinguish between a text and an email

When using the syntax Send a message to…, Siri will send either an iMessage or an SMS (depending on whether the recipient has iMessage or not). However, if you start the sentence with Write a message instead of Send a message, then your message will be sent as an email instead.

Change spelling or find alternative interpretations

Perhaps when using Siri or when using the dictation feature, you may have noticed blue dotted lines under select words in the text. This means that either alternative spellings are available, or Siri thinks it’s possible you said something slightly different. Tap the underlined word, and a menu similar to the copy/paste menu will appear, allowing you to select the suggested alternatives.

Do you have any tips of your own for using Siri more effectively? Share them below in the comments.

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