John Brownlee - page 179

Steve Jobs has very clearly spelled out his feelings about multitouch on a desktop or laptop environment. Multitouch, in Apple’s view, is meant to be horizontal, not vertical, which is why you will never see a touchscreen iMac or MacBook. The Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad are Apple’s answer to the problem posed by desktop multitouch.

Makes sense to me. That said, the problem with even the Magic Trackpad is that it’s not real multitouch, in the sense that you are not directly interacting with a display with your fingers. Instead, you’re phoning what your fingers are doing to a connected display, the same as any mouse.

That’s clearly not as elegant a solution as Apple would like, so it’s no surprise to me that a new patent application spells out the possibility of a Magic Mouse with either an “OLED or specialized display surface made of collimated optical glass that contains a unique magnifying capability.”

Your vintage Macintosh Plus might not get a lot of playtime anymore now that you’ve got an iMac and a new MacBook Air, but there’s no reason it can’t still be a valuable part of your home Mac office… as long as you’re willing to do a little bit of hacking.

Over at Macenstein, hacker Dean Gray talks about how he took his old 1986 Macintosh Plus 1MB and turned it into a working Time Machine server… about as pitch perfect a use for an old Mac as I can think of.

According to Dean, the hack was pretty easy: he just ripped out the innards and filled it with six different hard drives equaling 2.3TB of space total. An Intel Atom motherboard ties those drives together, and since he couldn’t find a display that fit, Dean decided to install a 10.4-inch digital picture frame instead.

Too bad: if Dean had found a display of the right size, he could have had a vintage Macintosh Plus emulator running full-screen all the time, while the Time Machine server quietly backed up his data in the background. Maybe this would work, Dean?

One of the most irritating things about upgrading your version of iOS as a jailbreaker is losing all of the Cydia tweaks you’ve installed. Even if you re-jailbreak the next version of iOS, there’s no easy way to re-download and install all of your favorite apps and tweaks… especially if you’ve been grabbing them from third-party repositories.

Luckily, that seems like that’s about to change. Cydia’s newest feature allows you to re-download all of your apps easily in case you have to wipe and restore your device through the “Manage Account” section, which lets you keep track of your packages and app purchases through a Google or Facebook account.

Surely, there will be some who won’t entirely be comfortable handing over their Facebook or Google login details to a bunch of jailbreakers, but I just can’t wait to if it means I never have to find and download 5 Icon Dock again.

Before Tuesday’s Q1 2011 earnings call, Fortune issued a score card ranking various analysts’ predictions (both pro and amateuralike) on how Apple would do this quarter

Now the results are in, and across the board, the amateurs did far better predicting Apple’s results than the professionals at the brokering houses and banks.

It’s not even close, either. Once ranked, the bottom twenty spots in scorecard accuracy all go to professionals being paid for their insight and accuracy. On average, progessionals were off by a 9.04% margin. Meanwhile, nine out of the ten amateurs made the top ten, and overall were only over by a little under 4%.

Jeez. And to think we bailed out these bozos. Based upon these results, it looks like the average investor would be better off cracking open a blog than employing a pro.

Another intriguing fossil unearthed from the second iOS 4.3 beta is the mention of two new services called Media Stream and Photo Stream, which 9 to 5 Mac’s Marc Gurman speculates is meant to be just one more element of an eventual Apple-run social network which will debut in iOS 5.

If you for whatever reason doubted that the next iPad would be FaceTime compatible, a new screenshot found inside the latest iOS 4.3 beta gives stronger indication than ever that there will be both front and rear-facing cameras in the iPad 2.

Earlier this week, Leander predicted that Apple would sell its ten billionth app this coming Friday, giving the lucky App Store downloader a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card to mark the occasion. CoM Reader Allan disagreed, arguing that it was more likely to happen on Saturday evening, PST.

Here’s some more soothsaying to consider, if you’re holding off on buying some apps in hopes of winning the Golden Ticket: a new website called tenbillionapps.com has launched, and it is counting down to the ten billionth app in projected real time.

When does tenbillionapps.com think the milestone will be reached? Saturday, January 22nd, 2011 at 12:31pm EST.

I have always loved the idea of the iPod Shuffle — an iPod small enough to attach to my keychain and always carry around with me — but unfortunately, the iPod Shuffle just doesn’t fit the way I listen to music. I don’t want to randomly listen to a bunch of tracks — if I want to listen to random music, I want it curated by a DJ or something.

My Shuffle, then, rarely gets used unless I dust it off along with a delusion of jogging. But musician Matthew Irvine Brown’s new project is enough to make me want to pull my old Shuffle out of the drawer: he’s compiled a set of 18 original tracks that are meant to be played in random order on the iPod Shuffle.

The scarcely, randomly reputable boys over at Digitimes are recycling weeks-old rumors by insisting that one of their sources from inside AAPL’s component supply chain says that the iPad 2 will boast a Retina Display.

Well, no, it jolly well won’t. But just in case that doesn’t convince you, how about some extrapolation due Moore’s Law?

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak didn’t see Steve Jobs’ sudden leave of absence coming, according to an email he wrote to CNET.

“The news actually frightened me because I did not expect it,” Wozniak said, before trying to look more brightly at the news as perhaps a personal choice on Jobs’ part to downplay his day-to-day involvement with Apple.

“If Steve is tired and wants a bit more normal life, more power to him,” he said.

At the time of writing CNET on Monday, Woz said he had not yet contacted Jobs, but in an email statement to Cult of Mac the Apple co-founder said that he had since reached out to Jobs directly with his best wishes of rapid recovery.

Steve Jobs’ latest medical leave of absence was announced one day before Apple scheduled their fiscal Q1 earnings result… which in and of itself had been scheduled during a strange period, given the scheduling history of such calls.

That was no accident, of course, but an interesting post by Andy Zaky over at the Seeking Alpha blog reveals not only the reason behind the timing, but shows that Apple and Steve Jobs had been planning this for well over a month, if not longer.

I quite like the look of Kensington’s new combination dock, stand and battery charger for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Called the PowerLift, the dock packs in its own battery to provide an additional boost of power for when you just can’t get to the mains.

It’s not a piddling battery either. The PowerLift actually will give your iPhone jolt enough to power it for another 3.5 hours of talk time, 1.5 hours of FaceTime, 5 hours of video and 20 hours of music. That’s a respectable amount of juice for when you just can’t get to the mains.

Of course, the PowerLift’s larger battery means it doesn’t have the most streamlined design in the world, but if you look at it as a travel dock that just happens to also be an external battery, there’s a lot to love here.

The Kensington PowerLift is available now for pre-order on Amazon for $50.

Verizon may have dropped its “New Every Two” promotion before the advent of the Verizon iPhone, but that’s not to say they don’t want to help some of their existing customers along with an upgrade.

AirView is a free new app that allows you to send video wirelessly between your iOS devices, as well as from iTunes to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

As perhaps is obvious from the app’s name, AirView taps into the AirPlay functionality in iOS 4.2 which allows you to beam video from your iPhone or iPad to a compatible device like an AppleTV. However, AirPlay doesn’t let you beam video from iTunes to your iPhone, or from your iPhone to your iPad.

AirView remedies that. Just open it on any iOS device and it will show up on your WiFi network as a new destination for video, just as if it were an AirPort Express or AppleTV.

Pretty neat, but grab it now: who knows how this might fall afoul of Apple’s sometimes inscrutable whims.

[via Gadget Lab]

Much of the Apple blogosphere consensus is that now that the Verizon iPhone is a real product, we should see a mass migration of Verizon users ditching their Android phones in favor of an iPhone 4. The rationale goes that the only reason Verizon has sold so many Android handsets is because it was the only thing close to the iPhone every Verizon subscriber really wanted.

That was always a perspective too black-and-white to be true, and now a new study has come out from Zokem, finding that while iPhone owners are most loyal to their existing smartphone, Android owners are the more likely to upgrade to a new Android phone than even iPhone customers.

Here at Cult of Mac, I’ve posted time and time again why I don’t think the iPad 2 will have a Retina Display, even though Apple definitely wants to give it one. It’s all about economic feasibility, and the bottom line is that an iPad packing nearly the same amount of pixels as a 27-inch iMac isn’t going to come in at a sub-$500 or even sub-$600 price range.

It appears that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber agrees. His sources, which are usually impeccable, tell him that the iPad 2 simply does not have a Retina Display, and will still run at a 1024 x 768 resolution.

Although stock prices were still down 2% upon the news that Steve Jobs was taking another, this time open-ended medical leave of absence from Apple, the Wall Street analysts taking part in Apple’s Q1 2011 earnings call exhibited a remarkable lack of curiosity about the CEO’s health, or the company’s near future without him.

In fact, of nearly a dozen analysts asking twice as many questions during the Q&A section of the call, not a single one made even a passing reference to CEO Steve Jobs and his health.

Asked at today’s earnings call whether or not he feared that the success of the iPad and the rise in popularity of tablets would cannibalize Mac sales, Tim Cook not only said Apple was not afraid of cannibalization and hadn’t seen it occurring, but even if it did happen, they weren’t worried about it. In fact, Apple welcomed it.

“Last quarter, the Mac grew at eight times the PC market rate of growth, so as far as we can see, there’s no cannibalization on Mac sales by the iPad,” said Cook.

“In fact, there’s the opposite: a Halo Effect from Apple product to Apple product.”

“If this is cannibalization, it feels pretty good,” Cook laughed.

What if the tablet market does cannibalize PC sales, though? Cook downplayed the threat.

“One thing to keep in mind if the iPad and tablets do start cannibalizing, the Mac has a relatively low share in the PC market, so we actually have a lot more to win because of that, while our competitors have a lot more to lose.”

During today’s Q1 2011 earnings call, one consistent strain ran throughout: Apple could not be happier with the success of the iPad, and could not be more contemptuous of the competition.

Apple just concluded their Q1 2011 earnings call, and while Steve Jobs may be taking a leave of absence, he’s leaving his company in good shape: Apple has just had their best quarter ever, racking in over $26.7 billion in revenue, a number which blows away even the most optimistic Wall Street projections.

In Q1 2011, Apple managed to sell 16.24 million iPhones, which was a new record for the company. Even more impressively, they sold 7.33 million iPads over the holiday period, which was over 3 million more than the previous quarter.

On the Mac side, Apple sold 4.13 million Macs, a strong growth of 23 percent year-over-year, largely buoyed by the runaway success of the new MacBook Air. iPod sales, on the other hand, were down 7 percent year-over-year, continuing a steady decline.

Steve Jobs did not appear during the conference call, nor was his health referenced. However, he did provide a quote for the press release, saying: ““We had a phenomenal holiday quarter with record Mac, iPhone and iPad sales. We are firing on all cylinders and we’ve got some exciting things in the pipeline for this year including iPhone 4 on Verizon which customers can’t wait to get their hands on.”

Apple projects $22 billion in revenue for next quarter, as well as earnings per share of $4.90. Given Apple’s history surprising its shareholders, it’s probably going to be a lot more.

Verizon Wireless appears to be preparing for the sudden onslaught of new customers coming to their network for the Verizon iPhone by making it harder and more expensive to upgrade their phones at the end of two years.

Yup. Sadly, Verizon has quietly discontinued their long-running New Every Two promotion, which allowed any customers who successfully completed a two-year contract to either get a free new low-end phone or rack up credit ranging between $30 and $100 to apply to the downpayment of their next phone.

Case makers don’t necessarily know anything more than the rest of us about what the next iOS devices will look like — see, for example, the insistence of second-gen iPod Touch case makers that the next iteration of the PMP would have a camera, which didn’t happen until the FaceTime-capable model came along a year later — but they are always of interest, as they usually come from information leaking out of the factories of Apple’s own Chinese manufacturers.

The latest case designs coming out of China, then, is interesting for showing off two new openings that we haven’t seen before. The slot for the rear camera and speaker are, of course, there in their usual places, but two new holes have been carved out to fit an SD card slot and either a mini DisplayPort or an HDMI port.

Intriguing. Of course, if the iPad 2 does get an SD card slot, don’t expect to be able to use it to expand your device’s storage: it’ll strictly be for offloading photos and videos with an iPad Connector Kit.

A rather questionable new rumor is coming out of Three Guys And A Podcast. They’re claiming that Apple will not only discontinue iTunes this year but they’ll replace it with Safari. What?

You probably know Bump as the guys behind the iOS app that allows you to exchange contacts by “bumping” your device against someone else’s while the app is running. It’s such a good product that I’m mystified Apple hasn’t stolen their idea, integrated it directly into iOS and put them out of business already.

I’m glad they haven’t, though, because the Bump guys have just posted some interesting statistics gleaned from their 25+ million downloads. According to their figures, over 89% of their users are running iOS 4.0 or above.

Apple Insider has a juicy scoop from the same source who revealed the negotiations between Apple, Imagination Technologies and Samsung back in 2008 that ultimately led to the creation of the A4 CPU: Apple is reportedly building a new version of their A4 chip that will bring faster dual graphic cores to the iPhone 5 and iPad 2.