Pop some acid and the above video above will look chromatically normal to you, but as some owners of Sony and Philips brand televisions are discovering, dropping some lysergic bliss is about the only way to get the new AppleTV to play nice with their sets.
Following Thanksgiving as it does, Black Friday — and it’s smaller and more stupidly named sister “holiday.” Cyber Monday — is generally an America-only affair, but not if you shop directly from Apple, who are now teasing their November 26th “one-day Apple shopping event” both domestically and internationally.
TJ Maxx and Marshall’s are selling a limited number of iPads for $100 off their retail price at random outlets this Black Friday weekend, but as Steve Jobs made abundantly clear in an e-mail yesterday, they’re not an authorized reseller.
Where’d TJ Maxx get all the iPads then? Easy. They might not be an official reseller, but that hasn’t stopped them from buying from one… or reselling those iPads at a loss.
Following yesterday’s story that Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch might meet on stage to debut the world’s first iPad-only newspaper, comes a new report suggesting not only that Apple will hold that event on December 9th, but also use it as an opportunity to unveil a new subscription billing option for periodicals on the iPad.
Apple’s elves in China are going into hyper-drive to meet expected increased holiday demand for the red-hot iPad, a report suggests Tuesday. Foxconn Electronics has added new manufacturing sites able to produce 10,000 additional tablets each day.
The new plants in Chengdu could eventually produce enable Foxconn to produce around 40 million iPads per year, prompting the report to call the inland China factories “a major supply base” for the first quarter of 2011. Apple could sell 15 million iPads in 2010 and start 2011 with a second-generation tablet.
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.
Black Friday’s an exciting time of the year for the gadget hound, but let’s face facts: so many of those big box discounts are purely illusory, and you can already get an equivalent or better price through Amazon.com.
That’s why Amazon has released Price Check, a free iOS app that lets you quickly check Amazon’s price on a product by scanning barcodes, snapping a picture, saying the product’s name aloud or typing it in to search. If the price is better, you can then easily add it to your shopping cart.
You can download Price Check for free here.
According to a new report by analyst Brian Marshall, we should all expect the iPad 2 in April.
No duh. Apple’s stuck to a rigidly defined yearly update cycle for all of their iOS devices, so you don’t need to go to Analysis U. to figure out exactly when to expect the next iPad.
But the April date for the iPad 2 isn’t really the meat of this story. More interesting is what Marshall says we should expect spec-wise from the iPad 2, which is… nothing special at all.
Gearbox Software’s Borderlands was one of my favorite video games of the past year, but unless you’re willing to reboot into Boot Camp, it doesn’t run on a Mac.
It’s a shame, because in many non-trivial ways, it’s the best multiplayer Diablo-like since, well, Diablo II. Borderlands takes place on a Mad Max style extraterrestrial world in which every chest, container or killed enemy spits out a treasure trove of randomly created weapons, each with their own unique special abilities.
I spent about 80 hours playing through Borderlands when it was released on the Xbox 360 earlier this year… such a substantial block of time that the inamorata can’t even hear the game’s title without whiplashing herself with an eye roll… so no one tell her that Borderlands is coming to the Mac coming December 3rd, complete with all the DLC, for the quite reasonable price of $49.95.
No surprises here, but if you’re not one of the lucky bastiches who manages to score himself a $399 iPad from TJ Maxx or Marshall’s this Black Friday, don’t expect the Apple Store to price match: as an email from Steve Jobs makes abundantly clear, TJ Maxx is not an authorized reseller, and they are selling them for $399 at a loss.
Ever mused on why Apple is Apple, and not, well, anything even vaguely computer related? Steve Wozniak’s disembodied head boils it down for you: it apparently comes from Steve Jobs’ days as a migrant fruit picker in the orchards of Oregon, and was chosen simply because it sounded “unique and interesting.”
It’s been well over six months since we last heard that Apple might be considering dropping its MobileMe subscription fee, but newly discovered code in the iOS 4.2 and 4.2.1 gold master builds suggest that Apple hasn’t scrapped plans for MobileFree: in fact, it could launch imminently.
Is the new 11.6-inch MacBook Air a netbook? Steve Jobs would become apoplectic if you called it one, and he’s right. Sure, the 11.6-inch MacBook Air has about the same form factor as a 12-inch netbook, but without any of the latter’s compromised build quality or lousy performance… even when running a netbook’s go-to operating system, Windows 7.
Today is the day. Finally. Apple is shipping iOS 4.2 to iPads, the iPhone 3G, 3GS and 4, and second, third and fourth generation iPod touches. iPad users have the most to benefit since they will be getting app folder enhancements and multitasking for the first time. The update also includes Game Center, AirPlay and AirPrint for all devices. Find My iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is now free to use without a MobileMe subscription and you can now rent TV episodes directly on your iPad.
The update should be available for downloading around 10:00 AM PST today. You’ll need the latest copy of iTunes (version 10.1) so make sure your Mac is up-to-date. Afterwards tether your iOS device to your Mac and check for updates in iTunes after the appointed time.
Check out Apple’s press release for complete details on this exciting new iOS release.
Rivals attempting to share in the wave of momentum for tablet computers may be hurt by an expected wait-and-see attitude as consumers look toward a rumored iPad 2 from Apple. That’s the assessment by anonymous overseas suppliers talking to an industry publication.
According to the suppliers, the expectation of a new iPad sometime in the first three months of 2011 will “seriously weaken” sales of competing tablets from PC makers. Additionally, predictions for tablet sales in 2011 my be overly optimistic and risk disappointment.
Both Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs agree: devices like the iPad are the future of media, and the death of print.
It looks, however, like Apple and News Corp. might be working more closely to bring that end about than it was previously thought: according to WWD, Apple is helping News Corp. build an iPad-only, subscription-based newspaper to devices in early 2011… and Steve Jobs himself might debut it.
The new MacBook Air is Apple’s least self-repairable notebook yet, thoroughly bolted down by proprietary Torx screws, but if you thought that was just an anomaly, think again: Apple’s so averse to you cracking open your iPhone that they are actually retrofitting proprietary screws into iPhone 4’s brought in for in-warranty servicing.
Macs don’t really get viruses very often, but there’s more than a few anti-software firms who’d like you think they do… and sell you some software to help squash them.
Anytime we write about Mac viruses, then, it should be done with some salt dissolving on the tongue, and anti-virus firm Sophos’ latest report showing a surprising amount of malware on the Mac is no exception.
The data was culled from 50,000 malware reports generated by 150,000 users of Sophos’ free Mac anti-virus software during the first two weeks of November. The chart looks bad, but in actuality, it’s not really very dire… a fact that Sophos themselves are being upfront about.
In the tablet tug-of-war between Apple and Android-maker Google, the Cupertino, Calif. company may have one the first scuffle in South Korea. Although the iPad doesn’t officially go on sale there until Nov. 30, carrier KT reportedly sold some 60,000 units in less than won week of presales.
With a little more than one month left in 2010, KT — Apple’s partner in South Korea — expects to sell 200,000 iPads, according to a local report. By comparison, the rival Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab from SK Telecom pre-sold about 25,000 tablet in its first week of availability. Overall, Samsung expects to sell more than 150,000 by the end of November.
Apple’s intentions to bake reprogrammable SIM modules into future devices may have been killed off, thanks to the carrier revolt we reported on Friday.
Black Friday is this week and it will mark the beginning of the 2010 holiday shopping season in the U.S. Cyber Monday is the first Monday after Black Friday.
I’m not exactly excited about braving the crowds for holiday bargains. So I’ll be using my iPhone or iPad and any of the free apps below to help me shop from wherever I happen to be.
Concerned with the growing problem with eWaste? Want the ability to upgrade and repair your own electronics? Believe that the throw-away mentality needs to change for the sake of sustainability?
So does iFixIt, teardown-masters extraordinaire and longtime information and parts resource for Apple users. They have just published the Self Repair Manifesto, along with an ambitious call to action to create – via crowd-sourcing – a Wikipedia-style Free Repair Manual for devices of all kinds: electronics, appliances, even a few cars.
On Tuesday, Apple made the addition of the Beatles’ repertoire to iTunes the story of the week (ho-hum though the story was), and this Sunday, the company made the new partnership the centerpiece of every NFL game, flooding the airwaves with multiple ads drawing on still images from the Get Back/Let it Be sessions (and occasional Ed Sullivan performances).
It’s all a bit retro, but there is some kind of nice unifying warmth to the band that made Helvetica rock-and-roll being featured by the company that made Helvetica high-tech.
The ads are nice, though, particularly if you’re enjoying a holiday beverage or two and are feeling nostalgic about the excitement of four friends, a recording studio, and creativity. Take a sip, sit back, and remember that love is all you need.
I’ve read a lot of Steve Jobs interviews but until now I’d not seen this 1985 interview from Playboy.
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: