John Brownlee - page 222

Responding to a recent New York Times piece linking the horrific warfare in the Congo with the minerals used in our gadgets, Steve Jobs wrote a new iPhone 4 customer explaining Apple’s policy in dealing with mineral purchases:

We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict few materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.

That’s a refreshingly blunt admission of relative impotence: Apple’s doing what it can, but ultimately, their suppliers are in turn supplied by people who could well be lying about their source. Short of a way to independently verify where minerals are coming from, Apple’s got to take people at their words.

In some recently leaked internal slides detailing Microsoft’s plans for the upcoming Windows 8 operating system, this nightmarish iMac-like monstrosity was revealed as a possibly forthcoming new multitouch all-in-one PC.

What the f… I mean… what is this thing? It looks like some horror that the utero-absorbed fetus of Johnny Ive’s Dark Half twin might design, or something that might creep out of Steve Job’s closet in the night, hungry for rape.

Jeez, Microsoft.

Apple’s accidentally hinted at the existence of iWorks for iPhone a few times in the past now, but these blurry images over at 9to5Mac are the first plausible look at the software, demonstrating a beta of Pages for iPhone running on an iPod Touch.

Sure, this kind of image is something that could be easily spoofed by a programmer with a jailbroken iPhone, but I suspect that it’s legit: with iMovie for iPhone, Apple has already demonstrated itself to be ready to start porting over their desktop apps to iOS.

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As a film, Michael Korbel’s Apple of My Eye is schmaltzy enough that it might make you want to puke out a kidney. The plot can best be best described thusly: old man walks down street with granddaughter, looks into a window, hallucinates for thirty seconds about being a lilliputian riding a toy train.

“Grampa? GRAMPA?” the alarmed girl asks as her dead-eyed grandfather wobbles back and forth, clearly in the throes of a ministroke. “Let me tell you a story!” he cries. The film ends just before the little girl’s inevitable response: “Oh, great. I’m sure it’ll be a humdinger.” *eyeroll* “Let’s just get you back to the assisted care facility, okay?”

Pretty putrid. In fact, if it weren’t filmed with an iPhone 4 and edited with iMovie for iPhone, I’d tell you to watch something more interesting. But it was, which makes Apple of My Eye impressive, tacky though it may well be. If anything, it just goes to show how good the iPhone 4’s video capabilities are… at least when wielded by professional cinematographers under ideal lighting conditions.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6L07nPrjzo&feature=player_embedded

Don’t have an iPhone 4 but still want to use iMovie for iPhone? There’s no real reason it can’t work on the likes of the 3GS, and so it does, with a little jailbreaking.

The hack’s easy enough. If you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone, you just edit the info.plist file of the app and change the “Minimum System Version” to 3.0.0 and “Front-Facing Camera” to False. Launch the app again and you’ve got the ability to edit videos on your last-generation iPhone, seemingly without much performance degradation.

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Although usually the model of reasonableness and imperturbability, Downfall’s Adolf Hitler is none too happy with the iPhone 4’s reception problems. It’s enough to make a Nazi an Android fanboy!

As they are wont to do, the guys over at iSuppli have ripped apart their pretty new iPhone 4s, done some math and figured out how much it cost to make.

What’s the damage to Apple? The 16GB iPhone 4 costs $187.51 to put together in hardware costs alone, with the fancy new Retina Display costing $28.50 per unit, the A4 CPU costing $10.75 and the new gyroscope only coming in at around $2.60./

Needless to say, there’s a lot more money spent on every iPhone 4, including marketing, design and manufacturing, so this isn’t a complete view of how much profit Apple is looking at per device, but I still always find this stuff fascinating, like taking my dental records down to a pawn shop and seeing how much I could get for my fillings.

Steve Jobs just can’t seem to make up his mind. Just a few days after he tersely told a customer that people experiencing rampant reception issues with their iPhone 4 that people were “holding it wrong,” Steve Jobs has written to another Apple customer, saying “There is no reception issue [with the iPhone 4]. Stay tuned.”

Isn’t that a bit of a contradiction? Even if a forthcoming iOS 4.0.1 update does fix the reception issues, that still implies there wasan issue. Plus, why do we need to hold it in a specific way if there’s no issue whatsoever?

More interestingly, what are we “staying tuned” for if there’s no issue with the iPhone 4’s reception at all? A placebo? If you want one of those to work, Steve, you’re not supposed to tell the patient.

Apple’s taken to list making with their latest addition to the App Store, Awesome iOS 4 Apps. It seems a strange and disparate bunch of apps to highlight, and while many of these are awesome apps indeed, the vast majority of these apps don’t take particular advantage of iOS 4 except through Apple’s new built-in save stating option. Still, it’s always interesting to see which apps in particular Apple has their eyes on.

In order to demonstrate “Two of mankind’s greatest inventions, together at last, “iPad owner Jesse Rosten create this fantastic little video which is as much a paean to Apple’s tablet as it is to that wonderful element, Velcro. In fact, the video’s so good that Apple themselves have chosen to highlight it on the official iPad webpage… although you’d think they’d be less cavalier about people strapping their expensive tablet computers onto objects like a wall or motorcycle.

The mouse has once again darted around the cat. Just a few days after the official release of the iPhone 4, userland has once again managed to find its way around Apple’s updated security measures to jailbreak the handset and get root access to the device.

Don’t expect to do this yourself for now: because the exploit uses remnants of Apple’s own code, it can’t be released to the public just yet, and it’s possible the forthcoming iOS 4.0.1 update might put a kibosh on this particular jailbreaking strategy.

But if you’ve got dreams of high-res Cydia apps dancing in your head, be patient and keep waiting for Dev Team Christmas.

Read more at Redmond Pie

Being the star of the best comedy series of all time has its perks: recognized waiting in line like some sort of pleb by an Apple Store employee, actor Jason Bateman was pulled from the line and ushered into the Apple Store to get his iPhone 4 ahead of the less famous people waiting in line in front of him.

Usually, we’d be incensed at the privileged treatment celebrities get, but in Michael Bluth’s case, I think we can make an exception.

Edit: This post was originally accompanied by a photo of Jason Bateman being spoken to by an Apple store employee while waiting in line for his iPhone 4, which we picked up from the celebrity gossip blog WWTDD. If you want to see Jason Bateman looking bored and sitting on the ground in a long line while an Apple Store Genius with his underpants exposed talks to him, you should go over and see the pictures there.

My 27-inch iMac’s display is so big and gorgeous that ever since I got it, my 50-inch living room plasma has been getting a lot less burn-in. The 2560 x 1440 iMac display is just so choice: just about everything looks better on it.

Unfortunately, up until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to hook your iMac up to an HDMI source, which means there’s no good solution for watching a Blu-Ray movie or playing an Xbox 360 game on your iMac.

Belkin’s AV360 Converter is a simple bridge that acts as an HDMI-to-miniDisplayPort converter. It requires a free USB 2.0 port to keep powered, but otherwise you can pipe in any HDMI signal to your iMac or MacBook without any further fuss.

There’s a couple big downers here, though. The first is the price: $150 is a lot of money to spend on something like this. The second downer, though, is that while the AV360 Converter will accept a 1080p signal, it will downsample it to 720p on your Mac… pretty disappointing if you’re trying to finally watch your Blu-Ray copy of Planet Earth on the 27-inch iMac’s gorgeous display.

The AV360 Converter is available for order now directly from Belkin

TV-B-Gone is a small, portable device that allows you to remotely turn off televisions, and consequently it’s easily one of the most irritating, selfish and pretentious gadgets on Earth. Now it looks like an iPod.

The iPhone might not run Flash, but that hasn’t stopped Zynga from bringing their popular social gaming phenomenon Farmville to the App Store.

Almost everything short of a Flash-engine is the same in the iPhone version, allowing players to buy and sell their crops and livestock. Any changes on your farm are reflected in the Facebook app, and vice versa. Additionally, iOS players get some exclusive new Farmville items to play with, including a Snow Leopard.

Farmville is available now on the U.S. App Store. It’s free to download.

Having problems with your iPhone 4 reception when you touch the bottom of your device? According to antenna expert Spencer Webb, don’t blame Apple… blame the FCC.

Just about every cell phone in current production has the antenna located at the bottom. This insures that the radiating portion of the antenna is furthest from the head. Apple was not the first to locate the antenna on the bottom, and certainly won’t be the last. The problem is that humans have their hands below their ears, so the most natural position for the hand is covering the antenna. This can’t be a good design decision, can it? How can we be stuck with this conundrum? It’s the FCC’s fault.

You see, when the FCC tests are run, the head is required to be in the vicinity of the phone. But the hand is not!

Basically, because phones have gravitated away from clamshell or extendable antenna designs, and because the FCC has rigid guidelines on how much radiation a cellphone is allowed to pump directly into your skull, Apple had to put the antenna at the bottom of the phone… right where most people will grab onto it.

When Apple rejected WiFi Sync from the App Store, speculation was that their reasons had a lot to do with future Cupertino’s own plans to allow iDevices to sync with Macs wirelessly.

The latest Jobs’ email lends some credence to that theory. Rick Proctor wrote Jobs and asked, “Do you think you will ever allow syncing iPhone to Mac over wifi?”

Jobs’ terse but cheery response: “Yep, someday.”

Excellent news. I’m sick of syncing my iPhone through wires like some sort of caveman. If we get wireless syncing, though, is it too much to ask for inductive charging as well?

If you’re eager to ensconce your iPhone or iPod Touch in the shell of a far inferior (but nostalgically remembered) medium of analogue music delivery, the iPhone Cassette Tape case looks like a great buy. Not only does it look pretty sweet, but once your iPod or iPhone is inside, all you need to do is flip the cassette shell around to make it functional as a stand.

Unfortunately, they are only available to purchase in bulk right now, but some geek-oriented web outlet is sure to start selling them individually as soon as their own orders are in.

[via Technabob]

Cupertino’s been having some problems lately when it comes to yellowing on their more ambitious displays, and it looks like the iPhone 4 is no exception: numerous owners are reporting that their iPhone 4 Retina Display have come with visible yellow bands and spots.

Gizmodo’s up to 27 cases of yellowing and counting, which certainly seems like a huge number given the fact that the iPhone 4 isn’t even officially on sale yet. And a reader poll on Engadget has the number of yellow iPhone 4 retina displays at over eight thousand, or a little over 38% of those with iPhone 4s polled.

Anyone out there with an iPhone 4 noticed the same issue? If this is true, between the antenna issues and the screen yellowing, this might be the most problem prone hardware Apple has released in a long time.

Just a few hours before the iPhone 4 officially goes on sale, Apple has dropped iMovie for iPhone onto the App Store.

The $4.99 app will allow users who own an iPhone 4 (and presumably future video-capable iPads and iPod Touches) to edit and share videos directly from their handset, adding everything from transitions, background music and titles to your clips before shooting them off to YouTube, MobileMe or to a friend via e-mail.

There’s nothing out there when it comes to mobile video editing like iMovie for iPhone, so if you plan on stitching together some movies on the go, this is your best and only real choice. Just one caveat: while you can export your videos to your computer at 720p, any emails you upload to YouTube, MobileMe or send out by e-mail will be downgraded to 568×320… almost definitely to help accommodate 3G network providers.

A couple of weeks ago, we posted a link to a stress test the guys over at iFixYourI performed on the iPhone 4, showing that while it was fairly bend proof, it easily shattered when dropped.

The problem with their test was that since the iPhone 4 hadn’t been released yet, they had simply conducted their test with an empty iPhone 4 case and display, which prompted our commenters to raise some excellent points that a hollow iPhone 4 was more likely to be easily broken than one with all the electronics innards tightly packed inside.

Here’s the follow through. iFixYouri have done another drop test on a real iPhone 4. Frankly, I’m surprised how well the real iPhone 4 holds up to dropping it from waist height onto concrete: three successive drops breaks the phone, while the fourth shatters it, but I’d actually consider that pretty good for an unprotected handset made largely out of glass, wouldn’t you?

Following the steps of their comic book competitors Marvel, DC Comics has just released their own iOSself-branded comic reading app for iOS, built for them by Comixology.

Like the Marvel app, comics cost between $0.99 and $2.99 an issue, and there are some free comics available… although the selection of those is quite paltry compared to Marvel’s offerings, although no doubt this will change. The best freebie right now is probably a black-and-white comic by Neil Gaiman and Simon Bisley that portrays the Joker and Batman as actors working on a television series.

Otherwise, if you’ve used Comixology or the Marvel app, you’ll be pretty familiar with how the DC Comics app works. It really only trades in Spider-Man for Superman.

According to LOOPRumors, Apple intend to host a special event in the next sixty days to reveal a refreshed, touchscreen iMac, and will come preinstalled with both OS X and iOS. A hybdrid iMac/iDevice, as it were.

Needless to say, it’s a lie, and you have to be pretty gullible to believe it. While it looks likely that Apple will try to merge OS X and iOS over time, it’s not going to happen in the next “sixty days.”

Those in the know of how cellular antennas work have been expressing misgivings about the design of the iPhone 4’s antenna for a while now.

As a simplistic summary of the problem, with the iPhone 4, Apple chose to essentially make the stainless steel band wrapping around the phone act as the phone’s antenna by separating it into three distinct chunks delineated by the gaps in the handset’s frame. Superficially, that should give the iPhone 4 more reception bars, but as MAKE’s Dave Matthews said two weeks ago: “Having been in the cellular business most of my career, I think it’s really odd that you’d want an antenna grounded by a moist hand.”

It looks like this fear may have been grounded in reality. Numerous users are reporting — with video proof — that the iPhone 4 loses up to four bars of reception when it’s actually picked up. If you don’t touch the bottom of the phone, you’re fine, but as soon as you connect the left side with the bottom of the phone… reception goes in the toilet.

While the white iPhone 4 wasn’t available from Apple or AT&T for pre-order last week, it’s started to look like those who want a more opalescent handset might have more luck local big box retailer: just two days after info leaked that Best Buy might have white iPhone 4s on Thursday comes indication that Walmart might have them as well.

Bluntly, I doubt you’re going to be able to get a white iPhone 4 anywhere on June 24th: if anyone was going to have them, it would be Apple and AT&T, and their refusal to take pre-orders for the white model strongly hints at some sort of supply chain problem. My guess is that while Best Buy and Walmart may have placed orders for the white iPhone 4 before this problem exhibited itself, they aren’t going to be getting any… this week, that is. If you’re optimistic or desperate for a white iPhone 4, though, it can’t hurt dropping by.