Apple - page 29

Since contacting Steve has gotten so popular lately, The Joy of Tech has created this handy web based Steve Jobs Email Reply Generator for simplifying the process…

HTC just got a powerful new ally in its patent fight against Apple.

Following Google’s announcement that they would support their frequent manufacturing partner in its defense against complaints made by Apple that HTC handsets infringe upon a number of key iPhone-related patents, Microsoft has issued a press release saying that they have signed a broad patent-sharing agreement with HTC.

According to the agreement, Microsoft will license its patents to HTC across all of their phones. If the phone is a Google Android handset, HTC will pay them a couple bucks in royalties on every handset sold.

Police have identified and interviewed the person who found Apple’s iPhone 4G at a bar, the San Jose Business Journal reports.

Also, it looks like Gray Powell, the engineer who lost the iPhone at the bar, and an Apple lawyer reported it as a theft. However, the District Attorney still hasn’t determined whether the case is a crime.

Investigators said they have identified and interviewed the person who took the phone from the Gourmet Haus Staudt on March 18 after it was left there by Apple engineer Gray Powell following a birthday celebration. Officials were unable to tell the Business Journal whether that person, whose name has not been released, was the same person who eventually sold the phone to tech Web site Gizmodo.com. […]

Wagstaffe said that an outside counsel for Apple, along with Apple engineer Powell, called the District Attorney’s office on Wednesday or Thursday of last week to report a theft had occurred and they wanted it investigated.

San Jose Business Journal: Apple asked for ‘lost’ iPhone criminal probe

Another piece of the iPhonegate puzzle has fallen into place. It’s been officially revealed for the first time that Apple reported it’s iPhone 4G protoype as “stolen,” not lost, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Stephen Wagstaffe, the chief deputy district attorney for San Mateo County, said Apple contacted authorities and “advised us there had been a theft,” which led to the search warrant and an investigation.

Until now, it’s been rumored that Apple considered the iPhone stolen — but hasn’t been officially confirmed. The distinction, of course, is crucial. If authorities conclude the iPhone was stolen, Gizmodo may be on the hook for buying stolen property. If the iPhone was lost, Gizmodo may be in the clear. However, under California law, a lost item that isn’t properly returned to its owner may also sometimes be considered stolen.

The authorities themselves don’t seem to have reached a conclusion yet. It is still unclear if they are investigating Gizmodo or the person who sold Gizmodo the phone. CNet spoke to the San Mateo District Attorney , reporting that it “has not been able to confirm whether the felony investigation is targeting Gizmodo staff, the iPhone seller, or someone else.”

If the authorities conclude that Gizmodo bought stolen property, staff may face up to a year in prison. But if police and the District Attorney are pursuing the seller, the raid on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s home may not have been warranted. Gizmodo may be protected under California shield laws, which prohibit judges from issuing search warrants against editorial publications, including online news sites. Techcrunch reports that the investigation has been “paused” while authorities decide whether Gizmodo is shielded or not.

Artists make use of the tools around them.  The iPhone is one of the newer ones in the toolkit, and it’s unique capabilities and limitations make for some interesting results.

Norm Zarr says about the Art of iPhone Photography:

“It’s a challenge to take great photos with an iPhone. Compared to most any digital camera, it doesn’t stand up as a camera. But the integration of the iPhone camera, the internet, and the hundreds of camera App’s has made it truly a mobile photographic workstation. This brilliant connection of technologies makes the power of iPhone far beyond the camera itself.”

Some of Norm’s work is shown on his website, Norm Zarr iPhone Photography Galleries; all photos are taken and edited on an iPhone.  A very nice mobile version for Safari on the iPhone is also available.

Apple sits on the steering committee of the special police task force investigating iPhonegate, Yahoo News reports, raising the possibility that the company may have had a hand in the raid of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house.

Friday’s police raid on Chen’s apartment was ordered by Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) task force, which is commissioned to investigate high-tech crimes. Apple is a member of the task force’s steering committee.

Apple is one of the 25 companies that sit on REACT’s “steering committee.” Which raises the question as to whether Apple, which was outraged enough about Gizmodo’s $5,000 purchase of the lost iPhone for CEO Steve Jobs to reportedly call Gawker Media owner Nick Denton to demand its return, sicked its high-tech cops on Chen.

The San Mateo District Attorney’s office said the task force is investigating a “possible theft,” but wouldn’t say whether the target is Gizmodo or the person who found the iPhone in a bar and sold it to the site.

Yahoo News notes that the task force has investigated other cases in response to requests by committee members, including Symantec, Microsoft and Adobe.

“In either case, it’s hard to imagine — even if you grant that a theft may have occurred under California law, which requires people who come across lost items to make a good-faith effort to return them to their owner — how the loss of a single phone in a bar merits the involvement of an elite task force of local, state, and federal authorities devoted to “reducing the incidence of high technology crime through the apprehension of the professional organizers of large-scale criminal activities,” as the REACT website motto characterizes its mission.

Yahoo News: What is Apple Inc.’s role in task force investigating iPhone case?

Gizmodo’s publisher Nick Denton is not likely to back down to Apple or the police, says a publishing industry executive who has followed Gawker closely for years.

Denton, who owns Gizmodo’s parent company, Gawker Media, relishes a fight in the courts, says the executive, who asked not be named.

The seizure of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s computers is illegal, says Gawker Media, the parent company of the blog.

As a journalist, Chen is legally protected from divulging his sources of a story: in this case, details of Apple’s 4G iPhone, which Gizmodo purchased after an Apple engineer left a prototype in a bar. Gawker says the authorities are not allowed to search his computers in pursuit of a suspect, presumably the person who sold Gizmodo the iPhone.

Gawker cites section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code protecting journalists’ sources. It further cites O’Grady v. Superior Court, which extends the protections to online journalists. The O’Grady case is another Apple case, but one that the company lost. Apple tried to force Jason O’Grady to divulge his sources after his PowerPage website published details of another product Apple was working on.

Wow. Silicon Valley police have seized several computers belonging to Jason Chen, the Gizmodo editor who detailed Apple’s iPhone 4G prototype for the site.

California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team entered editor Jason Chen’s home without him present, seizing four computers and two servers. They did so using a warrant by Judge of Superior Court of San Mateo. According to Gaby Darbyshire, COO of Gawker Media LLC, the search warrant to remove these computers was invalid under section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code.

The technology site has just posted some of the details and paperwork, including Gawker Media’s response.

Gawker says the seizure of Chen’s computers is illegal. As a journalist, he is legally protected from divulging his sources, and authorities are not allowed to search his computers in pursuit of a suspect (presumably they’re after the identity of the person who sold Gizmodo the iPhone).

Apple has introduced a new Technical Note for OS X 10.6.3 that allows third-party developers to use hardware acceleration to decode H.264 video.

Adobe’s failure to deliver acceptable performance under OS X has long been blamed by the company on the lack of this functionality. Only Apple computers boasting GPUs supporting the functionality (such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M) will be able to take advantage of it.

“We will be enabling support for hardware accelerated video decoding for Flash Player on Mac,” Adobe spokesperson Matt Rozen told Macworld. “Now that the required APIs are available, we are working on an additional Flash Player release to follow shortly after Flash Player 10.1 to include this functionality for the hardware configurations supported by the new APIs.”

Adobe’s only got themselves to blame here on out. Let’s hope they finally get Flash fixed on OS X.

With the addition of the Xbox-Live-like Game Center to iPhone OS 4.0, Apple has finally made a serious commitment to gamers and game developers after nearly a decade of ignoring them on the OS X platform.

Expect that commitment to continue to deepen: Nintendo games expert and journalist Matt Casmassina of IGN has just been hired by Apple as their new Global Editorial Games Manager.

“Anybody who has read my work through the years will know that I’ve long been a huge Nintendo fan, but if there is one company that could entice me away from covering Mario and Zelda it’s the one owned by Steve Jobs. Beginning early May, I will join Apple as global editorial games manager, App Store,” Casamassina wrote on his blog.

Kyle Conroy, a computer science student at UC Berkeley has just released a project that asks a provocative question: Should you buy Apple’s products or Apple’s stock. Using a large data set combining Apple’s stock price over time and the prices of nearly every Apple product introduced since 1997, he calculates how much your AAPL holdings would be worth if you had spent the price of a contemporary Apple product on investing instead.

For Mac lovers, it isn’t a pretty picture. In some cases, stock valuation has increased as much as 5800 percent. So, for example, a top-of-the-line Powerbook G3 from 1997 cost $5,700 at introduction. If you spent that on stock, you would have $330,563 bucks today. If you bought the laptop instead, it’s currently available for $10 on Ebay.

As a very small holder of AAPL, this makes me cry. Though I have invested a bit more than a 13″ MacBook Pro in stock over the past few years, I also bought that same computer, an iPhone, an iPod nano, a shuffle, and an iPod in the same period. I love them all, but it’s pretty eye-opening to see what might have been. How about you? Any products you wish you’d spent on stock?

Here’s a interesting story about secrecy and making mistakes at Apple. The story is told by Woz, Apple employee number one (check out his hilarious shirt).

While Woz was waiting in line to buy the iPad last month, an Apple test engineer showed him a prototype iPad. It was just a few hours before the device went on sale. Woz, who is still an Apple employee, fired up the Numbers app. Little did he know, the unit was 3G test prototype, and was not to be shown or used outside of secure areas at the company HQ. Unfortunately, Woz’s playing with it must have somehow sent up a warning flag at Apple.

“… I can tell you that the test engineer who showed me an iPad after midnight, for 2 minutes, during the iPad launch was indeed fired. I opted to spend 2 minutes with Numbers on this iPad, trying some stunts I’d seen on Apple’s website demo video. I was not told that it was a 3G model and I had no way to know that. I was told that this engineer had to wait until midnight to show it outside of Apple’s secure area. And I’m an Apple employee who he was showing it to. My guess is that he was allowed to take the iPad outside of the secure area but still not supposed to show it.”

The test engineer was fired for betraying Apple’s ironclad rules on secrecy. The device was not to be shown to anybody — not even Woz. (And worse, Woz told Steve Jobs about seeing the iPad that night. Jobs himself said it was “no big deal.”)

On the other hand, Gray Powell, the Apple engineer who lost an iPhone 4G prototype at a bar, is still employed at Apple.

“Product secrecy is good for Apple and should be strictly enforced, but maybe 10% of niceness and 90% of strictness is OK too,” writes Woz.

It seems mistakes are forgiven, but betrayals are not.

Gizmodo: Steve Wozniak On Apple Security, Employee Termination, and Gray Powell

There’s another juicy wrinkle in iPhonegate. The Silicon Valley cops are investigating, reports CNet:

Silicon Valley police are investigating what appears to be a lost Apple iPhone prototype purchased by a gadget blog, a transaction that may have violated criminal laws, a law enforcement official told CNET on Friday.

Apple has spoken to local police about the incident and the investigation is believed to be headed by a computer crime task force led by the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office, the source said. Apple’s Cupertino headquarters is in Santa Clara County, about 40 miles south of San Francisco.

CNet: Lost iPhone prototype spurs police probe

How’s this for customer service? Steve Jobs personally intervened to get a dodgy iMac replaced. Author Michael J. Weber bought a new iMac, but his Apple machine was a lemon. Perhaps emboldened by Steve Jobs’ recent email responses to customer emails, Weber didn’t waste any time going straight to the top to complain about it:

Steve,
Received a 27″ i7 iMac today that would only boot in verbose mode. Whatever happened to “It Just Works”? This was a top of the line unit built to order in Elk Grove, CA — not China. And it booted like a Gateway 2000!

Continue reading

The team at Patently Apple mined a patent granted today to find what may be future gold: more evidence that the Cupertino company is toying with the idea of touchscreen iMacs and MacBooks.

After slogging through patent no. 20100100947, titled “Scheme for Authenticating without Password Exchange,” they discovered a flowchart illustrating a touchscreen that could be associated with both a Macbook and a small desktop.

In a patent that even these document hounds defined “obscure,” the flowchart they sniffed out points to a touchscreen component not restricted to the iPhone.

Continue reading

From the “oh that’s awesome” category — which quickly leads to the credit card coming out of the wallet  — some of the most unique and whimsical iPhone stands I’ve seen from Forked Up Art.

Stands are $30 each, come in portrait and landscape orientations, and are made of genuine used cutlery.  The best form of recycling I’ve seen recently. It’s earned a place in my kitchen!

Thanks to iPhone Savior for the tip.

Apple has filed a very interesting patent for a travel app called iTravel that books flights, hotels and car reservations. But the most interesting part is how it uses a radio chip to check you in at the airport, whisk you through security and allows you to wireless board your flight.

The iTravel app uses Near Field Communications, a short-range wireless technology that is starting to become widely used in cell phones for mobile ticketing, payment and electronic keys, especially in countries like Japan.

Apple is rumored to be adding NFC chipset to the next iPhone. If so, it could turn the iPhone into an electronic wallet, allowing you to for everything, from a cup of coffee to a subway ride. Your iPhone could unlock your car, pick up e-coupons at the local mall, and pay for all your supermarket groceries just by laying it on top of the checkout.

Over at TUAW, TJ Luoma made note of something I wasn’t aware of: about a month ago, Apple quietly removed the “Downloads” tab from the Apple homepage. The page continued to exist, but it appears that Apple is no longer updating it.

On the one hand, Apple’s own Downloads page was always inferior to the likes of VersionTracker, I Use This or MacUpdate. The editorial resources they were employing to keep it up to date probably didn’t make sense when there were better repositories.

On the other hand, though, Apple’s Download page served an important role: it was an software repository that Apple neo-nates could easily find the first time they booted up Safari, offering a quick library of all the cool software they could use on their new Macs. The other, third-party Mac software repositories don’t have that sort of visibility to new Mac owners.

My guess is that Apple eventually intends to employ their App Store strategy with Mac software, but I wouldn’t expect anything like that to happen until either the next major version of OS X or iTunes. In the meantime, I think a lot of new Mac owners will acutely miss the presence of an updated Downloads section on the Apple homepage.

Apple’s executives dropped several references to “extraordinary” new products during the Q2 conference call, but unfortunately gave little clue what they might be.

Indeed, one Wall Street analyst asked if they were entirely new products, or upgrades to current products.

Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO responded: “We’re just not going to help our competitors (by talking),” he said.

But he added: “We’re very confident in our product pipeline and very excited about coming months.”

The conference call references reiterate Steve Jobs’ Q2 press release: “… we have several more extraordinary products in the pipeline for this year,” Jobs said.

Who wants to bet it’s a bigger iPad?

Apple is sweeping up PC switchers and new iPhone users by the millions.

Take the 8.75 million iPhones Apple sold in the March quarter. Add them to the 42.4 million sold at the end of the last quarter. That makes 51.15 million iPhones sold to date. That’s a lot of iPhone users.

Also consider that half of the Macs sold in the quarter from Apple stores were to people who have never owned a Mac.

The March quarter was Apple’s best ever for iPhone sales, racking up more than double the number of units sold in the same quarter last year. Mac unit sales are up 33 percent. Apple is projecting similar numbers for the next quarter.

And there’s no end in sight. On the analyst conference call right now, Apple COO Tim Cook is talking about increased retail distribution points (like Radio Shack) and the massive growth opportunities in China. And all this during a recession.

The beta 2 of iPhone OS 4 has just been posted to Apple’s Developers’ site. The build is 8A248C, and developers can get it here.

Apple has just reported record earnings for Q2 2010. Earnings and profits were the best ever for a non-holiday quarter, and sales of Macs and iPhones were up by a big margin. The only blip is iPod sales — down 1 percent year-on-year.

“We’re thrilled to report our best non-holiday quarter ever, with revenues up 49 percent and profits up 90 percent,” said Steve Jobs in a statement. “We’ve launched our revolutionary new iPad and users are loving it, and we have several more extraordinary products in the pipeline for this year.”

Highlights:

• Q2 2010 revenue = $13.50 billion
• Profit = $3.07 billion, or $3.33 per diluted share. (Last year, revenue = $9.08 billion and profit = $1.62 billion)
• Gross margin = 41.7 percent, up from 39.9 percent last year
• 2.94 million Macs sold (up 33 percent year-on-year)
• 8.75 million iPhones sold (up 131 percent year-on-year)
• 10.89 million iPods sold (down one percent year-on-year)

Apple sent Gizmodo a formal letter asking for its iPhone back (proving it was genuine) — and Gizmodo is returning it, along with a nice note asking Apple to go easy on the kid who lost it.

Gizmodo editorial director Brian Lam says Apple called him today asking for its iPhone back. He said he’d be happy to oblige, if he received a formal written request from Apple’s legal department.

He duly received the following:

It has come to our attention that Gizmodo is in possession of a device that belongs to Apple. This letter constitutes a formal request that you return the device to Apple. Please let me know where to pick up the unit.

Sincerely,
Bruce Sewell,
Senior Vice President & General Counsel
Apple Inc.

Lam wrote back putting him in contact with his colleague Jason Chen, who actually has the phone.

Happy to have you pick this thing up. Was burning a hole in our pockets. Just so you know, we didn’t know this was stolen when we bought it. Now that we definitely know it’s not some knockoff, and it really is Apple’s, I’m happy to see it returned to its rightful owner.

P.S. I hope you take it easy on the kid who lost it. I don’t think he loves anything more than Apple except, well, beer.

As well as mentioning that Gizmodo didn’t know the iPhone was stolen when they bought it, Lam also says the guy who sold them the iPhone had earlier tried to return Apple it to Apple. Apparently, he called customer service but go the runaround.

The “sorry Apple engineer” who lost a 4G iPhone at a Bay Area bar has been identified as Grey Powell, Gizmodo reports. Powell is a 27-year-old software engineer with a taste for the sauce (judging by his pictures, like this one above with a PBR). He left the test unit at the Gourmet Haus Staudt in Redwood City several weeks ago.

“I underestimated how good German beer is,” he typed into the next-generation iPhone he was testing on the field, cleverly disguised as an iPhone 3GS. It was his last Facebook update from the secret iPhone. It was the last time he ever saw the iPhone, right before he abandoned it on bar stool, leaving to go home.”

Left on a stool, the iPhone was handed to a guy sitting next to Powell. The guy asked around to see if anyone had lost it, but when no one claimed it, he took it home.

When he woke up after the hazy night, the phone was dead. Bricked remotely, through MobileMe, the service Apple provides to track and wipe out lost iPhones. It was only then that he realized that there was something strange that iPhone. The exterior didn’t feel right and there was a camera on the front. After tinkering with it, he managed to open the fake 3GS.

However, Gizmodo does not explain how the iPhone came into their possession — which may be the most important part of the story. “Weeks later, Gizmodo got it,” is all that is said. Gizmodo publisher Nick Denton paid just $5,000 for the iPhone, he admitted to the AP. According to California law, the iPhone is stolen even it was accidentally left at a bar. The finder is legally obliged to return it to Apple. Instead, they sold it to Gizmodo, who at the time of purchase knew it was Apple’s property.

Via 9to5Mac.