Apple’s meteoric rise since the 1997 return of Steve Jobs has many icons, from the iMac to the iPod, iPhone and MacBook Air. But none is quite so fitting a monument as the flagship Manhattan Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. After all, it’s a giant glass cube, as succinct a summary of the Steve Jobs approach to design as I can imagine. The monolith is an amazing image of the brand’s power.
What’s less known is that it might be the single-most lucrative store in all of New York. According to information uncovered by the New York Post, the owners of the building that houses the near-legendary Apple Store claim that the shop pulls in $440 million a year in sales. That location alone. By comparison, a nearby Zara flagship only does $25 million annually. Unreal.
Apple's giant new retail store in Beijing. Rendering by architect Ben Wood.
Apple is preparing to open a huge new retail store in China’s capitol just steps from the historic Tiananmen Square.
Renderings of the giant, three-story store have been published on the website of U.S. architect Ben Wood, who is based in Shanghai.
The store will be built on Qianmen Street, an up-and-coming shopping strip just blocks from the great square, which has seen huge military parades as well as student protests.
Expected to open as soon as the fall, the store will be Apple’s second in Beijing and its ninth in Asia.
The design mixes traditional Chinese architecture with Apple’s signature glass and steel. It will feature a glass staircase spiraling through all three stories, plus a huge white Apple logo above the front door.
A new spy shot claiming to show the next-generation iPhone has emerged, and it appears to show a forward-facing camera.
If the spyshot does indeed show the new iPhone, a forward-facing camera would be a cool but surprising feature. Although high on many iPhone users’ wishlists — it would enable iChat videoconferencing from anywhere — the feature seems too Dick Tracy to be true, especially with AT&T’s bandwidth-challenged 3G network.
A forward-facing camera was mentioned in a recent Apple patent granted April 16 — although this doesn’t mean much. Apple patents everything, and a ton of patented features never see the light of day.
These handmade cards have the clamshell form of the iBook with a pretty realistic-looking keyboard and “Happy Birthday” greetings on the screen.
Maker Cadizcards says, “All the glory of the Mac cult favorite, sendable with a first class stamp. I created one of these as a birthday card for a die hard fan of the clamshell Macs and fell in love with them myself.”
Wish there was a non-birthday version with a white screen (like the real thing) to write on, can think of a lot of people and occasions for these…
$12 for a set of three on Etsy (one each blue, aqua and lime), including envelopes. Custom colors available.
In April, I got terribly excited about Flight Control, an air traffic control arcade-oriented ‘management’ game. The premise is simple: drag aircraft to landing areas. The reality is an intense arcade game where game over is a blink of an eye away.
Recently, I’d heard rumors of updates. But with the original game such a fantastic, simple and polished production, there was the worry that it’d be ruined under a pile of new features. That worry went away on playing Flight Control 1.2, which keeps the original’s gameplay intact but introduces two new airfields and new craft.
The beachside resort is the first new airfield, adding water landings to the mix. Initially, this seems little different to the original game, but the number of craft ramps up rapidly and the revised landing layout is tougher than the original’s.
The real star, though, is the intense and absurdly tricky aircraft carrier level. Military jets move just a tad faster than anything else, and you’re soon not only juggling that, but also a surprising twist when you realise what happens to landing areas on a moving ocean… Frankly, we’ll be shocked to see 10,000+ landing scores on this map for some time to come.
Overall, this is a triumphant update—a classic iPhone game made even better. The fact that it’s still under a dollar [App Store link], for a game that betters most other handheld titles out there, just goes to show what great value Apple’s platform can be for gamers.
TIPS: If you’ve any tips for dealing with the new airfields and getting high scores, please post in the comments below.
Hacker Nathan Seidle has rigged his car so that his Nike+iPod pedometer unlocks the doors wirelessly as he walks up to it.
“I hate keys,” he writes. “I am on a mission to dispose of them all.”
Seidle already uses keypads and wireless RFID cards to get into his home and office — the last key in his pocket is for his car.
So Seidle took a Nike+iPod sensor — the pedometer/transmitter that normally goes into your running shoe — and rigged up a simple proximity sensor inside the car to detect when it approaches. The Nike+iPod sensor is constantly transmitting a unique ID, which the car uses to identify Seidle and unlock the doors. He keeps the Nike+iPod in his pocket.
Seidle made the proximity detector inside the car from the Nike+iPod receiver (the part that normally plugs into the iPod) and an Arduino Pro Mini microcontroller board, made by his company, SparkFun Electronics, plus a few other bits and pieces.
The system, which Seidle calls the iFob, is an intermediate hacking project. He’s posted a detailed tutorial on the SparkFun website.
Unfortunately, the iFob doesn’t start the car; it just unlocks the doors.
“The system now works great!” Seidle writes. “When you’ve got a handful of stuff, it’s great to know the doors will automatically unlock as you approach. However, I still have use a key to start the car. The next step is get a big red button wired up for button start so that I don’t have to carry my key. Someday.”
It all started with the Apple-1 computer. Photo: John Moran Auctioneers
Tech buffs can delve into Silicon Valley history by perusing Apple Computer’s first business plan and IPO documents.
The 1977 38-page IPO filing, done in a typewriter-y font with the odd punctuation issue, lists management as the fourth risk factor for potential investors: “Apple Computers’ Management team is young and relatively in-experienced in the high volume consumer electronics business.”
And would you put money into a company headed by these key execs?
* “S.P. Jobs, V.P. Operations, Attended Stanford and Reed College, Engineer – Atari – 2 Yrs”
* “S.G. Wozniak, V.P. Engineering, Attended University of Colorado and University of California at Berkley [sic], Engr. Tennant – 1 Yr., Engr. Electroglass – 1 Yr., Engr. – Hewlett-Packard – 3 Yrs.”
The IPO document was donated to the Computer History Museum by original Apple investor Mike Markkula, who saw massive potential in the green startup. In 1977, Steve Jobs met with Markkula and convinced him that personal computers were an exciting opportunity. Markkula invested $250,000 in Apple for a one-third stake in the company and served as president from 1981 to 1983.
A pair of theives “armed” only with a toddler to distract employees walked out of a SuperTarget with an iPod Touch. Police are still looking for the man and woman who snatched the device in a Boynton Beach, Florida store.
In the security cam footage, you can see the man talking to a sales associate in the foreground, then a woman comes along with a toddler (around 1:30) and asks a question. While the sales associate looks up, the man takes the iPod touch, an 8g model valued at $230.
Police hope the video footage will help ID the pair, you can contact them by calling Crime Stoppers at (800) 458-8477 (TIPS).
Truphone, arguably the most persistent VoIP developer for Apple’s mobile products iPhone and iPod Touch, released the 3.0 iteration of its app for the iPod Touch Monday, making a very strong case for the portable gadget as an effective communication device.
Among the improvements in Truphone 3.0 are a faster, slicker UI, improved voice quality, and native support for IM communications using Skype, MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk.
Users with a stable WiFi connection will assuredly enjoy being able to IM using any of those clients from within a single app, as well as make free phone calls to other Truphone users, Skype and Google Talk users. Truphone also offers excellent rates on calls to landlines and worldwide mobile phones.
The upgrade offers improvements to in-app account management that now allow users to:
See rates before initiating a call
Display recent call history, showing the exact cost of a just-ended call, how long it lasted, with the ability to see a summary of calls made month by month
Top up an account balance without the need to access a browser window separately
Top up an account balance in variety of ways, including credit card or PayPal
Change calling tariffs within the application.
When Apple introduced the iPod Touch few considered the possibility it might become a communication device, but with the addition of a microphone adapter and the evolution of 3rd party applications developed for the iTunes App Store over the past year, Truphone has done a great job of employing its WiFi connectivity to give iPod Touch owners the added value that comes with being able to make VoIP calls.
Receiving calls through the Truphone app still requires a user to have it open and running, but when Apple introduces a new version of the device’s operating software next week at WWDC, the push notification it will support could change even that limitation.
Labor protesters demonstrating outside Apple’s Taiwan offices in May. The Apple laptop says “Responsibility.” Images: Global Post.
Asian labor unions will be putting more pressure on Apple on Tuesday with a protest at Computex Taipei, Asia’s largest electronics show.
The unions are hoping to force Apple to intervene in a labor dispute with one of the company’s major suppliers, Wintek, which makes LCD screens and is rumored to be working on the upcoming Mac/iPod tablet.
Wintek has been accused of unfairly laying-off workers and poor and exploitative working conditions in factories in Taiwan and mainland China. Wintek denies the charges.
The protest will “expose the reality to the public, and request Apple Inc. to execute its Code of Conduct, to end the exploitation of labors in Taiwan and China,” one of the unions said in a news release.
The iPhone Blog reports that OS X iPhone 3.0b is now throwing up error messages when you try to ‘redownload’ an app you’ve already bought. You get the option to buy again on your ‘iDevice’, or you can download again for free in iTunes.
Already, forums are up in arms about this (well, forum posters, given that forums haven’t quite arrived at a state of sentience), bitching about Apple being Big Brother and hating every single one of its users. However, it seems like the change is down to users ‘sharing’ apps amongst several Apple devices.
With some devices and games—especially those specifically designed for network play—one might argue that multiple purchases can be somewhat unreasonable from a financial standpoint. (For example, you see plenty of $30+ DS games with broken or severely restricted wireless modes, a problem that magically goes away when every gamer has a cart.) But with the vast majority of App Store games being by indie devs and costing under five bucks (and manyofthebest costing under a single dollar), it’s easier to forgive being ‘forced’ to buy a copy for each device you own.
Along with being a surprisingly versatile device for gaming, reading eBooks and surfing the web, iPhone is becoming an increasingly useful source of distribution for comics publishers. Late last month, ClickWheel, who’ve been in the comics-on-iPods game for a while, released Future Shocks: Part 1, a 99-cent collection of early Alan Moore stories, which was subsequently followed by part two. We caught up with ClickWheel Editor in Chief Tim Demeter for his thoughts on these apps and the market in general.
Cult of Mac: What are the Future Shocks apps and how do they work?
Tim Demeter: The Future Shocks apps are collections of early work from Alan Moore, digitally restored and formatted specifically for iPhone and iPod touch. The apps are entirely self-contained and once downloaded require no cell or Wi-Fi collection to read—you can access them anytime.
How do these apps sit alongside your ClickWheel app?
These are completely separate from our other app. The ClickWheel app is a reader for a multitude of streaming comics, some of which need to to be purchased from the ClickWheel site first. Each Future Shocks app is a one-time purchase. Once it’s downloaded you can start reading right away. Look for a change in how we handle downloading comics to iPhone once the 3.0 software is out there though.
What do you think of iPod touch/iPhone as a comics-reading platform?
We love it. ClickWheel began putting comics on iPods with the launch of the iPod video, so to say that these new devices have enabled us to take our vision of mobile comics to new levels would certainly be understatement. The nice thing about mobile comics is they provide the convenience and immediacy of web-comics while retaining the portability of printed comics. I don’t think printed comics will ever go away and I certainly don’t want them too but I wouldn’t be surprised if many monthlies go digital while the collections remain in print.
What advantages does the App Store bring a company like yours?
People know and trust the iTunes store and many people have a credit card stored in their account which makes impulse purchasing very much a reality. It also seems to be going through the same kind of growth that Amazon did. Back in the day, Amazon was just books. Now it’s just about everything. The iTunes store started as just audio but now it’s TV, movies and apps of all kinds. It’s quickly becoming a one-stop-shop for anything and everything digital and there’s a lot of value in that.
After Jorge Colombo’s iPhone art was featured on the cover of the New Yorker, it seems everyone wants to get their fingers in the pie.
The Brushes app Colombo used to finger paint a late-night scene in Manhattan sold 2,700 copies when the cover debuted Monday, earning slightly over $13,000. It usually sells around 60-70 copies a day.
“A painting app seemed like a natural fit for the iPhone,” 32-year-old Brushes developer Steve Sprang told the NYT Bits blog. “You’re touching the screen, so it’s a natural step to want to draw on it.”
Sprang said the results dwarfed when Brushes was chosen as the app of the day on iTunes and that the app had sold 40,000 copies to date, earning him six figures.
If you’re itchy to get busy with fancy fingerwork, Sprang has knocked the price down a buck, to $3.99, in honor of the New Yorker cover.
A university in Japan is giving out hundreds of iPhones to students, in part to keep truants in check with the GPS system.
Aoyama Gakuin University is handing out 550 3G iPhones to those enrolled in the School of Social Informatics and, much like its growing use in other colleges, it’ll be used as a research tool (press release in Japanese, or semi-comprehensible Google-translated English) and to give out information on class schedules and lectures.
Attendance is a key requirement for graduation in Japan, the AP reports, so the cat-and-mouse game of skipping class and getting someone to sign-in for you or put a hand up during roll call is rampant. The school plans to give out another 500 iPhones for a total of 1,000 to complete the program after a test phase.
Not sure how effective this will be. Students who are determined to sleep in or play hooky could hand the iPhone to a friend and get on with it. Seems easier, and in some ways less deceitful, than getting someone to pretend they’re you or fake a signature.
Would you take the free iPhone in exchange for being monitored?
Photo from the iPhone project press conference courtesy @ Aoyama Gakuin University
Hulu’s newly released Desktop application may or may not put Boxee on the ropes, but it could end up being the best thing that ever happened to the Mac mini.
Released Thursday by the popular television content aggregator whose major partners also happen to be some of the biggest Hollywood content producers, Hulu Desktop signals a major move away from the “online only” model that once served as a thin veneer of protection against the ire of cable companies that pay good money to get content from Hulu’s partners.
Still trying to have it both ways, Hulu issued comical Terms of Service with the desktop product that purport to prevent users from using the software on “Prohibited Devices,” to whit:
“You may not download, install or use the Hulu Software on any device other than a Personal Computer including without limitation digital media receiver devices (such as Apple TV), mobile devices (such as a cell phone device, mobile handheld device or a PDA), network devices or CE devices (collectively “Prohibited Devices”).”
In the real world, however, don’t be surprised to see news of an AppleTV hack by this weekend (if not before); and Mac mini users who employ that device’s excellent media server capabilities with a connection to plasma screens in their living rooms should be sitting pretty, too.
Will you use Hulu Desktop or stick with your web browser? Will you keep the content on your computer screen or take it into the living room? Let us know in comments below.
Web conferencing provider Fuze Meeting is sponsoring a SlideShare contest in which the Grand Prize winner will walk away with $5,000.
All entrants in the “Tell a Story in 30 Slides or Less” contest will get a free Fuze Meeting account for a year — a $270 value – and 4 runners-up will get an iPhone + $100 iTunes Gift Card.
The contest will be judged in 4 Categories:
1. Best Design
2. Best Story Telling Ability
3. Most Popular
4. Best Use of Multimedia
Closing date for entries is Monday, June 15 and winners will be announced June 29.
Apple’s Retail division has no plans to scale back its ambitions, according to a report Thursday in USA Today, and in fact sees opportunity in the recent economic contraction.
“We’re investing in the downturn,” said Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vice president of retail. Apple plans to remodel 100 of its existing stores this year, adding space for customer training and room for displaying more product. The company also plans to open 25 new stores, including a fourth location in New York City, and new ones in Paris, Italy and Germany.
Stores will soon display “twice the amount” of Mac computers and other products, according to Johnson, and Genius Bars will get 50% more room to serve up free tech support for Apple products.
Beginning June 2, Apple’s One to One product training program will limit sign-ups to purchasers of new Mac computers at Apple Stores or via the company’s website, although any of the half million current One to One subscribers will be able to renew their $99 one year subscriptions .
“We originally set up One to One to get people to switch to the Mac,” Johnson said. “Now we want to expand it to make it even more relevant to people who have bought their Mac.”
Still priced at $99, the annual subscription includes personal setup, transferring of files from an older computer (Windows or Mac) and help with projects.
Previously, sessions timed out at one hour; new policy will extend the limit to three hours, but sessions could also include up to three participants.
Even in the light of his division’s expansion plans, Johnson conceded the recession has affected in-store traffic. Apple reported a 3% decline in sales during the most recently reported quarter. Traffic remains strong, he said, but has cooled off since last summer, when long lines greeted the introduction of the second-generation iPhone.
With many expecting an update to the iPhone to be announced at next week’s WWDC in San Francisco, Apple stores could well see the return of long lines and a need for all that extra space.
Flickr user jumbledpile (nichole) offers pics of a unique iPod meatloaf ‘birthday cake’ made by her friends Amanda and Carlos, which has to be as notable for floating the idea of a birthday cake made from meat as it is for its homage to Apple’s iconic MP3 player.
With creamy mashed potato ‘frosting’ layered over a tasty center of seasoned ground beef, the meatcake comes with cheesy earbuds and pea decorations arranged to suggest the iPod control wheel and personalized data screen.
Easily serves a party of 6 – 8 Apple fans like peas in a pod. Sorta.
However, Woz said he’s never asked Jobs directly about his health.
Jobs is expected to return to Apple at the end of next months after taking six months medical leave to concentrate on his health. In a January letter to Apple’s employees, Jobs said his health issues “are more complex than I originally thought.” He lost an alarming amount of weight in 2008, leading to speculation his cancer had returned. Jobs was treated for pancreatic cancer in 2004.
Engineer and programmer Steve Capps, who worked on Lisa, the Finder and Macintosh system utilities, talks about his work on the original Macintosh team with the guys at RetroMac Cast in a two-part podcast (episodes 115 and 116).
Capps got started by automating a library in college, then went to do the same at Xerox before landing at Apple in 1981. He was chosen to work for the Mac team because he had “the right chops at the right time.” Capps was working on a printer drive for the Lisa team, when Steve Jobs lost interest in Lisa and put the steam behind the Mac, calling Capps over.
“Great to talk about the old glory days,” Capps, who went on to work on Internet Explorer and MSN Explorer, said.
The rollout will begin later this year, AT&T says. The company also promises it will “introduce multiple HSPA 7.2-compatible laptop cards and smartphones beginning later this year.”
One of the smartphones is likely Apple’s next-generation iPhone. Apple is expected to introduce a faster iPhone that will support HSPA 7.2. The new iPhone will also likely have a faster processor, which will be better able to handle the faster data stream, quickly updating content like web pages and maps.
CrossLoop, the Monterey, CA-based developer of a popular screen-sharing application for PCs announced this month a version compatible with Intel Macs, extending the company’s innovative on-line technical support model to the Apple community.
Having racked up over 100 million minutes of tech-support served by nearly 5 million downloads of its PC client since 2006, CrossLoop is now seriously targeting the universe of Mac users and even pitching the product as a perfect vehicle for helping PC users switch to Mac.
While a great percentage of the peer-to-peer help sessions done with CrossLoop are free (downloading the software is free and there is no charge for users to share their computer screen with other CrossLoop members), the company’s platform supports a community of nearly 15,000 registered “helpers” whose freelance technical support can be had using the service for between $50 – $60 per hour.
CrossLoop competes in a field with larger (Citrix) and better known (Geek Squad) names, but is currently logging a quarter million screen-sharing minutes a day and looks to be in the game for the long haul. If you are looking to help a friend remotely with a software install or considering freelancing your tech support skills on the side, CrossLoop could be well worth a look.
US college students and teachers who buy a Mac get an iPod Touch thrown in a back-to-school promotion. (Fine print: you have to buy before Sept. 8 and shell out the cash for the iPod touch, which you get back via rebate. Full details here.)
The ad shows a cheerful student whose iPod Touch displays “Monopoly” but with the iPod Touch being used more frequently in colleges for orientation, class lectures and in some cases required or in place of textbooks having one is becoming less of a plus and more of a necessity.
Apple’s entry-level white MacBook received a hardware update on Wednesday, possibly foreshadowing revisions to the aluminum unibody MacBooks.
For the same $999 base price, the WhiteBook now gets:
* CPU bump from 2.0 GHz to 2.13 GHz.
* Hard drive from 120 GB to 160 GB.
* RAM boost from 667 MHz to 800 MHz.
*Battery life upped from 4.5 hours of “wireless productivity” to 5 hours. And now rated Energy Star EPEAT Gold, up from EPEAT Silver.
Thanks to the updates, the WhiteBook now has a faster processor than the entry-level aluminum MacBook, and a bigger build-to-order hard drive (500GB). And it still has a FireWire port. Updates to the unibody soon?
Apple is rumored to be offering similar upgrades to the aluminum MacBooks at WWDC, and rebranding the machines as MacBook Pros to further distinguish them from the white plastic MacBook.
