Leander Kahney - page 21

The Apple Store is currently down. Nothing is rumored, AFAIK, but we all know that Apple loves surprises. Let’s hope it’s something big!

Anyone got any wishes?

Thanks Steven in Settle.

Best Buy is expecting pre-sales of the iPhone 5 to begin in the first week of October, a leaked internal document from the retail giant reveals. In addition, the document says Apple’s eagerly-awaited handset is coming to the Sprint network.

This one’s nuts. Remember how there were no police reports about the missing iPhone 5 prototype, even though CNet reported that police offices had actually searched a man’s house looking for it? The guy whose home was searched in search of that lost iPhone 5 prototype says the officials weren’t actually police officers… they were Apple employees impersonating them.

The implication is that the officials, who appear to be members of Apple’s security team, were impersonating police, a crime punishable by up to a year in jail in California.

Silicon Valley marketing guru Regis McKenna is an old friend and colleague of Steve Jobs. Their history goes back to when McKenna’s firm designed the famous Apple logo back in 1977.

You know, then, that when McKenna talks about Jobs, the Apple founder gets his love and respect. Even so, McKenna says that Steve Jobs is just part of Apple’s recent success… and Apple’s new CEO, Tim Cook, just hasn’t gotten his fair share of credit for Apple’s massive growth.

McKenna says Jobs is undoubtedly a genius, but Tim Cook hasn’t gotten his fair share of the credit for Apple’s massive growth.

“He is as responsible for Apple’s success as Steve is,” he said. But why?

I just went to Cava22, the San Francisco bar where an Apple employee reportedly lost a secret prototype of the iPhone 5.

I was hoping to get more details, and maybe even track the missing iPhone to Bernal Heights, where police apparently tried to recover it. I live in that neighborhood.

Writer Lisen Stromberg lives in Palo Alto, just down the street from Steve Jobs. She has an awesome and touching post about Jobs as a neighbor who waves and says hello.

Apple founder and recently retired CEO Steve Jobs has accumulated a personal fortune of $8.3 billion, but despite this, he is not known for his philanthropic contributions — at least, not publicly. According to the public record, he hasn’t given any money to charity in decades, and he reportedly declined to join Bill Gates’ and Warren E. Buffett’s Giving Pledge, a campaign to persuade the wealthiest to give away at least half their fortunes.

So is it time Jobs pulled a Bill Gates and start giving his money away?

Apple’s website already has a new executive profiles page emphasizing Tim Cook as CEO . I guess it should come as no surprise. Steve Jobs has always been disciplined and unsentimental.

Below, Jobs is listed as Chairman of the board. Let’s hope it stays that way for some time.

Here are some quick thoughts about Steve Jobs’ resignation…

Steve’s stepping down has been some time coming, but it’s still a shock. We all knew he would be standing down eventually, but that was at some point in the future. Maybe next year, or the year after. It was a shock to hear he’s stepping down. And obviously, it doesn’t bode well for his health.

Reports about Best Buy and Walmart returning huge numbers of unsold TouchPad tablets to Hewlett Packard appear to be strikingly true.

Speaking on a conference call right after dropping the bombshell that HP is killing its webOS phones and tablets, HP CEO Leo Apotheker admitted that his company’s iPad competitor is not selling at all, despite hefty price cuts.

The company hoped the TouchPad would quickly establish itself as the number two to the iPad, Apotheker said, but it hasn’t made a dent at all.

Several Apple stores in the U.K. are clearing their show floors in case of a fourth night of rioting.

Stores in Manchester, Liverpool and Kent have been emptied, while police have taken up a heavy presence on Regent Street, a popular shopping street and location of Apple’s biggest flagship store in the U.K.

Thanks to the massive stock selloff today, Apple is within $16 billion of displacing Exxon Mobil as the the world’s most valuable company.

At market close, Exxon Mobil’s stock fell $3.88 (4.9 percent) giving it a market cap of $366 billion. Apple’s stock fell too, but only $15.20 (3.87 percent) for a market cap of $350 billion. That puts Apple within $16 billion of Exxon. Two weeks ago, the gap was $50 billion. Any day now…

Via NYT.

Here’s a mockup of the iPhone 5 spy pic posted to the MacRumors forums, courtesy of another forum member.

As you can see, it looks just like the iPhone 4, but thinner. There’s also no tapering or plastic back, as previous rumors have suggested.

Via Arnold Kim.

Could this be the iPhone 5? The picture was posted to MacRumors’s forums, and was snapped at the office of a French cell phone company, according to the forum member who posted it.

Just as we exclusively reported last year (and no one believed us), Apple will build one of its biggest retail stores yet in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal.

Apple signed a 10-year lease with New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to build a whopping 23,000-square-foot store on the upper balcony of the iconic train station, the New York Post reports.

The store will fill Grand Central’s north and northeastern balconies, displacing Charlie Palmer’s Metrazur restaurant. It will be among Apple’s largest stores, about 3,000 to 5,000 square feet larger smaller than Apple’s biggest stores in London and on New York’s West 14th Street.

The MTA is offering Apple a special move-in rent of $800,000 (a cool half-mill more than Charlie Palmer’s restaurant is currently paying). Then it will up the rent to $1 million annually. Apple will pay to refurbish the space, and the MTA estimates it will make $5 million profit on the deal, and revitalize retail at the popular station.

Editor’s Note: This post has been stickied to top of the front page. If you scroll down there is probably new content below it.

Intro

OS X Lion is the eighth major release of Mac OS X, and it brings to the table several ideas from iOS, like Launchpad (a matrix display of installed applications, similar to the iOS Home Screen — and the Mac App Store) which is being used to deliver the new OS.

Despite the iOS inspiration, Lion’s not a huge shift from previous versions, and it won’t turn your Mac into a faux iOS device. Rather, it borrows some of iOS’s best ideas and uses them to polish the core Mac experience, making Lion the most attractive, cohesive, user-friendly and idiot-proof OS X yet.

It’s a big accomplishment overall. Lion not only looks cleaner and nicer, it fixes a surprising number of long-time niggles. But it also adds some nice new features, and while there are some changes that will cause consternation, like reverse scrolling, almost everything added is for the better.

The question isn’t whether you should spend $29 on Lion, because that’s just a no-brainer. No, the real question is: now that we’re in the post-PC age, how will Lion change the way you use your Mac, and how does it set the stage for the Mac of the future?

TuneUp is the #1 add-on for iTunes. It cleans up song metadata like missing album info or misspelled names. It also delivers related music videos, and alerts you when favorite artists are playing in town.

It’s easy to use and can do a quick job of cleaning up the messiest library. But it’s not perfect: songs can be mislabeled and there’s been complaints of bugs and crashes. TuneUp costs $39.95/yr or $49.95 one time fee for a bundle. TuneUp also offers a la carte pricing for individual products. A free demo cleans up to 50 songs and removes 25 duplicates.

Yesterday I got a chance to talk to Gabe Adiv, founder and CEO of TuneUp Media,company behind the plug-in.

He gave me some interesting statistics about iTunes and listening habits, as well as thoughts about Apple moving music into the cloud.

Here’s another way the iPhone is revolutionizing medicine — it’s now a cheap, portable tool for detecting cataracts, the leading cause of blindness worldwide.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed Catra, a cheap plastic lens that clips onto the iPhone’s screen. Using a simple vision test, the Catra software creates a map of cloudy areas that may indicate the onset of cataracts.

The Catra software can provide a diagnosis within minutes and requires no training. It also works on the iPod touch and other smartphones. It’ll be a boon for use in developing nations, the researchers say.

Below is a video explaining how it works. Catra will be shown off at Siggraph in Vancouver next month.

As my colleague Mike Elgan points out, the iPhone has changed the world in profound ways.

Now an ex-colleague, Brian Chen of Wired.com, has just published one of the first books to take an in-depth look at how, exactly, the smartphone world is shaping up.

Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future — and Locked Us In is an excellent overview of how the iPhone is changing the computing landscape.

I follow Apple closely, yet I was surprised at how much I learned about the world of mobile from Chen’s well-reported book (Full disclosure: I provided a blurb).

There’s a lot of truth in these Organizational Charts for various tech companies from Bonkers World.

Via Laughing Squid

Late on a Friday summer afternoon when everyone’s about to get early cocktails, Apple goes and releases the new iOS 5 beta we’ve been waiting all week for.

iOS 5 Beta 2 is now available to registered developers. The build is 9A5248d.

As usual, there’s skimpy release notes; but it looks like WiFi syncing has been turned on.

Here’s some good news for fans of retro arcade games on the iPad.

A Software Development Kit for the fantastic iCade iPad cabinet is now available free of charge, Ion Audio has just announced.

Macworld magazine has given Apple’s controversial update of Final Cut Pro X a cautious thumbs up.

The new version of Final Cut Pro rocked the video editing world with its ruthless embrace of the new at the expense of the old. Lots of veteran FCP editors are outraged by the update, which has a whole new code base and workflow. The new software can’t even open old FCP projects!

But Macworld says that’s the price to pay for progress. The new software has been rewritten for a tapeless, metadata-based video workflow, and though incomplete, it’s a huge imporvement:

With Final Cut Pro X, Apple is once again out to completely re-invent the video industry. This is a truly groundbreaking release for a 1.0 software version, and I hope that the professional features that many video editors currently use will be made available soon.

Macworld: Review: Final Cut Pro X

I have a personal request: I’d like to ask for your support for a charity bike ride I’m doing in July.

I’m riding the Tour of the California Alps, better known as the Death Ride, to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training program.

I’m $1,000 dollars short of my fundraising minimum ($3,500). I’d like to ask for your support.

If you can help in the fight against blood cancer, please make a pledge using this link (use the “Make a Donation” widget at the right). It’s fast, easy and totally secure. I only need 20 people to make a $50 donation (or one person to make a $1,000 pledge). The deadline is Monday June 27 — just three days away.

The Death Ride is a very challenging 130-mile route that goes up and over five mountain passes in the awesome Sierra Nevada. It  features 15,000 feet of climbing in one day, most of it between 6,000- and 9,000-feet above sea level, where the air is pretty thin. Here’s the elevation map. For an idea of how high that is, see this amazing infographic. It’s a masochistic ordeal.

Many thanks for reading this — and for your support. I’d appreciate you sharing this post via email, Facebook or Twitter. Every penny counts, and it’s for a very good cause.

UPDATE: I totally screwed this one up. When my contact, TuneUp founder Raza Zaidi, told me iTunes in the cloud has only 20% of the all the music listed in Gracenote’s big database of music, I interpreted it to mean that the upcoming iTunes Match service would mirror only a fraction of most music libraries. What I failed to realize was that 20% of music in iTunes represents the most popular 20%. The remaining 80% is all the music in the long tail. So when Apple rolls out iTunes Match in the fall, it will indeed likely mirror most music libraries, just as Apple claims. In a clarifying note, Zaidi says matches will likely be 95% or higher. In addition, the Get Album Artwork feature in iTunes isn’t powered by Gracenote, as the post implies. Sorry for the mistakes. Teach me to post before my morning coffee.

When iTunes Match goes live in September, Apple promises to instantaneously match any of the tracks in your iTunes library to the iCloud… as long as it already has your music in its mega music library. What Apple hasn’t said is that as much of 80% of your music might not be recognized by iTunes Match… and the only way to get that music into the iCloud will be to spend days manually uploading gigabytes at a time.