Earlier today, the Space Shuttle Discovery took its final flight on the back of a modified Boeing 747 jumbo jet from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to Washington, D.C. where it will go on display in the Smithsonian.
As it flew over the U.S. capitol, Instagram user Adam Wells took this totally sweet shot of the Discovery being piggy-backed to her final home at the Smithsonian’s Air & Space facility in Chantilly, Virginia. Beautiful.
[via ObamaPacman]
Apple has been increasingly interested in powering its operations with that happy old sun, working on a 20-megawatt solar farm coupled with a 5-megawatt fuel cell facility at its data supercenter in Maiden, North Carolina. But that’s not nearly good enough, according to Greenpeace. In fact, the environmental activist group has gone so far as to call Apple out for using “asthma-inducing, climate-destroying coal” which makes the iCloud “the dirtiest thing on the internet.”
It’s always fun to speculate about what Apple should or could do with its horde of cash, and this video runs through some of the wackier ideas: from building and staffing a lunar base for eight-and-a-half years. to buying a third of the world’s drugs and throwing a continent-wide coke party, to enslaving the Rolling Stones and making them play a concert night after night after night for thirty-four years. It leaves the best for last though: making 4,813 baby clones of Steve Jobs.
(<em>Thanks, Mike S!</em>)
https://youtu.be/ovh0mdAHsyQ
Here in America, AT&T’s rather desperately trying to convince people to buy the Lumia 900 by saying it’s a “notch above” an iPhone.
In Russia, though, Nokia’s taking a different tack and trying to get people to buy the new Lumia 900 with this advertisement, in which they seem to imply that being locked into a two-year contract with a garish Lumia phone is like being entombed alive in a metal box filled with bad techno music, seizure-inducing flashing lights and half-a-dozen garishly made-up Russian call girls covered in glitter and reeking of cigarettes and vodka.
What iPhone fan could disagree with that metaphor?
[via Apple 2.0]
Today mark’s the 35th anniversary of the iconic Apple IIe, the first PC that can really be said to have achieved true mainstream success, but between the Apple IIe and the Mac, there was another computer: the venerable Apple Lisa, which Steve Jobs named after his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
The Lisa was a first for Apple in many ways: the first Apple computer to have a GUI, and the first Apple computer to ship with a mouse… both ideas that were borrowed by Steve Jobs from his historic visit to Xerox’s PARC labs. Unfortunately, due to both its price ($10,000 new) and the repeated delays, the Lisa never took off, and was in fact almost immediately replaced by the less expensive Lisa 2.
If you’ve got a 25K bill deep wad of Washingtons, though, you can now pick up a rare Lisa 1 computer system in original box on eBay, courtesy of the same seller who put that $100K 128K Mac prototype on sale earlier this week.
As spotted by the beautiful souls over at Reddit, someone in Apple’s patent filing department seems to have taken a shortcut in illustrating an application for way to make a touchscreen iMac useable by tracing the hands of of the divine Renaissance artist, painter and sculptor, Michelangelo.
Hey, you know what they say. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. And trust me, you don’t Apple’s patent clerks drawing their own hands if you value your sanity.
Despite the fact that competitors like Rdio have had one for ages, It’s taken Spotify frickin’ forever to release an official iPad app. That may be about to end though, as a Swedish technology journalist has just posted the above screenshot of what appears to be Spotify’s official iPad app… perhaps not-so-coincidentally ahead of a special announcement Spotify has planned for Wednesday.
Let’s hope it is the official app: it’s far past time, and applying a Twitter-like pane approach to the app is actually pretty brilliant. This app actually looks worth the wait.
Jawbone’s Jambox is already one of the best loved miniature portable Bluetooth speakers out there, and we’re here to add to the praise: this is a great piece of kit for anyone who wants to take out the headphones and pump up the volume far more than what the iPhone or iPad’s dinky build-in speakers allow.
But it’s more than just a great speaker. It’s the very distillation of the great design that has sprung up in the accessory space in direct response to the way Apple has redefined the way we look at computers, from pieces of assembled technology to experiences. If you were looking for just one gadget to pick up and show a friend how Apple has revolutionized design outside of its, the Jambox would be a good contender.
We’ve long been in love with Italian design house Ciccarese Design’s incredible renders of upcoming Apple products, and the images they just sent us of what they envision a 7.85-inch iPad mini would look like in the flesh are no exception. No implausible whimsy here: these could just as well be product shots pushed up on Apple’s site the day after the iPad mini is officially announced by Tim Cook later this summer, and really puts the totally usable size of such a device in perspective. Check out some more after the jump.
I’ve always liked the idea of Bump: instead of trading contact details with someone by typing it all in, why not just pull out your iPhone and bump them together and have all the relevant details automagically traded between devices?
In reality, Bump’s main problem is that Apple hasn’t bought them and baked them into the core of iOS. I have Bump on my iPhone, but it’s not often I meet anyone else with it, which means I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been able to trade contact info with someone with a totally awesome fist bump.
Still, if you hang out with more Bump-centric circles than I, you may well want to know that the latest update added the ability to add a Bumpee as a social network contact on Twitter or Facebook.
This is just totally sick. The guys over at Germany’s Hardwrk have taken 16GB of DDR3 RAM and a 1TB Samsung 830 SATA III SSD bundled up in an SSD-RAID-0, slapped it into a 13-inch MacBook Pr running an Intel Core i7-2640M 2.8GHz chip.
The result? A three-thousand euro behemoth of a machine — custom-engraved and covered in a beautiful matte black covering — that they say is the world’s fastest MacBook Pro, and with a 1.7 second PhotoShop boot-up time, we’re inclined to believe them.
Best of all? They’re giving this bad boy away to one lucky winner. All you have to do is leave a comment on their post.
Apple’s Q2 2012 financial earnings call is on April 24th, and if history is any guide, it’s going to see Apple announce all new record earnings and another huge jump in stock price.
Now Piper-Jeffray analyst Gene Munster is piping in, and not only are his estimates higher than Wall Street consensus, but that Apple could have sold 33 million iPhones and 12 million iPads this quarter. Not too shabby, considering the new iPad was on sale for only two weeks before the fiscal quarter ended.
Do you like Chair Entertainment’s blockbuster iOS game, Infinity Blade II? A beefy new update has just hit the App Store, and it adds new content for ClashMob, the game’s awesome social battle mode. In addition, the new update adds over two dozen new items and fully implements iOS 5.1 support. while Chair promises that an expended single-player campaign is coming soon.
Intel’s upcoming Ivy Bridge update are scheduled to be officially announced and made available on April 23rd, and they will most likely be immediately used to build updated, Air-like MacBook Pros including second-gen Thunderbolt controllers.
But could the next MacBook Pros also have HiDPI, Retina-ready displays? It’s conjecture at this point, but we know Apple has been interested in moving to Retina quality displays in its Mac line for quite some time, and now a recent comment from Intel VP Kirk Skaugen confirms that Ivy Bridge makes it possible for PC makers to make retina display laptops and computers, “if OEMs choose to use it.”
In other words? The next MacBook Pros might not just have slimmer footprints and ditch the optical drives, but pack four times the pixels. Swoon.
[via 9to5Mac]
Did you think the $399 iPad 2 was just Apple cleaning out inventory? Think again: the iPad 2,4, as its known inside its own firmware, has a new A5 chip built upon a 32 nanometer process, which means it’s cheaper for Apple to make… and potentially more battery efficient to boot.
When Apple first debuted the new 1080p Apple TV in March, they said they’d brought their set-top box up to spec with the rest of the industry by including what they called a “single-core variant” of the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S’s A5 processor.
But how is it an A5 processor if only has one core? The answer is that technically, the A5 inside the Apple TV is still a dual-core chip, but one of them’s a dud.
Unreal. This phony iPhone 4S found in Turkey looks and feels exactly like the real thing up until you turn it on… and even then, if you weren’t already familiar with what an iPhone’s low battery warning looks like, you might mistake it for the real thing. This is why you should either buy your gadgets from an Apple Store, or test them extensively before buying.
It’s long been rumored that the Department of Justice would file an antitrust suit against Apple for e-book price fixing, but now it’s happening, as the United States DoJ just filed such a suit against Apple, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Penguin.
At issue here is Apple’s attempt to overthrow Amazon’s hegemony on e-book selling by collaborating with publishers ahead of the iBookstore launch to standardize how much is charged for e-books, not just through Apple, but through Amazon as well.
Have you been following all the rumors and saving up your pennies for a new MacBook Pro or iMac the second Apple releases them? Well, looks like you might not have to wait, as two reports this morning suggest new models will be dropped imminently.
Right now, every Mac fan is looking forward to the major next revision of OS X, Mountain Lion, which will continue what Lion started and keep on blurring the line between Apple’s Mac and iOS ecosystems. But what’s the end goal here?
Cult of Mac reader Cameron Leask put his design chops to the test to imagine what a completely unified OS X / iOS experience would look like. The result: OS XI, an operating system that merges OS X and iOS’s best features while finally ditching the Mac filesystem and embracing an iOS-like approach to data and apps.
It certainly looks sleek, but we’ll let you be the judge of that. After the jump, take an imagination-fueled tour through the future of the Mac with OS XI. Let us know what you think in the comments.
We’re a big fan of BareBones Software here and endorse their incredible BBEdit app whenever we have the chance, but if you don’t want to parcel out fifty bones for it, BareBones has just done everyone a solid and brought over many of the new features from BBEdit 4.0 to their free, powerful text editing software, TextWrangler.
Conventional wisdom on Wall Street has it that eventually (and possibly as soon as the end of this year) Apple’s stock price will reach over $1000 a share, largely fueled by the iPhone. But one Wall Street analyst isn’t nearly so optimistic. In fact, BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyck is downgrading his recommendation on Apple stock from “Buy” to “Neutral…” and his reasons actually make a lot of sense.
Products can be too popular for their own good. Take zipper, for example. Today, it’s used as a generic term for the interlocking steel teeth that keep you from exposing yourself to the public, but in the 1920’s, it was a distinct brand: the Zipper, invented and marketed by B.F. Goodrich, which was such a successful alternative to the boring old button that it lost its capital ‘Z’ in the mind of the public and became a generic term that lost its trademark… and once it lost its trademark, anyone could call their rip-off product a “zipper” as if it was the real thing.
It’s a very real issue that many companies spend a good deal of money on every year. They want their brand to be synonymous with a certain type of product, but they don’t want it to be so synonymous that they lose ownership of the brand. And it’s why, if you like, say, Jell-O, or Xerox, or Kleenex, you shouldn’t refer to similar products from another company by the same name.
Over at The News Virginian, there’s an interesting think piece by AP writer Mae Anderson if the same thing could happen to the iPad. It’s a great read on the history of trademarks becoming generic, but it’s not really very likely to happen to the iPad. Here’s why.
Apple’s market cap has been worth more for a while, but now even a single share of AAPL stock is worth more than Google’s, having reached that milestone today at 12:26PM EDT, as noted by Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt. Boom.
Popular belief is that if Apple does end up releasing their long-rumored smart TV, they’ll call it the iTV… but there’s problems with that, not least of which is that there are at least two companies out there called iTV who are threatening to sue if Apple does so.
So what will they call it? Analyst Peter Misek — who believes the Apple TV is imminent — thinks it’ll be called the iPanel, and Apple will be building up to 5M of them starting in May.
