Leander Kahney - page 64

With or without Steve Jobs, Apple has the best lineup of hardware and software it has ever offered.

All in all, the WWDC keynote showed that Apple is paying attention to all the right things. It’s got a great line-up of affordable hardware that’s fast, feature-packed and environmentally friendly. The software loaded on top is designed for user-freindliness and ease of use. And Apple is no longer alone: it has thousands of partners in software and hardware who will push Apple’s platforms in new directions.

And while Apple is making a stealth enterprise play by supporting Micorosft Exchange, it’s not devoting features or resources to taking on Microsoft head on. Instead, Apple is concentrating on its core market: home users. And it’s got a killer lineup for consumers, especially in software.

* The new iPhone 3GS is a killer device. The speed bump, better camera and digital compass (which will enable a raft of amazing location-based services) will tempt iPhone users to upgrade in droves. The iPhone is becoming finally a true mobile computer, and no one has anything that comes close.

* The $99 iPhone is the Palm Pre killer. Who now will pay $199 for an iPhone-imitator on Sprint, when the original costs less than half the price?

* The new MacBook Pro laptops running Snow Leopard are the best laptops on the market, bar none. Even if other laptops have good hardware, Microsoft’s Vista is their Achilles heel. With a great built-in battery, memory-card slots and the return of firewire, MacBooks will sell like hotcakes. Netbooks be damned. The real computing market — and most of the money — is in laptops, and Apple’s got the best available.

* Snow Leopard looks like a great upgrade, despite the lack of whizbang new features. Instead, it will offer upgrades in all the right areas: Web browsing, better multimedia, easy of use and speed. Snow Leopard has tons of little touches that will add up to an extremely polished, consumer-oriented operating system that focuses on the things consumers do — browse the Web, watch videos, and communicate with friends. That’s why things that seem small and minor — like today’s WWDC demonstration of easy video editing and uploading in QuickTime — really counts. Apple is focused, as usual, on improving the user experience. And unlike Vista, Snow Leopard delivers.

* Green. The new MacBooks are rated EPEAT Gold — the highest standard of energy efficiency, green production and recyclability.The importance of being green can’t be understated. There’s a huge shift in consumer attitudes, especially among Apple’s educated, upscale demographic, who are demanding environmentally-friendly products. Being green is a huge selling point, and Apple now offers some of the greenest hardware.

Apple fans are generally pleased with Snow Leopard and the new iPhone 3GS but are disappointed Steve Jobs didn’t make a surprise appearance at WWDC.

“Despite Snow Leopard, OS 3.0 and the new iPhone 3GS, what i really wanted to see was Steve Jobs healthy and onstage,” tweeted AppsAddicts.

“Dammmn, We miss Steve Jobs. This keynote sucked,” said mumph.

Steve Jobs’ absence prompted many to wonder about his health, and whether he would return to Apple at the end of the month as the comapny has indicated. One Apple fan compared Jobs to the elusive Osama Bin Laden.

“Where’s Steve Jobs? Keeping his death a secret like bin Laden?” tweeted brokenalice.

Fans also complained about the lack of a forward-facing camera on the new iPhone, which had been widely rumored, and no iTablet.

Apple’s Scott Forstall just showed off the previously-rumored Find My iPhone feature in the iPhone 3.0 OS.

Find My iPhone is a MobileMe service that helps you find your lost iPhone, or wipe it remotely.

The service allows you to send the iPhone an alert sound that will play even if the phone is in silent mode — good for finding it in the back of the couch. It will also display a message on the home screen, such as another phone number, in case a stranger found it and the screen is locked. Clever.

If you think the phone has been permanently lost or stolen, you can also wipe all the data remotely. And if it shows up again, you can restore from a backup.

Snow Leopard — Apple’s next major operating system update, which looks friggin’ awesome — will cost just $29 for current Leopard users.

Apple usually charges $130 for major operating system upgrades, but Apple says it wants to encourage everyone to upgrade. Snow Leopard will be available in Septmeber (developers at WWDC get a near-finished version today.)

Snow Leopeard will run on all Intel hardware, even the older stuff, and includes a ton of under-the-hood tweaks and improvements. At WWDC, Apple’s top software honcho, Bertrand Serlet, demonstrated a ton of cool speed enhancements and nice interface tweaks, including a sleek update of QuickTime. Serlet showed how Snow Leopard will double the speed of some tasks while trimming about 6GBytes of disk space.

A family pack will cost $49.

The number of Mac users has tripled in the last two years, Phil Schiller just said at WWDC.

There were 25 million active OS X users in first 5 years of OS X, up until 2007, Schiller said. But in the last two years, however, it has grown to 75 million.

“We’ve TRIPLED the number of users,” he said to big applause. “It’s astounding.”

The line for this morning’s Schillernote at WWDC was already several blocks long before the first light of dawn. See the pictures on Flickr and reports on Twitter. Compare to this unintentionally hilarious collection of pre-dawn Palm Pre lineup photos.

Talking of Twitter, there’s been several tweets saying Steve Jobs has been spotted at WWDC.

However, it looks like a false rumor that’s spreading fast. Most of the Twitter sightings seem to be a retweet of a tweet by Michael Fey, known as MrRooni, who said: “Holy damn I just saw Steve Jobs walk through Moscone! #wwdc.”

‘I’m guessing, but MrRooni’s tweet looks like a joke to me. But now the joke is spreading, and others are treating it as real.

By Peter Yan, a graphic designer from Melbourne, Australia.

Steve Jobs is recovering from his mystery illness and is set to return to Apple at the end of the month, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Jobs will not however make a surprise appearance at WWDC on Monday. Instead, he’ll host a product presentation or other special event later in June, the Journal says.

“He was one real sick guy,” added this person. “Fundamentally he was starving to death over a nine-month period. He couldn’t digest protein. [But] he took corrective action.”

The story is hidden behind the Journal‘s pay wall, but is free to read on the iPhone.

(The Journal also reports that the next-gen iPhone will be unveiled during the keynote address on Monday but won’t be available until July, to coincide with the two-year anniversary of original iPhone purchases. The iPhone will have a faster processor and a better camera with video editing, the Journal says, citing someone who’s actually seen the phone).

The story also notes that Tim Cook is doing a good job in Steve’s absence — the stock is way up.

Via Tuaw.

Apple is preparing to open a huge new retail store in China’s capitol just steps from the historic Tiananmen Square.

Renderings of the giant, three-story store have been published on the website of U.S. architect Ben Wood, who is based in Shanghai.

The store will be built on Qianmen Street, an up-and-coming shopping strip just blocks from the great square, which has seen huge military parades as well as student protests.

Expected to open as soon as the fall, the store will be Apple’s second in Beijing and its ninth in Asia.

The design mixes traditional Chinese architecture with Apple’s signature glass and steel. It will feature a glass staircase spiraling through all three stories, plus a huge white Apple logo above the front door.

Link.

Via IFOAppleStore.

The first round of Palm Pre reviews are in — and they are generally very positive. The iPhone has a real contender, especially if the Pre comes to Verizon in a few months — a good smartphone on a good network.

The big three gadget reviewers — Walt Mossberg, David Pogue and Ed Baig — all give the Pre very positive reviews, with a few reservations.

Pogue is the most excited. “One of the world’s best phones,” Pogue says in his enthusiastic New York Times review. Pogue is very positive about the Pre, saying it’s a worthy iPhone contender, despite noting drawbacks like the lack of apps and poor battery life.

Ed Baig of USA Today also gives the Pre a thumbs up, but also notes the lack of apps and battery life. Nonetheless, he says the Pre “stacks up well against Apple’s blockbuster device, and in some ways even surpasses it… Palm has delivered a device that will keep it in the game and give it a chance to star in it.”

The big granddady of reviewers, the Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg, is the most measured, giving a positive review but saying Palm has some catching up to do, especially if the gen-3 iPhone is announced next week.

“The Pre is a smart, sophisticated product that will have particular appeal for those who want a physical keyboard,” says Mossberg. “It is thoughtfully designed, works well and could give the iPhone and BlackBerry strong competition — but only if it fixes its app store and can attract third-party developers.”

A new spy shot claiming to show the next-generation iPhone has emerged, and it appears to show a forward-facing camera.

If the spyshot does indeed show the new iPhone, a forward-facing camera would be a cool but surprising feature. Although high on many iPhone users’ wishlists — it would enable iChat videoconferencing from anywhere — the feature seems too Dick Tracy to be true, especially with AT&T’s bandwidth-challenged 3G network.

A forward-facing camera was mentioned in a recent Apple patent granted April 16 — although this doesn’t mean much. Apple patents everything, and a ton of patented features never see the light of day.

Hacker Nathan Seidle has rigged his car so that his Nike+iPod pedometer unlocks the doors wirelessly as he walks up to it.

“I hate keys,” he writes. “I am on a mission to dispose of them all.”

Seidle already uses keypads and wireless RFID cards to get into his home and office — the last key in his pocket is for his car.

So Seidle took a Nike+iPod sensor — the pedometer/transmitter that normally goes into your running shoe — and rigged up a simple proximity sensor inside the car to detect when it approaches. The Nike+iPod sensor is constantly transmitting a unique ID, which the car uses to identify Seidle and unlock the doors. He keeps the Nike+iPod in his pocket.

Seidle made the proximity detector inside the car from the Nike+iPod receiver (the part that normally plugs into the iPod) and an Arduino Pro Mini microcontroller board, made by his company, SparkFun Electronics, plus a few other bits and pieces.

The system, which Seidle calls the iFob, is an intermediate hacking project. He’s posted a detailed tutorial on the SparkFun website.

Unfortunately, the iFob doesn’t start the car; it just unlocks the doors.

“The system now works great!” Seidle writes. “When you’ve got a handful of stuff, it’s great to know the doors will automatically unlock as you approach. However, I still have use a key to start the car. The next step is get a big red button wired up for button start so that I don’t have to carry my key. Someday.”

Via GadgetLab.

Labor protesters demonstrating outside Apple’s Taiwan offices in May. The Apple laptop says “Responsibility.” Images: Global Post.

Asian labor unions will be putting more pressure on Apple on Tuesday with a protest at Computex Taipei, Asia’s largest electronics show.

The unions are hoping to force Apple to intervene in a labor dispute with one of the company’s major suppliers, Wintek, which makes LCD screens and is rumored to be working on the upcoming Mac/iPod tablet.

Wintek has been accused of unfairly laying-off workers and poor and exploitative working conditions in factories in Taiwan and mainland China. Wintek denies the charges.

The protest will “expose the reality to the public, and request Apple Inc. to execute its Code of Conduct, to end the exploitation of labors in Taiwan and China,” one of the unions said in a news release.

Woz signing his book, “Woz,” in 2007. CC-licensed photo by bangdoll@flickr.

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak on Wednesday said Steve Jobs is “healthy, energetic” and “doesn’t sound like he’s sick.”

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D conference in Southern California, Woz said Jobs doesn’t “seem to be in a health crisis,” according to the WSJ.

However, Woz said he’s never asked Jobs directly about his health.

Jobs is expected to return to Apple at the end of next months after taking six months medical leave to concentrate on his health. In a January letter to Apple’s employees, Jobs said his health issues “are more complex than I originally thought.” He lost an alarming amount of weight in 2008, leading to speculation his cancer had returned. Jobs was treated for pancreatic cancer in 2004.

AT&T is promising more and faster bars. CC-licensed photo by daBinsi (Vegas).

Hot on the heels of the faster iPhone expected this summer, AT&T is promising to double the speed of up its 3G network.

AT&T on Wednesday said it is bumping its 3G network to support HSPA 7.2, which offers download speeds up to a peak of 7.2 Mbps, which is double its current capacity.

The rollout will begin later this year, AT&T says. The company also promises it will “introduce multiple HSPA 7.2-compatible laptop cards and smartphones beginning later this year.”

One of the smartphones is likely Apple’s next-generation iPhone. Apple is expected to introduce a faster iPhone that will support HSPA 7.2. The new iPhone will also likely have a faster processor, which will be better able to handle the faster data stream, quickly updating content like web pages and maps.

Apple’s entry-level white MacBook received a hardware update on Wednesday, possibly foreshadowing revisions to the aluminum unibody MacBooks.

For the same $999 base price, the WhiteBook now gets:

* CPU bump from 2.0 GHz to 2.13 GHz.
* Hard drive from 120 GB to 160 GB.
* RAM boost from 667 MHz to 800 MHz.
*Battery life upped from 4.5 hours of “wireless productivity” to 5 hours. And now rated Energy Star EPEAT Gold, up from EPEAT Silver.

Thanks to the updates, the WhiteBook now has a faster processor than the entry-level aluminum MacBook, and a bigger build-to-order hard drive (500GB). And it still has a FireWire port. Updates to the unibody soon?

Apple is rumored to be offering similar upgrades to the aluminum MacBooks at WWDC, and rebranding the machines as MacBook Pros to further distinguish them from the white plastic MacBook.

White MacBook tech specs.

White MacBook at Apple’s online store.

Microsoft will release a Web-surfing, HD-video-playing, multitouch Zune in the fall to compete with the iPod touch — and the hardware actually looks pretty cool. But as Apple well knows, the gadget is one thing, the software and services are another.

Sporting a sexy metal case, the Zune HD will have a 3.3-inch, 480 x 272 OLED capacitive touchscreen display (16:9 widescreen); a built-in HD Radio receiver, and WiFi. The “HD” refers not to the touchscreen, but the HD radio and HD out (720p), though that’s only available with an optional cradle. Pricing was not released, and release is “early fall.”

“There’s a lot here that MSFT is doing well, especially when it comes to the hardware,” said Interpret analyst Michael Gartenberg on his blog.

San Francisco’s No Starch Press has posted a big chunk of it’s popular My New iPhone book on Scribd for free, plus is selling it cheap as a PDF.

No Starch has a new version of Wang’s iPhone book coming out with the release of iPhone OS 3.0 this summer. In the meantime, the publisher is making about 50% of the current version of the book available for free.

“We have this content ready to go, but with the OS 3.0 release looming, it didn’t make sense to print and ship a book just to have it go out of date in a month,” said Leigh Poehler, No Starch’s sales manager. “It also didn’t make sense to hoard this information. So we’re making the content available to people via Scribd.”

No Starch is no stranger to experimenting with digital formats. In 2008, the publisher made available copies of my Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod books on the Bittorrent file-sharing network (which saw tens of thousands of downloads).

More recently, No Starch has posted several samples of its books on Scribd, including an excerpt from its “Manga Guide to Databases,” which has been read over 9,600 times). But this is the first time it has given away such a large chunk of a book and let Scribd sell the full PDF (for $9.95).

Hit the jump to read a chunk of the book.

Our friend Roger, the t-shirt designer from Brighton, U.K., has another Mac-related shirt for us to check out.

It’s a classic skull design, made with the keys from a pair of Apple keyboards. The white keys come from an extended white Mac keyboard; the black keys were taken from the original iMac (the one with the half sized F keys). Says Roger:

“I could say it depicts the obsolescence that all computer equipment faces, but really it’s just skulls make great tees! What Mac geek wouldn’t like to see a design featuring Mac keys, and only only closer inspection can you find the classic Apple command key.”

Hit the jump for a bigger picture of the skull — and the elusive command key.

You can find Roger’s skull tee here, available in a range of colors.

Apple’s Safari 4 browser is a pig. It’s a resource hog that doesn’t clean up after itself — and it remembers every site you visit, even in “porn mode.”

Safari records every site you visit, even if you turn on the “Private Browsing” feature or clear the browser history. And the files it generates can consume gigabytes of disk space.

“This is a huge privacy concern,” writes designer and musician C. Harwick, from Chapel Hill, NC, who did some snooping in Safari’s hidden system folders. “With no good way of getting rid of them except manually (clearing the history doesn’t do it, and I don’t think resetting Safari does either), these hidden files are strewn all over the user’s hard drive unbeknownst to him waiting for snooping relatives (or more pertinently, law enforcement) to dig them up. I really like Safari, but I’m going to have to seriously consider using Firefox now (ack).”

Who says Apple doesn’t listen to customers? Thanks to a public outcry, Apple has reversed course and accepted the Eucalyptus eBook reader into the iPhone App Store.

The web erupted in outrage last week when developer Jamie Montgomerie’s eBook reader was rejected by Apple because it allowed readers to download the Kama Sutra from Project Gutenberg — which Apple deemed “inappropriate sexual content.”

But on Sunday Montgomerie received a call from Apple. The Apple representative chatted with the developer about his app and invited him to resubmit it.

“We talked about the confusion surrounding its App Store rejections, which I am happy to say is now fully resolved,” Montgomerie wrote on his blog.

The application is now available for purchase from the App Store for $10. A small victory for common sense.

Via Macworld.

David Leibowitz is a veteran fine art photographer who’s lately been making some pretty amazing art using his iPhone.

Based in NYC, Leibowitz’s pictures of the city look like a French Impressionist painted the scenes (hit the jump for more pictures). There’s nothing to indicate they were made using his iPhone and about $40 worth of apps from the App Store.

Leibowitz has a long history of using digital tools to make art. He started in the ’80s with a Polaroid camera. He’d hand manipulate the emulsion to create photographs that look also look like Imrpessionist paintings. But now he’s discovered the iPhone, and the results are not your typical iPhone art.

Hit the jump for some of Leibowitz’s latest pictures and an interview explaining how he makes iPhone art.

Picture by Nikolai Thelitz.

A big crowd turned out for the opening of Apple’s latest flagship store in Zurich on Friday.

There’s no official numbers, but pictures at MacPrime, a Swiss Mac magazine, suggest the line snaked several blocks.

Opened at noon, the new Bahnhofstrasse store was mobbed. Several fans camped out overnight, waiting 16 hours to be the first inside.

The Bahnhofstrasse store is the second in Zurich.

It has an unusual design, accoring to Gary Allen of IFOApplestore. It’s only the second Apple store (after 5th Ave.) to have an underground space. A glass staircase leads down to a large Genius Bar for service and training at the “Pro Labs.” More details about the Bahnhofstrasse store at Allen’s site.

Via TUAW.

Swiss insurance company Mobiliar gave knockoff iPods to guests at the Swiss Economic Forum. Pic: Berner Zeitung.

The head of Apple Switzerland has threatened legal action after a Swiss Insurance company gave 1,200 iPods to bigwigs at the tony Swiss Economic Forum. Trouble is, the iPods were cheap Chinese knockoffs.

At the Swiss Economic Forum last week, the insurance company Mobiliar surprised guests with an MP3 player that looked very much like a second-generation iPod shuffle.

But when Adrian Schmucki, the head of Apple Switzerland, received his, he threatened legal action against Mobiliar.

Add insult to injury, several of the guests asked Schmucki if the knockoffs would work with iTunes.

The Swiss Economic Forum is a two-day gathering of Switzerland’s leading companies, politicians and academics.

Berner Zeitung (Google German-to-English translation).

Many thanks to Renato Mitra of ApfelBlog. Link to Renato’s post.

My friend Jeffy picked up this pack of stickers at a Macworld past. Do Mac users have a sense of humor ? Should they be printed up as stickers for MacBooks?