iPod - page 25

Apple faithful, I sense a disturbance in the force. I feel … fear. Worry. Anger. Faithful, put aside these negative feelings. The OS is fine. The iPhone is fine. Everything is fine. We are taking a little extra time, that’s all. I’m sure you’re receiving taunts from your Windows-loving friends talking about “OS X Leper.” I’ve been taunted too. Bill Gates just called and offered to send over a team to help us port Vista features into Leopard.

Faithful, do not lose heart. I’ve chosen the photo above to help you re-hypnotize yourselves. Look directly into my eyes, not around the eyes, but into the eyes. Now think of products. Glossy white products that cost too much money and make you feel superior to other people. Feel better? Good. Me too.

Link.

VMware Fusion Beta 3 now supports Apple’s Boot Camp. VMware Fusion is virtualization software that allows Windows XP to be run at the same time as OS X (It doesn’t yet support Vista).

VMware Fusion automatically detects your Boot Camp partition, so you can now run a Windows XP virtual machine from your existing Boot Camp partition. You no longer have to choose Windows or Mac: you can now run Windows side-by-side with your favorite Mac applications. Note: For this Beta 3 release, Windows Vista is not supported; only Windows XP is supported.

Ingrid Ebeling, an analyst at JMP Securities, believes 500 million MP3 players will be sold before the market becomes saturated. Apple will easily sell 350 million of those, besting Sony’s record for Walkman sales.

Reports AppleInsider:

“During Sony’s 15-year reign with the Walkman, the company sold over 350 million units, and we believe that Apple’s addressable market over time will exceed this number given the upgrade and replaceable nature of iPods as well as the overriding trend of consumers’ increasing use of digital media,” she wrote. “The net takeaway is that this is a product category that is far from saturated, and we believe well over 500 million units will be sold before the product category hits maturation.”

Apple has long had Sony’s benchmark in sight. Last year, Jon Rubenstein, the now-retired head of Apple hardware who oversaw development of the iPod, told me that he was pretty confident Apple would beat Sony’s 350 million record.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs:

We’re havng a diner 2 celebrate at John Bentley’s in Wooodside tonght. and Ill be honorst, were getting a little buzzed om super expnsive wine. But itsgood blow ff steam once on a while. ths is relly a special time 4 a[ple. Jon Ive just told us that if you put 100 million iPoods end 2 end, they wd encricle the globebe 13 xtimes. Amazing. Speaking of amazing, i type ths whlala whow whole massage on my iphone usissins using its touchchcscreen keypayd and adaptiona adaptiv typeing and it worksss greeeat.

Phillip Torrone of Make magazine and Adafruit Laser Services, a laser-etching etching service for iPods and MacBooks, has kindly offered to etch OxyContin pills for free onto any Rush Limbaugh iPod. If you recall, Limbaugh is offering eight free iPods engraved with his signature as an incentive for his email newsletter (see here).

Phil writes: “If any of your readers wins one, I’ll etch pills all over it for free with my laser. We can then auction it off and give the $ to a group Rush hates.”

Send mail to Pete or I at the email addresses listed at right. Also include suggestions for a suitable charitable organization.

Pic by Sudden Curve

Apple on Monday triumphantly announced it has sold 100 million iPods in five years with a big splashy ad in the New York Times and across the front page of its website. Apple claims the iPod is the “fastest selling music player in history.” That may be so, but it’s not yet the biggest seller: Sony sold 340 million Walkmans (and others sold countless millions of knockoffs).
But Apple watchers are actually more interested in the growth of iTunes. Carl Howe at Blackfriars Marketing notes that iTunes has now sold 2.5 billion songs — 1 billion more songs than 6 months ago. These numbers are only semi-official (Jobs mentioned them casually in an interview), but if Apple is now selling 1 billion songs every six months, that’s a very sharp growth curve.
Also, Howe points out that Apple is also beginning to dominate online sales of movies and TV shows. Wal-Mart revealed on Monday that its online movie store sold just 3,000 movies in the first month. By contrast, Apple sold 125,000 movies in the first week.
“Once you’ve bested the largest American retailer, the sky is the limit,” Howe writes.

Lawmakers are out of touch and corrupt. Democrats in my home state, Michigan, appear to have reinforced this image by proposing $38 million be spent on iPods for every student in the public schools to use as learning tools.
As you might expect, this proposal has drawn guffaws and outrage from armchair analysts across the land. Newspapers and bloggers alike have gone out of their way to highlight the spending bill as reflecting a worldview that can’t fix things. Don’t believe it. This story has a lot more to it than iPods. At the heart of the matter is a state that seems dead set on dying. Read on to learn what you aren’t hearing.

Technorati Tags: back-dating, ipod

If you can’t wait until June for the real iPhone, buy this $3 paper iPhone cutout on eBay instead. The seller, who has has 96.9 % positive feedback, claims it’s the “most accurate” paper model on the market today. It boasts advanced features like:
1. Real Rounded Corners
2. Images of the top and bottom of the iPhone
3. Cingular icon has been replaced with AT&T
The seller has even made a high-quaility, pre-assembled paper iPhone for an extra $3. It even includes a thich cardboard insert for extra rigidity. Link to the assembled Paper iPhone auction.

Drug-addled nutjob Rush Limbaugh is giving away eight, 80-gig video iPods, one a week for eight weeks. The bad news: you have to sign up for his email newsletter “Rush in a Hurry.” Even worse, he’s vandalized the iPod with an engraving of his signature. How about a handful of painkillers instead?

Pix by Chris John Beckett

About 4,000 dancers reveled to the sounds of their own iPods at an impromptu flash mob at London’s Victoria train station on Friday, according to the Evening Standard.

A deafening 10-second countdown startled station staff and commuters before the concourse erupted in whoops and cheers. MP3 players and iPods emerged and the crowd danced wildly to their soundtracks in silence – for two hours.

University of London student Lucy Dent, 20, was among the flash mobbers. She said: “It was my first flash mob and I’m hooked. I’ve been dancing non-stop since we began.

“I didn’t even notice the commuters. When you get into the dancing you’re oblivious to them and forget you’re at a railway station.”

Says Flickr user vandanger: “It lasted almost two hours before the police intervened. It was great.”

It’s good to be the king, isn’t it Steve? Especially when standing next to Damon Albarn, lead singer of The Good, The Bad and the Queen. Damn. Steve is relishing this DRM-free breakthrough with EMI:

“We are going to give iTunes customers a choice–the current versions of our songs for the same 99 cent price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 30 cents more,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think our customers are going to love this, and we expect to offer more than half of the songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this year.”

Hear that, other record companies? They’re Steve’s footsteps — you’re all prey. His smug grin is coming for you.

Photo: Denver Post / Helen H. Richardson

A Colorado teenager was struck by lightning while mowing the lawn and listening to his iPod, according to the Denver Post. It appears the lightning struck his iPod and fried the earbud wires, severely burning the inside of his ears. Ouch. The paper reports:

Jason Bunch was listening to Metallica on his iPod while mowing the lawn outside his Castle Rock home Sunday afternoon when lightning hit him.

The last thing the 17-year-old remembers was that a storm was coming from the north and he had only about 15 minutes before he should go inside.

Next thing he knew, he was in his bed, bleeding from his ears and vomiting. He was barefoot and had taken off his burned T-shirt and gym shorts. He doesn’t know how he got back in the house.

…

Bunch’s ears were burned on the inside, and he’s lost some hearing, mostly on the right side. His hair was singed.

His face, chest, hands and right leg have freckle-size welts on them as if buckshot had come from inside his body out.

The wounds follow the line of his iPod, from his ears down his right side to his hip, where he was carrying the device. The iPod has a hole in the back, and the earbuds dissolved into green threads.

It’s a global mega-brand mashup!

Apple is teaming up with Nike to cross-promote sneakers and iPods. The footwear and earwear giants are soon launching a new line of iPod-compatible sneakers, plus a wireless pedometer-cum-connection-kit that pumps exercise feedback into runners’ ears. “Faster, fat ass!”

The Nike+iPod cross promotion encourages runners to buy a new pair of Nike+ sneakers, which have a little pocket for a wireless sensor. The wireless sensor is part of a $30 Nike+iPod Sport Kit from Apple, which is expected to ship within 60 days.

The Nike+iPod Sport Kit also includes a small receiver that plugs into the dock connector on the bottom of the iPod. Out on the road, the sensor sends data about time, distance, and pace to the iPod, which provides unspecified “workout-based voice feedback” while you run. Presumably, it’s encouraging.

Back at home, the iPod uploads the exercise data to the Mac or PC, and syncs with iTunes and the NikePlus website which records runs and sets goals. In addition, the site will allow runners to challenge each other to “virtual races” and download time- or distance-based workout routines. It will also offer sporty iMixes “chosen and introduced by top athletes.”

SanDisk has launched a new advertising campaign that portrays iPod users as mindless sheep or robots.

The iDon’t campaign asks listeners to “Think for yourself” and “resist the monotony of the white earbuds.”

“Now is the time to break free from restrictive formats and a single source of music,” it says. “It’s time for choice, for freedom, for self-expression — and for all independent spirits to stand up and say “iDont.” You don’t need to follow. Now there is an alternative.”

The alternative is SanDisk’s own Sansa e200 (there’s a memorable name), which looks like an iPod knockoff with a pseudo-scroll wheel.

The campaign is reminiscent of Apple’s ill-fated 1985 Lemmings commercial, which portrayed potential customers as lemmings walking off a cliff. The spot is judged to be Apple’s biggest advertising blunder. It’s never a good idea to insult potential customers.

New York’s popular Mac repair shop, Tekserve, has created a video advert for its services featuring dozens of iPods falling like dominos.

The ad is bound to spread virally — after all, you’re reading about it here and I saw it on Gizmodo, which got it from The Consumerist.

The company claims more than $60,000 worth of iPods were used in the filming, which I doubt, because it looks like the same dozen iPods were shot from different angles and edited together.

The question is, where did they gat all the iPods? Perhaps they were dropped off at the shop for servicing?

The nominees for the first iPod Emmy have been announced.

And the nominees are (with iPod-friendly movie links):

24: Conspiracy QT/iPod.

It’s Jerrytime! QT/iPod.

Live 8 on AOL QT/iPod.

mtvU Stand In QT/iPod.

Sophie Chase QT/iPod.

Stranger Adventures “Helen Beaumont” QT/iPod.

On the DealCatcher forums, Dan Baxter writes: “So I decided to install the new Apple Boot Camp Beta to dual boot Windows XP on my Mac. Everything went great then I got this after using it for about an 30 mins.”

And here’s another one:

What a shame Apple didn’t release Boot Camp — it’s new software for installing Windows on an Intel Mac — on April 1. What a surprise that would have been.

When I saw the news this morning — via email from an acquaintence — I thought it was a tardy April Fool’s joke.

One curious thing about Appe’s Boot Camp page: it’s entirely in black and white, except for the Mac OS smiley face logo in a screenshot towards the bottom of the page. The Windows logo is conspicuously monochrome.

There’s actually a much better Apple advert to be found in Google Maps than the iPod that made the rounds last week.

Take this iPod silhouette dancer. Note the hip haircut and how the road makes a perfect earbud cord — remarkable!

Click the thumbnail for the full-size image.

(Via Digg)

Someone called Pink Vixen sent me these pictures of some iPod earbud covers supposedly made of white gold and diamonds. I asked for more details but all I got was a price: $400-$500. I’ve no idea who makes them or where you can get them.

Pink Vixen wrote:

“I have discovered the ultimate Ipod accessory, 18k white gold w/ diamonds earpiece covers! Ttalk about bringin\’ the bling-bling to your ears in a totally different way. I know this is a gitly thing, but we girls jsut love our ipods, and this sista, just loves the bling, so combine the two, and what do you have!!! Photo is available…

Here is a photo, they slip on over the top of the head phone. And are available in hearts, stars, moons, and for guys black colored gold, with black diamonds with lightinghbolts! The price varies between $400-$550 a pair, I am in discussions with the manufacture, I just love these things. Yours PV.”

Gratis Internet, the company behind FreeiPods.com that’s being sued by the NY attorney general for what’s been described as the biggest internet privacy abuse ever, denies the charges.

In a statement published on Friday, Gratis says:

At all times, Gratis has maintained control and ownership of its user information and never, not once, profited from any sale of data…

Gratis at no time in its history ever sold its list to anyone or allowed a company to purchase consumer data, nor has it ever considered doing so, nor will it ever in the future. Email marketing represented a small fraction (less than 1.5%) of its 2004 and 2005 revenues, and the company earned less than $32,000 from users in the state of New York from its practice of sending promotional emails.

Establishing and maintaining a bond of trust between Gratis and consumers is a cornerstone of its business. Gratis believes that its impressive growth in recent years is a direct reflection of the fact
that, in all its dealings with consumers, the company has behaved in a trustworthy and responsible manner at all times and in all ways.

Yesterday BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow rightly called out Apple’s hypocritical “state-sponsored piracy” response to France’s new law against vendor lock-in.

One of the big reasons the iPod took off is because of Napster and other file-sharing services. People suddenly had huge collections of digital music on their computers, but no easy way to take it with them when they left the house.

Now it appears Steve Jobs himself once agreed with the thinking behind the French law, which is to protecting consumers’ right to move content they buy from one device to another.

In a 2002 interview with the Wall Street Journal, reprinted in part at Macworld, Jobs said:

“If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own.”

Compare that to what French lawmakers had to say this week:

“The consumer must be able to listen to the music they have bought on no matter what platform,” Martin Rogard, an adviser at the French Culture Ministry, told the Financial Times.

Image courtesy of wpc-fr.net.

(Via SiliconBeat)

Talking of Apple billboards, MacBillboard.com is a site devoted to — Mac billboards.

The site, based in Holland, has six pages of billboard photos submitted by snappers from all over the world, like the one above of a billboard in Los Angeles by Mark Adamson.

Better, the site also has a series of ebOY-style pixelart desktop pictures, showing incredibly detailed Amsterdam street scenes full of iPod billboards and office workers sitting at Macs. Here’s the index page with each image at several different resolutions.

There’s an Apple garage sale, an iPod factory, and an Apple retail store with a line of little pixely Macheads waiting to get in. Here’s a detail:

You can also get an Apple mini store desktop — modelled after Apple’s container-sized mini shops — which has lots of space around the edges designed to be populated with the site’s custom icons, like these I-heart-iPod icons.

It’s all free, so have at it.