Leander Kahney - page 23

When Apple reveals iCloud at WWDC on Monday, it’ll have the kind of impact the iPod has had, predicts Kevin Fox, a Silicon Valley software veteran who’s worked at Apple, Yahoo and Google.

“The rumblings are huge,” says Fox, lead designer at Mozilla. Fox worked on Newton software before designing Yahoo’s chat service and then software for Google (including Gmail 1.0, Google Calendar 1.0, and Google Reader 2.0). He continues:

… given the complete failure of MobileMe over the last decade there’s no way Apple would introduce [iCloud] on such a pedestal unless it’s incredible. My guess is that iCloud is to MobileMe as iPhone was to Newton: a complete, deep, polished solution after an underwhelming market failure.

Apple Stock Chart by YCharts

At the close of markets on Friday, Apple had a bigger market cap than Microsoft and Intel combined — the so-called Wintel alliance that almost buried Apple a decade ago.

Here’s how much Apple, Microsoft and Intel were worth on Wall Street at the end of the week:

We have word from a trusted source that Apple is indeed adding location and travel information to iCal alarms.

Got a flight to catch? iCal takes note of your location, combines that with the route to the airport and says, “You’ve gotta leave in ten minutes if you wanna be there in time.”

MacRumors has a sneaky spy shot of the new iCloud icon, courtesy of a banner going up at WWDC. Hope Steve Jobs doesn’t see the pic. It’s pretty sloppy work by those two banner hangers. Who thinks they’ll be fired by day’s end?

Then again, Jobs already let the cat out the bag, letting everyone know that Monday’s keynote will be about iCloud, iOS 5 and Lion.

And here’s another, better pic:

The Oakland police have just arrested the suspect on the crazy viral “This Guy Has My MacBook” Tumblr blog.

Joshua Kaufman just Tweeted:

ARRESTED! An Oakland police officer just called me to let me know that they arrested the guy in my photos! BOOYA!

Guess how the police got him?

Wrapping up his D9 interview, Google’s Eric Schmidt had one last piece of advice for anyone worried about online security:

Google’s Eric Schmidt may have just pre-announced the iPhone with NFC.

Steve Jobs calls Android a “probe in your pocket” because it spies on users, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Kara Swisher.

Apple’s iCloud music locker will not require users to laboriously upload all the music in their iTunes libraries, but will instead rely on “scan and match.”

There’s something fishy about this, but iPad 3G has supposedly been hacked to make phone calls and send SMS messages — just like a giant iPhone!

Check out the video of the supersized iPad/iPhone in action:

Business mag Fast Company had funnyman Conan O’Brien pose as eight of history’s greatest innovators for its latest issue on the 100 most creative people in business.

For the cover, Conan dressed as Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, Steve Jobs, Madonna, Moses, Socrates and Teddy Roosevelt. Weirdly, Jobs doesn’t make Fast Company‘s 2011 list, but his software lieutenant Scott Forstall does.

Here’s a bigger version of the cover:

An Apple store at New York’s Grand Central Terminal is back on.

To celebrate Apple Retail’s tenth anniversary, Gary Allen just drove 3,200 miles, crossed 12 states, and burned 100 gallons of gas.

His destination?

Although the Third Man theme will quickly drive you crazy, this clever video makes inventive use of three iPhone screens.
written/choreographed by Ronen Verbit and Vanya Polunin

Written/choreographed by Ronen Verbit and Vanya Polunin.

Party planner Stephanie Gordon was flying from New York to Palm Beach when the caption told passengers they might witness the final launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour this morning.

As the plane descended, Gordon pulled out her iPhone and snapped some incredible pictures of Endeavour as it punched through the clouds:

Here are the new wallpapers in OS X Lion Developer Preview 3, released this afternoon. There are poppies, ducks, and an actual lion.

They come courtesy of it’s all tech, who bundled them up into a downloadable zip file (26.1MB).

Check them out:

This is new the login screen in Lion Developer Preview 3, which was just released this afternoon. And we also have a list of some of the biggest changes.

Apple has just released the third major Developer Preview of Lion, the upcoming update of Mac OS X.

The 1.07GB update is avaliable to registered Mac developers running developer preview 2 update 2.

There’s also an update to Xcode, which is now version 4.1. Developers must upgrade Xcode to 4.1 after installing Lion Preview 3.

We’ll have more details soon…

UPDATE: Gladwell debunks the old story that Jobs “stole” the Mac from Xerox PARC. See below.

In the latest edition of The New Yorker, preeminent business writer Malcolm Gladwell takes on Steve Jobs and the creation of the mouse.

The piece is called “Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation.”

Apple’s giant datacenter in North Carolina may bring advanced voice controls to the iPhone and iPad, reports Techcrunch.

The function of Apple’s massive datacenter — one of the biggest in the world — has been kept firmly under wraps. The North Carolina facility is like Area 51: everyone knows it exists, but few know its true purpose. Observers believe it is primarily for iTunes in the cloud, but Techcrunch suggests it is already set up to bring voice recognition to iOS 5.

According to Techcrunch reporter MG Siegler, Apple is already running advanced voice-recognition software from Nuance Communications – the company behind the Dragon Dictation applications for the iPhone and iPad — at the massive datacenter. The two companies will announce a deal at WWDC in early June.

And that likely means that iOS 5 will feature a plethora of advanced voice controls when it also is unveiled at the programmers’ conference.

One of the most interesting revelations of the Fortune piece “Inside Apple” that’s making headlines this weekend is how Steve Jobs thinks Apple will be OK without him.

Fortune reporter Adam Lashinsky writes:

“Jobs himself believes he has set Apple on a course to survive in his absence. He has created a culture that, while not particularly jolly, has internalized his ways.”

The iPad 2 came to China this morning and sold out in less than 4 hours, according to our friends at M.I.C. Gadget.

Apple’s flagship store in Beijing attracted a massive crowd of customers and scalpers, who started lining up at 5 p.m. on Thursday. Overnight customers were treated well: there was a special waiting room for them to sleep in, and everyone got a wristband, allowing them to leave the line for an hour and return to their place in line.

There was even a special section for scalpers, who set up shop behind a barrier. Here’s the details:

Review: Early 2011 Apple iMac (27-inch screen, 3.1GHz quad-core Intel Core i5)

Apple updated its venerable iMac this week with new machines that are fast, sleek, and beautifully packaged.

Sporting Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors, powerful new graphics cards and Thunderbolt ports that can support two external monitors, the new iMac is the undisputed champion of all-in-one machines. Plus, it’s the only one out there that’s not butt ugly.

As well as being the most attractive desktop computer available, it offers just about everything modern computer users might need in a self-contained package, from a HD webcam to a gesture-sensitive trackpad.

I’ve been testing a 27-inch model with a 3.1Ghz Core i5 chip (the biggest, fastest stock model currently available at the Apple Store), and it may sound silly, but it’s almost too much machine for my needs. The screen is so big, I have to sit back lest I get motion sickness. And the i5 chip has power to spare for someone like me, who doesn’t do high-end video or graphics work.

Still, I’ll take it. If the chip is too powerful now, it sure won’t be in a couple of years.

Just seven days after Steve Jobs promised to fix the location tracking bugs in iOS, an update is available now for download through iTunes.

A free download, iOS 4.3.3 fixes three bugs related to location tracking:

• The cache of location data is limited to just one week.
• The data is no longer backed up to your computer.
• The cache is deleted when Location Services are disabled in iOS’s Settings app.

The data isn’t encrypted, but Apple says that will be fixed in the next major update, likely iOS 5, which is expected at WWDC in early June.

The 4.3.3 update applies to the iPhone (4 and 3GS, but not the iPhone 3G); iPad (1 and 2); and iPod touch (3rd and 4th gen, but not 1st or 2nd gen).

There’s a separate 4.2.8 update for the Verizon iPhone 4 (the CDMA phone is still on a different fork of iOS).

Update or no, Apple is still expected to testify at a May 10 Congressional hearing about mobile tracking.

Here’s the new 2011 Thunderbolt iMac playing HD movies on three screens simultaneously — without a hiccup.

It’s a 27-inch model with an Intel Core i5 chip and AMD’s Radeon HD 6970 graphics card (1GB of GDDR5 memory).

The two 21-inch Dell monitors either side are connected via the iMac’s pair of Thunderbolt/Mini DisplayPort jacks on the back (with a pair of pricey $30 Mini-DisplayPort-to-DVI adapters).

The main 27-inch display’s resolution is 2,560-by-1,440; while the external monitors are at 1,920 by 1,080 (true 1080p HD).

Pretty impressive.