John Brownlee - page 73

Steve Jobs Threatened Patent Litigation To Enforce ‘No Hire’ Emails

Apple’s Record-Breaking Q1 2013 At A Glance [Charts]

Back To The Future: 15 Years Of Apple Web Design Seen Through A Time Machine

How Apple Will (And Won’t) Colorize The iPhone 5S

Remote Control Your Mac At Home Using Only An iOS Text Editor [How-To]

Nose Jobs: The Story Behind The Most Incredible Steve Jobs Photo You’ve Never Seen

Buck’s of Woodside doesn’t just serve eggs or coffee or toast. It serves you biomechanical sharks and surfing crocodiles. Sometimes, it even serves you up a photograph of Steve Jobs so incredible, so deserved of being considered iconic, that you simply can’t believe that no one has ever even heard of it. But for twenty-three years, no one has.

This is what I wrote earlier this month, strung out on CES and showing it at the edges:

“With irritating regularity, my girlfriend and I dance the same dance. She, or I, go to bed with our iPhones. She, or I, lose it somewhere within the ocean of the bedfolds. She, or I, find ourselves apoplectic. She, or I, demands that the other calls the phone to locate. And then she, or I, realize that we’ve lost our phone too. And then we murder each other into a spattering of bloody chunks in our festering rage, somehow to reconstitute ourselves, temporarily find our iPhones and begin this amphisbaena dance anew.”

The guys behind HipKey, a keychain dongle that can track your iPhone (and vice versa), were paying attention, and so they sent me over a unit for review. I’m not sure it’s revolutionized my life, but it sure has simplified it: now, instead of constantly worrying about misplacing my keys or my iPhone, I only have to worry about misplacing both at the same time.

Earlier this month, Melinda Gates told an interviewer in the U.K. that “of course” her kids asked for iPods for Christmas, but the Gates won’t give their children Apple products because “the wealth from our family came from Microsoft so why would we invest in a competitor?”

This isn’t the first time Melinda Gates has piped up on the subject of giving her children Apple products. Two years ago, Melinda Gates took part in another interview in which she said that she had “gotten [the] argument” that her children should be allowed to have an iPod. She said that her response was to say, “You may have a Zune.”

Today, the FOX Business Network did an interview with Bill Gates, in which he says his children have never asked for an Apple product in their lives. Ever! Someone’s lying.

Wow, talk about a stealth release. First released in 1998, Half-Life has never been available on OS X through Steam for Mac, even though every other Valve game — including Half-Life 2 and its episodic sequels — have. Sometime in the last few hours, though, Valve quietly released Half-Life for Mac on Steam… and still hasn’t apparently officially announced it.

Following Verizon and Apple’s quarterly earnings reports, AT&T has just released their numbers for the last quarter, and the iPhone 5 made it another banner period for Ma Bell: they activated 8.6 million iPhones last quarter, with 16% going to new AT&T customers.

Apple has just announced the numbers for what has proven to be another record quarter, yet compared to the numbers Cupertino was showing a year ago, Wall Street is worried that Apple’s growth may have finally stalled. Are they nuts?

To help you make sense of Cupertino’s incredible growth, here’s a breakdown in easy-to-read chart form of everything from the growth of Apple’s revenues, profit and cash hoards, to the rise and fall of Cupertino’s various product empires.

We even have a comparison of how Apple did this quarter compared to how Wall Street prediced Apple would do. Usually, Apple does better than analyst predictions, but this time, they did worse. What does it mean?

When it comes to iOS devices, Apple’s long adhered to a (slightly modified) adage of Henry Ford: “You can have it any color, as long as it’s white or black.”

With the 2012 iPod touch refresh, though, Apple showed for the first time they were willing to start making iOS devices in different colors. From there, it was only a matter of time that the inevitable rumors started circling that the iPhone 5S would come in a swatch of different colors.

This concept by Alexander Kormishin imagines what an iPhone 5S in color would look like, but we think he’s got it all wrong. Here’s why.

The debate over illegal immigration isn’t just about adults hopping the border. Oftentimes, children are caught in the middle: kids who were brought to the United States illegally when they were young, and who are now facing being deported as adults, having never known any other country besides America?

Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, is now trying to put a face on this side of the immigration debate. To help her promotion of the Dream Act, she has launched a new website called The Dream Is Now.

Apple has pulled the apps of popular photo-sharing site 500px over concerns that it is too easy to search for nude photographs within the app. This, despite the fact that 500px’s method of dealing with searches for nude images is even more prohibitive than that of the official Flickr iPhone app. Could Flickr be next?

Apple hasn’t updated the Mac Pro significantly since 2010, much to the dismay of professional Mac users. That’s why there’s keen interest in the future Mac Pro: Apple has reiterated its committment to the beefy desktop powerhouse, yet it’s the only Mac to not undergo a major redesign in the last couple of years. Eager eyes look to the future of the Mac Pro line to see what’s next.

A new series of concept images by Peter Zigich have been doing the rounds today, and they are getting a lot of buzz. The images describe a Mac Pro that isn’t just significantly smaller and more power efficient than the existing Mac Pro, but that eschews Intel’s server-class CPUs in favor of custom-built A-series chips.

Darrell Etherington over at Techcrunch says that while “obviously a flight of pure fancy, ” Zigich’s concept is “one that takes serious the question of what comes next for the standalone desktop PC in a mobile-first world.”

It does nothing of the sort. Zigich’s concept isn’t just a flight of fancy, it’s nonsense. Here’s why.

No one tell former Vice President Al Gore that it’s a bad time to buy AAPL. He just exercised a big chunk of his Apple stock options, walking off with $29 million worth of shares at a steep discount.

The idea of a secret public transportation system that only a small, technocratic elite knows about has something of the Knight Bus about it, but it’s a reality here in San Francisco, where thousands of commuters go to their jobs thirty to fifty miles south in Silicon Valley on ultra-secret bus lines. And yes, Apple — of course! — runs one.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – I love my Jambox, but I’m always perplexed why I can’t charge my iPhone using it. After all, it’s essentially a big battery brick with a speaker attached… why can’t I siphon some juice off the top?

The answer is that, in reality, the Jambox has a pretty tiny battery. It’s good for powering a speaker, but it would die pretty quick if you tried to juice an iPhone or (heaven!) an iPad with it. The JBL Charge, though, remedies that problem: it’s a great sounding Jambox-style speaker with a massive battery inside.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Last year, I gave my friend Rachel — a NYC singer/songwriter/comedian with an impressive array of musical proficiencies — my old iPad 2 as a gift. It was her first tablet, or even touchscreen device. I worried she wouldn’t know what to do with it, so when she opened the box and gave me an inquisitive cock of the eyebrow, I told her that the very first thing she needed to do with it was install Garage Band.

To this day, I think it was Garage Band that is the real gift to Rachel, not the actual iPad. Using Garage Band, she can quickly jot out a song idea on the road, or even fully record a fantastic mix, all from a device small enough to fit in her purse. There’s only one trade-off: you have to use the touchscreen. There’s no physical instrument as portable as the iPad to take on the road with you.

That’s where the Jamstik comes in. A product so new and in-concept it doesn’t even have a distributor yet, it’s one of our favorite products of CES. It’s a tiny, ukelele-sized guitar with real strings that connects to your iPad over WiFi, and not only can you use it to record or even perform with your iPad, but it can also teach you how to play the guitar… or serve for an impromptu game of Guitar Hero.

I have an admiration for very simple solutions, and while the CardNinja — a new iPhone accessory that was on display last night at Showstoppers! — isn’t going to light anyone’s world on fire, it’s a “why didn’t I think of that?” kind of product that makes it a lot easier to treat your iPhone like a real wallet.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – The venerable MacBook Pro has a number of workstation options available to it, but the MacBook Air tends to get short shrift in the B2B accessories market.

The LandingZone wants to change that, and they’re showing off a simple, attractive pair of docking stations that not only make it easy to “check in” to your workstation, but give the MacBook Air a wealth of new USB ports and security benefits.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – When Steve Jobs first unveiled the 9.7 inch iPad back in 2010, he made a specific point of telling how many endless hours, how many prototypes had been rejected determining the perfect size for an onscreen keyboard. 9.7 inches, he claimed, was the minimum device that you could accurately and comfortable type on. Any smaller tablet, he later elaborated, was a “tweener” you would need sandpaper to whittle down your fingers to type upon.

For Steve Isaac, CEO of Touchfire, those words are a challenge. If anything smaller than an iPad is a “tweener,” how can you enable a satisfactory typing experience on the 7.85 inch iPad mini? And Isaac thinks he’s got an answer.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – I honestly believed I’d seen pretty much everything in iPhone cases. I’m existentially bored with them, like if Camus wrote about tech writers.

So it was notable to me as I walked through the iLounge Pavillion today that a small booth of cases actually caught my eye and for just a second, made me go, “Hey, I haven’t seen that before.” The cases are by Huckleberry; called Chara-Cases, they turn your iPhone 4, iPhone 5 or iPod touch into the equivalent of a big, colorful action figure.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – There’s nothing that isn’t Bluetooth-powered at CES. We saw a Bluetooth-enabled fork the other day, and today, we saw a pack of Bluetooth-enabled stickers. Really.

Unlike the stickers of Hello Kitty and She-Ra: The Princess Of Power that Buster and I shrewishly compete to collect, however, the Stick ‘N’ Find Bluetooth stickers are actually pretty useful, although worth every penny as much to collect.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Sometimes you find something that catches your eye in the back alleys of CES, and the Justin Case by Innovative Technologies is exactly like that. It’s a very compact, slim and stylish folio case for your iPad or iPad mini with built-in slim line battery connected to elegantly sreamlined 30-pin and Lightning chargers.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – The first Lightning speaker docks are starting to Rumble out of CES, starting with the thunderous OnBeat Rumble, an attractive new dock from JBL that can not only dock a new iPhone, iPad or iPod, but accepts audio streamed across the room via Bluetooth as well.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – The truth of the matter is that there’s just no way to have a telescopic lens phallically jutting out of the back of your iPad in a way that Jony Ive’s sense of dignity in design would approve of. Props to Polaroid, then, for not even trying, instead going a more playful route with their brand new line-up of iPad, iPhone and iPad mini cases that support snap-on external lenses.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – With irritating regularity, my girlfriend and I dance the same dance. She, or I, go to bed with our iPhones. She, or I, lose it somewhere within the ocean of the bedfolds. She, or I, find ourselves apoplectic. She, or I, demands that the other calls the phone to locate. And then she, or I, realize that we’ve lost our phone too. And then we murder each other into a spattering of bloody chunks in our festering rage, somehow to reconstitute ourselves, temporarily find our iPhones and begin this amphisbaena dance anew.

But no longer! At Digital Experience, I talked with a wonderful little outfit selling a gadget called the Hipkey, which creates a sort of blood bond between a dongle and your iPhone. The possibilities after that are pretty rich: not only can it help you find a lost iPhone, or a lost set of keys, but you can even do things like help find a missing child or be alerted by a pickpocketed smartphone with it.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Hyper has been juicing up our iPhones, iPads, iPods and Macs for ages. Now they want to juice up your camera: not with mere electricity, but with advanced smartphone functionality. Their latest product is called the CameraMator, and it basically allows you to control your SLR with your iPhone, iPad or Android device.