Oh, Woz. How can your allegiances be so fickle? We always supposed that when your heart finally exploded in a bright toxic sludge of congested cheese curl powder, you’d die on your Segway with an iPhone in each hand. You were a goofy hirsute geek with an unflappable allegiance to the company you’d helped create. And now what do we hear? Your new favorite gadget is, the HTC Nexus One.
Well, that certainly didn’t take long. Less than a day after Gawker announced an up to $100,000 bounty for information about the forthcoming Apple Tablet including images, video or hands-on time, Apple’s lawyers have already sent them a cease-and-desist letter, demanding the “bounty” to be withdrawn by 6:00PM PST today.
A recent Intel contest ad “confirming” a forthcoming transition to Intel’s new Core i5 mobile chips for the MacBook Pro had all the hallmarks of a corporate gaffe…. and so it was. Intel has issued a statement, clarifying that they never meant to use MacBook Pros in the ad in the first place.
According to Spanish site faq-mac.com, which broke the story, Intel has now revised the promotion to give away HP Envy notebooks, which do contain a Core i5 chip, instead of the MacBook Pro. They’ve also apologized for the confusion, blaming the error on a lack of communication from their central marketing agency.
That’s not to say the Core i5 MacBook Pro isn’t likely to be unveiled sometime in the future… as usual, it just goes to show you can’t take a contest entry form as a prophetic glimpse into the future of Apple products.
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Why spring for a Wacom tablet when you can transform your existing unibody Macbook trackpad into a graphics tablet? For $24.95, Ten One Design will do just through their impressive Inklet OS X application.
The demo is both swank and intuitive. When not in use, the application sits in your menu bar, but Control+Option+i overlays the screen with a bright translucent box, showing you where, exactly, your penstrokes will be inputed. Draw on your trackpad with a finger or stylus and it converts the input into digital ink; hit the Inklet hotkey again and you can use your trackpad as normal. Simple, elegant and efficient.
Of course, there’s some caveats: the Apple trackpad won’t register stylus pressure like a real graphics pad, so Ten One Design recommends buying a Pogo Stylus from them for $14.99 to recreate that functionality. Needless to say, the trackpad also doesn’t have the surface area of a Wacom tablet. Still, for the idle doodler, occasional Photoshop artist or even the professional designer who wants to work portably without dragging a tablet around, this seems like a great little app.
A celebrity gossip blog squarely targeting the lives of Silicon Valley eggheads, anti-socials and mouthbreathers has always been one of Gawker founder Nick Denton’s stranger and least accessible publication ideas, and it’s not so surprising that the once prolific Valleywag has gone from its own website to a mere tag over at Gawker over the last year or two. Odd to see Valleywag, then, announce a bounty of up to $100,000 for information about the forthcoming Apple Tablet… a bold play at relevancy, to be sure.
Back in November, our own personal Aleister Crowley of Cult of Mac, Leander, sat down and interviewed Ken Segall, the originator of the iMac name. According to Segall, Steve Jobs recognized he was “betting the company on the machine and so it needed a great name.” The only problem: the name Jobs had his heart set on was so bad it would “curdle your blood.” The original product name? MacMan, says Gizmodo.
Luckily, at the end of the day, iMac won out… but it wasn’t because Jobs let himself be swayed, according to Gizmodo’s sources, but rather because the name was already trademarked by a company called MidiMan, who had released a serial-to-MIDI adapter under that brand name. Apple made an offer; Midiman declined; Steve Jobs fumed and Segall got his way.
Although the Tablet is obviously prompting a degree of speculative slathering unlike anything we’ve seen for the last years, the last month has seen a persistent trickle of next-gen iPhone rumors coming out as well. The latest is courtesy of Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Chan, who claims (amongst some “no duh” predictions like a 5-megapixel camera and a June release) that the 4G iPhone will have a new plastic casing similar to that used by Apple’s touch-panel Magic Mouse.
Magic Mouse users over at the Apple.com Discussion Board have been complaining that their multitouch mice require almost weekly battery swaps for a couple of months now. Apple has yet to officially acknowledge the problem, but an experiment by Softpedia confirms the issue.
The good news? It’s not really the Magic Mouse: it’s an issue with the Magic Mouse’s power management software. The bad news: that doesn’t really change anything until Apple issues a fix.
The experiment was simple: Softpedia plugged a fresh set of batteries into their Magic Mouse then let the batteries drain until the Magic Mouse software reports the batteries are dead. Softpedia then took these “dead” batteries and plugged them into an old Mighty Mouse. Voila! According to the Mighty Mouse software, the batteries still had as much as 40% charge remaining.
That’s a pretty astonishing bug. According to Softpedia, even a 50% charge isn’t sufficient to power a Magic Mouse in some cases. If Softpedia’s experiment is true, Apple needs to fix this bug, pronto.
Now, I’ve long since sworn off trusting Apple to sell me a mouse, so I can’t confirm this: that leaves it up to you. Anyone willing to give Softpedia’s experiment a shot and let me know how it goes for them in the comments?
★-y eyed Apple commentator, Internet darling and occasional grouse John Gruber has posted an intriguing nugget about the forthcoming Apple Tablet in a post otherwise filled with routine incredulity at reports that an Orange CEO had “confirmed” Apple’s Tablet as being equipped with a webcam earlier this week.
According to Gruber: “For what it’s worth, I’m hearing there is no camera, webcam or otherwise, on The Tablet.
Excepting only the iPhone platform, Apple’s never been serious about gaming on its computers, often lagging far behind not only PCs but their own hardware in programming support for the latest graphic technologies into its operating systems. Snow Leopard’s no exception: although the OpenGL 3.0 standard was unveiled in July of 2008, and although all Macs currently shipping have graphic cards which support it, Snow Leopard 10.6.2 implements only 15 of the 3.0 standard’s 23 extensions.
Thankfully, Apple appears to be serious about finalizing support for OpenGL 3.0 in the forthcoming Snow Leopard 10.6.3 update. According to a post at netkas.org, 22 of the 23 extensions are now supported in the latest developer build, which should improve the graphics performance of all current Mac computers.
Unfortunately, these are just extensions, with most of the specific OpenGL 3.0 functions still unsupported. And OpenGL 3.0 isn’t even the most recent standard: OpenGL 3.2 was released on August 3rd of 2009. Still, progress!
An archeologically stratal cross-section of the port placement of Apple’s metal-skinned professional line of notebooks over the course of the last decade, courtesy of photographer and Mac enthusiast Robert Donovan. Fireflies dance in the background.
From top to bottom, the notebooks pictured are:
• The 13-inch Unibody MacBook Pro (2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo)
• The 15-inch Titanium PowerBook (400MHz G4)
• The 15-inch Aluminum PowerBook (1.25GHz G4)
• The 15-inch MacBook Pro (2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo)
For me, this is morbidly erotic. It’s like four ex-lovers stacked nakedly atop each other, two of whom were dumped for their younger, hotter sisters, one of whom ran off on me because of my drinking problems, and the last so emphysemic from passive smoking that she’s due to cough up a lung any day now… a medical emergency definitely not covered by Apple Care.
GigaOm’s been releasing a slew of admirable, Apple-oriented infographics lately, leading with a fantastic look at the money at stake if AT&T loses the iPhone, and now following with a through vivisection of the thriving App Store economy.
Here’s the jist: 28,000 developers have generated over 133,000 apps to date. Surprisingly, the average approval time is only a little under five days,which is shockingly lower than the collective complaints of Internet developers about long App Store turn-around times… although it’s worth noting that that statistic only applies to apps that are approved, not ones that have been rejected.
In general, the average iPhone or iPod Touch user downloaded 3.7 apps in December, only 25% of which were paid apps. Ninety nine cents is the most popular price for paid apps, although the average app price goes as high as $2.59. Even given the low margins on most apps, though, December saw renuews of $500MM, with $350MM of that going to developers.
As usual, it would be downright rude to just slurp up and regurgitate the whole graphic, so click through to check the full thing out.
While smartphones have certainly upped their resolutions in recent months, Apple’s iPhone line doesn’t usually garner negative reviews based upon the quality of their display panels, at least as far as their accuracy is concerned. The guys at MOTO Labs have come up with an easily reproducible DIY test that anyone can do to see exactly how accurate their smartphone’s touchscreen is. No surprise here: the iPhone’s is best of class, when compared to the HTC Nexus One, the Motorola Droid and the HTC Droid Eris.
The test works like this: opening a drawing program on your smartphone and slowly draw a grid of intersecting diagonal lines across the touchscreen with your finger. If the lines are smooth, the engineers of the smartphone have managed to seamlessly integrate the hardware components and software of the touchscreen display; if they are jagged, something’s off.
According to MOTO Labs, you need to go slowly because “on inferior touchscreens, it’s basically impossible to draw straight lines. Instead, the lines look jagged or zig-zag, no matter how slowly you go, because the sensor size is too big, the touch-sampling rate is too low, and/or the algorithms that convert gestures into images are too non-linear to faithfully represent user inputs.”
This is, of course, hardly a scientific test, but it’s hard to look at the comparison images between, say, the iPhone and the Motorola Droid and not see a major discrepancy in terms of quality. Apple’s flawless implementation of reliable touchscreen displays in the iPhone line is certainly a feather in their cap compared to the competition, and a great example of just how hard Cupertino works to get the details just right.
Over the weekend, the New York Times claimed that word from several inside sources indicated that the new Apple Tablet would have a multi-touch interfaces that required a “somewhat complex new vocabulary of finger gestures…. making use of technology [Apple] acquired in the 2007 purchase of a company called FingerWorks.”
It appears that the New York Times might have managed to pinch zoom right over the truth of the technology behind Apple’s latest product: a couple days later, and Fingerworks.com has quietly been shuttered.
Stéphane Richard, the CEO Delegate of Orange.fr has seemingly confirmed the forthcoming announcement of the much anticipated Apple Tablet in response to questions posed to him by journalist Jean Pierre Elkabbach of Radio Europe 1… but the whole interview could just as easily be the mindless corporate boasting of a mouthpiece not really listening to the question.
The iTunes App Store approval process is infamous for its impenetrability, its arbitrariness and its Leviathan-like slowness to move. Yet Apple’s been remarkably good about improving the App Store approval process in recent months: sure, apps are rejected as arbitrarily as ever, but recent changes to iTunes Connect have made figuring out just how far through the process an app is to approval or rejection far more transparent. But if recent dev reports are anything to go by, Apple might have also managed to improve approval times as well.
According to some of the developers quoted by TUAW, Apple has significantly improved the turnaround time of app approval. In fact, some of the new turnaround times border on the preternatural. Consider Atomic Cactus’ anecdote:
I’m a developer behind Atomic Cactus, we have 3 games currently in the app store, and they all took approximately 2-3 weeks to get approved. Today at 4:00 am I submitted for approval our latest app, which isn’t exactly a “fart app” (it’s a pretty polished puzzle game with OpenFeint). As of 1:30 pm today, the app is in the app store.
In other words, Atomic Cactus submitted an app and had it approved in a little under ten hours. Amazing, and heartening to hear if true! Any app developers out there able to confirm or deny an improvement in App Store turnaround time? Let us know in the comments.
In a profile piece on the sudden surge of “slate-like” tablet computers that took CES by storm (which, with few exceptions, already managed to seem like also-rans compared to Apple’s still unannounced and unreleased tablet), the New York Times claims that Apple has been working on a multi-touch capable version of the iWork suite for the last few years.
That’s interesting, no doubt, but the New York Times goes on. According to the newspaper, “conversations with several former Apple engineers” who claim to have had a role in the creation of the device, the Apple Tablet’s multi-touch interface requires a “somewhat complex new vocabulary of finger gestures to control it, making use of technology it acquired in the 2007
purchase of a company called FingerWorks.” Sound familar?
For Apple fans abroad, the price discrepancy between between the cost of an Apple computer locally and what it would cost in the States is often enough to justify a flight to the States. In first class. On a chartered Gulfstream jet. Loaded as cargo in the belly of an Anatov An-225.
Fine. I’ll cop to the slightest of exaggerations. But as an American living abroad, paid in dollars but doing business in Euros, the 40% premium on the cost of a new MacBook Pro or iMac is enough, sometimes, to make me want to weep. Apple’s not alone in this: across the board, gadget makers releasing their products in the EU set a MSRP assuming a dollar-to-euro exchange rate of 1 to 1…. even when, in reality, the actual exchange rate is 1 to 1.45. There’s optimistic ways to look at it, of course — commit to buying that new MacBook Pro I have my heart set on for its euro price but in the States, and I get a trip home “for free.” But this is meager comfort: in reality, it often feels like the low prices of gadgets in America and Japan are subsidized by the exorbitant markups people pay for their technology in the rest of the world.
Don’t believe me? Check out this helpful infographic over at CMYPlay, which colorfully and informatively breaks down the price discrepancies between the same model of MacBook Pro over a handful of countries. At the end of the day, the average Brazilian spends enough in local currency for one MacBook Pro that he could pick up two of the same model if he bought it in the States. It’s almost enough to make a native Brazilian woe the day he was born in that bright, sunny paradise of plump, bethonged bikini bottoms.
Click through for the full infographic.
As equally tenuous a confirmation of last week’s Wall Street Journal report that the Apple Tablet’s enclosure would be made of a very Mac-conventional material indeed, this Reuters report, which says that the Apple Tablet will be a brushed aluminum unibody affair, and ship in Q2 of 2010.
Apple owns a not-unsubstantial chunk of graphics chip manufacturer Imagination Technologies, which makes their newly announced mobile GPU, the PowerVR SGX545, of interest to me and you, my fellow iPhone droogies. After all, this could be the graphics chip that will pump out the polygons come June’s iPhone 4G.
And what a nice chip it is. The HD-capable PowerVR SGX545 adds full support for OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL 1.0, and is specced to deliver real-world performance of 40 million polygons per second at 200MHz.
The iPhone is currently at a disadvantage to handsets like the Motorola Droid or the HTC Nexus One, at least as far as screen resolution is concerned. It stands to reason that Apple will attempt to improve the iPhone’s current maximum resolution of 320×480 by incorporating a HD-capable GPU. In fact, given Apple’s tendency to distinguish each new iPhone model with a short acronym, it wouldn’t be surprising if the next iPhone was christened the iPhone HD. A chip as the PowerVR SGX545 would be a perfect fit for such a phone.
In fact, outside of the obvious Apple ownership connection, there’s plenty of reason to believe that upcoming iPhone and iPod Touch hardware refreshes will contain the PowerVR SGX545, given the PowerVR SGX536 chip firing all synapses inside the black plastic brainpan of the iPhone 3Gs.
Then again, Imagination Technologies is doing a lot of boasting about the SGX545’s DirectX 10.1 support, so perhaps, horror of horrors, what we’re really looking at here is a Windows Mobile GPU.
Once the most bitter opponents of Cupertino’s allegedly wasteful and polluting ways, environmental advocacy group Greenpeace has awarded Cupertino a four-star rating in their latest environmental survey.
Still, it doesn’t seem like Apple has done all that much to earn the applause. In fact, Apple only gained 0.2 points from its previous 4.9 environmental rating. That said, most of the other companies surveyed by Greenpeace, including Samsung, Sharp and Sony, fell in their rankings this month, automatically elevating Apple to the number five spot.
Greenpeace isn’t entirely happy with Apple: though they applaud Cupertino for eliminating hazardous substances in their product line while other companies make empty promises, they feel that Apple’s re-designed environmental section of their website is actually less informative than it used to be.
Still, it’s nice to see one of Apple’s most vocal and implacable critics recognize the great work Apple has done over the last couple of years in making their products as environmentally friendly as possible.
Another day, another Apple patent… perhaps one even describing technology that could perhaps be nebulously related to the much anticipated Apple Tablet coming later this month.
Today’s? A new Apple touch display patent spotted by the usual gang of scourers over at Patently Apple. The patent describes a thinner and brighter touchscreen display that works by combining both the touch and pixel displaying elements into the same hardware.
It’s possible we’ll see just such technology in the Tablet, although it’s worth noting that this technology could be used in pretty much any touchscreen device. It feels, right now, more conceptual than technology to be thrust into our hands later this month as an integral part of the Apple Tablet, but only time will tell.
The Google Chrome Beta for Mac has a lot of holes in its feature set compared to the more mature Windows and Linux ports. The biggest omission is probably extension support, which allows Chrome’s functionality to be broadened similarly to Firefox thanks to small code plugins.
Extensions still aren’t live in the Google Chrome for Mac beta, but if you’re willing to test drive the Chrome for Mac developer channel, you can start expanding your Chrome experience now.
In my experience the developer channel has been pretty stable, and I was actually playing with Chrome for Mac for months before the beta, but if you’re not interested in the risk, the Chrome for Mac developers are insistent extensions will roll out to the beta soon.
Former Senior Market Manager at Apple John Martellaro has a thoughtful post up at the Mac Observer explains how and why Cupertino occasionally leaks information about its own products to major news outlets.
Martellaro notes, “Often Apple has a need to let information out, unofficially. The company has been doing that for years, and it helps preserve Apple’s consistent, official reputation for never talking about unreleased products.”
Apple’s method of leaking product or company news is always done in such a way as to guarantee that no one can accuse them of trying to manipulate stock prices, by making sure the leak goes live after the close of the markets.
Surprising absolutely no one, The Street is reporting that the Apple Tablet to be announced on January 27th has no Intel processor inside.
According to their source, Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar (who apparently has had conversations with Apple’s tablet design partners), Apple has predictably eschewed an Intel CPU for a low-power ARM processor created by P.A. Semi, a company which Cupertino acquired a couple of years ago.
To be honest, you’d have to be completely out of touch with the Apple landscape of the last couple of years to be flabbergasted by this news. Apple did not pick up P.A. Semi on an idle whim, and given that the Tablet is more likely to run an evolution of the iPhone OS than OS X, an ARM chip seems pretty much a given, especially given the power efficiency requirements of a tablet? Yet the Street reports:
There has been speculation that Intel’s new generation of Atom chips was in the running for the slot… If you believe that the closely-watched Apple Tablet will reshape the mobile computing landscape, then the snub deals Intel a significant defeat. Intel had a lock on the netbook market with its Atom processors and it was widely assumed that the chip giant would win the Tablet contract at all costs.
“Widely assumed?” Who seriously thought the tablet would pack an Atom processor? Heck, Apple’s been dropping Atom support, at least in Snow Leopard. Given Apple’s ownership of P.A. Semi, it’s been a lock since the get go.