John Brownlee - page 138

Send a lot of texts and looking to get your first iPhone? AT&T just became a less compelling option, as Ma Bell will be eliminating their $10 a month texting plan on August 21st.

One thing you hear a lot from people who think that Apple has no case against Samsung for ripping off the iPhone and iPad’s designs is that the design of a touchscreen smartphone or tablet is “obvious.”

Well, sure, obvious once Apple did it. But check out what tablets looked like before the iPad: they were all Windows laptops with styluses. Now look at them: slates of glass all designed to be directly interacted with through your fingertips, like a frame into media.

[via Mac Rumors via OP]

Besides the Lion USB keys, the only thing new that came about after the Apple Store crashed offline for hours all around the world earlier today? On the Mac Pro page only, you can share the model of Mac Pro you want to select on either Facebook or Twitter.

Totally bizarre. Presumably Apple will roll this out to other Apple Store pages, but it seems like a pretty strange and useless addition to us.

Edit: Apparently, it’s on the iPod Classic page now too. Huh.

This week, Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer took part in a conference call hosted by Gleacher & Company, an investment firm. No surprises here: someone asked Oppenheimer what Apple thought of the $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google.

Oppenheimer’s response? Classically understated. “$12.5 billion is a lot of money.”

You should probably read “too much money” into that statement for Apple’s snide opinion on the matter.

The image above would seemingly brook no further comment without sniggering. To all appearances, it is a prosthetic to strap onto your iPad, possibly for use with some tele-dildonics app that snuck by the App Store review process. But looks can be deceiving.

Andy Miller, the founder of Quattro Wireless who became Apple’s VP of mobile advertising and the head of iAd after Apple acquired his company for $250 million, is leaving the company.

Are these white suited factory workers building iPhone 5 screens? It sure looks like it, given the elongated home button, widely rumored to be a capacitive number in the next iPhone. It’s even alleged to be taken in Wintek’s touchscreen plant, which handles the iPhone 4.

It certainly looks pretty legit to us. What do you think?

[via MIC Gadget]

For the past several hours, the Apple Store has been down, but unlike when we usually say that, Apple’s seemingly not doing just maintenance… instead, store.apple.com seems to have totally crashed.

Making things stranger, the Apple Online Store fell over on a Wednesday, as opposed to the traditional Tuesday maintenance period. Some users have reported in the last hour the usual ‘We’re Updating The Store” message… so could a new product be imminent?

Those weirdo Taiwanese animators are back, and this time they’re covering the Google-Motorola deal, complete with Steve Jobs in a Darth Vader helmet, swinging a lightsaber at an Android robot.

Well, this is juicy! Following yesterday’s report that Apple was already testing an LTE-equipped iPhone with carriers comes this insider photo, showing that AT&T is secretly installing LTE equipment in at least one retail Apple store. Whoa!

In line with their promise to stick to a much more aggressive release schedule, Mozilla has just officially released version 6 of their popular Firefox browser.

According to 9to5Mac, a proven source has told them that Apple’s going to phase out their official Apple Store app in favor of a mobile web version of the online Apple Store.

UK wireless carrier O2 has just seemingly confirmed an early September reveal of the iPhone 5.

Flex Benefits

Way back in 1996, when Safari wasn’t even a glimmer in Apple’s eye, Apple sent out this email to document explaining how to use the Netscape browser.

It’s pretty interesting reading a document in which what I would consider to be core modern computer concepts like hyperlinks and back and forth arrows are explained to a technical-minded audience for the first time.

It just goes to show that everyone’s been a noob one time or another.

Do you remember the first time you used a browser? My first browser was Lynx on a dial-in Unix ISP. Which browser was your first, and what platform was it on?

Apple’s chalked up some big victories against Samsung in recent weeks, culminating in a preliminary injunction that got the Galaxy Tab 10.1 banned throughout the EU. But did Apple do so based upon false evidence? That’s what one Dutch website is alleging, and we’ve got to admit, their argument’s pretty good.

This morning, Google made a bold move and purchased Motorola’s mobile business for $12.5 billion. In doing so, Google brought the hardware design and manufacturing of Android devices in-house, just as Apple has always done with its products, starting with the original Macintosh and continuing all the way to the iPhones and iPads of today.

This is nothing short of a capitulation. By purchasing a smartphone maker, Google has all but admitted that it needs more than just a free operating system and loads of partners to compete with Apple: they need to duplicate Apple’s successes by totally controlling both the hardware and software of their devices.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ official biography by Walter Isaacson has just had its release date bumped to November 21st, 2011 from the original date of March 6th, 2012. It also has a new cover and a new title!

The safe bet is that the iPhone 5 will stick with 3G instead of lightning fast LTE 4G mobile broadband, but not so fast! A new report on Monday says that Apple’s 4G-capable carrier partners are already testing iPhones with LTE capability.

Samsung’s not going to like this: Google has just purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, finally placing the Android maker on equal footing as Apple when it comes to controlling both the hardware and software of their smartphone platform.

It’s hard to figure out quite what to make of this rumor given the wide-spread agreement that the iPhone 5 will be released between mid-to-late September and early October and represent a significant upgrade over the iPhone 4, but Macotakara is now reporting that Apple will be releasing the iPhone 4S early next month.

As a kicker? They also say the iPad 3 is coming next month… despite the fact that a report from earlier today made it clear that the A6 CPU won’t be ready until the second quarter of 2012. What gives?

This is just an awesome idea for an app: Converse by Riot Software turns your iPad into a traveling, dual-keyboard kiosk that will allow you to have a conversation with anyone you might encounter, no matter how bizarre and filled with phlegmatic squawks his native language is.

There’s not much else to know right now, but Valve Software — the AAA game design house behind Portal 2, Team Fortress 2 and Steam for Mac — have just announced an entirely new game in the Counter-Strike series, which will debut on the Mac in early 2012.

I’ve mostly been very happy with my migration to Lion, but I did get bit with one bug after the upgrade: for the life of me, I couldn’t get sound to output through HDMI when using my Kanex Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter. That meant the days of hooking my 11-inch MacBook Air to my 47-inch 1080p HDTV were at an end.

I wasn’t alone. Apple’s support communities are filled with threads from frustrated Lion upgraders who suddenly lost the ability to pump sound through their HTPCs. HDMI sound also stopped working on my girlfriend’s MacBook when she upgraded to Lion. It’s obviously a widespread problem.

Luckily, today I finally figured out how to fix the issue, and it was remarkably simple. Here’s how to get HDMI sound back into Lion.

While Apple obsesses on slimming down the next iPhone, maker Benjamin Bachmeier instead focused on blowing the iPhone 4 up to Brobdingnagian proportions. That’s why he took a 40-inch LCD 1080p display and installed it in the body of an enormous white iPhone 4.

Bachmeier calls it the iTableous, and while it doesn’t run OS X, it is a pretty impressive Hackintosh. All the buttons even work, and it even has a hinge so you can use it while sitting down. The only thing it needs is an appropriately large case. Maybe Bachmeier should consider laying out the 40 gees for this one?

Sick of greasy fingerprints smudging your pristine iPhone or iPad? Wish Apple would come up with a tiny vacuum with a practically microscopic nozzle to suction out the vast rivulets of grease and oil that flows between the furrows of your digits’ epidermis? No need to go crazy: Apple’s already working on fingerprint resistant coatings for future iPhones and iPads.