College student Amanda Foote sold her place at the head of the iPad line at Apple’s 5th Ave. store for $900.
Who did she sell it to? The guy right next to her apparently. Why? No one knows.
She camped out for two nights for the $900. She plans to buy tickets to Lady Gaga.
“line is around the block” — Paul Arrington in Charlestown, SC.
“Hmmm, I wonder what these could be?!?” — Joey Egan at Apple Flagship Store in San Francisco.
“Its crazy how many ppl r standing in line 4 the new iPad,” tweets Tracie Cooke-Wilkes from the Oxmoor Mall in Louisville, Kentucky.
Here are some more pictures from around the U.S.:
Send your own to [email protected] and we’ll post them up.
If you’re thinking of visiting Target for an iPad 2 later today, better think again.
We just got a report from the stockroom of one Target store, which has only five iPad 2s in stock for sale at 5PM today. They are all 64GB, WiFi-only models in black.
An employee at the store just sent us the following message with the picture above:
“stockroom we only got 5 of the 64gb wifi only black models insulting right.
Stock levels at big box retailers like Target and Best Buy were expected to be much lower than Apple’s retail stores, but this is shockingly low.
It’s not clear if this is the inventory level at all Target stores, but I’d say it’s typical. Apple is offering the iPad 2 for sale at about 10 different retailers, so stocks are likely to be stretched thin. Obviously, retailers are keeping their inventory levels secret: they don’t want to scare potential shoppers away.
The Target employee summed it up nicely: “Better off waitin outside apple or best buy.”
The popular Flipboard app was updated on Wednesday, adding Instagram support and search across social networks. But it also included a surprise for users with jailbroken iPads.
Steve Jobs has jumped almost 40 places on Forbes’ list of the World’s Billionaires. He is the 43 rd richest person in the U.S. and the 110th richest in the world.
Jobs’ net worth has jumped almost $2 billion in one year, from $5.5 to $8.3 billion, Forbes estimated. The leap is thanks to Apple’s surging stock, bouyed by a successful year of iPads and iPhone 4s. Jobs has been on Forbes’ 400 list for the last 11 years. He’s grown his net worth more than 500%. Not bad for a college dropout.
Here’s Jobs’ profile on Forbes, and the annual list of filthy rich.
New beta Release Candidates of Lightroom 3.4 and Camera Raw 6.4 are available for immediate download on Adobe Labs.
Adobe:
The Release Candidates bring raw file support to seven popular camera models including Canon EOS Rebel T3i and Olympus E-PL1s, improve on lens correction profiles introduced in the Lightroom 3.3 and Camera Raw 6.3 releases, and add over 10 new lens profiles to help photographers automatically correct unwanted distortion and chromatic aberration.
Lightroom 3.4 RC is a free download for Lightroom 3 customers, and Camera Raw 6.4 RC is free for Photoshop CS5 customers. More information at Adobe Labs.
Her’s the list of newly supported cameras:
An astonishing 82% of consumers plan to buy an iPad despite the dozens of competing tablets due this year, a ChangeWave survey found.
There’s a caveat: that’s 82% of consumers who plan to buy a tablet in the next 90 days, which is only 5% of the 3,091 consumers surveyed in February – before Apple showed off the iPad 2.
Still, it’s a huge percentage. Only 4% plan to buy the Motorola Xoom; and 3% plan to buy RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab.
Further out, almost 30% said they will be buying a tablet in the future — also an amazingly high number. Not surprisingly, these tablets will cannibalize sales of netbooks, eReaders and even traditional notebooks.
Just kidding. Of course it doesn’t suck. Just the opposite.
The first reviews are in, and they range from enthusiastic to downright giddy. Everyone raves how light and thin it is, and what a big difference that makes in a tablet. Across the board, the reviewers say Apple has made a great device greater, and it’ll be difficult to beat: on design, performance, experience and price.
The only knocks are the screen (last year’s spec) and the cameras, which are functional but not great.
Here are some highlights of the early reviews:
Engineers built and flew a replica of the flying house in Pixar’s “Up” — setting the record for the largest cluster balloon flight ever.
It took 300 balloons, each 8-feet tall and filled with an entire tank of helium. The stint was for or National Geographic Channel’s “How Hard Can It Be?” show. Watch the video report:
Four days before the iPad 2 goes on sale, the first line is already forming.
Apple fan Justin Wagoner has set up camp outside an Apple Store in Dallas, Texas. Here’s a snap of his tent taken by a MacCast reader.
Wagoner appears to be the first person lining up for the iPad 2, which goes on sale on Friday at 5PM. Apple isn’t taking preorders, so its first come, first served.
Wagoner also camped out to be first in line for the iPhone 4 last year. He has set up a site to document his camping trip: iJustinOfficial.com.
Who can guess this iPad app from the fingerprints it leaves behind?
And what about this one below:
A Hungarian politician is for the first time drafting the country’s new constitution on an iPad.
Politician Jozsef Szajer, a member of the European Parliament for Hungary’s ruling party, said in a blog post:
Steve Jobs will surely be happy when he gets word that Hungary’s new constitution is being written on an iPad, actually my iPad… The best is I don’t have to wait for minutes to turn it on, like with a normal laptop. I can open it anywhere and can take advantage of every minute. It’s a miracle!
Via Bloomberg: Hungary First to Write a Constitution on IPad, Lawmaker Says
When reader Liam Dennis updated his Twitter for iPhone app yesterday, it told him that Steve Jobs had registered a Twitter account. He explains:
“It scanned my address book for users I wasn’t following. It only found one. A twitter account linked to [email protected], a contact I had made to send the occasional email to him as we all do.
The [email protected] email address is known, of course, as Steve Jobs’ email address at Apple — the one he uses for his famous one-word responses to customers’ queries.
So has Jobs finally registered a Twitter account?
I feel pretty bad about yesterday’s post about the iPad 3 being the one to make a song and dance about. I’m sure the iPad 3 will be great when it comes out, but for right now, the iPad 2 is a great upgrade. This is not a ho-hum update, as our anonymous Apple staffer suggested.
It’s a rockstar from Mars update. It runs on tigerblood.
The slimmed-down weight and bulk make a big difference. It’s much easier to hold and handle. It’s pretty astonishing that Apple managed to cram in so more, yet made the case so incredibly thin. That is rockstar engineering.
The cameras should have been in there all along, of course, but the addition now makes the iPad much closer to feature-complete.
But the real magic of the device is the integration of hardware and software. Look at the piano in Garageband. You tickle the virtual keys softly and it plays softly. But hammer on them and you sound like Little Richard. The iPad 2’s screen is touch-sensitive, thanks to the built-in accelerometer, which tells the iPad how hard you are touching the screen. Watch the video of it in action here. It really is pretty astonishing!
Without that integration of hardware and software, other tablets are just fancy digital picture frames, as Wired’s Brian Chen noted on Twitter.
The iPad 2 is pure Apple: it proves that Apple is its own most ruthless competitor. Overnight, 15 million first-generation iPads were rendered obsolete.
Apple’s competitors are dead in the water. Steve Jobs is a master of hyperbole, but this time he’s right. There’s no doubt about it: 2011 is the year of the iPad 2.
It’ll be interesting to see what color iPad 2 you guys are interested in. Black is the classic color, but white is distinctive and new.
So what color will it be: black or white?
[polldaddy poll=4648411]
The big news today for me is that Steve Jobs looks as healthy as ever. Yes he’s thin, but he looks good and his voice is strong. See for yourself. Watch the 30-second video below, taken from CNN’s live stream of this morning’s event.
This is NOT a man with six weeks to live. Long live Steve!
The Apple Store just went offline. New goodies coming soon!
Does it mean the iPad 2 will be available to order today?
That was quick. Google appears to have already upgraded CultofMac.com in its search results, just a few days after downgrading us.
As we noted yesterday, Cult of Mac was collateral damage in Google’s war on crappy content farms. For some inexplicable reason, we got downgraded when Google tweaked its algorithms last Thursday.
But today we’re back in. We’re on Google News (a very important source of daily traffic) as well as Google’s general search results. However, we still get outranked by some of the scraper sites that steal our content, so not everything’s perfect.
Why we’ve been upgraded, I have no idea. Google’s head of spam, Matt Cutts, tweeted me yesterday, saying Google had likely seen my post and would get it resolved. And Wired.com published a story about us today after speaking to a Google Fellow Amit Singhal. But the changes were already in place early this morning, which makes me think Google is slowly tweaking its algorithm to get better results. I’ve asked Cutts for an explanation, and will post up if/when I get a reply.
I’d like to thank readers for your awesome support. We got some very nice notes in the comments to the last post. Made my day. Thanks guys.
This one looks a bit fishy, but we’re throwing it out for fun. Amazon.de may have accidentally posted the specs and release date of the iPad 2.
According to the screenshot above, snapped YourAppleDaily.net, the iPad 2 available will have Thunderbolt, a camera and 1.2GHz CPU. And it will be released released on March 17.
Here’s the specs:
9.7-inch screen (same as the current iPad)
1.2GHz CPU
Wi-Fi
Thunderbolt
Camera
Bluetooth
Available 17 March
However, the link to Amazon.de provided by YourAppleDaily.net isn’t working (here’s the link), and a search of Amazon.de pulls up zip.
That just leaves the screenshot above…
Reader Lovell just sent this very puzzling email regarding something new from Apple tomorrow regarding phones. He writes:
I had a friend go to apple today to purchase an iPhone 4. The salesmen talked her out of buying it and told her to come back tomorrow. Would not say what was coming out tomorrow but said she would be verry happy. I ask what it could be phone wise because she said I don’t want a white iPhone but yet the salesmen still wouldn’t say.
Lovell is in Lexington, Ky. I’m stumped. Anyone thinking it could be the rumored cheapo iPhone?
This is the icon for a new section of the Finder in Lion (Apple’s latest update to OS X) called “All My Files.” It helps users find recently-used files, listing them by type, date and so on.
Look carefully. The file cards contain some of Steve Jobs’ best-known quotes, including the words to the famous “Think Different” commercial.
Do you recognize the quotes?
Via Tuaw: Mac OS X Lion features hidden tribute to Steve Jobs
We’ve received some tidbits of information about the iPad 2 launch tomorrow from an Apple staffer:
The New York Times‘ Bay Citizen website has published more remarks from Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak on the subject of Mike Daisey’s controversial one man show.
As previously reported, Woz was moved to tears by “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” a monologue about Apple and Foxconn, the company’s largest supplier in Asia that saw a rash of worker suicides last year.
Wozniak says he found the play deeply upsetting. He urges Tim Cook, Apple’s COO and current acting CEO, to go see the one-man show besucase the issues it discusses could hurt Apple financially in the future:
Tim should know about this very soon, so that he knows what’s in more and more people’s heads. The emotions and understanding and moral feelings that Mike brings out are very strong and could be a threat to Apple’s future, even though they are only simmering now.
The Bay Citizen: Apple Co-Founder Responds to ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’
Former Apple manager Paul Devine pleaded guilty in federal court in San Jose on Monday to a massive kickback scheme involving Apple’s supply chain.
Devine will forfeit $2.25 million in proceeds and property, the U.S. Attorney said.
Devine provided suppliers with details of Apple’s product roadmap and pricing targets in exchange for hefty kickbacks. When he was busted, feds found about $150,000 in shoeboxes under his bed and more money in foreign accounts and safe deposit boxes.
Devine originally pleaded not-guilty but later agreed to protect Apple’s trade secrets if the case came to court. That move was seen as a way to get a favorable plea bargain. Devine had faced 23 counts of wire fraud and money laundering. He plead guilty to one count of each statutory violation.
He awaits sentencing on June 6. He could face up to 20 years in jail, the U.S Attorney said.
Full press release below:
It’s a beautiful morning here in San Francisco to wake up and find your website has been effectively disappeared off the web by Google.
Cult of Mac has been downgraded by the changes Google has made to its algorithm to rerank content farms like Demand Media.
We’ve become a civilian casualty in the war against content farms.
You can read more about here in The Guardian, which highlighted us in a story about legit sites hit by the changes.
We’re not alone. Also affected is the British Medical Journal, PR Newswire, and one of the earliest online communities, The Well. According to an analysis by Sistrix, an independent search-engine analyst firm, hundreds of other legitimate, hardworking sites have also been hit.
Why us? We have no idea. The changes Google has made to its system are secret. What makes it worse is that Google’s tinkering seems to have actually improved Demand Media’s page rank, while killing ours.
We’re a blog, so we aggregate news stories like everyone else. But our posts are 100% original and we do a ton of original reporting, as The Guardian noted this morning.
Perhaps it was because we’re constantly ripped off by shitty clone blogs?
Or maybe because we ranked so highly for popular keywords like “Apple” and “iPhone.” In fact, we used to get a lot of love from Google, placing highly on Google News and Google’s general search pages. A lot of our traffic came from Google, which is why the changes are so serious. I’m already seeing a big drop-off in traffic. Over the weekend and today, the traffic is half what it normally would be.
I’m pissed because we’ve worked our asses off over the last two years to make this a successful site. Cult of Mac is an independently owned small business. We’re a startup. We have a small but talented team, and I’m the only full timer. We’re busting our chops to produce high-quality, original content on a shoestring budget.
We were just starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. After two years of uncertainty, the site finally looks like it will be able to stand on its two feet.
But this is a major setback. Anyone got Larry’s cell number?