It’s amazing what you see when you look closely at numbers, and super-analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco looks closer than most. Parsing some of Tim Cook’s keynote speech at Goldman Sachs earlier this week, he did some digging came up with the incredible graph you see above.
If you grew up during the 1980s, many of its style tropes will have been burned indelibly into your brain. Shoulder pads, snow-washed jeans, pleated pants, and tacky, tacky poster art, exemplified by selective-colored black and white photos. If you can imagine a monochrome image of a rose, with the petals colored lipstick red, then congratulations: your mind just traveled back to 1985. Now, with Paint FX, your iPad can do the same.
With Mountain Lion, Apple has finally tied iCloud to the Mac desktop. While iCloud has worked seamlessly on iOS since launch, moving documents between iCould and your Mac was embarrassingly awkward, involving web browsers, dragging and dropping.
Now, it has been shoved deep into the heart of the OS, in the form of a kind of alternate Finder.
Have you ever wondered how Apple gets such beautifully clean, crisp product shots for its various devices? Are they real photos at all? Or are they just computer-generated images? The truth is somewhere in between, and shows that Apple’s obsessive attention to detail carries over to everything.
Knock, Knock!
Who’s there?
Doctor.
Doctor who?
Doctor who owns an iPad, along with 26 percent of my peers.
A good pun it’s not, but the facts are worth my terrible setup: Fully one quarter of European doctors own an iPad, according to a survey of “1,207 practicing physicians in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the UK.”
Imagine yourself at an Apple keynote event. A special, one-off launch for the newest version of Mac OS X. You see the familiar format: Phil Schiller and a couple of other Apple execs run through the successful sales numbers. Then they announce the new product, and then they work their way through a deck of pitch-perfect keynote slides.
It seems familiar, right? Only now imagine that you are alone. This presentation is for one person: you. This bizarro scenario is just what happened to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber last week when Apple briefed him on Mountain Lion.
Just when you thought there was nothing more that could be squeezed into a pocket-sized multitool, Gerber comes along with the Steady, and proves our imagination to be pathetically limited. What does this many-bladed wonder bring to the transforming tool party? A camera tripod.
Gerber’s Steady Tool is aimed at real everyday use, with a slew of practical, non-specialized tools. There’s a pair of needle-nose pliers, flat and serrated blades, a bottle opener (essential), screwdrivers, wire cutters and of course a tripod and cellphone/camera mount.
The body of the tool forms one leg, while the other two stick out like a sea lion’s flippers. You can either screw a standard thread into the bottom of a camera or tripod-compatible phone cases, or you can use the suction cup to stick the sleek, smooth glass back of your iPhone 4 to the 5.8-ounce tool.
The Steady will cost you $64. Not cheap, but you do get Gerber quality, plus everything you need to conduct a booze-filled picnic.
[Via Uncrate]
Apple’s new version of OS X, 10.8 Mountain Lion, bakes in a lot of new features that may make existing third-party apps obsolete. Notification Center, Reminders, Messages and Twitter all step on the toes of independent developers. And worst of all, these apps come from some of the most popular categories in the App Store.
Apple’s designs constantly prove that beauty and practicality can exist in the same place, but that’s clearly not the only way to do things. Take a look at the AQUA TEK S, which manages to be possibly the most practical and the most ugly iPhone case ever. It bills itself as “the first ever battery powered, solar charged, rugged under water iPhone 4/4S case on Kickstarter.”
Never have I felt worse about buying a gadget accessory than I did buying the Speck SmartShell, a flimsy plastic cover for the back of the iPad 2 which Speck somehow summons the stones to sell for $35. Worse, I bought it in Europe, where it goes for €30, or $40. After a few months of use, though, it turns out to be the best iPad “case” I own (and I have rather a lot).
If you think about it, printers are probably the worst-designed gadgets in our homes (unless you own the same awful Samsung Behold as I do). But despite the mythical advance of the paperless office, nobody has been able to kill them off. Until now. A new survey says that the iPad has finally doomed the printer, and is even saving trees.
Oh, man. We’ve seen some dorky iPad accessories in our time, but none has managed to be both embarrassing and stylish at the same time. The GoPad performs this seemingly impossible feat, and adds a little bit of campness at the same time.
When you’re snapping a tacky, cliched vacation photo, isn’t it annoying that all those other tourists are buzzing around and generally getting in the way of that monument/handsome plaza/amusing statue? Short of climbing up into a bell tower and, well, you know what, there’s little that you can do to remove these scampering human ants. You could take a sequence of photos and buy Photoshop just to paint out the milling hordes, or you could try Scalado’s Remove app. If you had an Android phone.
ZOMG! Never lose your iPhone again with the ZOMM Wireless Leash Plus, a hardware/software combo that wirelessly ties your iPhone to a needy dongle that cries whenever the two are separated. It can help you to remember your phone, your keys, or even where you parked Grandma.
It’s taken a while, but it seems that the dried up tear-duct that was the supply of Thunderbolt accessories is about to turn into a torrent of high-speed, daisy-chainable tears of relief. Hard drive supremo LaCie will at last sell you a 2big Thunderbolt Series external drive.
The iPhone makes a wonderful bike computer. It’s tough, comes with great GPS and can be loaded with zillions of navigation and fitness apps. It also enjoys a wide range of ready-made handlebar mounts.
But the iPad, possibly even more useful as a map thanks to its large screen and crazy-long battery life, has precisely zero bike mounts available. So I decided to make one. Here’s how:
Imagine buying a paper magazine (remember those?), only instead of pages it just has a cover and a hole in the middle. Into this hole you place your iPad, which you then use to read the magazine’s contents. Useless, right? But that’s (almost) exactly what Hasbro has done in a desperate attempt to bring its board games into the 21st century.
Lensbaby, purveyor of the finest image-degrading lenses known to man, has come up with a new blur-tastic optic. Named the Edge 80, it cuts a sharp, straight slice of focus through the photographic haze.
Your iPhone and iPad are great paper replacements, but they couldn’t actively stop it. Until now: PaperKarma is an iPhone app which lets you stop paper junk mail, just by snapping a photo of it.
Gas prices remain high, but over-achieving parents still need their status symbols. So I declare that the stroller is the next SUV, or Strolling Utility Vehicle. Exhibit A, the Origami stroller.
A Scottish School is prepping its iPads for exam season. Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, Inverclyde, was the first school in the world to deploy an iPad to every one of its pupils. Now it may become the first school to try to stop its pupils from iCheating in exams.
The iPad’s split-keyboard feature — gained in iOS 5 — sure makes it a lot easier to type while standing up. But it also seems a lot clunkier than setting the iPad on a table, propped up by its Smart Cover and tapping away at its large, inviting keys.
But what if you could be just as slapdash with your keystrokes when pecking at the tiny split keyboard. Armed with one little tip, and nothing else, you can.
Last week, the web exploded with the news that social iOS app Path was uploading your entire address book to its servers, and then keeping it there. Worse, it was sending and storing them in plain text (although the connection was at least SSL-encrypted). Clearly, having Path notify you when your friends join the service is handy, but is there a way to do this without compromising your privacy? According to Edinburgh iOS supremo Matt Gemmell, there is.
If you are remodeling your home and wish to spend ten times the price of a regular power socket on each and every wall wart, you can opt for one of many USB-enabled faceplates which let you charge your gadgets right from the wall. But for a more practical and portable option, you might take a look at the RCA USB Wall Plate Charger, a gadget which does exactly what it says on the label.
Instagram 2.1, which launched at the end of last week, has fixed up the frankly horrible interface of v2.0, and added in some significant new features. Other things — like the proliferation of scantily-clad ladies and (normally-clad) pets in the “popular” section — remain just the same.