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.
Apple’s iPad sales for Q2 were significantly lower than some analysts were expecting, especially given the 7MM+ iPads Cupertino was able to push over Q1.
What the heck happened? Did demand slacken because of the imminent arrival of the iPad 2? Could Apple not produce enough iPad 2s to satisfy demand because of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan?
According to comments made by research firm iSuppli, Apple’s low sales number for the quarter were primarily due to production issues that led to extreme shortages of display and speaker parts.
A unique service offering to unlock any GSM iPhone, no jailbreaks required, has suddenly shut down, leaving many customers awaiting refunds. Increased scrutiny from Apple may very well be responsible… and curiously, even the providers of the service had no idea how it worked, or why it’s all stopped.
Depending upon how much you spent on your MacBook, you’ve probably noticed that when viewing the screen from more extreme angles to the left or the right, the picture looks pretty terrible. Some new LED technology that Apple is perfecting might help that, though, improving color accuracy and allowing wider view angles for an array of future Apple devices, including new MacBooks and iPads.
When the Verizon iPhone was launched, Apple went on record saying that they did not think LTE or 4G was a good fit right now, in that the first-gen chips were still too big and power efficient to make sense.
Will we see an iPhone 4G in September, though? It doesn’t seem likely. Forbes is reporting that the chips required to produce well-designed LTE iPhones simply won’t be around until late in the year at the earliest… and possibly not until 2012.
Apple’s done much to improve its ranking in Greenpeace’s rankings of the most green-friendly tech companies in the world thanks to radical design decisions (like switching from plastic to aluminum for its Macs) and embracing smart, minimalistic packaging. In fact, after a few years, they’d managed to crawl pretty high on the list.
Apple’s physical products remain pretty green friendly, but in a new report presented by Greenpeace, Apple ranks at the very bottom of a list of ten Internet companies whose data facilities are dirtiest. And it’s all because of their new North Carolina data super-center.
Right now, there are effectively two iPhone 4s: the CDMA version and the GSM version. From an American viewpoint, one runs on Verizon, the other runs on AT&T, but are otherwise identical handsets… yet because of the vagaries of cellular communication technologies, these handsets are actually tangibly different phones.
This isn’t the sort of situation Apple likes. They avoid forking hardware as much as possible, and if they are forced to fork a product — as they did with iOS when the original iPad was released — they converge those tines into a single product as quickly possible (in this example, iOS 4.1).
So we know that eventually, Apple just wants to make one iPhone that they can sell on both CDMA and GSM networks. And according to Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo speaking at their quarterly earnings conference call, that iPhone will be the iPhone 5, a truly “global device.”
Verizon CFO Fran Shammo, asked about the sluggishness of the company’s ARPU growth in Q1, when the iPhone was introduced – growth was just 2.2%, compared to 2.5% in Q4, remarked:
“The fluctuation, I believe, will come when a new device from Apple is launched, whenever that may be, and that we will be, on the first time, on equal footing with our competitors on a new phone hitting the market, which will also be a global device.”
The technology’s already there, of course. Inside the Verizon iPhone 4 is a Qualcomm chipset that would technically allow the CDMA iPhone to run on any GSM or CDMA network around the world, but it’s not a chipset design issue alone: there’s also the antenna to consider.
If Shammo’s right, expect the tines to converge again in September, when Apple releases the iPhone 5. And expect the iPhone 5 to have a very different antenna design at that.
I know I’m late to the party, but I recently bought myself a Pogo Stylus for my iPad, envisioning a mid-life career change to an illustrator of Jack Kirby style acidless psychedelia. Wow, do these things suck or what? I never expected anything as good as a Wacom tablet, you understand, but I was expecting a little more than what appears to be an irregular shaped cube of asbestos glued to the tip of some aluminum…. especially from the only stylus sold at the Apple Store. Not only are they not pressure-sensitive (which I understand), but they don’t even have precise tips!
You’d surely think that Wacom’s official entry into the iPad stylus market would be better, and in fact it is… but don’t expect pressure sensitivity. It’s just your standard rubber-tipped pen. Sure, that tip is tapered for precision, but couldn’t Wacom — kings of the pressure sensitive tablet on the PC side of things — have maybe figured out some sort of Bluetooth-powered approach to communicating sensitivity to a custom app, then given that API to the Brushes and Paintmaker Pro devs of the world? Perchance to dream.
Not that I would know first hand, but there’s this wonderful sense of serendipity that occurs at the eureka moment of invention. Imagine the sensation Jonny Ive must have felt when he invented the Smart Cover for iPad 2: I imagine the moment of serendipity came when he stripped naked and lifted the lid to the Japanese style on-campus communal bath that he shared with Steve Jobs, Tim Cook and Phil Schiller and suddenly paused and said to himself, “You know, this bath lid would make a great tablet stand.” And as absurd as that sounds, it’s true… a Japanese folding bath lid does make a wonderful tablet stand!
Somehow, I doubt copycat creators get that same sense of serendipity when they just rip something off. Take Aviiq’s Quick Stand, a laptop stand for your MacBook that “borrows” inspiration from Apple’s Smart Cover, except without any of the magnets or functionality that afford the “smart.”
Not that they’re charging any less for it: the Aviiq Quick Stand will run you $40. As Wired’s resident gadget blogger and secret gerontophile Charlie Sorrel notes, that’s an awful lot of money to spend on something to prop your computer up a couple inches when any old piece of junk would do.
They say that the definition of insanity is to expect the same action to result in two different outcomes. If so, those jolly fellows over at M.I.C. Gadget have a past-time of plunging marshmallow-covered fingers into their own self-administered trepanation holes, because just a couple months after they got C&Ded by Apple over their Steve Jobs Ninja Action figure, they were back at it again with the iHub: a USB hub actually featuring Apple’s iconic logo.
Can anyone guess what happened? We certainlyt did, but now, Apple Bitch confirms it: Apple’s lawyers were just all over the iHub from mother day frackin’ one.
Apple has just posted their Q2 2011 financial results and, hey, surprise! Record numbers all around despite some lower-than-expected sales numbers, with all-around profit sitting pretty at $5.99 billion. Read on for more details.
Needless to say, the iPad is utterly dominating the still nascent tablet market… but the extent of its domination might surprise you: according to New York based ABI Research, Apple controls eighty-five percent of the tablet market.
If you travel around with an iPhone in your pocket or an iPad 3G in your bag, Apple knows everywhere you’ve ever been since the moment you started using your device. Even worse, it stores that information in a non-encrypted file structure that is synced with your computer every time you plug your device into iTunes.
Do you love Apple? No, really. I mean, do you looooooooooooooooove Apple? A new documentary traveling across Europe and the United States this summer wants to interview you.
According to producer Dimitri Kourtchine, the documentary film will be 52 minutes long, and examine Apple’s “brand, its fans, the enthusiasm and the criticism that it provokes around the word.” Fifty-two minutes doesn’t seem long enough to even begin to cover it, does it?
None the less, Dimitri and his crew will be traveling across Europe in May and America in June, looking to interview people who love Apple so much they want to get married in an Apple Store, or hate Apple so much they can’t even hear Steve Jobs’ name without punching something, or have created works of art on their iOS devices, or fired a Mac Pro into space.
Basically, if you are foam-at-the-mouth passionate about the subject of Apple — hate or love, it doesn’t matter — they want to talk to you and get you on film.
If you think you’re that kind of guy, you can email DImitri and his crew at appledocfilm at gmail dot com. Can’t wait to see some of you weirdos on screen when the documentary debuts later this year.
Between services like Dropbox and Amazon’s new Cloud Locker, not to mention Apple’s presumed imminent entry into the market, cloud storage is pretty hot right now, and it’s all done in software. That inevitably means that cloud storage will start creeping out to markets oversaturated with competitors boasting pretty much identical hardware… markets like USB hard drives.
As far as I know, Hitachi’s new Touro Pro line of USB hard drives now come with up to 3GB of free online cloud storage, which is upgradeable to 250GB for $49.99 per year.
That’s actually a pretty fantastic deal, considering 100GB of Dropbox storage costs $19.99 per month. On the other hand, while Hitachi is delivering native applications to allow users to access the data they’re storing in the cloud on their iPads and iPhones, but given that Dropbox is the de facto iOS standard for cloud storage, Dropbox will still have the advantage of cross-app compatibility.
Otherwise, Hitachi’s line-up of Touro Pro hard drives are pretty standard 7200 RPM drives. The desktop models come with storage capacities between 1TB and 3TB, and are priced between $130 and $230. The Mobile Pro drives, on the other hand, come in 500GB and 750GB capacities, and are priced at $110 and $130 respectively.
If you want Lion on your Mac, you’ve either got to be a developer or, in the immortal words of Malcolm Reynolds, “aim to misbehave.” Even if you just want your Mac to look like it’s running Lion, you’re out of luck.
But are you the kind of person who sometimes stumbles across a pungent pile of offal in the streets outside of your local butcher’s shop, and instead of crinkling your nose and walking quickly past, stops to adorn it with an array of sparking gemstones, festive ribbons and pretty flowers? Do you also use a PC? You’re in luck.
As it turns out, it’s a counterintuitively easy process to make your Windows 7 install look like Apple’s still unreleased operating system. All you need to do is download the Lion Skin Pack and run the installer, no patching required.
I live on this long, steep hill that some days just feels so infinite and Sisyphean that I fear I might be the character of some inexplicably forgotten short story by Jorge Luis Borges. On particularly hot summer days, I’ll sometimes muse to myself, halfway up this interminable hill, that walking really is for suckers, and I should just lop off these wimpy locomotive appendages and treat myself to some of those robo-legs I’ve had my eye on for so long.
Apple doesn’t make robot-legs, unfortunately. What they do make are MacBooks that come with SSD drives… and to me, investing in one was pretty much the direct equivalent of having my computer’s old weak, broken legs cut off and some rocket-powered karate kickers transplanted in their place. You simply will not believe how fast computing can be with an SSD, or how slow your current “fast” computing experience is without one.
Need more proof than my say so? MacWorld tested a few MacBook Pros — a couple with SSDs, a couple identically specced without — and found notable speed improvements.
Given its execrable reception and terrible performance, you’d expect an RIM BlackBerry Playbook — viscera spilled across a white room table — to contain nothing but 400 grams of dirty sand and several old marbles and rusty jacks.
But no! The boys over at iFixIt split the PlayBook open, and found a circuit board, a touch panel and some big batteries inside. Who’d a thunk?
I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty troubling. It was hard enough to accept the PlayBook’s woeful deficiencies (including features as simple as native email, contacts or calendar) under the assumption that it had no silicon at all inside, and was, in fact, some sort of glorified ant farm sold at a premium to unsuspecting suckers. That there’s actual hardware inside makes its deficiencies inexcusable, especially when that hardware is virtually identical to that of the iPad 2.
One thing I love about tablet breakdowns is the way they just casually reveal exactly which technology has become super-efficient, and which technology still has a long way to go. That tablets like the PlayBook and iPad 2 are essentially just huge batteries with a single tiny, index-card sized circuit board attach really show you how far CPUs have come in thirty years… and how much battery technology still has to go.
As a man who leaves as many discarded pens as his wake as a molting peacock after a spontaneous squid attack, one of my many problems with styluses for iOS devices is where to put them when you’re not using them. Unless I can physically attach the stylus to my iPhone or iPad itself, it’s gone.
When the iPad 2 came along with its Smart Cover in tow, I thought I had the answer. The Pogo Stylus has a clip to attach to shirt pockets and the like, and I thought it could fairly easily slip on the Smart Cover itself. In fact, this does work, but it pushes the Smart Cover away from the iPad 2 display just enough for the detritus at the bottom of my bag — a fragrant snuff made up of tobacco detritus, cookie crumbs and Cheetos dust — to siphon its way through the gap and onto the screen. Blech.
Here’s a smart alternative, though. Applydea (short for Apply the Idea, and not pronounced “Apple Idea” or “App Lydia”) designed a very clever aluminum stylus called the Maglus, which comes replete with magnets that allow you to stick the stylus directly to the Smart Cover or iPad 2 spine.
We thought, though, that Patel’s most compelling argument that Apple was in the right was worth its own post: check out the “borrowing” Samsung did from iOS for their TouchWiz homescreen icons.
We’d realized, of course, that Samsung’s icons had been “inspired” by Apple, but putting them side-by-side really just makes the theft look totally shameless. How does a company like Samsung think it’s cool to openly rip-off one of its biggest customers like that? I’m shocked it took Apple this long to sue.
Steve Jobs isn’t the kind of guy who likes it when smartass no-goodniks pretend to be him. Take it from me, a man who once spent the better part of six months in traction after donning a turtleneck and trying to bluster my way past security at Apple’s Corporate HQ by loudly squealing “My name is Steve Jobs!” in my best Truman Capote voice.
There’s at least one man out there, though, who has pretended to be Steve Jobs and not found his teeth grinning out of the opposite orifice. That man is Noah Wyle, aka that dreamy Dr. Carter from E.R., who played Steve Jobs in the famous 1999 biopic Pirates of SIlicon Valley.
So says Paul Allen, at least. He’s the co-founder of Microsoft, a notorious patent troll and the author of the new biography Idea Man. He says that Noah Wyle portrayed Jobs as a “mean-spirited jerk.” Far from being offended, Jobs seemingly approved, saying that Wyle did “a fantastic job.” Or should we say… fantastic Jobs. Groan, cymbal crash, sound of rotten tomatoes pummeling human flesh.
Are you a student teetering on the brink of an abyss of poverty some might describe as utterly Dostoevskyan? Barely enough coins in your pockets to buy tonight’s dinner — a single can of brine-soaked beans — and a sufficient volume of cheap lard trimming candles to light your midnight studies and pre-dawn app programming exercises, let alone the $1599 to attend this year’s WWDC? No need to hit your land lady with an axe handle for her hidden gold cache. Apple’s willing to give you a scholarship to attend WWDC in June at San Francisco.
According to Apple, to apply, you must be “at least 18 years of age, currently enrolled part-time or full-time at a college or university, and either an iOS Developer University Program member, Mac Developer Program member, or ADC Student member as of August 1, 2010 or later, and have identified yourself as a “Student” in your developer profile.”
About the only provision Apple’s making besides the academic ones is that applicants be talented, as they “will be judged on technical ability, creativity of ideas expressed in products or projects, prior WWDC attendance, technical and work experience.” No morons, in other wosrds.
Scholarship tickets will be passed out by May 3rd, with application due by April 26th. There will be 150 scholarship winners in all. Get on it there, Raskalnikov.
This is pretty neat. Deskscribble for the Mac is a new app that allows you to use your mouse, trackpad or Wacom tablet to deface, tag, scribble upon or vandalize anything you see on your Mac’s screen.
For example, if you were reading this post with Deskscribble open, you could easily vandalize my author bio photo… say, by blackening out one of my teeth, or drawing visible oscillations meant to denote pungent stench waves that are emanating from my body, or even just by drawing a cigarette poking out of the beak of the little budgerigar sitting on my shoulder.
Defacing the bio photos of Cult of Mac authors you find obnoxious is just the tip of the iceberg of Deskscribble’s functionality, though. You can also use it to highlight sentences in web pages you want to remember for later, circle interesting Craigslist ads, make notes to yourself atop of open windows, etc.
Pretty neat, although best with a tablet. If you’re interested in Deskscribble, it can be purchased for just $9.99 in the Mac App Store.
Apple’s usually pretty good about crowing about the number of devices it’s managed to sell to consumers… at least when they’re selling well. Yet Cupertino has kept iPod Touch numbers surprisingly close to its breast since the plucky touch PMP debuted in 2007.
Not that Apple hasn’t released numbers at all, just that they generally dump all iPod numbers into one catch-all “iPod” category. No one’s ever really believed this was because the Touch was a shameful dud — clearly it’s a hot seller — but if you ever wanted to know exactly how many iPod Touches were floating out there in the wild, just waiting to beam out their secret personality suppression fields once Steve Jobs finally gets around to thumbing that “Global Domination” button in his office… well, you had to guesstimate.
As one of the many smelly long-hairs who once set his American eyes upon the distant, wild lands of Europe and decided to explore it equipped with nothing but a festering ruck sack, a worn down copy of Don McLean’s American Pie (10 minute version) and a slim black journal filled with blank verse that would have made even late-career Jack Kerouac barf, I know the crawl opening every virgin Moleskine notebook by heart.
“The Moleskine notebook is the heir and successor to the legendary notebook used by artists and thinkers over the past two centuries: among them Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin,” it reads.
Note that Moleskine does not claim to be the same company behind those notebooks. It isn’t, and in fact, the story of how Italian notebook makers Modo & Modo took one of their regular, unassuming notebooks and turned it into a multimillion dollar busines and the hipster’s preferred analogue writing companion is pretty fascinating.
In truth, there’s not really such a thing as a Moleskine notebook. Picasso and Chatwin certainly didn’t use one. A Moleskine notebook is essentially just a notebook with an impeccably composed page of marketing copy inserted before the first leaf.
So here’s the question: if Moleskine is just some copy rattling on about Hemingway and van Gogh attached to something that can take notes, is a note-taking iPad app which opens up for the first time to display that same copy just as much of a Moleskine notebook as the one you might carry around in your back pocket?
Moleskine seems ready to find out with their new iOS app. The bad news? It’s just awful. The good news? It’s free, unlike a “real” Moleskine, whatever that is.
M.I.C. Gadget is no stranger to having their collective skulls smashed together by Cupertino’s lawyers with a Three Stooges-style acoustic cacophony of coconuts colliding, and I’m sure that’s what is going to happen here with the iHub: a third-party hub that not only looks like a little Apple TV sticking out of your USB port, but actually featuring the official Apple logo.
Trust be told, I actually kind of wish Apple made a USB hub like this. The little Apple logo lights up when the hub is plugged in, and the square Apple TV shape means that you never have to worry about your USB ports rubbing their male connectors shamefully together. Even the box is cute: it looks just like the iPod Nano box! Maybe Apple will make something like this for Thunderbolt.
$10 will get you one, if Apple doesn’t sue MIC Gadget into a juicy paste before you click the order button. [via Gadget Lab]
