Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com's senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late '90s and early '2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and '90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs' leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK's National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He's an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California's legendary Death Ride.
Just in time for the holidays, we’ve launched our first venture into fine geek apparel: a limited-edition shirt designed just for fans of the Mac. (If you don’t get it, hit the jump for a clue).
Just $22.99, the shirt is limited to 100 copies, so it’s super exclusive. Order it before the 19th you’ll get it in time for the big day.
We’ve teamed up with MightTees, the Seattle-based t-shirt empire famous for classics like His Steveness and Say Anything.
The CultofMac MILF shirt is totally custom branded. 100% designed, made, and printed in the USA. 100% sweatshop free. It’s awesome. A very fine tee indeed.
The system will use the iPhone 5, which will likely include a Near Field Communications chip, as an authentication mechanism. Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short-range wireless connection technology that would turn the iPhone into an electronic wallet or security passkey. Bump the iPhone 5 near a compatible NFC-equipped Mac, and the computer will load the user’s home folder and preferences.
However, it was unclear whether users would be able to load all their files onto the host machine. After all, iTunes and iPhoto libraries can get pretty large. Loading a massive iTunes library onto a guest machine from the cloud could be a lot of heavy lifting. And how about the applications to run them? What if the host machine didn’t have Photoshop installed?
Apple’s solution is that only a subset of user’s data and content libraries will be made available, according to a source familiar with a test version of the system. Specifically:
No word on whether Jobs plans to attend the three-month show. “I am not sure whether he’s even aware of the show opening in Palo Alto,” said Tompert. “But who knows.”
The New York teenager who made a small fortune making white iPhone 4s has shut down his website.
“We have closed the site, possibly permanently,” said Lam, 17, in an email to CultofMac.com.
It’s not clear why Lam shut the whiteiPhone4now.com website down. He didn’t elaborate. But Apple is the obvious suspect. Lam has already received a threatening letter from a private investigator representing Apple, who accused Lam of “selling stolen goods.”
Good piece from music writer/analyst Bob Lefsetz on why he’s an Apple fan:
That’s what’s selling Apple. Friends. People hear these amazing stories and take a chance. And they become members of the cult and have insanely great experiences and drag their friends in too. To the point where anything Apple sells, people will buy. Just like you’ve got to have the latest work of your favorite act.
Looks like Apple will be offering offering about 10% off for Black Friday — if Apple Australia’s prices are anything to go by.
Apple has posted sale prices down under, offering 10-15% off many items, including iPad (A$50 off),, iMac and MacBook Pro (A$121 off) 13-inch MacBook Air (A$121.00 off), iPod nano (A$25 off).
The best deal looks like the iPod Touch at about 20% off (up to A$51). Also on sale are the Time Capsule, Magic Trackpad, and a range of iPad accessories. The same savings are likely to carry across to U.S. sales, which are one-day only.
Here’s details of Apple Australia’s other sale items:
Check out this awesome video of Kinect hacker Robert Hodgin manipulating the Kinect feed in realtime with Cinder, a C++ programming environment for creative projects. (Hodgin posted the source + OSX project here: https://code.google.com/p/ruisource/downloads/list)
Here’s AirPlay working on the new Apple TV streaming from an iPad. It works great in Apple’s Video app and YouTube, but I can get audio only to work in iTunes — video isn’t working.
When I select the AirPlay popup, it shows a speaker icon for the AppleTV — not the normal screen icon. Audio streams fine but it won’t play video. Puzzled.
UPDATE: It’s audio only in Netflix too.
UPDATE 2: It looks like video playback is disabled in certain apps, including iTunes on iOS devices, which is more of a storefront than a multimedia app. Video bought through iTunes and played back through the iPod app on an iPhone (and the Videos app on an iPad) work fine. Jason Snell at Macworld had the same experience.
Here’s video of Apple’s new AirPlay video streaming running on an AppleTV updated to iOS 4.1. The Apple TV is playing a Family Guy trailer streaming from a MacBook Air. Pretty cool. The big question about AirPlay is whether it will play video that hasn’t been obtained from iTunes. The Family Guy trailer was downloaded from the iTunes store. I’ll be testing non-iTunes video shortly.
Neuhaus Laboratories recognizes that many people’s music collections are on their computers, not racks of CDs.
And so unlike other amplifier manufacturers, Neuhaus’ tube amps are designed first and foremost to be hooked to a computer as their main music source, not a CD player or turntable.
Now Neuhaus has taken the next logical step. It’s the first company to add Bluetooth to an audiophile-quality tube amp. Now you can enjoy super high quality music streaming from an iPhone or iPad.
Trust me, it’s the best thing you’ll ever hear from your iPhone, ever.
It catches Steve Jobs at age 29, one year after the Macintosh was launched. He is by far the youngest person on Forbes’s list of richest Americans and one of only seven who made their fortunes on their own.
He’s portrayed by Playboy as the Mark Zuckerberg of his era: a Valley wunderkind with a magical gift for foreseeing the future. Of course, it’s interesting to look back and see how the future actually panned out.
Jobs comes across as a confident and knowledgeable, but not brash and arrogant. Here’s a few of the highlights:
Australia's State of Victoria is experimenting with an iPad pilot project; likely the first of many. Photo courtesy of Department of Education and Early Childhood Development.
It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.
The iPad is going to be very big in schools, predicts Professor Mark Warschauer, one of the world’s leading experts in technology and learning.
In an exclusive interview, Prof. Warschauer predicted that schools may soon start buying iPads in big numbers to replace not just desktops and laptops, but also textbooks and other reading materials.
“Until a couple of years ago, the majority of book reading — and a lot of magazine and newspaper reading — was done in print,” he said in a phone interview. “I think we’re going to see that change now.”
It seems like everyone except Steve Jobs was underwhelmed by the Beatles on iTunes announcement today.
The reaction here, on other blogs, and on Twitter was unanimous: Who cares?
Most Beatles fans have already bought the CDs and added them to iTunes. The music is 40-50 years old. Half the band is dead.
Perhaps Apple overplayed it a bit, announcing that this was a day we’d never forget. Then it turned over the homepage, iTunes and Ping to The Beatles. There’s even four TV ads. Overkill? Maybe.
But seen from Steve Jobs’ point of view it is gotta be a big deal. Symbolically, at least. This is the day iTunes triumphed over the old music industry. It marks the complete obsolecence of the old distribution system and the triumph of the new.
The Beatles catalog was one of the last trump cards held by the old music industry. Giving it up is an admission that iTunes has prevailed. Music is fully digital, and there’s no going back. The other holdouts — AC/DC, Led Zeppelin Garth Brooks (CNet has a list here) — must surely follow.
Jobs has been working on this for seven years or more. To him, it’s a massive validation. Like he says, a day that won’t be forgotten.
Apple has finally approved the native Google Voice app after a 16 month delay.
Download it from iTunes here. It’s free, offers low-rate international calling and push notifications for new text or voicemail messages. It’s quicker than the HTML5 version, and has access to the iPhone’s contact list.
1. The lack of a SIM card slot (Verizon doesn’t use SIM cards)
2. A new external antenna design (Goodbye Antennagate)
3. The Verizon symbol in the upper left of the screen.
Wouldn’t it be great? But I call BS. The photo looks fake. It’s too good. Shots of prototypes are usually crappy. This looks too staged. I’ll bet it’s a Chinese knockoff.
NVIDIA has just announced a mid-range upgrade graphics card for the Mac Pro: the Quadro 4000 For Mac.
Aimed at workstation applications (video, graphics, scientific data crunching), the Quadro 4000 falls in the middle of NVIDIA’s professional lineup. It features NVIDIA’s latest Fermi architecture, boasting 256 CUDA cores and 2GB of GDDR5 memory.
But for a mid-range card, it’s pretty pricey: $1,199 when it ships later this month. The PC-compatible card is about $700. It shouldn’t take long for GPU hackers to create a Mac-compatible ROM. We’ll keep an eye out.
It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.
Computer scientist Alan Kay is one of the most foremost experts in computers in schools, and yet he believes technology in education has largely failed.
Kay is a pioneering computer scientist, a former Apple fellow, and famous for formulating the Dynabook concept that predicted laptops and tablets 40 years before they became commonplace. Kay was a researcher at Xerox PARC in the seventies on technologies that Apple later commercialized in the Lisa and Mac. Among many honors, Kay has won the prestigious Turing Award for work on object-oriented programming. During the mid-1980s he was an Apple Fellow at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group.
Computers have been in schools for the last 30 years, but with few exceptions, they haven’t been used to their full potential.
Kay says the education system has squandered 30 years of technology in classrooms. He likens the modern factory educatory system to a monkey with a microscope. The monkey looks at its reflection in the microscope’s barrel but doesn’t look through the eyepiece — it utterly misses the point.
Computers have become tools of distraction, Kay said, instead of education. He singles out Guitar Hero as the best example of this — players get the fantasy of virtuoso guitar playing without learning a single note.
“When I look at computers in schools, this is what I see. It’s all Guitar Hero,” he said during a keynote speech at CES earlier this year.
We asked Kay to expand on these ideas in this exclusive Q&A. Kay talks about the importance of using technology to create educated voters capable of participating in a democracy, and Apple’s general disinterest in education.
The consensus is that tomorrow’s big announcement isn’t streaming iTunes or anything to do with the cloud, but the Beatles finally coming to iTunes.
Look at the image above (via Techcrunch). Coincidence? Also, The Wall Street Journal and Billboard are reporting that the big announcement tomorrow is the Beatles on iTunes.
Says the WSJ:
Steve Jobs is nearing the end of his long and winding pursuit of the Beatles catalog.
Apple Inc. is preparing to announce that its iTunes Store will soon start carrying music by the Beatles, according to people familiar with the situation, a move that would fill in a glaring gap in the collection of the world’s largest music retailer.
Of course, the Beatles-on-iTunes rumor is as old as the hills. It was last aired in the run-up to Apple’s September 1st music-focused media event. Seems every time there’s an Apple event, it’s the Beatles.
Hard Candy’s iPad Stylus is an odd-duck product. It’s a stylus for a tablet that’s designed to be used with your finger. Like Steve Jobs said, “If you see a stylus, they blew it.”
But it’s actually pretty cool. I’ve got one, and I like it — even if I never use it.
I’m not alone. The Candy Pen iPad Stylus is already on its way to becoming a big hit.
Artist Michael Tompert takes Apple’s products and wrecks them with blowtorches, sledgehammers, handsaws and handguns. His large-scale prints of the detritus are surprisingly colorful and beautiful.
“It’s an alternate viewpoint,” explained Tompert at a preview of his first gallery show, which opens in San Francisco today. “They’re beautiful inside. They’re beautiful when you open them up.”
At a preview last weekend, Tompert’s three kids sat on the floor playing with iPhones and iPod touches underneath their father’s artwork. The irony was lost on no one. In fact, it’s our obsession with Apple’s products that Tompert is commenting on.
Feast your eyes on this beautiful gallery of Apple products destroyed in the name of art. The work is by artist Michael Tompert, whose show opens tonight in San Francisco. But you don’t have to be in California to enjoy the pictures. We have all 12 prints — plus detail shots — in the gallery below.
The photo above, called “Breathe,” shows a 2008 MacBook Air shot with a 9mm Heckler & Koch handgun.
Artist Michael Tompert, who’s first exhibit of Apple-inspired artwork opens today, tried to destroy an iPad by hitting it with a sledgehammer.
“I hit it with a sledgehammer about 10 times,” said Tompert at a preview of his art show, which opens today. “It did nothing. It’s incredible. It was really, really hard to destroy.”
Instead, Tompert took a blowtorch to the iPad.
“I had to blowtorch it for 15 minutes until the inside boiled and it exploded from inside,” said Tompert.
For the first time, U.S. music fans are streaming as much music as they download — and streaming is set to overtake downloading in a matter of months.
NPD Group says 30 percent of U.S. music consumers streamed music in August; the same percentage that downloaded music to their computers.
But streaming is growing fast. In a few months, it will far outstrip downloads, NPD Group spokesman Lee Martin told Evolver.fm.
Incredibly, the new numbers also include downloads from peer-to-peer file sharing networks as well as legal downloads from iTunes and Amazon.
Apparently, the convenience of streaming services, which now offer instant access to vast libraries of music of a wide variety of devices, even beats out piracy!
Good thing Apple has a $1 billion server farm coming online soon (if not already). But when are we going to see streaming from iTunes?
UPDATE: I go to dinner and all hell breaks loose. Sorry for the bogus info. My bad. I should have checked this out first. Apparently, this combo update is not good — it causes kernel panics. Here’s a legit link to the 10.6.5 combo update on Apple’s site: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1324
Here’s the hidden URL where you can download the Mac OS X 10.6.5 Combo update. This combo update is not visible on Apple.com
Some folks think it’s usually better for your OS to install the combo update. From what we understand, the combo update does a more complete update than incremental updates applied through OS X’s Software Update. For example, system glitches caused by earier updates may be fixed because the combo update reinstalls everything that was included in previous updates (in this case, everything in 10.6.1 through 10.6.5).
It can also help avoid update headaches, we’re told.
