News - page 2363

Apple is introducing dozens of arty new desktop backgrounds in Snow Leopard, the new version of OS X due in the fall.

There are 40 new desktops  in the latest test seed delivered to developers this weekend, including reproductions of famous paintings from artists like Edward Hopper, Van Gogh and Monet.

The new desktops include:

* Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Monet’s Lilies, Hopper’s Nighthawks, Degas’ Ballet Dancers on the Stage, and Katsushika Hokusai’s Tsunami.

* Three graffiti desktops that will make your computer look like a New York subway car circa 1978.

* Several high-res shots of snow leopards, including the one above.

The art is classic, but the themes struck me at odds with Apple’s optimistic image: madness, loneliness, alienation and death. I don;t know if I want my files hanging out with Hopper’s lonely souls.

All 40 Snow Leopard desktops after the jump.

Steve Jobs is fond of the saying “good artists copy, great artists steal,” which would put Microsoft in the great artist category.

Apple’s rival is planning to open retail stores this fall that are a direct ripoff of Apple’s super successful shops.

In a presentation leaked to Gizmodo, Microsoft is planning stores that are “light and airy,” divided into solution areas, and feature a “guru bar.” Sound familiar?

• Different areas for Windows Mobile, Windows Media Center, Windows 7, and netbook
• A Guru Bar where customers can get answers from Windows experts
• Regular demos and events
• A special Microsoft shopping bag

But here’s one idea that’s not ripped off from Apple.

The Microsoft Store will host birthday parties!

This handmade iPhone cover enlists an Apple icon born in the early 1980s to protect your smart device.

The gray felt case sporting a Happy Mac face is 5.125″ high x 3.25″ wide, so it should fit all iPhone models.

I’d buy it just for the tiny, embroidered Apple rainbow symbol in the corner.

$25 on Etsy.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XOtCFNaNUg

Apple recently complained to Microsoft about its “Laptop Hunter” ad series where pseudo-everyday consumers go on a shopping quest to buy computers on a limited budget.

In what Microsoft Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner called “the greatest single phone call,” Apple lawyers rang up to lament the ads weren’t accurate — since the company shaved prices off Macs, some by as much as $300 hundred dollars, in June.
Microsoft agreed to edit the ads to reflect this.

So what changed in the ad campaign? Not much.

The first edited ad is “Lauren and Sue,” where a mom-and-daughter team are in the market for a computer for under $1,700.

Originally, the ad showed law student Lauren declaring:

“This Mac is $2,000, and that’s before adding anything.”

“Why would you pay twice the price?” asks Lauren’s mom. “I wouldn’t,” says Lauren, who heads to the checkout with a $972 Dell laptop.

In the updated version, the specific price is edited out but Lauren does a drive-by of the Macs, dismissing the MacBook Pro (“this one only has a 250GB hard drive”) before sentencing: “It seems like you’re paying a lot for the brand.”

Microsoft’s Turner told journalists that his company plans to “keep running them and running them and running” the Laptop Hunter ads — and it’s easy to see why. They don’t need specific prices to use the expensive-but-not-really-worth-it Mac argument.

Via Ad Age

Apple is adding moisture sensors to everything, from iPods and iPhones to MacBooks and even its latest keyboards.

But recent reports suggest the sensors may be too sensitive, and may even be triggered by high humidity.

The moisture sensors, or Liquid Submersion Indicators (LSI), are small stickers that change color from white to red if submerged. Apple refuses to honor warranties on products with triggered sensors, assuming they’ve been dropped in a swimming pool or doused with Mountain Dew, no matter what the owner says.

The sensors, which are found in the dock connector ports of iPhones and under the keys of Apple’s latest keyboards, are controversial. There have been complaints that they’re triggered by sweat.

Now, there are reports out of Singapore that high humidity is killing iPhones, but positive LSI indicators are allowing the local carrier to reject warranty claims.

Today’s deals include new App Store freebies, Imation’s iPod Clock Radio, a $1 iPhone and iPod travel charger and many more.

Details of these and other Daily Deals can be found on the CoM Daily Deals page.

One of the biggest drags of the iPhone – its battery — may one day be supplemented with a wireless charging system that recharges the device in your pocket or bag when you walk in the room.

At the TED Global conference in Oxford on Thursday, Eric Giler, CEO of Witricity, demonstrated an iPhone being recharged wirelessly by his company’s new system.

“You’d never have to worry about plugging these things in again,” he said.

Giler explained the system to the BBC (see the video above). He says the technology could be on the market within 18 months.

Witricity’s wireless charging system is based on the physics of “electromagnetic resonance,” the same principle that makes a wine glass shatter when an opera singer hits the right note.

But instead of sound energy, Witricity’s system transports power over electromagnetic waves. The system has two parts: A transmitter unit, plugged into a wall outlet, which uses a vibrating coil to create a resonant magnetic field. In the target gadget, a matching coil tuned to the same frequency transforms electromagnetic vibrations into juice for the device.

The system works without any physical contact. Other wireless charging systems, like Palm’s Touchstone, require contact between the gadget and the charging base.

The system is claimed to be safe, and will charge gadgets and devices within range, including bigger electronics like flat-screen TVs. Giler demonstrated a TV running on wireless power that is commercially-available.

Giler also showed the system recharging a T-Mobile G1 phone, which had all the components packed inside. The iPhone had to be fitted with a special sled.

“They don’t make it easy at Apple to get inside their phones so we put a little sleeve on the back,” he said.

Today’s deals include a refurbished PowerBook G4 for $699, a MacBook Pro with 15-inch screen, an Apple Back-to-School offer and many more.

Details of these and other Daily Deals can be found on the CoM Daily Deals page.

What’s the worst kept secret in China?

The features and dimensions of Apple’s new iPod Touch and iPod Nano, which are hush-hush here in the U.S. ahead of their expected September unveiling, but are well-known in China.

According to more than a dozen pictures of new cases acquired by CoM, the new iPod Touch and iPod Nano will both get cameras.

The big surprise is that the iPod Touch’s camera is in the center of the device, not offset like the camera in the iPhone.

The Nano’s new camera is placed in the bottom left corner, which becomes top left when the iPod is held horizontally to take a picture, with fingers on each corner.

The outside dimensions remain largely the same as previous models, but the Nano gets a widescreen display, the better to take photos with the camera on the back.

This has all been widely rumored, of course. iLounge detailed the new Nano back in May.

But the dozen pictures of new cases below all but confirm the rumors. Chinese case manufacturers are so certain of the features and dimensions, they are already sending out samples of the cases. They wouldn’t do this unless they were pretty confident.

“My company had got full information and dimension,” wrote a Chinese distributor in an email to a U.S. reseller. “Enclosed some image and instruction for your reference. Most of the sample available now. If you need some sample check quality please freely let me know.”

Hit the jump for dozens of new cases exclusively unearthed by CoM.

As Apple ponders a makeover of some of its stores — the first international remodel is underway in Bluewater (UK) — it’s a good time to consider which of the over 250 retail outlets are worth making a pilgrimage to, or a slight detour if something goes awry while you’re on the road.

The top five must-see Apple stores, as per travel site Jaunted, are London, Tokyo, Sydney, New York — and Scottsdale.

What’s on your list? Let us know in the comments.

Pics and nominations after the jump.

Just spent two days recovering from a hack attack at Cultofmac.com. The site was a seething cesspit of Viagra spam and — get this – Windows malware.

Looks like hackers compromised an FTP login to our host (a notorious weakspot), allowing the filthy scumbags to inject hidden spam into almost every post we’ve ever published (more than 3,500 articles).

The lowlifes also added a malware redirect to a couple of index.php files. The redirects were located inside hidden iframes, and took a bit of finding. Not sure how these manifested themselves, but they seem to have popped up in the site’s RSS feed. At least one reader seems to have been infected with the System Security 2009 Trojan and the Bloodhood PDF virus — both Windows malware. Sorry Chris!

Luckily, most of you guys are on the Mac, or I’d have a lot more apologising to do.

I’ve spent the last two days downloading the site database, doing a global search/replace to remove the spam and virus links, and the re-uploading the DB.

I changed all the logins/passwords to everything; killed a bunch of old and dodgy-looking accounts on the site and host; and locked down the site with WordPress plugins to prevent brute-force logins and the like.

Amazingly it all seems to have worked, because I’ve no idea what I’m doing.

There may be a few gremlins in the RSS feed. New feeds are working fine, but I’m unable to get my old feeds to update. If you’re having the same problem, just cross your fingers and we’ll all hope together that the problem magically fixes itself tomorrow, especially because I’ve got a major scoop.

Is your MP3 collection maxxing out your iPod, your CD library getting out of hand? If you have $1800 lying around, Olive’s Opus device provides up to 2-terabytes of storage. While not as portable Apple’s handheld devices, the Opus No. 4 stores up to 3,000 CDs in Free Lossless Audio Codec, reportedly providing quality superior to MP3.

The 13 pound unit does include a touch-screen interface and will wireless distribute music to up to 10 rooms via Olive’s MELODY Hi-Fi Multi-Room Player.

[Via Gearlog]

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to a delighted Macworld audience in January 2007, he said Apple had protected its invention with more than 200 patents.

He didn’t mention that his company had also patented the box the iPhone comes in.

On Tuesday, the U.S. patent office awarded Jobs and 16 other designers a patent for the iPhone’s packaging.

The iPhone’s box certainly is elegant. Pull off the top, and the iPhone is presented to its new owner sitting on a slab of glossy plastic, like an expensive watch. Hidden underneath are its accessories and instructions.

Jobs has always been fascinated by packaging, believing the unboxing routine to be a crucial part of the customer experience. All of Jobs’s products have been carefully packaged going back to the original Mac in 1984. Jobs believes unpacking a product is a great way to introduce unfamiliar technology to the consumer — they explore the components as they unbox them.

The new patent application contains little but pictures of the iPhone packaging. No less that 17 designers are named on the patent, including Apple’s design head designer Jonathan Ive.

Hit the jump for a cool exploded picture of the iPhone package.

Ogle this “mesmerizing” new window display at Apple’s flagship store in Palo Alto featuring billions of iPhone apps flying towards you.

It’s “the coolest window display I’ve ever seen,” says TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid, who filmed the display above.

It is pretty trippy.

A security official has been suspended by Hon Hai Group after the suicide of an employee who lost an iPhone prototype, Bloomberg reports.

Hon Hai Group, one of the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturers, suspended a security official and turned the case over to Chinese authorities, the company said in a statement, but didn’t provide further details.

The security official is identified only by the surname “Gu.”

Last week, Sun Tanyong, a 25-year-old employee at Hon Hai’s Foxconn International Holdings unit committed suicide after losing one of 16 iPhone prototypes he was charged with mailing to Apple in California.

Tanyong leapt to his death off a dormitory at Foxconn’s factory city in Shenzhen. He had reportedly been subject to an illegal search and rough treatment by Foxconn security.

Hon Hai says it is unaware of the reasons behind Sun’s suicide, according to the statement.It offered the company’s condolences to Tanyong’s family.

Apple says it is awaiting the outcome of an investigation.

“We are saddened by the tragic loss of this employee,” spokesman Steve Dowling told Bloomberg. “We require that our suppliers treat all workers with dignity and respect.”

Foxconn is one of the largest contract makers of mobile phones, and produces Apple’s iPhone and iPods at its walled factory city. Home to 270,000 workers, the walled city has its own fire station and hospital, stores, restaurants, and recreation facilities. The giant factory also produces cell phones for Nokia and Motorola, Sony Playtation and Nintendo Wii, as well as PCs for Hewlett Packard and Dell.

Link.

Despite worldwide economic recession, Apple enjoyed its best non-holiday quarter ever in its 2009 third quarter ended June 27, 2009, the company said on Tuesday.

Apple made a whopping $1.23 billion profit on revenues of $8.34 billion. The gobs of cash came from robust sales of 2.6 million Mac computers (up 4% from last year thanks to a MacBook refresh in the quarter), and blockbuster sales of the iPhone 3GS, which sold 5.2 million units, up an unbelievable 620% from a year ago.

This when other tech companies companies like Nokia are tanking.

“We’re making our most innovative products ever and our customers are responding,” said Steve Jobs in a statement.

Other highlights:

– the traditional iPod is on the way out. Apple sold 10.2 million iPods during the quarter, down 7% from a year-ago. The market is saturated and customers are buying iPhones instead.

– Gross margin was an amazing 36.3 percent, up from 34.8 percent in the year-ago quarter. (Dell makes about 5% margins on its products).

– The iPhone 3GS and $99 iPhone are a huge hit. Apple shifted 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter, up 626% from a year ago.

– Apple is a truly international. Overseas sales accounted for 44% of the quarter’s revenue. This will jump when the iPhone goes on sale in China later this year.

Apple’s full unaudited financial statement after the jump.

A British thief was busted in Germany after posing as broke tourist selling his iPod and electronics gear to get home.

The sorta-samaritans walked away and realized instead of MP3 players and video gear they had bought a camcorder bag full of potatoes.

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book — buy a cell phone in a parking lot, find out it’s got sand instead of hardware in it — but the thief pulled off the bait and switch at least 26 times.

His accomplice has not been caught yet — and police in Dusseldorf warn he may be armed.
Should someone approach you, remember only Zune owners would sell their devices to get home.

Via The Sun

Are you looking for an alternative to Apple’s in-ear headphones? High-end audio gear maker Klipsch next month will begin selling a $100 headset, the Image S4i, complete with the same three-button microphone and remote as Cupertino’s $88 version.

Multiple reports Tuesday indicate a 25 year-old employee of Foxconn, one of Apple’s OEM suppliers in China, killed himself last week after losing a 4th generation iPhone which he had been instructed to ship to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA.

Sun Danyong was a recent engineering graduate who worked in product communications for electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn in Shenzhen, a city in the booming industrial corridor between Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

On Thursday, July 9th, according to the first English-language report on the incident at Venture Beat, Sun got 16 prototype phones from the assembly line at a local Foxconn factory. At some point in the next few days, he discovered one of the phones was missing.

On Monday, July 13, he reported the missing phone to his boss. Then, that Wednesday, three Foxconn employees illegally searched his apartment. Accusations have reportedly been flying about the Chinese language Twittersphere that Sun was detained and physically abused during the investigation, although this has not been substantiated.

Shortly after 3am on Thursday July 16th, security cameras at Sun’s apartment building show him leaping to his death from a window in his apartment.

All this Moon landing nostalgia is wonderful and I’m enjoying every minute of it, especially We Choose The Moon and the CAPCOM and EAGLE Twitter accounts — anyway.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you could make it as an astronaut, here’s the ultimate test: Virtual AGC for Mac.

Apple is due to announce Wednesday its earnings for the quarter that ended June 27, and you know what that means: wild speculation by analysts followed by pouting and a drooping stock price when Apple out-performs expectations.

But lately, it’s gotten still more insane: now, these same analysts are trying to infer some read of the overall economic condition based on Apple’s earnings. Which, to me, is a comically fruitless exercise, because Apple operates in a different universe from most companies. It has radically differentiated offerings in all of its businesses, and its focus on innovation is such that it always comes out with a new market-defining product that the rest of the industry can’t match. Apple’s an especially bad indicator of the rest of the consumer tech sector during this recession. Apple doing well doesn’t mean that Dell’s in good shape, or vice versa.

BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl, a long-time Apple-watcher, has a very sober account of this lunacy, which suffers from the problems associated with a lot of traditional business reporting — in pursuit of balance, he can’t actually address the questionable premise that Apple, a company that was out-performing the market before it collapsed, might signify the end of the recession by continuing to out-perform the market.

I can say this much: Apple will have great earnings on Wednesday. And that means that it remains good to be an Apple stockholder, even as the rest of the world is in chaos. It doesn’t mean we’re getting back to normal anywhere else.

If your memory is a little hazy on where to find a medicinal pot supplier, there are a couple of apps for that.

The Cannabis app, available on iTunes for $2.99, helps users locate the nearest medical marijuana collectives, co-ops, doctors, clinics, attorneys, organizations and other patient services in the thirteen states where pot is legal for medicinal purposes.

Cannabis is the work of a Devin Calloway — web engineer and medical cannabis patient and self-described “digital activist” — and software engineer Julian Cain. The pair will donate $0.50 of every app sold to found a cannabis non-profit reform fund.

Cannabis isn’t the only app on iTunes for pot-seeking people. The other cannabis finder is called California Herbal Caregivers and, for $0.99, offers a list of the state’s 700 dispensaries on-the-go.

Despite Apple’s ongoing policing for “inappropriate” apps, both pot apps are rated 12+, or suitable for anyone over the age of 12, for “infrequent/mild alcohol, tobacco or drug use references.”

High anxiety, anyone?

Over the weekend, writer MG Siegler of TechCrunch opened a can of online worms with a furious rant entitled AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure.

Complaining he hasn’t received Visual Voicemail on his iPhone for weeks, Siegler joins a growing chorus of pundits dissatisfied with AT&T, including Gizmodo, Wired and GigaOm.

But as some Techcrunch commenters point out, Visual Voicemail is bolloxed by a popular tethering hack, which allows the iPhone to share its internet connection with a tethered computer.

“I enabled the tethering hack weeks ago when it came out,” says one commenter. “It broke visual voicemail, so I reverted it. One heck of a coincidence if everyone’s voicemail spontaneously broke the same week that a tethering hack came out that breaks visual voicemail.”

Siegler didn’t respond to a query asking if he had tried the tethering hack, and he makes no mention of it in the comments to his post, where he engages in some back and forth with TC readers.

Either way, here’s a very simple fix to get Visual Voicemail back, while still enabling the tethering hack.

The days when you plugged your tiny thumb drive into your Mac may be over; memory maker Kingston Monday unveiled the 256GB DataTraveler 300 — more hard drive space than many desktop or laptop computers.

This thumb drive isn’t meant to transfer a few MP3s or an occasional Word or Excel file. No, the European branch of Kingston reports the DataTraveler has bigger tasks in mind, like 51,000 images or 365 CDs.

“This demonstrates how far flash technology has developed,” Antoine Harb, business development manager for Kingston Technology in the Middle East is quoted. Could this signal Apple a flash memory iMac or MacBook is possible?