Apple TV remains just a hobby, the Cupertino, Calif. company’s chief executive said in a Tuesday interview. The problem: the cable industry.
Cable operators “give everybody a set-top box for free, or for $10 per month,” Steve Jobs told an audience at the All Things Digital conference. “That pretty much squashes any opportunity for innovation, because nobody’s willing to buy a set-top box,” he said.
“My God, we can build a phone with this.” That was Apple CEO Steve Jobs reaction when a designer at the Cupertino, Calif. firm turned an early version of the iPad into what later became the iPhone. “So we put the tablet aside and we went to work on the iPhone,” Jobs said, recalling the moment in an interview Tuesday during Wall Street Journal’s D8 technology gathering.
Jobs initially had the idea of a glass display permitting people to to type with their fingers. Within six months, Apple engineers created the display. In an ironic twist, the iPad outsold the iPhone’s debut, when the tablet device was finally introduced in April. Apple sold one million iPads in 28 days, a milestone that took the iPhone 74 days to reach, the company announced in early May. (The Cupertino, Calif. company recently announced it sold more than 2 million iPads in less than 60 days.)
Iomega has just released a new slate of eGo portable external hard drives, and at least a couple happily have support for Apple’s own Firewire standard.
The first Mac-friendly eGo is the 1TB eGo BlackBelt Mac Edition, which has both FireWire 400.800 and USB 2.0 connections, as well as Iomega Drop Guard protection and a Power Grip band around the casing which will protect your data against falls of up to seven feet. It’s a pricy drive, though, at $229.99.
Iomega’s second Mac-happy eGo is the Mac Edition eGo Desktop Hard drive, which comes in flavors between 1TB and 2TB, and again comes with FireWire 400/800 and USB 2.0 support. It costs between $149.99 and $229.99.
Additionally, all drives come with a complimentary 12 month subscription to Trend Micro Smart Surfing software for Mac, Iomega QuikProtect backup software, EMC Retrospect Express backup software and MozyHome Online Backup service. That’s a pretty impressive list of software extras.
You should be able to find both drives at Apple stores later this month.
Looking for a display just as big and gorgeous as the iMac’s 27-inch screen for your MacPro? HP has just announced a new 30-inch monitor that will finally give your beautiful machine the LCD it deserves.
The HP ZR30w boasts a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels in a 16:10 aspect ratio, and — according to HP — achieves more than 64 times the colors available on mainstream LCD, with 100 percent accuracy in sRGB colors and 99 percent accuracy in Adobe RGBs. The end result is red, blues and greens that are visibly more lurid.
The new display comes with DisplayPort and DVI-D inputs, as well as an integrated 4-port USB hub and a 6-way adjustable stand. It all comes in dark but decidedly un-Mac-like brushed aluminum.
It’s a gorgeous, albeit slightly beefy display, make no mistake. Unfortunately, the big issue here is the price: the HP ZR30w is a lot of monitor, and it costs a lot of money. $1,299, to be exact. Consider the price of the 27-inch iMac, which is only $400 more expensive: it really is like Cupertino just sold people a top of the line display and threw an amazing Mac in there as a heavily discounted bargain.
Although Steve Jobs seems to think the Foxconn suicides are being overblown, Apple’s “all over” the problem, a new email exchange reveals.
Responding to an Apple fan who forwarded Jobs an e-mail campaign protesting the way Foxconn workers are being treated in China, Steve responded:
“Although every suicide is tragic, Foxconn’s suicide rate is well below the China average. We are all over this.”
Our good friend Graham Bower likes to occasionally send some of his gorgeous Apple product mock-ups our way. His latest creation is a direct response to the recent rumor that the next Apple TV will be a $99 iPhone OS device that streams media to your television set, and answers the question: how do you control a multitouch operating system without a touchscreen?
The answer: make the remote a touchscreen. Graham’s idea is that Apple would ship the new Apple TV with a remote similar to the Magic Mouse, along with a built-in accelerometer.
I’ve mulled over this idea for the Apple TV’s remote before. On first blush, it seems like a great solution, but here’s the problem: the only way a device like this can work is if it introduces some sort of pointer to iPhone OS. For multitouch to work on a display divorced from the actual input device (ie: for multitouch to work when you’re not directly touching the screen on which graphical elements are displayed), you need some sort of icon to show you where your “fingers” are.
Patents are usually dry, dull affairs, but this latest Apple patent has an elegant beauty to it that is more than a little bit breathtaking.
Yes, it’s for a solar-powered iPhone, but Apple being Apple, they’ve got a better solution to solar-charging than just a bunch of ugly panels stuck to the back of the device: the energy collection cells are actually hidden underneath the display. The iPhone itself would look no different, but lay it out in the sun and it will juice itself up.
After just two months of (perhaps overconfidently) offering a $29.99 unlimited, month-by-month data plan to purchasers of the iPad, Ma Bell has already killed it off… and are now replacing it with a vastly inferior and more pricy plan.
The new plan — called DataPro — offers 2GB of data per month for $25. Go over 2GB in a month and you’re charged another $25, with your 30 day window to use that 2GB resetting itself.
Think that’s bad? It gets worse. AT&T is also canceling unlimited data for the iPhone. Current subscribers get to keep their $30 all-you-can-eat plans, but when you new customers or contract renewers will now only get 2GB of data.
The positive side? After over a year of waffling on it, AT&T are finally bringing tethering to the table with iPhone OS 4.0. But you have to pay an additional $20 a month for it, and you’re still only limited to 2GB. To put this in perspective, this is twice as much as Verizon charges for 5GB of tethering data on a $29.99 unlimited monthly data plan.
Our succinct thoughts on the matter, after the jump.
The Chinese are always quick-on-the-draw with their knockoffs, but this may be the first time we’ve seen a iPhone doppelganger before the handset its emulating is even officially announced.
It’s called the GPS iPhone, and it looks pretty convincing. You know, except for the telescoping television antenna. Somehow, I think Ive would choose to do that a little bit differently. You could gouge your eye out on that thing.
AT&T announced today that, on June 7th, unlimited mobile data plans for new users are going bye-bye in favor of two new “limited” data plans. It also provided new details on its U.S. iPhone tethering plan.
AT&T currently offers an unlimited data plan for both the iPad and iPhone for $30 a month. A 250MB plan is available for the iPad for $15 a month. Both these plans are being nixed in favor of two new plans that will be available for both devices:
As a former Londoner myself, I can give you clear advice from the outset: don’t take your car into London. It’s slow, expensive, and bound to end up a frustrating experience.
Y’know those popular kids in high school? The ones who get along with everyone, are easy on the eyes, fun to hang out with, good at everything without being exceptional in any one area, and don’t ever seem to run out of energy?
That’s Casio’s EX-H10. Aside from one ridiculously high-performing attribute, the EX-H10 isn’t really exceptional in any one arena; rather, this point-n-shoot is a collection of quality and smart features brought together in a relatively high-value, good looking — if stoutish — container.
Panasonic just announced the addition of a new wide-angle, 5x zoom camera to their line, the slim Lumix FX75.
Somewhat notable here is the ultra-wide 24mm lens equivalent on this camera, but we like the wide-open f2.2 aperture even more — definitely on the fast side of the spectrum for a PnS, and pretty nifty for creating shots with a shallow depth-of-field. A souped-up Venus Engine HD II image processor should help keep things snappy, and the camera also shoots HD video video in AVCHD Lite at 720p and 30 fps. And of course, like the other models toward the high-end of Panasonic’s range, the FX75 is equipped with a Leica lens.
Panasonic also festively included a “Happy Mode” in the FX75, a setting that adjusts the brightness, saturation and color to ramp up an image’s cheeriness (presumably for tourists visiting London). No word yet on ship date or pricing.
On the increasingly small off chance your computer doesn’t have it’s own webcam (or you’ve blowtorched it because those aliens from Tau Ceti II were spying on you), German developer Drahtwerk has a clever solution: an app that lets you turn your iPhone into a wifi-tethered webcam.
iWebcamera ($5) includes a pause-mode, two quality options and a “send drivers by e-mail feature,” which is apparently some BS that Windows users need to deal with.
The bad news is that iWebcamera is only for Windows boxes; the good news is it’ll work with any iPhone, even the Original.
It appears many analysts couldn’t get the word out fast enough after Apple announced over the Memorial Day holiday how well the iPad is selling. Analysts increased predictions on how many tablets Apple would sell and how high the Cupertino, Calif. company’s stock would rise.
Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster told investors Monday he expects Apple will sell 6.2 million iPads during calendar 2010, up from the 4.3 million he had previously projected. Despite warning investors to “keep iPad expectations in check” due to international and domestic iPad supply problems, Munster also boosted to $330 his target for Apple shares, up from $323.
Well, Apple has shuttered LaLa, its streaming music service. The sign appeared early Tuesday morning, but while the closure comes as no surprise, what is unsettling is the dead air that replaces the web-based music application. What’s more, don’t bet the farm LaLa will be reborn as some streaming version of iTunes.
“I have a hunch we’re not going to see one soon,” opines Peter Kafka at the Wall Street Journal‘s All Things Digital. Although it could be just a teaser for Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ appearance tonight at the All Things Digital conference, Kafka notes web-based music services are on life support and the music industry’s legal eagles control the oxygen supply.
CNN paid a visit to Foxconn, the Chinese factory complex where 10 workers jumped to their deaths this year.
What did they find? A super-concentrated complex in Shenzen where sleeping quarters, restaurants, hospitals, supermarkets and swimming pools are packed into 2.3 square kilometers (about 0.9 square miles).
It’s a factory town, they report, that feels more like a “heavily secure” university campus.
Apple has sold more than two million of its iPads in under 60 days, a sign demand for the tablet device is not slowing. The Cupertino, Calif. company also acknowledged it was having difficulty keeping up with the fast-moving sales amid reports of short supplies.
“Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do,” CEO Steve Jobs announced Monday. “We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone.”
At this week’s Computex expo in Taipei, Hitachi-LG unveiled their new HyDrive: an amalgamation of a Blu-Ray DVD drive and solid state drive that could afford us a look at the direction future MacBook hardware will take to slim down chassis design.
The HyDrive is interesting: the current models offers 64GB of NAND flash memory with a read/write speed of 175MB/60MB per second, although capacities should increase. The SSD and Blu-Ray drive are then connected through SATA II. The end result is two drives — one optical, one solid state — that take up half the room as their separate counterparts in a laptop.
We all know how much Cupertino likes efficiency. If Apple chose to use a combined solution like this in their next MacBooks, they’d significantly cut down on the size of their internal components, leading to slimmer, lighter notebooks that have Blu-Ray functionality to boot.
The HyDrive will launch in August 2010, and while there’s no official price yet, they’re still definitely priced for luxury laptops: it’s been hinted that a HyDrive could add $200 to the price of a standard notebook.
For scuba-diving iMovie users looking to edit together some gorgeously lurid undersea footage, Sanyo’s gorgeous new Xacti DMX-CA100 promises to be the world’s first completely waterproof camcorder capable of shooting 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second nat up to 10 subaqueous feet. Even better: the resulting footage is captured in iPhone-friendly H.264 format, although a word of caution: your iPad isn’t nearly this submersible.
Additionally, the Xacti DMX-CA100 can capture still shots at up to 14 megapixels, and supports 6X optical zoom and high-speed sequential zooming that allows you to capture up to 22 photos per second at a 2MP resolution.
Sanyo’s latest Xacti will be released this June in colors of black, yellow or pink for a still unrevealed price.
Even if the iPad did have weight sensors, this would still be a self-evidently bad app idea…. and grow exponentially worse in direct correlation to user weight density.
[via Slashgear]
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATpSPNIuj3M&feature=player_embedded#!
Steve Jobs himself said the iPad is “magical” but this may be the first we’ve seen it used as a prop in a magic trick, thanks to Japanese YouTube illusionist “Salary Magician.”
His tricks are all standard sleight-of-hand affairs that take advantage of the iPad as a prop behind which birds, books and envelopes can be hidden “in plain sight” but the real beauty of this act is the way Salary Magician has conjured himself up a home-made app to give his tricks that extra bit of shazam.
End note: is “Salary Magician” the best name for a Japanese magician ever, or what?
[via Gizmodo]
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw5jH8GN12U&feature=player_embedded#!
Created by Stanford alums Ashkay Kothari and Ankit Gupta as part of the Launch Pad class at the Stanford Institute of Design, Pulse is an absolutely gorgeous iPad newsreader that makes RSS and Atom feeds as easy as Google search, and even more gorgeous than Google Reader Play.
Whether in line with the national average or not, the recent slate of suicides at Foxconn has been a public relations nightmare not just for the Chinese electronics manufacturer, but for their partners as well.
Now, a report from Chinese site Zol.com.cn suggests that Cupertino might be taking the well-being of their subcontracted workers into their own hands: they claim that Apple will subsidize the wages of Foxconn employees working on their products with a profit-sharing scheme.
According to the article, Apple believes the main reason for the suicide jumps is low wages, and so they are prepared to offer roughly 1 to 2% of the profits of Foxconn-produced Apple products to the employees who have worked on them.
According to a report in the Financial Times, Google is so fed up with Windows 7’s woeful security issues that they are now taking Redmond’s operating system by the pants seat and unceremoniously hurtling it from the building.
What machines are employees getting instead? Linux rigs… and Macs.