News - page 2377

My ambivalence toward the MacBook Air is pretty well-known. While I think its basic idea is compelling, Apple’s execution just leaves too much to be desired with just one USB port, terrible iPod hard drive, and no mobile broadband radio. This parody from Lenovo that’s been circulating to its suppliers in China sort of sums up the flaw in Steve’s vision for a truly wireless laptop. I mean, how can you release a machine with one USB port when the iPod and iPhone both need to be synced over USB and not WiFi?

Bonus points for the warbly parody of the MacBook Air song.

YouTube – test Via Fake Steve

Tags: macbookair, lenovo, thinkpad, humor, parody

That’s a MacBook Pro, apparently running Steve Ballmer’s keynote presentation at a media conference in Louvain, Belgium last week. Flickr user Paint.It.Black got the shot, and Choubistar got a picture with both Ballmer and the MacBook Pro together. Allegedly, MacBook Pros were used to drive all presentations for the conference, and there are multiple shots of it. No Photoshop. Glorious.

What laptop does Steve Ballmer use for his presentations? Right… on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Via Gizmodo

My old colleague Rob Beschizza, who recently abandoned Wired.com for BoingBoing Gadgets, has a brilliant parody of my new book, Inside Steve’s Brain. The treacherous bastard writes:

“It’s hard to believe that one man revolutionized the operating system business in the 2000s, converting Windows’ extraordinary market dominance into the reviled seven-year ditch that is Vista, and squandering billions on confused advances into ill-understood peripheral markets like video gaming and music hardware

…. Wired.com’s Leander Kahney cuts through the salt-ringed tide marks that surround him to unearth secrets to his unbelievable results. It reveals the real Steve.”

LINK.

UPDATE: Microsoft says this was their attempt to make the worst internal video ever. MMM…yeah. Interesting spin…

I’ve been wrapping up an all-intensive project at work lately, but I have to break my silence for this: “Rocking Our Sales” by Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band. I don’t really know where to begin. I guess I will just say this. I have no idea if Apple makes lame Bruce Springsteen parody music videos to inspire its channel sales teams, but if it does, I have to assume that it uses better lyrics than “Talk up our Microsoft Application Virtualization…See what’s on employee’s laptops with AIS and MDOP!”

EPIC FAIL, MS! And if anyone is actually inspired to sell more Vista based on this, really think about switching your job. I mean, damn.

Via Daring Fireball

The first movie starring stoner legend Ellen Feiss, the break-out star of Apple’s “Switch ads,” will air online on Monday, April 21. But don’t get too excited: it looks like a turkey.

Bed & Breakfast, an indie movie shot in France, will air at 9:30PM ET / 6:30 PM PT on TheDigitalLifestyle.tv, a 24-hour Apple-related Web TV channel.

Feiss stars as the girlfriend of an American guy lured to a castle owned by a former college roommate, or something. The movie was shot in 2006 and seems to have promptly disappeared. There’s no indication whether it’s a comedy, a drama or a slasher flick.

It looks like a film school project; it “twists the apparent perception of things to reveal the reality that lurks behind,” according to this archived web site for the film.

Feiss shot to fame in 2002 after slurring her words in an Apple Switch ad detailing how her dad’s PC ate her homework. The ad became an online sensation, and was parodied widely. Feiss was invited on late night TV and was offered roles in moveis and TV shows, but shunned Hollywood — until now.

Here’s a still of Feiss from the movie:

From the department of “I’m-going-to-crow-about-it-because-no-one-else-will,” Wired.com has been nominated for a 2008 Webby award in the prestigious News category.

We’re up against BBC News, NYTimes.com, CNN.com and Discovery News.

As the day-to-day editor of the site, it makes me enormously proud to be rated against such formidable competition. The Webbys are known as the “Oscars of the Internet.”

All told, Wired.com has been nominated for six Webbys this year: Wired.com for best news site, best copywriting and best home page, Danger Room for political blog, Game|Life for games-related website and Compiler for software website. Epicenter and Gadget Lab were also designated “Honorees” in the business and culture categories, respectively.

By comparison, the BBC is up for four Webbys. The nominations come on the heels of Wired.com winning Best Classic Website at South By Southwest a few weeks ago. We’re on a roll.

(Full disclosure: Wired magazine — our sister print publication — is a media sponsor of the awards.)

Leigh looks over at fellow consultant Pete M., “if this is true, buddy, we’re going to be RICH! RICH beyond our wildest dreams…”

Fake Steve, in a recent story, referred to an article by Dev Corvin, which was breaking news about the forthcoming Windows 7 (which has moved its ship date up to 2009 as a result of the spectacular results Vista has demonstrated in the market…). Found amid the usual Windows blah-blah-blah, which I suffer through so you don’t have to, was this tasty quote:

Dev Corvin, thebetaguy.com :

Windows 7 takes a different approach to the componentization and backwards compatibility issues; in short, it doesn’t think about them at all. Windows 7 will be a from-the-ground-up packaging of the Windows codebase; partially source, but not binary compatible with previous versions of Windows.

Now I didn’t just take FSJ and this Dev guy’s word for it, I employed minimalist “journalistic” research and went ahead and Googled “Windows 7” “Not Backwards Compatible”, which yeilded some 1.8 million hits.

This has me literally giddy with anticipation, see I am a consultant, which my mom thinks is code for being unemployed, and about 55% of my firm’s business world-wide is Microsoft-related. I have half a mind to switch practices from Strategy and Transformation to MS (though those practitioners do look hostilely at my Blackberry let alone my Macbook Pro).

In short, fixing all that broken .NET code out there in corporate America will be tantamount to the Y2K effort 10 years ago; a license to print money for consultants. From the bottom of my heart, Thank you Bill.

Now why should anybody who reads Cult of Mac care about this, other than some kind of surrogate pleasure to be gained from my anticipated financial success?

Because, friends, Microsoft’s lock on corporate IT has every everything to do with backwards compatibility. Should Redmond choose to proceed with this folly, our ranks (of Mac loyalists) are destined to swell such that I might have to consider something other than my MB Pro to make me cool and hip in the eyes of our college hires (as-if… might I suggest a really expensive (and thus exclusive) accessory, like a tablet. –ed)

It’s been a long time now since Jeff Goldblum was the face and voice of Apple, but YouTube user notatypewriter provides a remixed blast from the past that reminds why the past is the past. Taking a holiday ad from 1999, the video and audio was slowed down about 30 percent, resulting in the ultimate Apple pitch man: Hammered Jeff Goldblum! “I’d say…Internet?” Genius.

Via Macenstein

YouTube – Apple Ad – Drunk Jeff Goldblum

Tags: goldblum, apple, advertising

Hey, remember the late 1990s? It was a heady time of rap-rock records, resurgent sci-fi epics, and, most importantly, the photo mosaic, an art form where computer artists take hundreds of tiny images and make a vaguely unsettling and blurry bigger picture.

Now we can take a trip back courtesy of Charis Tevis, a graphic artist commissioned by Fortune for its recent cover story on the iCEO. The rad image (click through to see it in all its glory) basically builds Steve Jobs out of the full portfolio of Apple products.

He’s got a lot of others on his Flickr account, including another image of Steve and one of Barack Obama.

Charis Tevis via Gizmodo

You know, I’m mostly proud to be associated with everyone else who loves Macs. I’ve got my problems with Rush Limbaugh, but he’s done plenty to make people realize that Macs aren’t just for left-wing latte-sipping liberals from San Francisco like myself. A little balance to the card never hurt a bit.

Well, that’s mostly true. You see, in an interview with NewsBusters, Darth Tyrannus himself, Karl Rove, has revealed that he is a born-again Apple lover, carrying both an iPhone and a MacBook Air.

NB: All right, I’ve got just one more quick question for you. Last time I saw you, you’d just gotten an iPhone. How’s that working out for you?

ROVE: I love it. My life has changed. I have a shred of coolness. I’ve got my 3,500 people in my addressbook on the phone, I can sync my calendar. I keep track of my modest little stock investments. I can check the weather of my house in Washington, my house in Florida, my boy at school, my hunt-lease in south Texas. I can surf the web, I’m just–œI get part of my email there.

Rove had no comment on what effect, if any, his toxic touch had on the performance of either device. Let us never speak of this again.

FORTUNE: Apple 2.0 Karl Rove loves his iPhone

Found via Apple Finance Board

Tags: rove, apple, iphone, macbook air, evil

Wired’s Editor in Chief Chris Anderson says the future of business is free, and so my publisher and I are giving away free copies of my books.

Bill Pollock of No Starch Press has seeded full electronic versions of my coffeetable books — Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod — to Bittorrent via Pirate Bay.

We want to see if giving away copies of the books will have any effect on sales.

“I’ve been in publishing for just over 20 years and my training has not been to give books away,” writes Pollock on the No Starch blog. “But I think there’s something to this and logic tells me that if we increase the visibility of our titles, we’ll sell more books.”

We came up with the idea after reading about the amazing success to bestselling author Paulo Coelho, who seeds his own books to file-sharing networks and then promotes them on his blog. Coelho claims great success with “pirating” his own books, saying it has had a slow but dramatic effect on sales.

Of course, Coelho is an internationally acclaimed author with a high profile, which may account for his success more than giving away free books. But still, it’s an experiment worth trying.

As Pollock says on his blog: “I think that publishers (music and book) are spending too much time circling the wagons and not enough time thinking of ways that they can use technology to advantage. Certainly, our move here is a bit unusual, but someone has to take the plunge. May as well be us.”

Here’s the torrent for Cult of Mac.

And the torrent for Cult of iPod.

If you download the books, remember to keep your torrent client open so that others can also download the files.

Please let me know what you think of the experiment and the books. Send mail to: [email protected]

The Apple nay-sayers love to pretend that Mac OS X and all of Apple’s other products are destined to be destroyed by hackers. Although Apple has marketed its products as being far less hackable than Windows, someday, the Mac will just be riddled with viruses. It’s inevitable! Except that it’s never happened, and what do you know, Mac OS X is far less troubled by malware than Windows is.

Still, the notion persists, and Apple detractors such as the bearded man at right, Roger L. Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates, will continue to draw irrelevant correlations between minor software hacks on Apple products and overall platform insecurity.

Hilariously, Mr. Kay is under the impression that iPhone jailbreaks and the major unlocking project “Project Pwned” are somehow indicators that virus writers will soon over-run all of Apple’s products. Riiiiiiight. Because individual users finding ways to maximize the value of their own machine is exactly the same as a random prankster taking control of someone else’s machine. His poorly reasoned opinion, courtesy of BusinessWeek, argues that unauthorized iPhone apps will stink, and people will blame Apple for no apparent reason:

Apple, welcome to Microsoft’s world! This is an environment in which you have to support thousands of developers of varying quality, and all sorts of apps, well made or not. Some of these developers make you look good, but others end up trashing your reputation. And despite your best efforts to monetize what they do, it’s not always possible. The elegant simplicity of your platform just makes hacking easier. There is no such thing as real security. All you can do is throw up roadblocks–which, by the way, make it harder for both crooks and law-abiding citizens to drive on your roads.

Wait, what? You think Apple will feel bad that some of the jail-broken apps will suck? That will provide additional evidence that Apple is right to lock down the iPhone. I think the iPhone should be a lot more open than it is, but the only possible conclusion to this situation is the opposite of what Kay argues. But who am I to disagree with a man who has this to say?

UPDATE: The survey has concluded. Thanks to everyone who took part.We’d like to ask you — the readers — for a favor.We’re trying to get a better idea of who you are and what you like to do — more than your thoughtfully-written comments can tell us.So, we’ve crafted a little questionnaire. Click here to take our Cult of Mac reader survey. We’ve kept it as painless as possible. It’s just two pages and it takes about a minute or so to complete. Everything is totally anonymous.Most of it is the standard reader survey stuff (did we mention it’s fast and anonymous?), but when you’re done, we’ll have a better understanding of each other. And really, isn’t that reason enough?

At the Mix 08 conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft CEO and noted iPhone fan Steve Ballmer reprised two of his greatest hits in a panel with Apple Evangelist Guy Kawasaki. First Ballmer suggested Apple was trying to get too big of a cut from iPhone application sales (30 percent is fine, in my opinion; exposure on iTunes is worth the royalty). Second, Ballmer did something truly sublime: he actually responded to a “fan’s” request that he do the “Developers, Developers, Developers” chant. And then, HE DID. It’s awesome. You have to hit the link.

CNET via Gizmodo

From user ndhmashfan: I thought this would be a good use for Legos.

It’s the night before the last Tuesday of February, and you know what that means: Rumors! It’s been widely speculated that Apple is holding a secret event tomorrow, likely for the roll-out of the iPhone SDK or new hardware. And now…proof. Or something very like it. Photos of an inventory sheet from a store with new hardware SKUs that suggest new MacBooks, MB403LL/A and MB402LL/A. Initially, some speculated that these must be new MacBook Pros (because they desperately need updating), but these numbers suggest an update from the low end.

BusinessWeek claims they have it confirmed that the iPhone SDK will be late. What do you think will happen tomorrow?

Via Gizmodo.

Nineteen-year-old Mac enthusiast Cameron Kerr has made a spot-on parody of the HP Hands ad campaign to detail his own life. Though he doesn’t mention it in the actual spot, he did put together a clever how-to which reveals that a Mac can make it so easy to create a visually stimulating ode to HP computers.

A shame. Of course, the only thing wrong with today’s HP laptops is that they ship with Windows, so maybe the celebrity endorsers of the famous campaign just aren’t telling us something.

Via Winandmac.

My colleague Chris Kohler at Wired News has a thought-provoking piece on the iPhone’s potential as a games platform. Since the day Apple introduced it, I’ve been waiting for Apple to unleash multi-touch games, and many of Chris’ sources think that the impending release of Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch SDK might let that happen at long last:

Whether or not iPhone gets a gaming-centric redesign, the release of the SDK makes it all but certain that we’ll see some touchscreen games from the development community.

Ehrenberg sees iPhone games as a sort of warm-up for a dedicated gaming system to come later: “This could be a launching point to get people thinking: Apple, games, Apple, games. A device may well follow from that that’s more tailored to the gaming experience.”

What’s really interesting is that 2008 promises to be a huge battle in mobile gaming. Nokia has relaunched N-Gage as an Xbox Live-like social gaming service for its highest-end phones like the N82 and the impending N96. Samsung could easily go this direction in a heartbeat, and if Microsoft ever does make a ZunePhone (as Zune fans believe), you can bet that gaming would be a major component of it to leverage the Xbox brand. Can Apple get there first and best? Only time will tell.

One thing is certain, however. Analyst Roger Ehrenberg of Information Arbitrage could stand to do some more research on the screen resolution of most handheld game systems:

But if the iPhone and iPod Touch are going to be serious contenders for gamers’ attention, they’ll need a screen upgrade, in more ways than one. Ehrenberg says gamers will want a higher-res display: “Right now, the screens generally don’t have the clarity to get the most out of the videogame programming that exists today.”

Um…yeah. Here’s the thing. The Nintendo DS? Uses two screens, each at 256×192, which is a total of 98,304 pixels. The Sony PlayStation Portable? One screen at 480*272, which is 130,560 pixels. The iPhone? One screen at 480×320, or 153,600 pixels. It would be the highest-res gaming platform on the market, not the lowest. That said, maybe there’s a screen-refresh issue that I don’t know about that could make the iPhone weak for action games. It would surprise me, given how nice “Pirates of the Caribbean” looks on it, but one never knows.

Gamers Eye the iPhone, As SDK Approaches

Tags: iphone, games, uninformed analysts

MacWorld was oddly devoid of non-MacBook Air, AppleTV software and Time Capsule product announcements this year. No new MacBooks, iMacs, or MacBook Pros, and no new iPods or iPhones. Apple remedied the latter this Tuesday with double-capacity iPod touch and iPhones, but other new hardware or the iPhone and touch SDK were nowhere to be seen.

TUAW claims to have a tip that the company that typically broadcasts Apple events, MIRA Mobile, is looking to hire people for an unannounced Apple event at the end of the month. My top priority is a new MacBook Pro, but my old iPod just conked out, so the SDK for the touch would be pretty compelling, too…

Via TUAW

As part of the launch of new how-to video site Neulio, Steve Wozniak, the Woz himself, has created a brief course on the basics of his favorite sport, Segway Polo. Having been nearly run down by Woz and his Segway, I can confirm that he knows what he’s doing.

Thanks, Christina!

In a clear sign that everyone is really frantic to get Super Tuesday over with already, the New York Times has published the article contrasting Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama the world wasn’t waiting for. Noam Cohen has the temerity to ask: Is Obama a Mac and Hillary a PC?

I started cringing before I even started reading. Essentially, it comes down to the idea that Obama’s website looks like Apple’s (it doesn’t – looks more generic Web 2.0), and that Hillary’s looks like a typical business-solutions provider (maybe? I’d say it looks more like Foxnews.com). Some of the quotes are quite hilarious.

With Obama’s site, all the features and elements are seamlessly integrated, just like the experience of using a program on a Macintosh computer,” said Alice Twemlow, chairwoman of the M.F.A. program in design criticism at the School of Visual Arts (who is a Mac user).

And what does this mean for those of us voting on Tuesday? Absolutely nothing. The story doesn’t even bother to mention if either Obama or Hillary use Macs. Seems like that might have proven relevant…

On a more relevant front, I’ve reposted the Hillary 1984 video after the jump.

Though it’s actually a slightly older commercial, I was struck during the Super Bowl pre-game today by Dell’s ad for the XPS-One, the Austin PC-maker’s all-in-one iMac competitor. The commercial is nothing but 30 seconds of vanilla PC box destruction. Exploding. Getting hit with wrecking balls. And then the (semi) attractive XPS One pops out. The tagline: “Dell – now available in beautiful.” I was so shocked that I rewound it and watched it again. Does Dell hate itself this much?

While Dell, HP, and Gateway’s increasing focus on industrial design (only 15 years after Apple and IBM) has made some serious progress toward getting ugly beige boxes off of the desks of America, it’s disturbing to me how much Dell’s approach to design is an attack on itself. Those weren’t just generic PCs – they represented the former soul of the Dell corporation. And while the former Dell corporation made bland, bottom-feeding PCs, at least the company’s point of view on what a computer should be. Now, its designs evoke where Apple and Sony were about four years ago. Is it not possible to make more attractive computers without trashing yourself?

In this regard, Apple will never be in trouble. With Steve Jobs in charge, the company’s identity is rock solid, as its perspective on what technology should be. Every Apple shareholder is thankful for that.

Point well made, Rodrigo. Still, did Apple really need to make the single USB port on the MacBook Air so recessed that you can’t plug in a 3G radio adapter?

Via Digg.

What? Those totally mean the same, don’t they? … OH! Oh, dear.

Stephen Carboni via Digg.

Apple has launched another of its ingenious “Get a Mac” banner ads on the New York Times front page. As Mac and PC chat in a sidebar, a seemingly unrelated ad up above becomes a topic of discussion and then manipulation.

Pretty brilliant — PC “correcting” a “typo” in a Wall Street Journal review so it says “Leopard is better and faster than Vista – NOT!” Nicely done. And now to correct the rest of the Internet, indeed.

The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia

Via TUAW

Tags: advertisingapple internet getamac