News - page 2374

• PM: Best article on Apple product design I’ve ever read: https://tinyurl.com/6j4awv #
• @jamessime Thank god that Whedon didn’t do the Batman films… #

Image copyright ABC-7 KGO

SAN FRANCISCO — Multiple Bay Area news outlets report that an Apple research and development facility located at 20605 Valley Green Drive in Cupertino was set ablaze late Tuesday night, with NBC affiliate KTVU blaming a malfunctioning air conditioning unit.

Given that this was an Apple R&D facility, it’s naturally operated nearly 24 hours a day, and at least 100 Apple employees were forced to evacuate the building in the three-alarm fire. Also given that this is Apple we’re talking about, no one has any idea what these folks were working on. As of 12:30 a.m. Pacific Wednesday morning, Santa Clara County firefighters report that they expected another hour before they could put out the blaze completely.

See the Jump for a map of the fire relative to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino (basically, it was across the street).

As if Apple’s MobileMe users haven’t enough cause for concern these days, an email-based phishing scam has turned up, tempting users to click on an embedded link to resolve unspecified billing problems.

Reported yesterday by Macworld, the email purports to be from Apple and asks users to “confirm” personal information at a web page that is not affiliated with the company.

Click after the jump for a look at the email and be careful out there.

Best Buy is set to announce Wednesday it will become the first retail chain in the US to stock and sell Apple’s iPhone 3G. After a recent upgrade of its mobile departments, Best Buy’s more than 970 outlets in the US will begin selling iPhones September 7th.

Best Buy has a longstanding relationship with Apple and already sells iPod digital music players at all of its stores. The retail giant also recently expanded Mac computer sales to more than 600 of its larger outlets.

Via SF Gate

First off, we don’t want to take any heat about this entry’s placement in our list. Certainly the “1984” commercial announcing the original Mac is more important than to place dead last. So don’t read anything more into this week’s entry than we wanted to begin our list where this whole adventure began: on January 22nd 1984.

Pete Mortensen:
I have to confess something here: I never had the opportunity to see the original “1984” commercial when it originally aired. I was, after all, 3 years old, and my parents, clearly thought I should go to bed before it aired on the East Coast. I did, however, seek it out in 1995, the darkest days of Apple’s history and the apex of my Mac fanaticism. I read countless summaries of the spot, clicked through very slowly loading galleries of screenshots, and finally, sometime around January of 1996, I got to see it on TV in my parents’ basement during a rather insufferable “Greatest TV Commercials of All Time!?!” special on CBS. I loved the ad, but I had built it up in my mind to an experience comparable to transfiguration. It wasn’t. That didn’t happen until “Think Different” came out, the first signal that Apple wasn’t just going to lie back and take it anymore. The birth of a new era…

Lonnie Lazar:
In 1984 I was 2nd year law student still using IBM Selectric and Smith-Corona electric typewriters. I thought spooled white-out correction tape was a great invention! By the dawn of the 90s I had a friend on the SF peninsula working for a custom PC maker and it would be over a decade after the debut of Macintosh before I used my first Apple, a Color Classic II in 1995. I remember being very impressed with the dramatic effect of Mac’s introductory commercial when I saw it live during the Super Bowl, but as a bit of a political radical and anti-Reaganite, I read more of an underlying social statement into it. It’s significance as a harbinger of change to come in the realm of the personal computer went right over my head. After all, those Selectrics were the gold standard at the time.

Leigh McMullen:
I remember the commercial vividly, we had been studying Orwell in school that fall, and so its timeliness and visual impact were stunning. That said, I was an Atari guy when the Mac launched, and to be honest the allure of a computer that lacked color graphics, or bad-assed arcade style games eluded me for quite some time. It really wasn’t until a few years later, playing the original SimCity at the Drake University computer lab, that the little beige toasters started to grow on me.

Here at Cult of Mac we’re not content just to report other people’s rumors we occasionally start our own. Hence this post’s title (The question mark makes it A-Okay, right?).

To be clear, we have no specific information that suggests this might be true. No rough voiced informant leaking this news to us from the bowels of some dungeon in Cupertino. No circumstantial evidence (like a Chiat/Day media buy) dug up through hard-nosed investigative reporting.

Nothing, Nada, Zip, Zilch, Zune.*

Yet here’s the post anyway, what gives?

First, I’m making up this rumor because I really, really want it to be true. Not only does it have a certain symmetry to it that OCD dictators like Steve would gravitate to, but it would be the perfect forum to unleash something truly game-changing on us.  Something that would upset an entire industry, something as profoundly impacting as the original Macintosh.

Secondly, because it is exactly 25 weeks until Superbowl Sunday, and while this year’s Superbowl doesn’t fall on the same date as the airing of the original “1984 commercial”, it marks a symbolic milestone for that Anniversary.  To that end we’re going to use the next 25 weeks to count down the Greatest Moments in Mac History. Culminating (I hope) in an announcement from Cupertino that will change everything forever, just like the last one 25 years ago.

(*Thanks to Rip Ragged for letting me borrow that line).

In the wake of last week’s NetShare takedown, the fizzle this week with Box Office, and the it-might-be-a-crime-if-it-weren’t-so-funny debacle of I Am Rich, third party iPhone developers are starting to clamor for more, well, actually, any transparency from Apple about the process for approving and disapproving listings in the AppStore.

Many really wish the NDA would just go away, or at least apply only to developers whose applications remain unreleased, but that’s not likely to clear Apple legal. We do think it’s not unreasonable, however, to ask the company to be more responsive to requests for information about the approval and rejection process.

A former Apple engineer who worked at the company from 1995 to 2007 has filed suit and is the lead plaintiff in  asked the court to certify a class action seeking restitution from Apple for overtime pay and meal compensation under California labor law.

David Walsh, a former Network Engineer claims he was required to work after hours and weekends without overtime compensation and that Apple “intentionally and deliberately created numerous job levels and a multitude of job titles to create the superficial appearance of hundreds of unique jobs, when in fact, these jobs are substantially similar and can be easily grouped together for the purpose of determining whether they are exempt from overtime wages.”

During his on-call hours, Walsh “was required to remain on stand-by for the entire night, every night of the week, for the entire week without compensation,” contends the suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for Southern California.

Walsh’s attorneys are asking the court to grant class status to all of Apple’s California IT workers, including those who are dispatched to perform support functions at Apple retail stores.

Apple has yet to make a formal response to the suit.

Via TUAW

In February next year, receiving over-the-air television signals will require either a digital converter for current analog TVs or a digital TV set, creating a huge potential market of people looking to upgrade home viewing technology. Could this be the area for the mysterious “product transition” Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer mentioned last month?

We would like to think so. Of all the products that Apple could do, a smart TV makes the most sense. It would be like the AppleTV, but without a separate box to hook up. All the functions of the AppleTV would be built into the new Apple TV.

Netflix is already getting into this sector by teaming up with hardware makers to stream movies directly to living-room devices — a DVD player from LG, a movie box from Roku and MS’s XBox. Building the AppleTV’s smart functions into a flatscreen LCD TV would differentiate Apple’s offering from competitors like Samsung and Sony, and help the company dominate the emerging market for streaming television programming and movies the way it has come to dominate music distribution through iTunes.

In my childhood, I had two obsessions: Calvin and Hobbes and Apple. And someone has finally had the foresight to bring them together for Calvin and Jobs, which chronicles the adventures of a boy and his imaginary Apple CEO. It’s quite witty, very much in the tone of the real series. The cartooning isn’t so elegant as (almost certainly disapproving) Bill Watterson, but that’s pretty much a certainty. Still, my favorite remix comic since Garfield Minus Garfield, so well done, PinkFloyd99 of Flickr!  Click through the jump for four more adventures of Calvin and Jobs!

Update: This set of cartoons was written by Jacob Lambert and drawn by Gary Hallgren, and is from a two-page spread in the current issue of MAD Magazine.

More people in the US turned to Apple’s iTunes Store for their music purchases in the first half of 2008 than to any other music retailer, according to a MusicWatch consumer survey released today by NPD Group, a leading market researcher.

Apple’s digital distribution sales outpaced the three leading physical cd distributors, WalMart, Best Buy, and Target. Amazon, which launched a digital distribution service last year, moved from fifth place into fourth based on consumers’ increasing preference for downloading files over owning physical cds.

“We expect Apple will consolidate its lead in the retail music market, as CD sales continue to slow,” said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD. NPD combines digital and physical sales for those outlets who market music in both formats and tracks digital music sold by the song or album, not music purchased under subscription from services like eMusic, or subscription revenues from Rhapsody and Napster.

UPDATE: The MIT design team referred to in this post is basing its design not on the Apple II, but on the Nintendo Entertainment System, which used the same processor chip. We regret our error, which was originally reported by The Boston Herald article to whcih our post was linked. Thanks to David Zeiler at The Baltimore Sun for the clarification.

Derek Lomas, an American graduate student, has recruited Apple II enthusiasts at this month’s MIT International Development Design Summit “to give Third World schools Apple II computer labs like the ones I grew up with.”

Lomas, Jesse Austin-Breneman and other designers want to create a computer that Third World residents can buy for much less than the ones currently being developed by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, who has been working since 2005 to provide $100 laptops to Third World kids. “We see this as a model that could increase economic opportunities for people in developing countries,” sas Lomas. “If you just know how to type, that can be the difference between earning $1 an hour instead of $1 a day.”

Lomas discovered kids using a cheap keyboard and Nintendo-like console hooked up to home TVs running simple games during an internship in India last summer and hit on the idea of upgrading the devices’ 1980s-era technology. He and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology symposium hope to get buy-in from programmers to help upgrade the systems – which are based on old Apple II computers – with rudimentary Web access and more.

The six member team at MIT is working on writing improved programs and connecting to the Web through cell phones. The group also wants to add memory chips – which the devices currently lack – to allow users to write and store their own programs. “We think we can develop a really good educational tool that could give kids exposure to keyboards, typing and mouse usage at an early age,” said Austin-Breneman, a 25-year-old MIT graduate and a mechanical engineer.

Via The Boston Herald

Amid growing criticism of a lassiez-faire approach to security issues, Apple has canceled participation in a public discussion of its security practices at the Black Hat security conference scheduled this week in Las Vegas. Black Hat Director Jeff Moss told reporters in an interview Friday that unnamed members of Apple’s engineering team had agreed in early July to participate in a panel discussion on computer security issues, which would have been a first for the notoriously secretive company. “It was [going to be] them talking about security engineering and how they take security seriously,” Moss said, but “marketing got wind of it, and nobody at Apple is ever allowed to speak publicly about anything without marketing approval.”

In a separate security-related development, reports indicate the DNS security patch released by Apple on Friday may fail to fix the exploit flaw it was intended to repair.

Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc. and Swa Frantzen of the SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center both detailed research indicating systems running the client version of Mac OS X were still incrementing ports, not randomizing them, as should have been the case if the fix had addressed the flaw. “Apple might have fixed some of the more important parts for servers, but is far from done yet, as all the clients linked against a DNS client library still need to get the work-around for the protocol weakness,” Frantzen said.

While Dan Kaminsky, the researcher who uncovered the DNS flaw in February and helped coordinate a multivendor patch effort indicated “if there was a huge population of people behind DNS servers running OS X, I’d be more worried,” Rich Mogull, an independent security consultant and former Gartner Inc. analyst said, “It may be a low priority in the scheme of the DNS vulnerability, but if all my servers are OS X, it matters. Within the Mac audience, it matters.”

Via Computerworld

• Apple going to blend ARM and PA Semi tech? https://tinyurl.com/5bjxda #

• CG: The Small Wave on iPhone’s native iTunes UI versus the superior one from the Remote app: https://bit.ly/o0BCM #

UPDATE: Above link fixed. Thanks, Church of Apple.

Apple has posted a job opportunity for a position it calls “iPhone Security Engineer.” An “exceptional individual” will get the chance to “have a major impact on Apple’s embedded operating system products,” according to the job posting.

Job requirements and useful experience include “passion for developing “proof of concept attacks, industry exposure to and knowledge of OS security and UNIX internals” and “involvement in reverse engineering and security communities.”

The company appears to be taking seriously recent criticisms of its nonchalance toward patching iPhone security holes and its less-than-full-embrace by the enterprise community.

Who says crime doesn’t pay?

Via Ars Technica

Microsoft is taking a leaf from Apple’s playbook and re-organizing its major online services division to create a tighter link between hardware and software.

Microsoft has reorganized it’s Platforms and Services Division, responsible for products like online search and Internet Explorer, to more closely follow Apple’s “whole widget” approach of closely tying hardware to software and online services.

In a memo to employees, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer explains:

“In the competition between PCs and Macs, we outsell Apple 30-to-1. But there is no doubt that Apple is thriving. Why? Because they are good at providing an experience that is narrow but complete, while our commitment to choice often comes with some compromises to the end-to-end experience. Today, we’re changing the way we work with hardware vendors to ensure that we can provide complete experiences with absolutely no compromises. We’ll do the same with phones–providing choice as we work to create great end-to-end experiences.”

It sounds like Microsoft is going to try and replicate what it’s done with the XBox and the Zune — exert more control over hardware, software and cloud services.

For decades, Microsoft has thrived by selling its software to third-party vendors who build with commodity components and compete fiercly on price. This model works well when selling to businesses, whichare concerned with price and interopability, but increasingly, ordinary consumers are the grwoth market for the PC industry, and consumers care more about ease-of-use, reliability and good design. These of course, are Apple’s strengths.

Ballmer doesn’t seem to be suggesting that Microsoft bring hardware in-house, but rather initiate a tighter pairing between Microsoft’s software and the company’s third-party hardware partners. Examples of this kind of hardware/software alliance include Real Networks and Sandisk, which have teamed to make MP3 players; and Netflix and LG, which are collaborating on an online movie service integrated into LG’s TVs.

Ballmer specifically mentions phones, which are increasingly becoming mobile computing devices that could threaten Microsoft. Microsoft is rumored to be working on a Zune phone to rival the iPhone (and soon, Google’s Android).

If you’re wondering whether it might be a good time to head to the nearest Apple Store to join the queue for a new iPhone, the folks at Top Muffin offer a comprehensive iPhone Availability Tracker.

The page is powered by data from Apple’s own availability widget and is updated every 15 minutes. The accuracy of Apple’s availability information has been questioned by some in the chaotic first two weeks since the 3G model launch, prompting Top Muffin to recommend calling stores first to confirm stock on-hand.

The Computer Science Department at Stanford University will offer a course in iPhone programming in the Fall Semester, according to its latest course schedule.

It is unclear at this point whether Apple will object to the course offering under the terms of its SDK confidentiality agreement.

Via TUAW

It’s no news that The Secret Diary of Fake Steve Jobs is off-line after what has to be one of the most entertaining runs in recent memory.  That said those of you longing for just one more dose of dry wit and satire FSJ-style need wait no longer.

Dan Lyons, the creative genius behind FSJ has opened another blog — this time in his own name.  Personally, I find it even funnier now that doesn’t have  to voice his satire through the mask of FSJ and can just be himself.

Dan’s new blog can be found at: https://realdanlyons.com/blog/

Mock up via Flickr

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Muntster wrote for his clients today “We believe there is an 80% chance Apple will introduce redesigned MacBooks and possibly new MacBook Pros at lower price points. Specifically, Apple may re-enter the $999 price point (currently $1099) with the MacBook, or test the $1,799 price point with the MacBook Pro (currently $1999).” Thus, the news from yesterday’s stellar earnings report is all about Apple’s future – new products on the horizon and facelifts for old friends.

The consensus appears to be that Apple will be slashing prices on on Macs in an effort to increase market share that has moved Mac into third place in the US and has Apple knocking on the door of 10% among all US computer buyers.

Additional speculation about new products in the pipeline – Oppenheimer referred in yesterday’s hour-long earnings report to Apple’s penchant for introducing “state of the art new products at price points our competitors can’t match” – has people salivating about a multi-touch Mac, a new iPhone-like PDA, new mid-to-low priced Mac workstations and more.

Whatever it is – whatever they may be – Apple’s new products are likely to follow in the mold of the company’s decade-long success introducing, in Oppenheimer’s words, something with “technologies and features that others can’t match.”

Mock up via Flickr

Apple, Inc. is expected to report strong second quarter earnings after US markets close on Monday and the company will do so without recognizing a single iPhone sale, according to a Bloomberg report. Instead of including sales of first generation iPhones that came at the end of the second quarter before the release of the wildly successful iPhone 3G, the company will report an increase in earnings on rising sales of Macintosh computers and iPod media players alone.

“The Mac is the primary reason we own Apple shares,” said Michael Obuchowski, a portfolio manager at New York-based Altanes Investments LLC, which began buying Apple shares in 2006. “For several quarters, we’ve seen an incredible acceleration in Apple’s PC business.”

There could be even more good news ahead for Apple shareholders, who will undoubtedly receive another boost next quarter, when Apple tells the story of its hugely successful iPhone 3G release, which has nearly completely sold out in the United States, Germany and other worldwide locations in its first 10 days on the market.

• CG: Sega bloke claims iPhone is as powerful as the Dreamcast. We await iPhone Crazy Taxi with bated breath. https://tinyurl.com/5j9kbz #

• CG: Ars Technica reports that Apple’s knocked apps with names trying to leapfrog the queue back into touch. Ha! https://tinyurl.com/6nwecr #

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