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.
Despite being on medical leave, Steve Jobs has been ordered by a US Magistrate to answer questions in court about the iTunes music store and Apple’s supposedly monopolistic behavior, Bloomberg reports.
The order was imposed by US Magistrate Judge Howard R. Lloyd, who is ruling over a class-action lawsuit aimed at Apple and iTunes. Steve Jobs will have to submit to “limited” questioning of under two hours, with questioning to be focused only on the changes that Apple made to their iPod software back in 2004.
While the big news of the day is Apple suing Amazon for violation of their (in my totally non-legal opinion) overly broad claims to owner ship of the term “App Store,” there’s another heady tech lawsuit hitting the feeds this evening: Microsoft has just filed a patent lawsuit against Barnes & Noble, accusing the company of infringement through their Android-based Nook e-reader.
What’s this all about? If you recall, early last year, Microsoft licensed some of their key smartphone patents to HTC, who was sued by Apple a month or so previously for allegedly violating their patents with HTC’s line of Android phones. That helped protect HTC, and Microsoft came to similar agreements with other Android device makers.
You know who didn’t pay up when Microsoft approached them, though? Barnes & Noble, whose latest Nook e-reader is essentially a budget, touchscreen Android tablet. So they’re suing.
On the first day of spring, everyone’s favorite desktop feline has shaken the snow off its spots: Apple has just released Mac OS X 10.6.7, the latest update to their Snow Leopard operating system.
What’s new? Big fixes include a boost to Back To My Mac’s reliability, some minor updates to the Mac App Store, resolves an issue with transferring files to SMB servers and incorporates a number of security fixes.
Big bugs fixed include an issue with mid-2010 MacBook Air kernel panics, AirPort driver issues, improved brightness on external displays and a DVD player playback issue only seen on 64-bit Macs, as well as a rare issue that could cause users accounts to disappear after the system went to sleep.
In addition and per usual, the latest update to Snow Leopard supplements an already excellent operating system with the standard gaggle of enhancements to stability and compatibility.
If you want to check out the full list of changes, you can find it below. Otherwise, Mac OS X 10.6.7 can be downloaded through Software Update, or directly by clicking here.
At her next performance at the Manchester International Festival in June and July, Icelandic musician and loveable weirdo Björk will apparently unveil a “bespoke gamelan-celeste hybrid”, “bespoke digitally-controlled pipe organ” and “30-foot pendulum that harnesses the Earth’s gravitational pull to create musical patterns” across six shows.
Now, I love Björk. I also love a good old gamelan-celeste hybrid as much as any man possibly can, as long as a gamelan-celeste hybrid is what I think it is… namely, some sort of chicken-horse. However, I wouldn’t be posting this little bit of news if Björk didn’t tie her latest professional eccentricity into Apple somehow… and, by gad, she has.
Apparently, Björk’s show will come with several “companion apps” which should be available on iTunes soon. No one quite knows what they are going to do, but I’m going to guess that, at the very least, they’ll allow users to initiate a good Björk-style bespokening of their very own.
The Smart Cover for the iPad 2 is undeniably pretty nifty. Even though it’s not much more than a sheet of polyurethane with some magnets in it, it feels less like a case than a gadget in its own right, thanks to its smart design allowing it to function as a stand, as well as the way the iPad 2 has been built to detect the presence of the Smart Cover and wake itself up or go to sleep accordingly.
If you’re happy with the first-gen iPad, you probably wish you could at least buy a Smart Cover that would work with it. Unfortunately, the original iPad lacks the magnets built into the case allowing the Smart Cover to attach… but you can always glue them on yourself
The guys over at Three Russians Used A Pencil have a pretty good walkthrough on how to make your Smart Cover work with the original iPad. It’s not perfect — the system doesn’t wake from sleep when you peel the Smart Cover off, and the stand functionality is a tad wobbly — but it works, and even without the “smart” part, the Smart Cover’s pretty neat.
Given the recent publicity given to the iPad 2 grey market, especially overseas, you’re probably not going to be surprised to hear that many people waiting in line for an iPad 2 at Apple’s flagship 5th Avenue Store after every delivery are being paid to wait in line and buy their iPads for someone who will then sell them overseas. These line-waiters tend to make between $100 to $200 dollars for their services, and with iPad 2s going for at least twice and sometimes three times their retail price on eBay or in other countries, grey marketeers are obviously interested in soaking up as many iPad 2s as possible.
What might shock you is just how big a problem this is. According to the New York Post, though, more than half of the 400 people in line at Apple’s 5th Avenue Store last Thursday handed over their two purchased iPads in exchange for cash to a man sitting in a nearby BMW-X5.
“This has been going on for days,” one Apple Store employee said. “I feel for the die-hard customers who want the product but can’t get it.”
BGR is reporting that Apple is already preparing a small point release of iOS 4.3 for release within two weeks time, and when it lands, iOS 4.3.1 will not only close the iPad 2’s jailbreak vulnerability, but update the baseband for the iPhone 3GS and first-gen iPad as well.
Here’s the fixes, according to BGR:
Baseband updates for the 3GS and iPad (original)
Fixed memory hang that results in memory corruption when reading large files from USIM filesystem
Fixed problem with NTLM authentication in apps and on websites
Fixed issue with the Springboard and 3rd party apps not recgonizing the gyroscope on the iPad 2
Fixed iPad 2 jailbreak vulneratbility
No word there on fixing the massive battery life drains that users of fourth-generation iPod Touches have been reporting, or a software fix for the yellowing display problems some iPad 2 owners have been experiencing. There’s also no word as to whether or not iOS 4.3.1 will be available for Verizon iPhone customers.
Owners of 15-inch and 17-inch 2011 MacBook Pros are reporting that their notebooks are freezing up entirely under extensive load… and the problem is so persistent that one sufferer was able to reproduce it on every MBP at his local Apple Store.
Apparently, owners of 2011 MacBook Pros are reporting that under heavy load, their notebooks will freeze, even as sound continues. The cursor will still be movable, but the computer is completely unresponsive, and the only way to solve the problem is a hard reboot.
Just one of the Apple.com Support Threads about the issue is now 41 pages long, and the word “systemic” is being thrown around. One fix being suggested is to try to limit yourself to using software that only uses the integrated Sandy Bridge GPU on the MacBook Pro, instead of the ATI one.
Given how wide spread this issue is, hopefully Apple will release a fix sooner rather than later. Have any of our readers noticed this problem? Let us know in the comments.
The Daily Mail — I know! — has posted up an excellent bio on Jonny Ive, explaining how the soft-spoken muscle man from Chingford went from designing toilet bowls — I know! — to becoming the lead designer over at Apple, which they argue makes him the most valuable Englishman on Earth.
From a news perspective, the most interesting detail of the bio might be word from close friends of Ive who say that he has no intention of leaving Apple to go back to the UK, and is, in fact, looking to sell his Grade II mansion in Britain to concentrate on America more closely.
AT&T’s $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile might have you hopeful that the iPhone will be coming to T-Mobile customers soon. T-Mobile themselves want to set you right on the matter, though:
T-Mobile USA remains an independent company. The acquisition is expected to be completed in approximately 12 months. We do not offer the iPhone. We offer cutting edge devices like the Samsung Galaxy S 4G and coming soon our new Sidekick 4G.
In other words, don’t expect T-Mobile to get the iPhone until at least 2012, and even then, T-Mobile stores won’t suddenly become AT&T stores: T-Mobile will work as an independent company within AT&T, and have their own handsets. If the iPhone comes to T-Mobile, it won’t just roll out automatically to customers by dint of AT&T being the parent company.
On an ancillary note, check out this quote on the rationale of T-Mobile’s decision to be acquired by AT&T:
Bringing together these two world-class businesses will create significant benefits for customers. The merger will ensure the deployment of a robust 4G LTE network to 95% of the U.S. population, something neither company would achieve on its own.
This is interesting. It’s T-Mobile and AT&T admitting that their current “4G” offerings are nothing of the sort. While both T-Mobile and AT&T are calling their HSPA+ service “4G” when it’s really just faster 3G, and far inferior to the likes of Sprint’s WiMax or Verizon’s LTE. In fact, AT&T’s 4G smartphones are actually slower at data transfer than the iPhone 4, which is a decidedly 3G handset!
T-Mobile and AT&T seem to both be admitting that unless they work together, they simply don’t have any hope of catching up with Verizon’s LTE deployment. Together, though, they can blanket most of the country in GSM LTE in a shorter period of time. If there’s any bright side to any of this, it’s that at least T-Mobile and AT&T will both stop lying to customers about what 4G means.
Warren Buffet, the world’s third richest man, has an aversion to buying Apple stock… because he just doesn’t get them.
“We held very few in the past and we’re likely to hold very few in the future,” said the billionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. “[It is] very easy for me to come to a conclusion as to what it will look like economically in five or 10 years, and it’s not easy for me to come to a conclusion about Apple.”
My first instinct was to decry this Mumm-Ra of financial wizardry for opening his desiccated gum flap and, with a puff of dust and a voice the sound of an unoiled door hinge slowly creaking open, shouting “I’M OLD!” in this manner.
Then I thought about it, and I realized he was right. I mean, not economically — I have no idea what AAPL stock will look like in five or ten years, although I think he’s right as an investing chairman interested in the long-term to view electronics as a tumultuous market: ten years ago, for example, Microsoft and Dell seemed untoppleable, Apple seemed doomed and no one gave a damn about Google. Apple just isn’t as sure a thing as Coca-Cola over the long haul.
But Buffett’s right in another way, too. I have no idea what Apple will even look like as a company in 10 years, or even five. After all, five years ago, Apple was still primarily an MP3 player maker. Ten years ago, they were primarily a computer maker. Now, they’re primarily a mobile device maker. Twenty years from now, they could be selling us all brain implants for all I know. But unlike Buffett, I don’t fear that. It excites me.
Every time a new iOS device gets a camera, it seems like there’s some first with it: the first movie or music video or television show or bang bus episode. Here’s a new first: a Minneapolis man is the first to use his iPad 2 to report breaking news. Even more interesting is the man in question is Robert Stephens, who co-founded the Geek Squad, which is now owned by Best Buy.
Here’s what happened. Driving to work one day, Stephens saw a fireball erupt in the distance. He quickly whipped out his iPhone, and started recording the explosion while driving “to see if anyone had dialed 911 yet.”
Once Stephens got to the scene, he pulled into a nearby parking lot, transferred the footage from his iPhone 4 to his iPad 2 using Apple’s USB Camera Connection Kit, edited the footage with iMovie, added a map, subtitled it and added a voice over and uploaded the film to YouTube. Before long, his coverage was being used by CNN and MSNBC.
Pretty impressive. Just think of how quickly a seasoned journalist could have turned a report around with the iPad 2. Thanks to companies like Apple, we’re not living in an era of citizen journalism where a good story breaks in just minutes, not hours or days.
Apple is telling suppliers that they will no longer be selling MobileMe subscriptions in preparation for a launch of a new, free and radically overhauled version of the service launching next month.
Rather than have all of his iOS devices strewn around his desk higgledy-piggledy, Andrew Kim designed the Polyply, a simply piece of kit that keeps his Apple gadgets as tidily arrayed as the interlocked tetronimos in a game of Tetris.
It’s not a real product, and we’re not sure it needs to be, since it’s the sort of thing that could easily be put together with some plywood and strategically carved acrylic fronting. You could make this easily yourself in a configuration personalized to your own iOS device set-up.
We love it, from the way it doubles as an iPad keyboard dock to the careful notches allowing the charging cables to slither through. Well done, Mr. Kim!
Which country’s natives and autochton’s love Apple best? You’d think the country’s home, America, but according to a neat little exercise in statistical research by the Pingdom Blog, it’s actually the Swiss, where almost one out of five people owns a Mac.
I love that the Swiss are so into Apple. It seems so appropriate that a country obsessed with the excellence of gadgets — from the latest million-gear horological marvel right on down to the common knife or belt — would heartily embrace the Mac.
And they have. 17.61% of all computers in Switzerland are Macs. America may love Macs — 15.36% of our computers were made by Apple — by the Swiss still have us beat for general enthusiasm.
Which regions reject the Mac most totally? Depressingly, it’s Asia — where all Macs are built — followed by South America, which only has a 1.08% market share of Macs.
Although not much more than a questionable confirmation of existing rumors, 9to5Mac is claiming that a source close to Foxconn has told them that the iPhone 5 will have a larger edge-to-edge screen and an aluminum back while otherwise sharing the form factor of the iPhone 4.We’re not sure what to make of these rumors.
The Mac App Store is off to a slower start than the iOS App Store, according to a new market research report by Distimo, which tracked data across a number of app stores including Apple’s, the Android Market, the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and more.
The Mac App Store is also made up of a much higher percentage of paid apps than the iOS App Store. A scale-topping 88% of all Mac App Store apps are paid, with only 12% being free.
I’m not much surprised by these numbers. The Mac software ecosystem was incredibly fertile long before the Mac App Store came on the scene, and much of the App Store’s earliest titles weren’t newly made for the platform, but instead existing paid apps ported over. Of course most of the Mac App Store apps are paid: existing paid Mac apps had the most to gain and the smallest barrier-to-entry to hit the Mac App Store running at launch. I imagine that these numbers will shift dramatically as OS X Lion makes the OS X experience more iOS-like.
Despite widespread controversy over their revised policies, Apple has just gotten one of the biggest names in publishing to agree to play by the new in-app subscription rukes: the New York Times has just announced that they are signing on with Apple’s new subscription plan and give 30% of all revenue to Apple if those subscriptions are signed up for within the New York Times app itself.
They’re also launching a paywall to exclude most non-subscriber access.The three different packages all include access to the New York Times website, and are seemingly priced according to which apps you can use in addition to your web browser.
• New York Times + smartphone app: $15 per month
• New York Times + tablet app: $20 per month
• New York Times full access: $35 per month
That’s over $450 a year for full access. The good news, however, is that the New York Times will continue to offer metered free access to their website, allowing non-subscribers the option to read 20 articles online for free each month, and possibly more if you are referred through Twitter, Facebook, etc.
The New York Times beefing up their iOS apps and offering subscriptions is good news, but we’ll have to see about this paywall. That could, in the long run, be a decision that the New York Times regrets.
For those of us who woke up at 1AM on March 11th to order our iPad 2s, the last week has mostly been a disappointing one. Although Apple began shipping out some 16GB iPads earlier in the week, it seems like they’re only now getting around to readying beefier iPad 2s like my 32GB 3G model for shipment.
Apple’s holding off on deliveries of initial pre-orders of these units as long as possible. As you can see, my order for an iPad 2 was placed within three minutes of the order page going live, but Apple is only now preparing it for shipment, which will presumably go out later today. That implies that people who ordered a 32GB+ iPad 2 3G shouldn’t expect to see their device until at least Monday.
Meanwhile, my Smart Cover was delivered today, which is like your mail-order bride shipping over her steamer trunk full of frilly underwear and fuzzy handcuffs two months before she boards a plane herself.
My guess is we’re not going to see many other product launches like this from Apple. It appears that even they were surprised by iPad 2 demand, and released the tablet at least a month before they actually had the number of devices produced that they needed for a successful, hassle-free launch. I expect the next iPad launch to go a lot smoother than this one did.
Apple’s supply of iPad 2s is clearly constrained, and it doesn’t look like that’s likely to change anytime soon. In fact, Apple’s ability to build more iPad 2s is expected to become even more constrained as at least two of the company’s core component suppliers in the region have temporarily shut down operations to assess damages caused by the March 11th earthquake and tsunami.
The two component suppliers in question appear to be the Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Company, who provide resin to Apple for iOS device circuit boards, as well as Toshiba, which provides Apple with its flash supplies.
The end result is it looks like Apple’s going to have an even harder time making new iPads, iPhones and iPod Touch’s for the rest of this quarter, and possibly well into next quarter. If true, that might make the iPhone 5 launch even more problematic and line-crazy than the iPad 2’s was.
There’s bigger difference between the 3G and WiFi versions of the iPad 2 than just their modems. According to iLounge, the iPad 2 WiFi and iPad 2 3G have differences when it comes to microphone quality… with the more expensive iPad 2 3G losing out to the WiFi-only model.
Although the microphone hardware between versions is the same, the mic level quality on the iPad 2 seems to be affected by its slightly different placement. On the WiFi iPad 2, sound quality is better due to the fact that the microphone opening is centered and bored through an aluminum surface; the mic opening on the 3G models, on the other hand, houses the microphone opening in plastic.
The result? The iPad 2 WiFi has cleaner audio through the microphone than the 3G version, which iLounge found to be slightly muffled and echo-prone as a result. It’s not a big deal if you’re willing to pop-in some in-line mic earbuds, but it’s still a difference worth being aware of.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has put pen to paper during his medical leave to write Apple employees in Japan, and if any CEO has ever written a classier and more modest promise of total and complete support to those in the turmoil of a great national tragedy, I’ve yet to read it.
The latest MacUpdate Bundle is just an insanely good deal. For $50, you get Parallels, 1Password, App Tamer, Divvy, TechTool Pro 5, Civilization IV, DVDRemaster Pro 7, and a handful of others. This is actually one of the best bundles I’ve seen in a while: the Windows VM machine Parallels and the incredible password manager 1Password are indispensable on my Mac, while App Tamer helps stretch my MacBook Air’s battery to iPad-like levels, and Civilization IV remains the best iteration of Sid Meier’s classic strategy game. Get get get!
The iPad 2 was the first iPad to bring us front- and rear-facing cameras.
The iPad 2 didn’t get a Retina Display this generation like the iPhone 4… but there’s more to the quality of a display than just pixel density. Now Dr. Raymond Soneir of DisplayMate Technologies has performed tests on the many other characteristics of the iPad 2’s display, putting it in a shoot-out against that of the iPhone 4.
The results? Outside of pixel density, the iPad 2 and iPhone 4 have almost identical performance. That’s a good thing on the hardware side… but a bad thing when it comes to software.
Phil Schiller has promised us that the white iPhone 4 is going to be coming this spring after long delays, but previous reports have suggested that it might be a GSM-only affair, leaving Verizon customers with no options but to buy the black iPhone 4.
iTunes 10.2 begs to differ, though. Within the resource files of the latest version of iTunes, you can find icons for the white iPhone 4 in both CDMA and GSM flavors, as differentiated from one another by their different antenna banding.
That’s no guarantee of a CDMA white iPhone 4, of course, but it certainly implies that Verizon customers will be able to get their hands on one in the coming months… just a couple months ahead of the launch of the iPhone 5.
