See the world through Apple-tinted lenses? @Cliff & Dick Huston
If there’s a good thing about the recession, it seems to be bringing some fine Apple memorabilia out of storerooms and closets.
Cliff and Dick Huston — ex-Apple engineers, for the record employees 27 and 25 — have decided to part with a treasure trove of Cupertino collectibles by auctioning them on eBay.
Take my iPod, please? CC-licensed, thanks to Sifter on Flickr.
This is the man-bites-dog of gadget crime: a mugger stuck a gun in the face of a 15-year-old demanding cash but just said no when offered an iPod instead.
It happened in Sydney, Australia, where police believe the attacker was another teen.
“[The boy] offered him an iPod but the attacker didn’t want that,” Green Valley Local Area Command duty officer, Inspector Siobhan Busetto told the Sydney Morning Herald. The attacker ran away, leaving the teen unharmed and still in possession of his mp3 player. Reports didn’t specify the iPod model involved in the scuffle.
For years, iPods have been at the center of countless robberies — and a few murdercases – attesting to their cult status and steal-a-bility.
Is this a fluke or a sign that market penetration has been reached?
Perhaps the mugger was waiting for the iPad?
All gratuitous speculation welcome in the comments.
Pulling a stunt worthy of Tom Cruise in “Mission Impossible,” thieves cut a hole in the roof of a Best Buy then dropped down 16-feet to snatch up 20 Apple laptops. Then they climbed back up, escaping with $26,000 of merchandise without ever touching the floor.
Touching ground would have set off the store’s burglar alarm. And the two or three person crew were too clever to get caught on tape: they cut the roof hole in a spot where security cameras are blocked by ad banners.
The cinematic caper took place in South Brunswick, New Jersey leaving police to marvel at their handiwork:
“(This was a) high level of sophistication,” said Detective James Ryan, a police department spokesman told NJ.com “They never set off any motion sensors. They never touched the floor. They rappelled in and rappelled out.”
Ok, a cardboard theater with an iPhone in it, but this still beats the sugar-cube igloos my dad used to pile together to amuse us kids on rainy days.
Gary Katz crafted this theater in a couple of hours using a laser printer, rubber cement and a humble shoe box. Put an iPhone in and voilà: it’s showtime.
Katz shows how he did it above, but if you’re short on patience, he sells pre-made kits — personalized on request — for $20, plus shipping.
The intact side of the 250lb stair from Apple's 5th Ave. store
Controversy pays: after going public about pressure from glass company Seele over the eBay sale of a fractured stair, former Apple employee Mark Burstiner sold the cracked keepsake for $9,950.
It comes from the spiral staircase in Apple’s 5th avenue store, Burstiner saved the glass heading to the trash after it was fractured by a customer’s Snapple bottle.
The final sale price is about four times what Burstiner first thought a 250lb glass stair from the staircase was worth, $2,500.
We can’t wait to hear the buyer gets the thing home and what they do with it. And whether the suits will have any more to say about it.
Weighing in at 250lbs, this glass stair may be the heftiest Apple keepsake yet.
You’ve got about 10 hours to place the winning bid on an unusual piece of Apple memorabilia: a cracked glass stair from the 5th Avenue store’s stunning spiral staircase.
As we predicted, Apple wasn’t happy about it. Former Apple employee Mark Burstiner, who rescued the stair from the trash after it was cracked by a customer’s Snapple bottle, got into an email tussle with a VP from Seele, the company that makes the glass stairs, over pulling the auction.
Burstiner pulled the item, then, in a post on Gizmodo, explained why he decided to put it up for sale again:
As far as Iʼm aware, I have done nothing illegal. I have not stolen. I have not deceived in any way. The step is not confidential, and it is not IP. The step is the very same that any New Yorker could see by walking into Apple Fifth Ave. The only thing I am guilty of is taking the risk of throwing out my back through having to move the step multiple times. I saw an opportunity, I asked for permission, received it, and proceeded. I wonʼt allow a major corporation to bully me into a corner. At the time of this posting, it has been seven full days since I put the listing up, and I havenʼt heard from Apple directly a single time. I have every right to sell my property, and I plan to do so.
The controversy is turning what might’ve been yet another quirky, deserted auction into a potential moneymaker.
Apple style on the high seas? @Image courtesy Celebrity Cruises
So the architecture isn’t spectacular like some bucket-list worthy Apple stores, but the iLounge looks like a good excuse to check your email or harass expert staff about flash cookies while on vacation.
This is a rendered first look at what will be rolling out on Celebrity Cruises fleet launching in April: funky retro carpet, comfy armchairs and workstations with bar stools and more comfortable-looking work benches.
This new seafaring iLounge is an Authorized Apple Reseller where cruisers can check out the latest MacBooks, iPods and accessories. (No word on whether it will also have iPad, yet). It also has a classroom plus an “enrichment center” where trained staff offers tips.
At least with this iPhone you don’t have to worry about managing or forgetting its cookies. A Japanese bakery called Green Gables whips up these handmade smart cookies — the “camera” on the back is an especially nice touch — but fortunately they spared us the glossy black frosting and made them out of what looks like gingerbread instead.
If you’re looking for a more slavish copy to sink your teeth into, there are other options.
The intact staircase of the 5th Ave store. Courtesy Apple.
This one puts the “cult” back in “cult of mac:” someone is auctioning off a broken piece of glass from Apple’s Fifth Avenue store on eBay. It’s a step from the retail locale’s elegant glass staircase, to be precise.
The person hawking it with a starting bid of $700 says:
“They replaced it with a new one after a customer dropped a Snapple bottle on it and cracked it. I picked it up before it could be thrown out over a year ago, figuring it’s a collectible.
This might be the first couple to get hitched at an Apple retail without permission, flash-mob style, by a celebrant dressed like Steve Jobs who pronounced the solemn vows from an iPhone. The news was first tweeted by an Apple employee of New York’s Fifth Avenue store.
“Toy Story 3″ director Lee Unkrich gave something for his seat mate to gawk at as he sat at 36,000 feet editing the latest animated tale of plaything adventures.
With not a second to waste — the release date is June 18, 2010 – Unkrich worked on a MacBook Pro, with what looks like shortcut color codes for Avid Media Composer. (Crane as I might, all I ever see are Excel spreadsheets. Need to get upgraded from Economy more often, perhaps.)
Apple products often feature in Pixar movies (perhaps in a nod to history?), the trailer for Toy Story 3 already has a nice bit of iProduct placement.
Steven Chan and two of his three kids, Megan and Matthew, who all share the same initials: M - A - C.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2010 — Steven Chan and his wife gave their three kids the same initials: M – A – C.
There’s Maxwell Alexander Chan, his brother Matthew and sister Megan.
“We’re in the printing and graphics business and we just loved the Mac from the very beginning,” said Chan. “Its the tool of our trade, so…”
In a dozen years reporting on Apple, the Chans are the first people I’ve met who named their kids after their favorite computer company. Although there have been rumors of kids named after Apple or the Mac — Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter Apple, for example — it has become an urban myth, often rumored but never verified (if ever). I don’t know of another documented case.
I met the Chans on the Macworld show floor. They’d driven up from Southern California for the Expo. The Chan’s printing business is in Riverside County.
“We’re both fanatics,” Chan added, laughing. “There’s five of us but we have eight Macs in the house. There’s more Macs than people.”
Highlighting another awkward portability problem the iPad may have — like that condom case — these prototype pants give one that dangerous did-you-just-mess-yourself look? But worn this way, the iPad would provide excellent lumbar support.
Steve Wozniak recounts a nice bit of Silicon Valley folk lore in this excerpt from the Discovery Forum interview where he talks about how he got the idea of bringing color to the Mac after staying up four nights in a row to meet a deadline for Atari.
Wish sleepless nights brought me that kind of inspiration…
Yesterday, we alerted you to blossoming galleries of attractive young women posing in various states of undress with their iPhones.
But, hey, iPhone fetish pics aren’t limited to the fair sex: there are a few galleries dedicated to iPhone Guys, too. Plus the NSFW user-generated Guys with iPhones website.
We were a pain, I know, bugging you guys to vote for us in 2010 Golden Retrevo Awards.
But it paid off — we won a 2010 Golden Retrevo Award for outstanding achievements in the “All Things Apple” space. The awards honor the “best and brightest independent gadget blogs on the web.”
Retrevo is an up-and-coming electronics shopping/review site, which claims more than 5 million visitors a month. Here’s the full list of Golden Retrevo Award winners.
There were so many possible names for Apple’s new device.
Now we know the super-slablet has been christened the iPad.
Let us know what you think of the name and what you would’ve named it in the comments.
