With the hatchet between Apple Computers and Apple Records long buried and the digitally restored catalogue sounding better than ever, the continued absence of The Beatles from iTunes is a bigger mystery than ever. Don’t blame Apple, though… either Apple. According to former Beatle Paul McCartney, it’s EMI gumming up the works.
“To tell you the truth I don’t actually understand how it’s got so crazy,” Sir Paul told Newsbeat. “I know iTunes would like to do it, so one day it’s going to happen.”
“It’s been business hassles”, he said. “Not with us, or iTunes. It’s the people in the middle, the record label [EMI]. There have been all sorts of reasons why they don’t want to do it.”
On their part, EMI say that discussions are ongoing, and claim that they would love to see The Beatles’ music available on iTunes. Translation: they want a much bigger cut of the iTunes pie, and you’ll have to rip your Beatles’ tracks yourself until Apple caves… which I seriously doubt Cupertino has any intention of doing.
All hail Vietnam, new Xanadu of surprising Apple leaks! Vietnamese site Tinthe — the very same site that leaked video of the fourth generation iPhone last week — somehow managed to get their hands on pictures and specs of the next MacBook.
Don’t expect anything too boldly different from the case: the new MacBook appears to be identical to the old unibody plastic. This is mostly just a hardware refresh to make the MacBook more competitive with the baseline 13-inch MacBook Pro, and like the latter laptop, the new MacBook gets a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and an NVIDIA GeForce 320M GPU.
Kyle Buckner has come a long way from sketching fantasy Apple accoutrements for school projects, though even he admits he’s set “a fairly big price” on his latest work – an elegant iPhone docking station that’s part art piece and part kick-ass speaker system.
After making inquiries about getting his prototype design mass produced for more economical sale, Buckner has decided for now to let his one-of-a-kind item fetch what it will on eBay, with a starting bid just shy of $3K.
But making and selling pricey one-offs isn’t the talented designer’s idea of success. “I would love to design new products for companies,” he told us in an email exchange. “I love making prototypes for my ideas but with no way of easily mass producing them, I’ll never make it.”
So Bucker’s focused his attention on looking for work with manufacturers on product design, industrial design, furniture design….anything that would put his talents to more effective (and less risky) use.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, Tivoli Audio has introduced an attractive new iPod Dock, the Connector, which allows you to hook your iPhone up to any radio… although the wood panel design of the Connector indicates that it is specifically meant to be paired with Tivoli’s own $199 Model 10 table radio.
A bit rich for our blood at $129, especially when you can hook an iPod fairly easily to any speaker system that accepts audio-in, but technology enthusiasts who have absorbed their sense of design from the aesthetics of Mike Brady’s living room might give the Connector a go.
British telecom company BT is readying a device similar to the iPad, but executives were reticent to compare it to Apple’s tablet device. BT CEO Ian Livingston told The Guardian newspaper the unnamed device is seen as a touchscreen telephone for the home.
“Someone else made a reference to it being a bit like the iPad but it is not,” Livingston said. “It is a different size and shape apart from anything else, but it is meant to stay in the home,” he added.
Foxconn Technology, the world’s largest electronics contractor and main supplier of most of Apple’s componentys, is once again in the news over the welfare of its employees in China after it racked up its sixth employee suicide this year.
The most recent suicide occurred in Foxconn’s factory city in Shenzen, where one of their 300,000 workers leaped to her death from her rented apartment. This follows a suicide last week by a 24-year old male factory worker, who also jumped to his death from the top of a dormitory building.
“We regret to see the recurrence of such incidents,” Foxconn said in a statement.
Apple has had bad publicity due to the way Foxconn treats its workers before.
In 2006, Apple launched an internal investigation over the matter of Foxconn “iPod Cities in which hundreds of thousands of employees worked in extreme squalor for pennies a day, and ultimately rejected the claims of abuse, noting that most workers’ biggest complaint was that they couldn’t work more overtime.
Foxconn’s latest slate of worker suicides calls into question the veracity of that report, as does a strike of 2000 workers earlier this month at fellow Apple contractor Wintek over 47 cases of hexane poisonings at the company’s Suzhou factories.
Not only did a survey by a local agency in the case of the Wintek poisonings find that managers at Wintek repeatedly deceived investigators trying to figure out the cause of the poisonings, but that none of their interviewees had ever even heard of Apple’s contractor code of conduct, which is meant to be enforced at the factories of all of manufacturing partners to guarantee the well-being of employees.
In America, Apple is one of the best and most employee-conscious companies in tech, but consistent reports of worker abuse and unhappiness in China really does raise the question: is Apple having the wool pulled over its eyes by companies like Foxconn and Wintek over the well-being of the workers who make our MacBooks and iPads?
Possibly not, but at the very least, it seems like its time for another internal Apple investigation… and a statement reaffirming Apple’s interest in the emotional and physical wellness of their contracted workers overseas.
The iPhone and iPod Touch have the industry’s best touchscreens, but some people still find the lack of true tactile feedback a barrier to adoption. Various companies have been working for a solution to that problem, but Toshiba’s new Senseg E-Sense technology seems ready for prime time now: slapped as a film on top of the display of an iPod Touch radically amplifies the tactility of objects on screen.
The film works by producing weak field changes in the area of the touchscreen touched by a user. This allows, for example, a swipe of the screen to offer the slight feel of resistance, or for an on-screen button to feel like it is actually protruding.
That’s genuinely exciting, and better yet, it’s cheap: Toshiba says that the Senseg E-Sense film, available now, costs as little as $0.11 per unit. Would you be interested in this sort of technology on your iDevice?
When Greg Hughes’ first revealed his amazing Wi-Fi Sync app a couple weeks ago, it didn’t take a genius to realize Apple was never going to let it on the App Store. Sure, there was no actual rule preventing it, but Apple has shown time and time again that they don’t want anyone messing around with iTunes sync. Plus, the very existence of the app makes Apple look bad: why the heck don’t we already have this functionality in iTunes? Apple was bound to kill it.
And so they have. Curious about Apple’s reasoning, Hughes’ even called them up, and was told that while the rep he spoke to agreed the app didn’t technically break any rule, it ” encroached upon the boundaries of what they can and cannot allow on their store.” Plus, you know, unnamed security concerns.
Still, not to fret if you’re a jailbreaker. Wi-Fi Sync was also bound to hit Cydia in case of an App Store rejection. And so it has, for a steep $9.99.
There’s nothing like a lawsuit to start the morning. The U.S. International Trade Commission announced Thursday night it would investigate Apple’s claims of patent infringement against Kodak. On April 15, the Cupertino, Calif. company alleged the imaging company violated two patents involving digital imaging and digital cameras.
The trade body said it would announce in 45 days when it expects to complete the investigation. Last month, Apple alleged Kodak violated Patent No. 6,031,964: a system and method for using a unified memory architecture to implement a digital camera device; and Patent RE38,911: modular digital image processing via an image processing chain with modifiable parameter controls.
In February, the trade court began investigating Kodak’s claim against Apple. Kodak claims the iPhone infringed upon a patent allowing other applications to “ask for help” in executing certain features.
Gradaddy’s song “Jed’s Other Poem” off of their album The Sopftware Slump has to be one of the most sweet and lonely ballads ever ostensibly written by a sentient robot, but Stewart Smith’s retroactively official “music” video for it — which prominently features an Apple IIe running a hand coded AppleSoft II program illustrating the lyrics — is probably what has made the song so famous.
Now, that music video has come, in a round about way, to the iPad. Smith, the original video’s programmer, happened to notice that the guys from Panic Software had an old Apple IIe sitting around, so he asked if they could run his animation on it. They didn’t have the old cassette drive to help Smith out, but they did have an iPad… and that worked just fine.
Fruit Ninja incorporates the speed and simplicity of games like Doodle Jump with an innovative control method that makes the game addictive. I love this game. The graphics look like crap but the game proves the old adage — gameplay is king!
One of my must-have apps from the iPhone is not only breaking down barriers between consumer shopping habits and the online marketplace, but also passing milestones left and right.
The top-selling barcode-scanning iPhone app RedLaser has recently passed 2 Million downloads, catered to 950K active users last month, and successfully completed 50 Million scans according to a press release by Occipital CEO Jeff Powers.
The 50 millionth scan was of a Deuter Backpack scanned by a RedLaser user in Germany.
RedLaser now has the ability to locate books at a local library via WorldCat and look up packaged food allergen and nutrition information based on the item’s barcode.
I have a feeling barcode tattoos will be making a comeback in the very near future.
Steam has arrived for your Intel chipped Mac with an impressive list of titles for your playing pleasure. We have been anxiously awaiting this contemporary gaming standard’s arrival and I for one am pleased with the titles made immediately available.
Diablo-esque Torchlight is half price at $9.99. If you want to test out Steam’s prowess without having to spend your allowance you can download Valve’s puzzler Portal for FREE until May 24th. I know it sounds too good to be true but this cleverly worded promo page backs me up.
Head over to Joystiq.com to check out the list of titles and download link.
You can claim your invitation by logging into MobileMe through me.com. The invite should be on the bottom left corner. MobileMe Mail beta is currently only available in English.
The iPad is a perfect accessory for the living room table, and Comcast’s forthcoming remote control app, the Xfinity Remote, capitalizes on that by pairing your iPad to your cable box through Bluetooth, allowing you to easily search listings and access movies on demand through an extremely attractive interface.
Additionally, Xfinity comes with some powerful social and sharing features, which allows you to share television or movies that you’re watching with other friends, even if they’re not in front of the same television.
You can find more information about Xfinity Remote here. It looks great, but at the end of the day, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the app is that it’s for Comcast instead of a better cable provider.
“Everything that Apple makes is meant to be dropped”
Adam Carolla tells it like it is in his latest rant about Apple products including a demonstration using his lucite handled Apple Tower. (Anyone know the model?) And apparently everything that Apple makes is shaped like soap.
Adam’s off TV, but he’s certainly doing well for himself. Check out Adam Carolla on his podcast available in iTunes.
That Verizon iPhone we mentioned the other day? According to Digitimes, it’s already in production, with Taiwanese manufacturer Pegatron having been contracted to produce up to 10 million CDMA iPhone units a year.
The Digitimes report seems to confirm the September Verizon launch that we’d previously heard rumor about, as the new CDMA iPhone isn’t expected to contribute to Pegatron’s revenues until August or September, according to sources.
That will likely give AT&T a three month exclusive on the next iPhone. No wonder, then, that they’re pushing up their upgrade eligibility dates to late June to entice existing subscribers to sign a new contract.
Exciting stuff: if the rumors of a CDMA iPhone pan out, American iPhone owners are finally going to be able to choose their network with the same freedom that they chose their smartphone, while Apple’s iPhone profits are going to go through the roof.
In a double-barreled response to Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ objections to Flash, Adobe’s cofounders released a public letter rebuking the Cupertino, Calif. company for undermining the Web while releasing a new advertising campaign marked by a tough love message.
Adobe cofounders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, in an open letter, charged no “single company” should control the Web.
iPads don’t charge through USB ports that aren’t 10 watts, which is a bummer, especially if you’ve got a laptop that won’t juice your tablet. Enter Quickertek’s iPad Charge Monitor, perhaps the most useless accessory of all time. It’s a $29.95 dongle that tells you if your iPad isn’t getting enough juice to charge… a function already provided by your non-charging iPad. Who can put a price on confirmation of the obvious, though?
Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC Wednesday filed a countersuit against Apple, asking the U.S. International Trade Commission to stop imports of key products sold by the Cupertino, Calif. company. The complaint, while centering on five patents, is the latest skirmish in a proxy war between Apple and Google.
“We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industry partners, and most importantly our customers that use HTC phones,” Jason Mackenzie, HTC’s vice president of North America, said in a statement. In March, Apple sued HTC, claiming the handset maker infringed 20 iPhone patents. One analyst said the move was a “warning shot” for rivals building handsets aimed at the iPhone. The ITC soon announced it had begun investigating Apple’s claims.
CBS announced on Friday that they will be going the HTML5 optimized route to bring content to your iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Instead of creating a slick app like ABC’s, CBS thinks the best way to enter the post-flash mobile web is through CBS.com.
CBS Interactive SVP Anthony SooHoo confirmed to NewTeeVee.com that the 2010 Fall line-up will be available to non-flash users. I love how CBS’s move to HTML5 is based solely on the iPad:
Unlike ABC, which built an iPad app to deliver its full-length episodes and promotional clips on the device, CBS decided to focus on delivering video through its website, CBS.com. Since the Apple tablet doesn’t support Adobe Flash, CBS has created a video site for the iPad through HTML5 instead. It’s still early days, but Soohoo expects CBS to deploy more and more video that is iPad-ready, until it reaches content parity with what’s available on the website through a PC.
Interestingly enough, CBS is exploring some unique advertising opportunities to take advantage of the iPad’s multitouch capabilities.
Walmart may offer Apple’s iPad later this year as part of newly-expanded electronics sales. While the move could boost sales of the tablet device, talk of the world’s largest retailer spotlighting the iPad comes amid concerns Apple already is having trouble staying ahead of demand.
“We anticipate being able to have the iPad later this year,” Gary Stevenson, Walmart U.S. vice-president of entertainment, told Bloomberg. Although retail giant Best Buy already offers the device, Apple officially has yet to announce any retail partners for the iPad.
Apple’s latest iPad ad, “What is iPad?” is a cheery nod to Apple’s classic “What is Newton?” ad, although I prefer the latter commercial’s droll, humorous tone. Still, when Apple says, “You already know how to use iPad” and then earnestly claims a new revolution has begun, it’s hard not to get a few chills down your spine.
I didn’t think anything could make me happier than Netflix coming to the iPad and soon iPhone, but I was wrong.
It’s just a mere mention, and there’s no promises or commitments, but Boxee has hinted at eventual expansion into Apple’s mobile universe. In Boxee’s post about payment system provider Vindicia, they mentioned their plans to move to the mobile platform:
Vindicia’s flexibility also makes it possible for us to enable payments on our website and across mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android and iPad. Boxee’s eventual expansion to these platforms will pave the way for universally accessible content no matter where a user is (we love this idea!).
Last year, we were pretty impressed by UpNext’s 3D mapping app for the iPhone, which rendered landmarks like the Empire State Building in 3D — which is, of course, cool; but it was only available for NYC, there was no iPad version (because there was no iPad — wow) and it cost a whopping $3.
Now, UpNext 3D Cities has a new name and is available for a bunch of new cities (San Francisco, Boston, DC and Austin, home of SXSW), it’s been tweaked to play well on the iPad and its price has been reduced by $3 — yes, it’s free.
But the pretty, 3D-rendered buildings are just icing on the cake — check out the cool way the app graphically illustrates where to find Asian restaurants through a sorta infrared-vision trick toward the end of the above clip, or the way it overlays public transportation routes. And if that’s not enough, they’ve added the ability to see what’s trending and where your friends be at in Foursquare.
