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.
Jobs just bragged the iPad’s capacitive touchscreen was the best in the business, but they just showed that the multitouch display is also more sophisticated in the iPhone.
While demonstrating a game from Gameloft called Nova, it was demonstrated that drawing three fingers across the screen allowed you to open a door.
That seems to indicate the hardware and software of the multitouch display allows for a lot more flexibility in gesturing than the iPhone, as expected. More registered points of articulation = greated gesturing sophistication.
We haven’t seen any integrated camera software yet, but right now, it doesn’t look like the iPad has any camera… just as John Gruber over at Daring Fireball guessed.
There’s no obvious camera in the front, and when Jobs held it sideways, there wasn’t a camera pinhole in back either.
Unless Apple has integrated the camera into the display, or otherwise obfuscated it, looks like this isn’t the lap-based video conferencing unit we expected.
We’re still waiting for iPad details to come from the mouth of Jobs, but here are some first observations.
Like everyone said, it looks just like an iPhone that met a rolling pin.
It’s way thin. Like MacBook Air thin, from the looks of it. This is bread slicing and jugular slicing.
The Home Button is at the bottom, which implies, like the iPhone, a dominantly vertical based orientation, although an accelerometer flips it.
There’s a WiFi signal clearly visible at the corner, so we have 802.11n support here, but I see no icon for 3G… yet.
The iPad doesn’t have a frontal camera and Steve has yet to show any Magic Mouse like capacitive case tech, although obviously, this is a vibrant, 10-inch multitouch device.
After implicitly acknowledging that they will announce the Tablet, Steve Jobs has just asked whether there is a third category between laptops and the smartphone. He thinks there is. It’s called the iPad.
What a terrible name, and what a shame the rumors are true. The device is exactly the same as what was leaked on Engadget earlier today, yet without the bolts and S&M leather.
At today’s Media Event, Steve Jobs just took the stage and started things off with an apology that he’d begin with a talk about existing stats.
Apple has just sold its 250 millionth iPod, according to Jobs. 234 retail stores to date, with over 250 million visitors to the stores last Holiday quarter. There are also 140,000 Apps in the App Store, with over 3 Billion Downloads to Date.
“Lastly, we started apple in 1976 — 34 years later, we just ended our holiday quarter with 15.6 billion in revenue. That means Apple is over a 50 billion dollar company — I like to forget that, because that’s not how we think of Apple, but it’s pretty amazing,” Jobs says.
And now, to a breathless sigh from the audience: “Let’s get to the main event.”
One of the things that’s easy to forget before every big Apple event is that even the vast majority of Apple employees, including people organizing the event, don’t know what Steve Jobs is going to unveil.
This Bloomberg interview with former Apple Senior Systems Engineer Edward Eigerman describes exactly what it’s like to go to an Apple event as an employee without having any more clue than the rest of us what the company has planned.
It’s definitely an interesting watch: Eigerman describes his own experience being a senior executive at Apple and literally having no knowledge of what the iPod would be like up to ninety minutes before it was announced. He says that internally, Apple employees are just as excited about product launches as the rest of us, and follow all the same rumor sites.
But there’s a more negative side to the internal secrecy: Eigerman claims that paranoia is common within Apple, since people worry they might “know too much” about products they aren’t meant to know about.
Eigerman’s an interesting mouth piece for this, since by his own admission, he was fired by Apple for accidentally giving an Apple client a piece of software a week before release. “If Apple finds out” you’re violating their intellectual property policies, intentionally or not, Eigerman says “there’s no turning back.”
A lot of the frenzied last minute speculation leading up to this morning’s Apple Tablet announcement is either going to look eerily prescient or downright silly in just a few hours time, but here’s one feature we can probably expect to see later today: Apple has just gotten itself a patent for a Tablet proximity director.
The patent doesn’t describe anything revolutionary, but it seems like a feature par for the course for a company as concerned with the cohesive and seamless user experience as Apple. Essentially, the proximity detector tracks objects that are near, but don’t touch, the Tablet’s display. For example, move your fingers in a typing position near the screen and a virtual keyboard would automatically pop up.
Seems like a lock to me — Jobs isn’t the type to be satisfied with an onscreen button that calls up a virtual keyboard — but six short hours should tell.
Fox’s24 hase never been shy about having its constabulary of terrorist smashers whip out the hottest new gadgets, but it looks like the production team isn’t even willing to wait for Steve Jobs to actually announce the Tablet later today before writing the device into the show’s seventh eighth season.
If the most often repeated scuttlebutt is to be believed. Apple’s Tablet, when released later today, will feature some sort of souped up flavor of the iPhone OS. That raises an interesting point: even as it is, the iPhone OS as an operating system brand name is pretty clunky, especially when you’re talking about non-iPhone hardware like the iPod Touch. If the Tablet does indeed run some flavor of the iPhone OS, maybe it needs a name change to reflect its expanded scope?
According to Mac Daily News, that’s just what Apple plans. The video they use as proof is pretty questionable, but nonetheless, MDN claims that Apple will rebrand the iPhone OS to iOS during today’s media event.
Short of a few bigwigs cloistered away in Cupertino’s panic rooms, no one really knows the exact details of what Steve Jobs plans to announce today, but even if this iOS rumor turns out to be false — and I suspect it might be — I think it’s still a pretty good bet that a name change for the iPhone OS might be in store.
On Friday, Pete called our attention to a lovely poem by Beat poet Gary Snyder called “Why I Take Good Care of My Macitosh,” which features lovely stanzas like:
And puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted and vanish in a flash at “delete,” so it teaches of impermanence and pain;
And because my computer and me are both brief in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,
Based on Snyder’s poem, you might be tempted to conclude that the Apple experience is synonymous with the zen and jazz inspired wanderlust of the Beat Generation as a whole. You might be right.
Here in Germany, Media Markt is the Teutonic equivalent of American big box retailers like Best Buy. Considering Amazon.de usually manages to ship the same items overnight for free anywhere in Germany at vastly reduced prices, there’s not much reason to remember the existence of poor old Media Markt, which is what makes it so downright bizarre to me to discover their name plastered all over the gadget feeds in connection with the Apple Tablet.
Supposedly, Media Markt accidentally “leaked” the name, price and ship date of the Tablet on their Twitter account. According to the (swiftly deleted) Tweet, the Tablet is called the iPad, it’ll ship on March 1st, 2010 and will cost €499 with a €120/month T-Mobile contract or €899 without one.
Short of the name (I will eat an extremity if Apple is creatively bereft enough to brand the Tablet with the similar to iPod and — in some dialects — identically pronounced moniker, iPad) that all sounds plausible enough… but, uh, no. Media Markt doesn’t know when the Apple Tablet is coming out or what it’s going to cost. I’ve actually seen their employees hooting and hopping around the latest iMacs with all the insight and grace of Hansel and Derek Zoolander. I refuse to believe that whatever administrative assistant they’ve got hammering out updates in the company’s Twitter account knows more about the Apple Tablet than the New York Times.
The Magic Mouse has numerous power management issues, but Apple’s at last solved at least one of them: the latest update to hit Apple’s Support Site promises to fix the bug that caused the Magic Mouse in conjunction with a 2007 aluminum Bluetooth keyboard to bleed out power.
Apple’s traditionally terse release notes for the Aluminum Keyboard Firmware Update version 1.1 read:
Improves battery performance of the 2007 aluminum Apple Wireless Keyboard when used in combination with other bluetooth devices and addresses an issue with the 2007 aluminum Apple Keyboard and the 2007 aluminum Apple Wireless Keyboard where a key may repeat unexpectedly while typing.
Any Magic Mouse owners out there able to confirm the update fixed their keyboard power problems? Let us know if you spot an improvement in the comments.
At least until Spotify lets me stream music in Germany again, I love iTunes as much as anybody, but as much music as I’ve slurped from its fiber-optical teat over the years, I still wouldn’t be caught dead buying television shows from Apple.
It’s just consumerism at work: most television shows on Apple cost $1.99 per episode, but if I wait for a DVD box set of a show, I’ll pay half that. More over, I can stream a lot of television shows for free over sites like Hulu. Apple’s prices simply aren’t competitive.
Apple seems to agree. According to The Financial Times, it is being reported that Apple is strongly pushing networks and media executives to halve the price of television shows from $1.99 to $1.
The timing of this report suggests a Tablet connection to me. The Tablet is likely to be a very media-oriented device, and there has been some theorizing that it may actually finally deliver on the promises of the Apple TV, but in a portable form factor. For that to work, though, Apple needs their video content to be a lot more appetizing… especially since the Tablet will presumably only support MP4 video files, like the iPhone or iPod. Cheaper video content and season subscriptions to shows would go a long way towards shoring up the iTunes Video Store’s current weaknesses.
The gadget blogosphere’s collective scuttlebutting navel-gazers peg it as a near certainty that Apple’s forthcoming tablet will, at the very least, come with a 3G option, opening the door to carrier subsidization. But if the Tablet does support 3G, which network will Apple choose to partner with? Their current domestic carrier partner AT&T, which has proven incapable of handling the traffic demands of just the iPhone, let alone the Apple Tablet? Or will it be another network, like Verizon?
Only Wednesday will tell, but Boy Genius Report was just told by one of their sources that Verizon Wireless has a “kick off” event at the beginning of every quarter to bring store managers up to speed with what to expect over the next couple of months.
That kick off event hasn’t happened yet, but can you guess the date when it’s scheduled to occur. Yup, January 27th, 2010… the same day Apple is slated to announce the Tablet. Even more incriminatingly, it will occur via a “live webcast” at the exact same time as Apple’s announcement, 1PM EST or 10AM PST.
Coincidence? Possibly. Rumor? Definitely. But the inference is obvious: Verizon wants to tell their store managers about a big, big product development at the first possible second when they can do so. I suppose it could be a CDMA iPhone, which is heavily rumored to hit Verizon sometime this year, but let’s face it: the Tablet is still the most likely contender, given the date.
Although Guy Day is, as pictured, about as far away from the har- boozing, womanizing, red-meat-eating Don Draper type as a 70s-style pompadour will get you, he was one of the country’s quintessential ad men for decades.
Everyone reading this blog knows his work: as the president of the acclaimed Chiat / Day advertising agency, Day was responsible for bringing together the team that created the hyper-Orwellian 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh ad.
Sadly, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that Day on Saturday, died in his sleep of natural causes. The timing is particularly depressing: a self-described “life-long agency ad man” who revolutionized Apple’s advertising strategies, Day, of all people, would be delighted by the marketing possibilities of the forthcoming Tablet.
Rest in peace, Mr. Day. You’ll always be remembered by this Mac fan for your art and for your work.
Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer is a curious man ape: loud, purple-faced, drenched in sweat, and hirsute but for his head. But at least the man’s got a good sense of humor: upon being handed a MacBook by a student at Trevecca Nazarene University, Ballmer happily autographed it with the message “Need a new one?”
Presumably, Ballmer was making a tongue-in-cheek jab at his rival, but he possibly also knew exactly how much an ironically autographed MacBook signed by Microsoft’s CEO would get on eBay.
We criticize Microsoft and Ballmer a lot here at CoM, but this was a cute and classy gesture, especially considering it’s almost impossible to imagine Steve Jobs doing the same thing without hurling the Windows laptop to the ground and apoplectically smashing it to atoms with his feet.
According to mobile analytics company Flurry, the Apple Tablet isn’t just a very real product, but they’ve detected up to fifty of them floating through Cupertino, running a new version of the iPhone OS numbered 3.2.
The ever vibrating Tablet hype machine has finally attained the emotional timbre of giddy, bladder-evacuating hysteria.
How else to characterize this Techcrunch post, in which Michael Arrington, citing “senior Apple execs and friends,” says that Steve Jobs is saying that the forthcoming Apple Tablet “will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”
Hearsay? Sure. But Techcrunch’s post has already garnered nearly 200 breathless comments from Giddy Apple fans expecting the Tablet, at the very least, to be a flawless amalgam of iPhone technology with Dr. Durand Durand’s Excessive Machine.
I think we’re officially at the point in the hype cycle that whatever Apple pulls out on stage on Wednesday is going to be a disappointment. The Apple Tablet’s OLED display could function as a Stargate-like dimensional portal to the lanugo-soft inner crevices of Elysium’s ethereal constabulary of virgin angels, and people would still be disappointed that the P.A. Semi chip inside was only sentient, and not — as anticipated — psychokinetic.
Apple’s shown some commitment to Haitian Earthquake Relief Efforts by making it easy for iTunes users to donate to the Red Cross, but according to one Genius Bar employee, this commitment doesn’t extend to letting its employees rush off to Santiagio to help facilitate relief efforts: he was fired for his troubles.
Although it’s amusing to think of a scenario in which the Internet threw a hype party for the a device that never came, it would be a sucker bet indeed to gamble that Apple won’tl announce a tablet-like device on January 27th. That said, the Tablet can’t be the only thing Apple has up its sleeves for Wednesday, and Hot Hardware is claiming that the media event will herald another much anticipated announcement from Apple: the end of AT&T iPhone exclusivity in the United States.
The rumor comes by way of an anonymous source within AT&T. They don’t have any details about what carriers we can expect to see the iPhone on if carrier exclusivity does indeed end, but according to Hot Hardware’s source, this might actually be a welcome development for AT&T, since having iPhone exclusivity has essentially crippled AT&T’s underdeveloped 3G network, with no end in sight. Although the iPhone has made AT&T incredibly profitable, it’s also generated such extreme bad press that their recent advertising efforts have been almost solely dedicated to fighting off network attacks.
Utter folly for a silicon company to rest on its laurels after the success of their last operating system, lest the competition pass you by. That goes doubly for Apple in the wake of Snow Leopard: although the latest version of OS X saw the highest upgrade rates yet for an Apple OS, 10.6 didn’t really add any new features into the mix, but was instead focused on tightening the engine bolts and preparing OS X for the future of multicore processors. That was an admirable, even revolutionary goal, but people are going to expect a lot more flash from 10.7.
It’s not surprising, then, that new reports are circulating, indicating that OS X 10.7 has been under development at Cupertino for the last couple of months. The first comes by way of the change database of the open source launchd framework, which specifically references the text astring “11A47” and seems to be the build number for the next version of OS X.
Apple doesn’t seem likely to introduce Flash to the iPhone or iPod Touch anytime soon, and you can take it pretty much as read that the Apple Tablet will have the same limitation. That’s a pain for those who want to play Flash games (and, in fact, its the possible dilution of App Store sales numbers that is making Apple so reticent to incorporate Flash), but it also means that sites that use Flash to serve up video are inaccessible.
Given how strongly focused on video media the Tablet looks like it’s going to be, the majority of online video sites may simply not be ready for Apple’s newest product. But a solution is in sight: the HTML5 standard will actually serve streaming video without installing Adobe Flash on compatible browsers, including good old Safari.
Even better? Both YouTube and Vimeo have rolled out opt in, beta versions of their HTML5 video players, and they work excellently on Safari in the iPhone or iPod Touch.
There’s small enough smut worth bothering about on the App Store, but if you’re the type who worries that exposure to, say, the hypnotic iBoobz app could your child into a sex-crazed Onanist for life, you probably have sympathy for the problem facing the Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, Scotland.
The Cedars School wants to give iPod Touches to every one of their 100 students next fall. The only problem? Even though the iPhone OS has parental controls preventing kids from downloading apps rated 17+, you can still browse potentially illicit screenshots of these apps in iTunes.
In fact, the school is so alarmed by the fact that their students might be exposed to apps like Amateur Swimsuit , Movie of Sexy Japanese Girl and A Hidden Cam Thong that they are ready to disable Internet access to iTunes’ App Store schoolwide.
It all seems prudish, but silly or no, the school has an obligation to parents to filter their minor charges’ access for objectionable content, and it seems a strange oversight that Apple wouldn’t allow parental controls to be set across all sections of the iPhone app ecosystem.
Next week, crazed-eyed bloggers with their fingers a-blur will collectively tweet each and every minute of Steve Jobs’ keynote, regurgitating in small micro-blogging belches each and every detail of the unveiled Apple Tablet.
But imagine if Jobs himself could easily send out automated Twitter updates as he walked us through the Tablet’s specs, features, availability and price. Keynote Tweet is an open source Applescript that does just that, automatically tweeting the user-customizable summary of a slide as it is displayed.
It’s a fantastic idea. In fact, Apple should incorporate this sort of functionality into Keynote as standard: there’s more companies than just Apple who could raise awareness of their new products and services by automatically micro-blogging about them as they are unveiled.
