Leander Kahney - page 69

This afternoon’s stock sell off after Apple reported some amazing Christmas numbers was initially puzzling. Apple had its best quarter ever — selling a record 2.3 million Macs — yet Wall Street dumped the stock in after hours trading.

Initial reports blamed the sell off on Apple’s cautious guidance for the current quarter. Plus there’s the receding economy, which will put a pinch on Americans’ gadget buying habits.

But here’s the reason: the iPod’s amazing growth has finally slowed to zero.

For the first time in six years, Apple’s key product saw no growth year-to-year in the crucial Christmas period. And there’s only one way to go form here: down.

Looks like the iPod gravy train is finally slowing, and from here on in, we’ll see declining year-on-year sales of Apple’s key gadget.

Chart: Silicon Alley Insider

Via: Infectious Greed

Steve Jobs’ much-ballyhooed movie rental service looks all fine and dandy, but the question in my mind is: “How long will it be before the service offers a single decent movie to rent?”

At present, the movies on offer are even shittier than the local video store, or those available on-demand from my cable providor, Comcast, which utterly stinks.

It’d be depressing if all Apple offered was popcorn garbage. Surely the service is serving the wrong demographic. Early adopters, the kind that run out to buy an AppleTV box, are surely more interested in less mainstream fare. How long will it be before there’s some independent movies, classics, artsy fartsy foreign stuff, and genre titles?

Eagle-eyed readers of Think Secret may have noticed that the site is still publishing.

Many assumed that Think Secret would cease publishing after the site’s owner, Harvard undergrad Nick Ciarelli, reached a settlement with Apple in December concerning Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit, and Ciarelli’s first amendment countersuit. (For which Ciarelli was rumored to have received a low six-figure sum from Apple).

But on Tuesday, Think Secret published a story and two galleries of photos from Macworld. On Monday, the site briefly published a pre-Macworld rumor, but quickly withdrew said item without explanantion. (There’s a screengrab here).

The site’s last day of publishing will be February 14, 2008, according to Dave Hamilton of BackBeat Media, Think Secret’s advertising partner.

“The last day that BackBeat Media-brokered ads will appear on Think Secret is February 14th, 2008, and content will be posted on the site regularly at least until then,” writes Hamilton.

When asked about the situation, Ciarelli sent a note pointing to Hamilton’s blog post, but declined to elaborate further.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

The Steve Jobs/Bill Gates lovefest that first became apparent at the WSJ’s D conference in the summer continues in the Times today. At the end of an post-keynote interview, Jobs said Gates should get a medal for his work at Microsoft! The Times’ Bits Blog reports:

Jobs saved his greatest compliment today for his former archrival Bill Gates, who has now largely retired will retire from Microsoft this summer.”Bill’s retiring from Microsoft is a big deal,” he said. “It’s a significant event, and I think he should be honored for the contributions he’s made.”

Jobs never praises Microsoft or Gates in public. There must be something afoot: A business deal, perhaps? Or maybe Jobs wants to give the Gates Foundation a few billion, but he feels they should first be billionaire buddies, like Warren Buffet?

It looks like there’s a mini backlash brewing against the beautiful but pricey MacBook Air — online at least.

Over at MacRumors, a “first impressions” gallery of the new sub-notebook is drawing far more negative reader comments than positive ones.

Yes, Mac fans like the Air’s thin profile, but there’s a lot of bitching about its limitations — the price, soldered ram, non-replaceable battery, and paying extra for an ethernet port or DVD drive.

“It’s an expensive, disposable toy,” says one MacRumors reader.

If anyone is planning to get married at Macworld this year (like Shawn and Lesa King last year), we’d like to hear your story for Wired.com.

Ditto if you are flying in from New Zealand to attend — or any other far-flung place.

We’d also like to hear from anyone who’s taking their work vacation to attend Macworld.

Please contact Wired.com reporter Jenna Wortham or send an email to me — [email protected].

My two favorite tech news sites — Gizmodo and Ars Technica — are hosting a pre-keynote party in San Francisco on Monday night (the 14th) at Harlot, 46 Minna Street. 8-11.30pm.

Giz editor Brian Lam is promising to buy everyone a beer, and there’s schwag (likely shite) for early birds. I’ll be there, and so apparently will Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve.

Here’s a handy map to the bar.

UPDATE: I just discovered that the free schwag are copies of my books. Ooops.

Last month, after a couple of eggnogs at the office, I drenched my keyboard in a cup of coffee. Kind readers suggested running it through the dishwasher. Of course, putting keyboards in dishwashers is the kind of thing you read on the internet all the time, but never believe it actually works.

So, skeptical that it would work, I tried it myself.I’m happy to report that running a filthy, coffee-stained keyboard through the dishwasher works great. The keyboard is spotless, and it works perfectly.

Feel me: dishwashers make keyboards better than new.

Full procedure after the jump.

Insanely Great Tees, a Mac-oriented t-shirt manufacturer, is running a Macworld predictions contest.

Correctly predict what Steve Jobs will announce at Macworld, and you could win an insanely great t-sirt. Prizes also for the funniest entry and the most creative.

But the site warns: “If your predictions are too accurate, expect to hear from some friendly Californian lawyers.”

UPDATE: I just got off the phone with Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret’s publisher, and wrote it up for my day job over at Wired: Apple Kills Think Secret: Publisher Nick Ciarelli Talks

Apple rumor reporter extraordinaire Nick Ciarelli is shuttering his Think Secret website after settling a trade secrets lawsuit with Apple, Ciarelli writes on his website.

Apple had sued Ciarelli, who is studying at Harvard, after he published details of an unreleased music breakout box codenamed “Asteroid.” Apple sought the identity of whoever leaked the product details.

The settlement of the suit is confidential Ciarelli says, but doesn’t involve the identity of the leaker. But it does include closing his site.

“I’m pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits,” Ciarelli said in a statement.

I’ve already sent Nick an email asking if he’ll contribute to Wired News.

I just spilled coffee all over my computer keyboard. While horrified at the damage, I was fascinated to see how the coffee pooled in the middle of the keys.

I’ve never seen the like before.

It’s an Apple keyboard. The keys have a glossy finish and are slightly depressed in the center. Of course, most of the coffee drained off the keys and collected in the keyboard’s base, which is made of transparent plastic. I wish i’d got a picture of that. It looked like one of those paperweights filled with oil and water, but in this case, it was a muddy brown liquid. But the coffee drained out when I turned it over.

I shall run the keyboard through the dishwasher to see if that myth works.

Foto: Markus Aarstad/www.ps.no

Heres’ the first picture of Steve Jobs in a suit and tie for at least a decade, maybe longer. Jobs wore the monkey suit to the Nobel Prize ceremony, in support of Al Gore, environmental activist and Apple board member.

Link.

The revamped Spaceship Earth ride at Disney’s Epcot Center has a special “Steve Jobs section,” according to the lifthill blog, which tracks news about rides and roller coasters, and was invited to a special preview.

But once at the Steve Jobs area, which is supposed to depict the birth of Apple computer in a garage, the lifthill blogger noticed that the lone figure in the garage looked a lot more like Wozniak than Jobs.

The figure is facing the wrong way, so it’s hard to tell, but it’s wearing the same shirt as Wozniak in a famous early photograph copied below, and has similar hair and beard. Conspriacy theorists note that Jobs is the single largest shareholder in Disney– but I can’t believe he cares that a section of Epcot bears his name or likeness (or not).

Anyway, there’s no second figure in sight, so one of them is slighted. And so too is the third Apple-founder, Ron Wayne, but no one cares about that.

But what is that thing the dummy Woz/Jobs is sitting in front of? It ain’t no Apple I or II — the first and only machines Woz created more or less single-handed. It looks like a big wooden Mac, but none of the Mac prototypes looked like that — they were much more finished.

Higher-res pictures at lifthill.

Via Boingboing.

We have three of Energizer’s new Energi To Go iPod battery extenders to give away.

To win one, simply decorate your Mac, iPod, or iPhone for the holidays and email the picture to [email protected].

We’ll post the pictures here next week. The three best will get an Energi To Go battery extender. The Energi To Go is a $20 battery-powered iPod charger that juices all iPods equipped with a dock connector. It runs on two AA batteries (Energizer recommends lithium AA batteries for better performance). It will charge an iPod nano for up to 46 hours; and an iPod video for up to 32 hours, Energizer claims.

Steve Jobs was inducted in California’s Hall of Fame in a swank ceremony in Sacramento last night hosted by Gov. Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver. Jobs was among 13 visionaries and trailblazers honored, including Ansel Adams, John Steinbeck, Elizabeth Taylor, John Wayne and Tiger Woods.
Apparently Jobs wasn’t thrilled about attending, but Shriver made the honor contingent on attending the induction ceremony. She told local affiliate KNBC that she had a hard time convincing Jobs to attend. “He’s trying to balance children, family, business, he doesn’t like to be singled out,” she said. “He believes that Apple is the star of the Silicon Valley, not him.”

There’s streaming video of the riveting ceremony here.

Gary Allen has some great pictures of the winding glass staircase at the new Apple Store in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district.

Allen, who lives in Berkeley, flew out for the grand opening of the 14th Street store on Friday the 7th at 6 p.m. He’ll no doubt be waiting in line soon to be first inside the store. Allen is a dedicated grand opening camper, and will likely be blogging at IFOAppleStore.

The store will be giving out commemorative t-shirts to the first several hundred inside, and some unspecified “special surprises,” according to the 14th Street Store’s webpage.

The store is one of Apple’s biggest. It’s three stories tall, and one whole floor is given over to service. Unlike its sister store on Fifth Avenue, it will be open 9 a.m. to midnight, not 24 hours.

In the rush to create high-markup accessories for the iPhone, one company is hawking the Pogo Stylus: a pointing device for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch — two products expressly designed to be used without a stylus.

Is there really a market for this? I imagine the pudgy fingered might take a look, as might people who have become accustomed to poking around their smartphone with a little pen. But the whole point of Apple’s multitouch is doing away with pointing devices. But the market for iPod accessories is worth more than $1 billion annually, so companies are taking a throw-it-out-and-fingers-crossed approach.

Available now from the company’s website for $25.

I’m losing my mind. I’ve spent the last two evenings trying to get a 300-page document written in Apple’s Pages ’08 word processor to export properly to Word format.

The bulk of the document exports OK, but it screws up hundreds of endnotes: the markers jump to the wrong endnotes. I’ve tried everything I can think of — exporting to PDF (which can’t track changes) or RTF (which strips the endnote markers).

Anyone got any ideas?

UPDATE: Many thanks for all the suggestions. I eventually found a solution. There were several problems with the endnote markers in the Pages document. The most serious was a missing endnote marker right at the beginning of the 300-page document, which caused all the subsequent endnotes markers to point to the wrong records. Trouble is, the problem only manifested itself when I exported to Word. The missing marker wasn’t apparent in the Pages document — it only showed up after exporting to Word! And no matter what I tried, I could not get rid of that screwy marker. So here’s what I did:

1. Convert all the endnotes to footnotes.

2. Cut and paste the document, one chapter at a time, to separate Pages documents.

3. Export each Pages document to Word, one at a time, carefully checking that all the endnote markers work.

4. Reassemble from the separate chapters in Word.

Miraculously, it worked. Why? No idea. Note: Exporting the Pages as a PDF works better than exporting to Word for preserving endnotes. All the endnotes are present and correct, but you can no longer track changes.

Again, many thanks for the suggestions.

While iPhone shoppers waiting at Apple’s Regent Street store for the iPhone launch on Friday were well behaved, women in line for a fashion launch at a New York H&M were not.

Female fashionistas at the launch of a new Robert Cavalli collection at H&M reportedly trampled each other, fought over dresses and stripped the mannequins.

Naughty:

Photos by Vogue.co.uk

Nice:

Photo by mbites

Via Portfolio

Illusionist Andrew Mayne is using a special filter in iChat to make it look like he’s bored to death or his soul is being ripped out.

It’s pretty effective.

Check his page for video of the effects in action.

Instructions for using the quartz filter called “HoloGit” is here on MacRumors.

Pic: A lab at the school’s library with a sea of new iMacs. At front is the display of a Mac mini running Windows.

To “diversify” its technology, the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in Dallas is switching to Macs from PCs.

By switching to Macs, the school can now offer students Mac OS X as well as Windows XP — the machines are all dual boot.

Cox joins several schools switching to the Mac, including Wilkes University Wilkes-Barr in PA, and St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. A few years ago, it was the opposite story. Schools were abandoning the Mac in droves, including long-time, all-Mac schools like Dartmouth.

At Cox, the school has installed about 100 iMacs in labs, and there’s dual-boot Mac minis (OS X and XP) at the head of about 30 classrooms.
“We’re enhancing and diversifying our computer platforms by keeping Windows XP while adding OS X,” said Allen Gwinn, the school’s technical director, in a statement. “Upgrading to Apple platforms is the only way to do this.”

Update: As noted in the comments, I bungled the headline, transposing PCs and Macs. But there’s no strikethrough in heds, so I just corrected it. Thanks for the heads up.

PC World: In Pictures: The Most Notable Notebooks of 2007

The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware. The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows.

Via Daring Fireball

Watch this video interview with MS CEO Steve Ballmer and see if you don’t conclude he’s a coke head.
Ballmer sniffs and snorts throughout and he’s constantly rubbing his nose as if he’s dying to take giant snot snorts.
If you were sitting in a bar with him, there’d be no doubt he just did a couple of fat rails.

Like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin was one of the last great holdout bands refusing to release its catalog online — until now. <cite>The Complete Led Zeppelin </cite>, a digital box set of the band’s entire studio discography, is available for pre-order on iTunes: 165 tracks for $99, including a new greatest-hits anthology <cite>Mothership</cite>. (The entire package is being promoted with a reunion performance at London’s O2 Arena on November 26.)

Meanwhile, if you do a quick search over on Bittorrent, the band’s entire discography is available as a 2.25-Gbyte download. It includes:

Studio Albums:
Led Zeppelin I
Led Zeppelin II
Led Zeppelin II
Led Zeppelin IV
House Of The Holy
Physical Graffiti (Discs 1 & 2)
Presence
In Through The Out Door
Coda
Live albums:
The Song Remains The Same (Discs 1 & 2)
BBC Sessions (Discs 1 & 2)
How The West Was Won (Discs 1, 2 & 3)
Video:
Led Zeppelin With Keith Moon – Forum Los Angeles 77-06-23 (Rare)
Led Zeppelin – Royal Albert Hall 1970 Concert

DJ / Rupture, a New York “turntable soloist,” has an interesting rumination on this situation following a raid on Tuesday by British coppers of the huge music-sharing tracker, OiNK.

DJ / Rupture found his entire discography traded through the site, but concluded file-sharing is a positive: “The overall movement is towards more ways to share music & ideas with like-minded individuals on the internet,” he writes. “The way I see it, this can only be a good thing for music fans. And what musician is not first a music fan?”

Picture by Manntar

Dave Horrigan, a tech columnist who lives in San Diego, just sent a note from Southern California’s fire-scorched front lines. He writes:

“I’m about 1 mile downwind of one of the fires in San Diego and as such have been watching the news closely. I see images of many people evacuating with their iMacs but I’ve seen no one evacuating with a PC in their arms. Of course its Rancho Santa Fe, but surely there is some rich guy here with a PC he wants to save?”