John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
Thirty two years ago, a UK office furniture manufacturer called Hille International wanted a new design for an office chair, something that would pry loose the white-knuckled fingers of American design duo Charles and Ray Eames from their death grip on the office furniture market.
The line of chairs that resulted was called the System Supporto, and not only is it a masterpiece of design… it is Apple designer Jony Ive’s favorite kind of chair, widely used within Apple. According to our own source, it probably even inspired the design of the MacBook Pro!
Just a reminder: as we mentioned on Thursday, Best Buy’s giving away the 8GB iPhone 3GS for free with a two year AT&T contract today only. The iPhone 3GS is a couple years old, but it’s still a hell of a phone, so if you fancy a free handset and need a carrier, you know where to go. Anyone going to take the plunge?
If you love Evernote as much as I do, this’ll delight you: a chunky update has just been released adding rich text support, shared notebooks, a redesigned UI for iPad and more.
Remember the darling little iHub that MIC Gadget used to sell, complete with a glowing little Apple logo that ended up getting them kicked so hard by Apple’s legal team that MIC Gadget ended up gargling their lower intestines?
Well, the iHub’s spiritual cousin is back with this cute Chinese SD card reader, and if Apple’s legal team can find them, we’re sure they’ll get C&Ded too in due course. In the mean time, it’s just $10 bucks at K.O. Gadget, and given the fact that my MacBook Air doesn’t have an SD slot, I’m about to take the plunge. If you’re in a similar pickle, you might want to get in on this before the Leviathan wakes.
PC Maker Lenovo just released their first would-be iPad killer, the IdeaPad K1. It is, of course, a piece of junk, with This Is My Next calling it “chunky and cheap-feeling” with software that is “unstable to the point of being unusable.”
You’d think that would damp anyone’s aspirations in the tablet game: HP pulled out of the tablet market despite garnering much more positive reviews for the TouchPad. Nevertheless, Lenovo not only thinks that Apple will lose dominance of the tablet market, but that Lenovo itself will become “one of the strongest… players in this area.” Now that’s pie-eyed optimism.
Ever wonder why iOS 5 features built-in Twitter integration but not Facebook, the largest social network on Earth? It’s because Steve Jobs thinks Mark Zuckerberg is a “f*cking a**hole,” according to tech evangelist Robert Scoble.
According to our own dear Mike Elgan, Apple is through creating new devices and will continue to coast on the product categories they currently have.
Not so fast, though! According to a Japanese site, component suppliers are gearing up to help Apple create new Macs that are “absolute different from current products,” with a debut as early as the end of the year.
Lion’s the best operating system that Apple has ever released, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have its sticking points… the little tweaks and changes to default OS X behavior that really sticks in some people’s craw.
There’s ways to fix these little irritants, of course, but most of them involve delving into Terminal and deploying write commands. There’s got to be an easier way, right?
Yup. It’s called LionTweaks and it allows you to tweak OS X Lion’s default performance just by clicking a yes or no button.
You might think the financial climate in America is bad now that we’ve had our credit downgraded by S&P, but we’re in good shape compared to Europe, where EU ministers have spent much of the past year playing whack-a-mole with member nations credit problems. In fact, all it will take by many estimates is one European country to default on its debt for the whole Eurozone to collapse.
Here’s how dire it is. For a brief spell earlier this afternoon, Apple was worth more than all 32 of the biggest Eurozone banks… combined.
Proving the rule that Downfall makes any tech story better, here’s Adolf Hitler reacting to the news that HP is killing the TouchPad after just a month on the market.
“They told me it would get faster and that I could bump my friends TouchPads to share music. How can I do that if no one has one?!?!?”
This is one of the best “Hitler reacts…” videos I’ve seen. Make sure to stay to the end.
Alongside posting up iOS 5 Beta 6, Apple has released a few other goodies to registered developers: a new iTunes, new Apple TV software, Xcode 4.2 Developer Preview 6 and iWork for iOS Beta 2.
Jeez, Apple, this is starting to really look bad. Just a few days after it was revealed that Apple filed misleading evidence claiming that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10,1 shared the iPad’s physical dimensions in a German court comes word that they’ve done it again in the Netherlands, this time with Samsung’s Galaxy S smartphone.
Do you prefer iOS 5’s rounded buttons while a friend prefers iOS 4’s rectangular ones? Well, as it turns out, there’s a scientific reason why you’re right and he’s just a total idiot and needs to just talk to the hand, and it all has to do with the shape of your eyeball.
When Apple finally rolls out the iCloud this fall, you’ll be able to backup all of your music on Apple’s own iTunes servers through iTunes Match. If iTunes Match recognizes your tracks, it’ll automatically mirror them in the cloud; otherwise, you’ll be able to manually upload them. If you ever have a devastating system crash, you’ll be able to just slurp them all down again.
But what if you’ve got a massive media collection too big to mirror on Apple’s iCloud servers? What if your Internet connection can’t handle uploading and downloading multiple gigabytes at a time. Well, at least you have iTunes “Back Up To Disc” functionality to fall back on, right?
Can’t wait to get your hands on Steve Jobs official biography later this year? How about biding your time with a tome of wisdom handed down from The Man himself? Then Steve Jobs Gives 11 Advices To Teenager! by Steve Jobs might be just the book for you!
Want to know why HP is killing off its webOS Device division after releasing just a single product? Let’s leave the abysmal sales numbers of the TouchPad out of things. The fact of the matter is that HP just wasn’t any bloody good at making webOS devices. According to a new report, in fact, the iPad can run a hacked version of webOS twice as fast as the HP TouchPad, despite roughly equivalent hardware.
Samsung’s in trouble. The Korean electronics giant is being sued by Apple in just about every market for copying Apple’s iOS, iPhone and iPad designs… and Apple’s winning. Worse, Samsung’s biggest mobile partner, Google, just bought out one of their main smartphone competitors, Motorola, for $12.5 billion. Now that Google has an Android hardware team in-house, how much longer will third-party smartphone makers like Samsung be given equal access to the Android operating system?
It’s a tight spot, and Samsung knows it’s in trouble. Samsung boss Lee Kun-Hee reacted to the news of Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobiity by telling top managers on Monday to “boost software prowess, patent pools and talent,” as well as seek out opportunities for mergers and acquisitions. Samsung — probably correctly — thinks this will be a quicker way to boost the prowess of their own in-house mobile OS, Bada.
Well, bada bing, bada boom, because a huge acquisition opportunity may have just presented itself. After a single round, HP just threw in the towel on webOS, a mobile operating system they purchased along with Palm back in 2010 for $1.2 billion.
We’re just spitballing here, but maybe Samsung should buy webOS and the Palm business out from under HP? Here’s why it could be a good move.
Wow, this took me completely surprise: mere minutes after confirming that they were in talks to spin off their PC business, HP has totally thrown in the towel on their mobile strategy. They’ve just announced that they are shutting down their WebOS Device business.
Unreal. That’s just a month and a half after releasing the HP Touchpad, which was supposed to relaunch webOS as a serious contender to Apple’s mobile OS crown. Now HP’s just killing off that side of the business in total.
In a move similar to when IBM sold off its PC and laptop business sold it to Lenovo, HP is reportedly on the verge of spinning off its PC business in order to focus on cloud-based software and enterprise services.
That means the world’s largest computer maker may be about to exit the game entirely, and small wonder: Apple’s been beating them to a bloody pulp. Making Windows PCs is a low margin game, and Apple’s pretty much the only company in town that isn’t experiencing negative growth.
Want a free iPhone? Don’t care that it’ll be two generations old in just a month or two? Rush on over to Best Buy Mobile on Monday, August 22nd and you can get an iPhone 3GS completely free with “two-year activation.”
The Best Buy Mobile offer has all the hallmarks of an inventory clearance to me, which seems to insinuate that BBM doesn’t exactly think the iPhone 3GS will continue in its role as the entry-level iPhone.
It’s been theorized for a while that Microsoft would try to ape Apple’s success with the Mac App Store when they release Windows 8, but until now, it’s just been conjecture. Now here we are, on the other side of the rumor.
“So you just shake the accelerometer and Sarah Palin’s breasts start bouncing? LOL! Gross!”
– President Obama to Vice President Joe Biden at the Outer Oval Office on Saturday, July 16th, 2011, according to the White House Flickr feed. Via 9to5Mac
Anyone got any better ideas about what Obama might be saying to Biden, and more importantly, what iPhone app they’re using? Let us know in the comments.
A couple of weeks ago, id Software said that if they got 100,000 likes on their Facebook page, they’d release the on-rails iOS version of their upcoming next gen shooter, Rage, free for a week. Well, they’re at 100k likes, so go grab yourself a free game. You can grab Rage HD here and Rage here.
