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.
The avatar of personal computing: a stodgy and cherubic businessman, played by that ineffably awesome hobo-lover, John Hodgman. The avatar of the Apple experience: insufferable smugness and a warrantless sense of privilege as coalesced together in the immensely punchable mug of Justin Long.
The endless gladiatorial battle between Mac and PC in the abstract, white-space limbo of Platonic ideals has entertained Mac fans since 2006…. a Spy vs. Spy for our times. No wonder, then, that AdWeek just named the “Get a Mac” series of ads the Campaign of the Decade as part of their Best of the 2000’s awards. And the “Get a Mac” ads weren’t the only Apple campaigns to be recognized: those trippy, psychedelic iPod Silhouette ads won AdWeek’s award for “Out of Home Ad of the Decade” (re: Billboard Award).
Every time Toshiba unveils a new NAND module, you should take note: that’s going to be a meaningful storage capacity when it’s time for Apple to refresh it’s line of iPhone OS devices.
Apple’s current line of flash-based devices, the iPhone 3Gs and iPod Touch, use Toshiba’s NAND flash memory modules to achieve their svelteness. The iPhone 3Gs uses a single 16GB or 32GB Toshiba NAND module, while the iPod Touch uses dual Toshiba NAND modules to double the storage.
Flash storage capacity roughly doubles every year, so it’s no surprise that Toshiba has just announced that they have now doubled the maximum capacity of its NAND modules from 32GB to 64GB. That means that next year’s refresh of the iPhone and iPod Touch should see the former packing 64GB of internal flash storage, while the latter will likely max out at 128GB.
128GB of storage is a magic number for the iPod Touch: 128GB means I can finally get rid of my 160GB iPod Classic and cram my iTunes library onto a Touch without worrying about juggling albums around like some sort of Walkman-wielding, early eighties troglodyte. For me, the whole point of living in music’s digital age is that there shouldn’t be a problem walking around with sixty two days worth of music crammed into my front pocket.
My guess is that once the iPod Touch gets to 128GB, you can say goodbye to the iPod Classic once and for all. It just no longer serves a point. Who thought your end-of-line would be written by Toshiba, though?
Although e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the new (and maligned) Barnes & Noble Nook are certainly tempting additions to a gadget fetishist’s armoire of doodads, I’ve never had much interest in owning one.
My ambivalence isn’t simply due to the fact that I think books conveyed as mere digital information is less sensual and vibrant than books as a medium: there is that, but I have still enjoyed reading e-books (thanks to Gutenberg.org) for most of the last decade. It’s mostly because I only enjoy reading e-books in certain circumstances: for example, when waiting for a subway, or in bed with the lights off. The e-ink panels of the Kindle and the Nook don’t work in the dark, which means my fleeting interest in e-books can only be satisfied with backlit devices. A few years ago, that was through my Pocket PC and the fantastic e-book program, uBook ; these days, it’s through my iPhone and the Stanza e-reader app.
Stanza is fantastic, of course, but with the release of the Kindle for iPhone app earlier this year, I’d been interested in supplementing my iPhone e-reading with Kindle books for awhile, only to be stymied by the fact that Amazon’s app was for US audiences only. But today, that’s changed: Apple has finally introduced its Kindle for iPhone App to international users.
It’s the same app as before, allowing you to purchase, download and read hundreds of thousands of books through the Kindle Store while syncing your notes and bookmarks across devices… the only difference is it now works on iPhones and iPod Touches in over sixty different countries.
I tend to doubt Kindle for iPhone will replace Stanza as my default e-reader on the iPhone — it’s hard to beat Stanza’s vast library of free classics — but I’m at least looking forward to finally being able to supplement it.
Is this the fabled Apple Tablet so spoken about on the collected gadget rumor sites of the Internet in that hushed whisper usually reserved for mythological artifacts of the gods like Achilles’ Spear or Hercules\ Cod Piece?
Originally posted by French site Nowhereelse.fr, the video purports to show a prototype of the Apple Tablet browsing through an Ikea catalog through a touchscreen interface effortlessly infused with the usual Apple flourishes: multitouch, cover flow and shake to shuffle.
It’s a gorgeous looking interface… but note the bluish tinges around the operator’s swiping, pinching and swishing digits: that’s blue screen technology, my friends.
In other words, to the question “Is this the Apple Tablet?” we must sadly answer: “No, it’s jolly well not.” Still, I have to say, it gives me hope: I’ve long thought of the Apple Tablet in terms of a colossal, book-sized iPhone, which is not a product I’ve ever particularly wanted. If this counterfeit video shows anything, it’s that the potential of the Apple Tablet is far, far greater than the name might first imply.
Apple’s long and tortuous travail trying to solve its 27-inch iMac production woes doesn’t look likely to end before the New Years, according to reports from authorized resellers who say that Apple has delayed shipping their premium all-in-ones for at least two weeks until they can figure out the cause of the 27-incher’s common graphic woes.
The iTunes App Store saw a mass overhaul over the weekend in a move to more vibrantly showcase apps on their individual pages while simultaneously presenting more relevant information to potential buyers.
Ah yes! Another Apple patent to swoon over! What mad genius will we glimpse in the minds of Cupertino’s engineers through the soothsaying of this sheath of dry legalese and blusterless line drawings? An Apple Tablet that also sports the incredible dual-function of the radioactive lumen output of a tanning lamp? The iPoiuyt: a brand new Shuffle in the impossible shape of a blivet? Some sultrily seamless and unibody sex bot?
If only. Instead, the latest Apple patent, published on Thursday but filed in June 2008, describes a new universal dock for the iPhone and iPod. The idea is to get rid of all of those cheap plastic iPod dock adapters and instead use an elastic, form-fitting substance which moulds itself around each of the iPod line’s unique shapes.
It’s not a bad solution, but I wouldn’t exactly expect this patent to ever become a retail product. Squishy elastic rubber doesn’t exactly seem like a good fit for Apple. I would imagine that future iPods and iPhones will adopt a charging and docking system similar to the Palm Pre’s galvanized lozenge, the Touchstone Charger, as soon as wireless USB makes a little more headway.
Despite the fact that the iPod Touch is increasingly being branded as a gamer’s device, Apple’s never had much truck with gaming… at least in-house. But new calls for a video game artist for the iPhone Gaming Group imply that Apple might be preparing to make a serious push into the gaming market, perhaps to better compete with other handhelds like the Nintendo DS.
Apple’s patents only rarely give us the first look at new products in Cupertino’s pipeline, but they can still be wholesome brain fodder to chew over, as they at least give us a glimpse at the current problems the company is trying to solve. Let’s mull over, then, Apple’s two latest patents, each as different from each other as it can be.
The first patent Apple has applied for is a “technology” that would allow their Geniuses to know when a device has been “compromised” by being opened. It’s not much of a technology: it’s just a little sticker affixed between an electronics component and the chassis’ removable lid. Think of it like Apple’s own iteration of that venerable classic of anatomic technology, the hymen: Open your laptop or iPhone and the sticker will tear in half, thus letting any future delvers know that your device has been sullied.
Clearly, the aim here is to give Apple an excuse to void warranties on modified machines, which is understandable if not entirely welcome.
Inspired (as legend goes) by a piece of pizza with a slice missing, Namco employee Tōru Iwatani first released the classic game Puck-Man to Japanese arcades almost thirty years ago. Later that year, Puck-Man came to the United States by Midway, although wisely renamed with the knowledge of just how tempting it would be to erase just a slight wedge of that first P‘s loop. The rest is history: America’s had Pac-Man fever ever since.
While the classic Pac-Man game has since been expanded into a franchise of quasi-sequels and spin-off titles, what you might not know is that original Pac-Man designer Tōru Iwatani never had any part designing the sequels until 2007, when he was invited by Namco and Microsoft to design a true sequel to his original game. The result was Pac-Man Championship Edition and it was the best Pac-Man games since Ms. Pac-Man. And now it’s available for the iPhone and iPod Touch for $3.99.
If you like to game on your Mac, you’ve probably played something released by Aspyr Media. After all, what choice did you have? Aspyr has long been one of the pillars of the wobbly Mac gaming scene, porting over seventy games to OS X, including The Sims, Call of Duty 4, Civilization 4 and Quake 4. Short of restarting into Boot Camp, Aspyr has been the only way for Apple gamers to actually play most of the AAA game releases on their machines.
Sad news for Mac gamers, then. According to gaming site Big Download, Aspyr Media has laid off over fifty percent of its staff, with only a handful of team members now remaining in the office. The layoffs apparently happened weeks ago, but the news has only just gotten out.
Aspyr Media’s business is more than just Mac porting of course: they also port games from consoles to the PC, and recently ported the original Call of Duty to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Unfortunately, it looks unlikely that their core Mac team members got away unscathed. The Mac gaming scene just got even sparser.
If, like me, your Christmas shopping list has question marks next to two petulant twin nieces whose only interests seem to be quoting popular song lyrics and passages from Twilight on their Facebook pages with infinite, poorly spelled gravity (and who then quickly delete the helpful replies you leave criticizing them for being such idiots without even making a passive effort to absorb the stately, elder wisdom of your words)… well, why not consider buying them an iTunes gift card through Facebook?
Yes, the popular social networking site has just introduced an application that lets you buy iTunes gift cards for other users. The cards come in $5, $10, $15, $25 and $50 denominations, and the interface even allows you to select a date when the gift card should be delivered. The cards come in six designs: two holiday cards, two birthday cards, and two generic cards featuring those psychotropic iPod silhouettes at a rave.
For me, this is actually ideal. My nieces are fifteen years old, and I’ve long since given up on trying to suffer through a sulky, eye-rolling conversation with either of them long enough to try to ascertain their interests. Buying them an iTunes card through Facebook is exactly the sort of impersonal yet convenient gift that I’ve been looking for: it certainly beats this Edward Cullen laptop decal I was planning on getting for them.
A quality infographic is worth a thousand words; by that logic, since GigaOm’s latest infographic breaking down exactly who is getting rich off the iPhone (and by how much) contains roughly exactly that amount of words, it’s actually worth about a million.
Although there’s a lot of fantastic data in the GigaOm infographic, the thing that it makes most explicit is exactly how much money AT&T is making off the iPhone… and exactly how much it has to lose if their exclusivity deal lapses in 2010. According to GigaOm, AT&T actually makes $369 dollars off of the sale of every iPhone. That might not seem like a lot, but it will earn AT&T almost $2 billion dollars over the next two years in monthly data charges on the iPhones sold in the third quarter of 2009 alone.
That’s food for thought. AT&T hasn’t exactly been acting lately like a company about to lose the vaster part of its ill-begotten lucre over the next few years, which is exactly what will happen if its iPhone exclusivity lapses. With the iPhone worth, let’s say, $4 billion a year to AT&T, one wonders exactly how much they’d be willing to pay Apple just to keep control of their bread winner.
Check out out the full infographic at the link below. A lot of sites are just snapping up the entire image and regurgitating it back up locally; that’s not quite fair to the GigaOm guys, so we’re just including a snip of it: you should definitely click through to see the entire thing.
Although it’s certainly an iconic advertising slogan, I’ve always felt Apple was wise to leave “Think Different” behind as a manta for their Macs.
Poor grammar aside, the slogan is more suited to a small, sprightly underdog weakly jabbing away at a juggernaut, which Apple certainly was back in 1997, but is much less so today. As a slogan, it also has too much of the tell-tale whiff of smugness about it, a problem Apple’s advertising has wrestled with for most of the last decade. “Get a Mac” is better: it’s strong, it’s simple and it is assertive, not self-satisfied.
Still, maybe the old slogan could work in a new context: Apple has applied for a new trademark for “Think Different”…. and it may imply that the vintage slogan will be used to advertise the forthcoming Apple Tablet.
Forehead arteries pulsing dangerously beneath purpling and apocalyptic skin stretched taut, a Microsoft manager recently told journalists not to use or even mention Apple products at a Windows Mobile event in Germany.
Eyeballs bulging out of his skull like the enraged ocular twins of his every spitted umlaut, the manager rebuked a journalist who had dared to opine over dinner that there has never been an easier-to-use smartphone than the iPhone.
“This is a Microsoft event,” the manager shouted. “Apple products have no business being here!”
Panic Software are the makers of some of the finest Mac software out there, including the superb FTP application Transmit, the superlative Usenet program Unison, and the hyperbolically adjectived icon tool, Candybar.
When Panic isn’t applying their peculiar brand of genius to creating the best programs OS X has to offer, they are drafting up hilarious mock histories of their company’s misadventures in the burgeoning Atari 2600 market… replete with gorgeously hallucinogenic cover art for what their apps would have looked like at Atari cartridges back in 1983.
Once again, AT&T shook their corporate fist menacingly at the bandwidth hogging iPhone kiddies scampering about their 3G lawn, threatening to charge users more if they keep on taking watching streaming video and availing themselves of other high-bandwidth services on their iPhones.
Speaking to attendees at a USB investor conference in New York, AT&T Wirelss CEO Ralph de la Vega said that AT&T was working on improving service in New York and San Francisco, possibly by introducing pricing tiers that would penalize high-bandwidth users.
Needless to say, if you’re under an existing contract, AT&T can’t just move you over to a tiered data contract… but once your existing contract is up, it’s open season.
To date, Dragon’s Lair — that “classic” quarter sucker of inexplicable and catastrophic player death animated by Don Bluth and first released to arcades in 1983 — is available for over 59 different platforms. Now you can make it sixty: Dragon’s Lair has officially been released for the iPhone.
If you’re set to automatically grab new updates, you’re likely to notice Apple’s Software Update burbling insistently in your dock for your attention, after Apple released a couple of updates of both their Airport software and the MacBook / MacBook Pro’s EFI.
The Airport Client Update 2009-002 is a routine update, fixing a few routine issues. The update solves the inability to turn the AirPort on or off in some cases after upgrading from Leopard, as well as an occasional loss of network connectivity when using Wake on Demand and the inability to create computer-to-computer networks or share Internet connections on some MacBook, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini computers.
The MacBook and MacBook Pro EFI Update is more interesting, in that with the installation of SuperDrive Firmware Update 3.0, the optical drive of these machines should no longer sound like Cookie Monster trying to chew his way through a sheet of plate glass when waking from sleep or start-up.
As usual, you can either load up Software Update to automatically suck them down and install them (restart required), or you can grab the latest updates from Apple’s support page.
With Time Capsules epidemically failing after an average of 18 months and 22 days, it might be time to start thinking about an alternative use for your pristinely albino, Apple-branded router once its body squirts out its last breath of 802.11-n ectoplasm.
Why not turn it into a lovely gift box? Over at Instructables, there’s a handy little tutorial on how to convert a Time Capsule into an ornamental box worthy of display, simply by prying it open, gutting it, then adding hinges and a silk cushion.
Not the most revolutionary use for an old Time Capsule’s casing, certainly, but this would be great presentation for, say, an iPod Touch gifted to a loved one later this month, and it can even be reused as a jewelry box or even a humidor (for cigars or the disembodied fingers of people who owed you money, you decide).
The AppleTV was a bizarre misstep for Cupertino, and judging by how they’ve consistently ignored the device since it launched, Apple damn well seems to know it. Popular AppleTV media software suite Boxee seem to too: they have just announced their own competing set-top media player for release in 2010.
Released over a year ago for the PC, Google’s wonderful Chrome browser has been purgatorial on the Mac for far too long, but now that’s all over: Google has finally released Chrome in beta form for OS X.
Mac users have a duty to download the beta and help Google finish it — it’s a great piece of work.
It’s a feature light release compared to the PC and Linux versions. For one, the Mac version is missing its Bookmark Manager and Bookmark Syncing; it also omits the App Mode, which allows Chrome to run web apps in their own basic browser window. Google’s Gears is also off the table for Mac users, but Gears won’t work under Snow Leopard anyway, so this isn’t a big deal: anyway, Google has announced that they will cease developing Gears because HTML5 is now suitable for the same purposes. Finally comes probably the biggest omission: the Chrome Beta for Mac totally omits Firefox-like extension support.
All together, it feels like something of a phoned-in affair, and it’s hard not to feel a bit bitter that Google delivered so little of the full Chrome user after a year of keeping Mac users waiting.
That all said, I’ve been using Chrome’s developer nightly builds for months, and its combination of extreme simplicity, the effortless amalgamation of the address bar and search engine support, and its sandboxed security mode that prevents single tabs from crashing the entire browser have quickly made Chrome my favorite browser for Mac. Despite my enthusiasm for Chrome, though, I’ll be keeping Firefox as my working browser until Chrome finally builds extensions into their Mac version… and, more importantly, some plucky developer comes up with a Chrome alternative to Tab Mix Plus.
Apple has just unveiled iTunes Rewind 2009, a feature on the iTunes Store that lists all of the year’s best selling content, across music, video and apps. For some, the feature will be confirmation of the intractable cretinism of that mouth-breathing biomass, mankind. For others, it will be a handy primer on popular media they might have missed this year. Let’s dive in!
It’s a small update, but it’s an important one: Apple has just quietly upgraded iTunes to allow buyers the ability to preview whole albums at a time.
iTunes has always allowed buyers to preview tracks before they buy: thirty second snippets that allow users to confirm that the 99 cents they are about to pluck down for “You Shook Me All Night Long” is, in fact, the AC/DC version, and not the migraine-inducing caterwaul of Miss Celine Dion dueting with Anastasia.
If you wanted to buy an entire album, though, you had to click the preview button in iTunes for every single song. No longer: now, a handy “Preview All” button is available on each album page in the iTunes Store.
Some nice functionality, to be sure, but long, long overdue. Amazon’s MP3 store has allowed users to preview full albums for over two years, and it’s hardly difficult functionality to ape. But better late than never.
Apple likes Intel’s desktop line of Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs well enough to put them in their iMacs, so it makes sense that they would want to avail themselves of Intel’s three new Core i5 and i7 mobile CPUs (codenamed Arrandale) for any forthcoming refresh of the MacBook line. But things may not be that simple.
One way the Arrandale line of processors differs from previous Intel mobile CPUs is that the chips include mandatory integrated graphics. According to the Bright Side of News, Apple’s not interested in that: even the most inexpensive Macs now contain NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPUs, which offer far superior performance to integrated graphics solutions.
