News - page 2405

The US back to school promotion’s done, but its equivalent has now fired up in the UK. Brits can now grab Apple laptops or iMacs, an iPod nano or iPod touch, and then get a rebate of up to £95 (which doesn’t actually cover the cost of even the cheapest iPod on offer, but still).

The most interesting part about this is the offer’s closing date: the spooktastic October 31. It’s pretty rare for Apple to start shipping new Macs when this kind of promotion is still running (although it does sometimes happen), so does this mean we now won’t be seeing new Mac laptops and iMacs until November? Or are British students just getting ‘encouraged’ to clear Apple’s UK inventory, readying the company for its autumn/fall assult?

Update: other European Apple Stores are also running similar offers—this isn’t just specific to the UK.

The summer holidays are barely over and the children only back at school for a week, but already the Christmas tat has started appearing in the shops and the media is casting its collective eyes over the events of the last few months to put together some “thing of the year” contests.

And first on the radar is the UK’s Stuff Magazine, best known for the scantily clad ladies who adorn its front cover (usually clutching some gadget or other in their manicured paws).

In the Reader’s gadget of the year category, the iPhone 3G is up against Nintendo’s Wii Fit, the Asus Eee, game consoles the PS3 and XBox 360 60GB, and the B&W Zeppelin speaker system.

That’s not all though. The MacBook Air crops up in the Design of the year category, against the Zeppelin (again) and a bunch of other things that, in my opinion, don’t even come close.

But wait, there’s more. Apple is also nominated in Retailer of the year.

So does the iPhone deserve Gadget of the Year status? I’d say it does, yes. I’ve not seen anything else — except perhaps Mario Kart on the Wii — make people smile so much. Everyone who picks up an iPhone, whether they’re playing with a friend’s or toying with one of the demo models in a shop, smiles. You watch, it’s true. They pick the thing up for the first time, they start tapping on it, and they smile.

Microsoft has maintained a publicly announced schedule for releasing Windows 7 in early 2010, but its internal calendar has June 3, 2009 as the planned release date, according to a report by InternetNews.com.

Stung, perhaps by the relentless ribbing its Vista operating system has taken at the hands of Apple advertising, along with countless jibes from pundits on the Internet, Microsoft plans to release a beta version of the new system at its Professional Developers Conference next month.

Inside sources confirm that internal builds of the redesigned platform have already been made available to partners for hardware and software certification. Windows 7 is not a whole new OS but an evolution of Vista, and will reuse the old kernel and device driver model. That means it would use the kernel in its newer state, when Microsoft updated it with Vista’s first service pack. It also means existing device drivers for Vista will work on Windows 7.

Good luck with that, guys.

A film that looks at the evolution and culture surrounding the Macintosh has been selected to the shortlist of the 2008 Naperville Independent Film Festival which takes place next week.

This is the first time the film, a documentary called, ‘Welcome to Machintosh’, has been screened in the US since new interview footage with original Apple co-founder Ron Wayne was added to the movie. Click here to watch the trailer on YouTube.

That exclusive interview was added just before the movie’s European premiere at the Globians Documentary Film Festival in August. The documentary mixes history, criticism and Apple idolatory into an exploration of the early years of Apple as seen through the eyes of Apple employees, engineers, resellers and supporters.

• Devon Kelly and friends literally make a song and dance about Mac OS X’s spinning rainbow of doom: https://bit.ly/1LZ8oZ #
• Apple rejects Podcaster from the App Store for, er, no discernible sensible reason – https://bit.ly/3a66nC (Hat tip: Daring Fireball.) #

One common problem I’ve noticed is that recent switchers from Windows to OS X don’t expect to encounter problems. At all. In many cases, they’ve heard so much good stuff about OS X that they expect it to be good stuff all the way through.

I make a point, these days, of saying to potential switchers: “Macs can break, you know. They do break. They can drive you crazy.” And the potential switchers look at me like I’m mad and say: “So why switch then?” And I reply: “Because it will happen far less frequently than it does with Windows, and most of the time recovery will be quicker and easier.” Note that: most of the time.

Anyway, Asraf Sani has a disappointed tone in his voice when he writes about the artistically interesting graphics failure that hit his iMac running Leopard last Friday. The colourful light show made it unusable, but at least the screenshot controls were still working, enabling Asraf to grab a few snaps for his Flickr stream.

Should we celebrate graphic failures on our Macs? I think we should. Every cloud, silver lining, all that.

Picture used with Asraf’s permission

Ex-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld break bread with a stereotypical American family in a second ad that attempts to rejuvenate the Windows maker’s image.

When Microsoft’s in a bind, this is the kind of advertising it comes up with. Something really risky and new.

My inability to do a simple task, like call up the international character palette, or even remember its (mostly) system-wide shortcut, is well documented.

That’s why I love something like Copy Paste Char; I’m so much better at remembering URLs. This simple web page will save me whole seconds every year.

I shall now paste in some celebratory glyphs, because I can: (Squiggles omitted — Ed)

(Whether or not they’ll show up properly in your browser, having been mangled in turn by TextMate, WordPress and the browser itself, is a whole nother question entirely.)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t have failed to notice that iTunes 8 arrived to some fanfare earlier this week. I’ve been putting it through its paces, figuring out whether the new features are any good, and scoring them using our patented* rockometer.

More after the break…

* Not patented.

I was immediately intrigued by the new headphones announced at Tuesday’s “big event” in San Francisco. Initially, I was excited by the prospect of the new “in-ear” style that will retail for $79 when they begin shipping next month. I have always found the ear buds on Apple headphones quite uncomfortable, especially for wearing an extended amount of time. The new “in-ear” style seems promising, since they will feature separate woofer and tweeter drivers, which should make for a higher-fidelity listening experience than is available with the standard headphones.

The remote play/pause/skip and volume control available on these new optional accessories (a lower-fidelity version with standard ear buds, available now, sells for $29) is another handy feature, but possibly the most interesting development, which Steve Jobs and many analysts either glossed over or failed to mention entirely, lies in their built-in microphone. At yesterday’s keynote Jobs mentioned in passing that the headset mic will enable voice note recording with the new iPod Nano, which is certainly a value add to that device. But a check of the headphones’ specs on the Apple website indicates they are supported by the iPod Touch and the new 120GB iPod Classic as well.

When I got my first iPod 5 years ago, I longed for a mic/line in so I could record directly to the device and wondered why in the world Apple had passed up the opportunity to produce a cool digital recording device when it was sitting right in front of the design team from the very beginning. Has it finally come to pass?

As usual, the answer is unclear. Comments in a MacRumors forum thread suggest great interest among iPod Touch and iPhone users for the utility of an external microphone, both for the VoIP applications it could enable, as well as for the music recording possibilities (GarageBand Lite, anyone?) it creates. The company makes no claim these new headphones are supported by the iPhone, although it says that iPhone headsets (which also include an external mic) work with iPods.

Stay tuned: when the new high-end headsets become available I’ll be getting a pair to see if my dream of an Apple digital recorder has indeed come true.

The cult of Mac is growing as Apple emerges as the key computer for US consumers, amongst which it is now the fourth-ranked computer manufacturer, according to new research from MetaFacts.

Brand loyalty, the report claims, is at an all-time high with Apple’s chain of retail stores pulling customers through the doors – and selling Macs, MacBooks, MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros in particular, the researchers claim in their latest Apple Profile Report 2008.

It gets better, “Like the camel slipping its nose under the tent, Apple is reaching into American households as the second or third Home PC,” said Dan Ness, Principal Analyst at MetaFacts. “Where Apple shines is
as the third PC, ranking fifth with 8 per cent of third Home PCs, and ranking fourth in notebook PCs, also at 8 per cent of the installed base.”

And whether that Mac is a first, second or third home computer, what households do with their machine is very different. They’re used to make websites, create graphics and “personal activities”, the report explains – probably while the Windows box gets used for checking email, playing games, and cranking up peoples scores in MMORPG games online. Or something.

Mac users are public, too, this report explains. Seems 21 per cent of Macs are used in public – double the public usage of your WIndows machine – and potentially marking Apple’s ascendancy as a laptop maker.

“If you look around at a Starbucks or cybercafé, you might think the whole world’s gone to Apple,”  said Ness, “Mac users are very active and use their notebooks in more locations than Windows notebook users.”

Wait, there’s more – brand loyalty, “More than four in five (81%) of households with  Apple as their primary Home PC plan to buy the same brand – Apple – for their next Home PC,” said Ness.

All this action in the consumer market, is it any surprise that the long tail effect Apple executives hoped for four or five years ago when they began visualising it has now begun taking place?

The company gets put down a lot for not focusing sufficient attention on the enterprise markets. Perhaps it didn’t – once – but for the last few years of Apple market expansion, the company’s executives have known that consumer demand would eventually become an enterprise market driver.

Think about it – do you recall when you moved jobs and were once excited about the technology you got to use because it would be better than what you could afford at home? Nowadays when you start a new job its not uncommon to live in abject fear (OK, slight trepidation) of the dated system you’ll end up working with…it’s not at all uncommon for workplace technology to be less advanced than the tech company workers have at home.

And as Apple’s consumer market share grows, so too does the demand made on enterprises to offer workers the equipment they are already familiar with.

And that’s the long tail Apple execs set in motion with the iMac in 1998.

• CG: Genius sidebar could not find matches for your specific selection, but here are the Top Songs and Albums in the iTunes Store. *sigh* #

In the week since Apple announced its “Let’s Rock” event, the organization’s spokespeople have assured all observers that this would be a really critical launch, with bigger news than just a refresh of the iPod product family.

Well, apparently Apple and I have very different definitions of “big news.” Because all the organization delivered was more of the same:

• An iPod touch that looks more like the iPhone 3G, but loses the black aluminum border that gave the device its own distinctive personality. But hey, price cuts and built-in Nike+ support! (no word on iPhone support, however)
• An iPod nano that looks more like the nano 2G than its predecessor, adds a few new colors and awkwardly tries to implement the UI from the touch and iPhone. Oh, and you can shake it to shuffle.
• An iPod classic that literally makes no changes other than bumping the hard drive capacity and cutting the high-end model. It now costs exactly the same as the high-end Zune, and has the same hard drive capacity.
• A new revision of iTunes with smarter automatic playlist generation, HD TV show downloads, and the return of NBC/Universal programs
• Bug fixes for the iPhone.
• And two lame songs from Jack Johnson. That’s it.

The business sense side of me is saying that Apple has another winner. The designer side of my brain really likes the subtle changes that Apple’s design team has brought to the the product line (except for the ugly iPod classic — hate the use of aluminum there). But the Apple fanatic in me can’t help but me incredibly disappointed by this morning’s activity.

Just how perfunctory was this round of updates? Consider this: The event has been done for 30 minutes, all the new models are available for purchase on the Apple Store, and Apple still hasn’t updated its own website to announce the product launches (EDIT: It went up as I finished typing. STILL). Apple has never gone this long without getting its main site up-to-date.

Now, none of us should be surprised by any of this; after the launch of iPhone 3G, AppStore, and the fiasco called MobileMe, it’s little surprise that Apple hasn’t been able to devote many resources to doing more than making slightly curvier cases for the iPod line. But Apple has trained us to expect the best, particularly when they say it’s really time to pay attention. Today, it completely missed the mark. I can’t recall an Apple launch event this underwhelming since the launch of the iPod HiFi and iPod socks. It’s this year’s model, and nothing more. It’s the entire iPod product line as afterthought to the iPhone.

And that’s not good. The iPod family is Apple’s highest-revenue business, and any indication that the company is bored with the media player business or unable to innovate beyond bringing iPhone features to iPods is going to mean a rough time in the market. It’s certainly not impossible to do so, Apple’s just in an unfortunate liminal space between the launch of a new business and the adaptation of another. The new nanos, in particular, felt oddly anacronistic. Why go to all that trouble to design such a wildly different case for this revision and then still use the same old clickwheel? Why, in the name of all that is holy, would you copy the horizontal interface on the right, screen on the left interaction found on the flash-based Zune? Why launch nine, count them, nine new colors in a single day when this is a clear incremental upgrade while the company works on a touchscreen nano for the near future?

Honestly, the biggest news today is that the iPod touch has dropped in price by $70 and has external volume controls.  It’s the future of the product line, and Apple needs to drive its adoption rapidly while the pre-2007 iPod outlook gradually ramps down.

In the mean time, I sincerely hope that we’ll see new Mac announcements on a not-too-distant Tuesday. The entire product line is just begging for processor upgrades, and they’ve been suffering while Apple has put so much attention on the iPhone this year. Not to mention which, it’s high time that Apple brought out a true Home Theater Mac for the living room — AppleTV and Mac mini aren’t cutting it.

Steve Jobs took the stage this morning for Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event, bounding into the lights like a rock star himself. My grandmother would say he looked svelte, but most importantly, he seemed energetic and strong.

We’ll be back later in the day with a full reaction and analysis of Apple’s news, but the big news is Steve looks ready to keep on truckin’.

This week’s entry in the ‘Greatest Mac Moment’ series caused a bit of debate in our sacred halls.  The contrarians questioned how a piece of software that wasn’t even originally written by Apple could possibly be one of the top 25 of Mac moments ever. Browse the opinions of our staff, and let us know your own!

Pete Mortensen: In many ways, iTunes is the most significant software program ever created by Apple. Without iTunes, there could be no iPod, and without iTunes for Windows, there could be no iPod and iPhone for Windows, which would mean far lower revenues for Apple these days. It showed people that Apple could do more than just make computers, and it opened the company’s first significant new market in years. Without iTunes, there is no third-wave Apple.

On the other hand, iTunes is only really important in retrospect. QuickTime for Windows already existed as a beachhead into the Dark Side for Apple, and MP3 software was widely available and adopted on Macs prior to the release of iTunes (ask any lovers of Audion what they think of iTunes 1 and 2 if you don’t believe me). While it’s clear that Apple had the iPod in mind as it rolled out iTunes, the digital hub strategy was more a hypothesis than a market reality in those days. Though many people credit iTunes for turning iPod into the cultural sensation that it became, I think it’s actually the converse. The iPod drove demand for iTunes. Thanks to the iPod, iTunes matured into the world’s leading jukebox program and helped drive Apple’s last seven years of growth. But for a first-generation program, it was kind of sad.

Leigh McMullen: I don’t disagree that iTunes is important enough to be one of the ‘Greatest Mac Moments’, I just disagree with its position on the list. If anything it needs to be MUCH MUCH Higher. iTunes ought to be in the top 5, and here’s why: it’s a little celebrated fact that iTunes is the most popular piece of software for Microsoft Windows.  It is very likely that there are more legitimately licensed copies of iTunes out there than Windows Vista!

With its popularity, iTunes is the official ambassador of the “Mac Experience” to forlorn Windows users everywhere.  It is in this capacity, that iTunes is second only to the switch to Intel processors in driving people to switch to Macintosh.  Anything that is responsible for that degree of proliferation of our beloved platform has got to be more important that #21 on our list!

Craig Grannell: I think Pete and Leigh have both missed one of the most important aspects of iTunes, in that—for better or worse—it’s driven UI considerations elsewhere on Macs: Finder is, to all extents, iTunes for documents, iPhoto is iTunes for photos, and so on. Therefore, iTunes is pretty much welded to the modern Mac experience and subsequently deserves to be on the list. On the surface, iTunes is just a media manager, but it clearly has plans for world domination; so don’t be caught unawares by SoundJam’s kid, because before you know it, the thing will have taken over the world.

Apple PR pulled out the big guns this week and invited, nay “encouraged” tech and entertainment media luminaries to pack the Yerba Buena Center for Steve Jobs’ “Let’s Rock” in San Francisco on September 9th.

The now-familiar rumors and speculation, with “leaked” photos and drawings that precede these Apple “events” have been flying back and forth for weeks, and soon enough we’ll see how all the pieces fit together. Join us on Tuesday as we twitter the proceedings.

We invite you to follow along with us as the morning unfolds, using the keynote bingo card below to keep track of both likely and rumored items that could appear during the presentation.

Amazon.com is now offering what it calls “instant ad-free movies and TV shows” on Macs, PCs and Sony BRAVIA TV sets at the newly re-branded “Amazon Video On Demand” website.

A few months ago, consumers greeted the giant webertainment service’s “Unbox” partnership with TiVo with a collective yawn, due mainly to complaints about the lack of on-demand streaming options, according to the director of Amazon Video On Demand, Roy Price, who says “the ability to watch content instantly without downloading first was among the most requested features of our customers, and now it’s live–customers can instantly watch the ad-free title of their choice “¦”

Some promotional videos are free and you can preview the first 2 minutes of any offering. Episodes of TV shows cost $1.99 and movies are $14.99. Movies can also be ‘rented’ for 24 hours for $3.99. Purchasing allows download to two machines and unlimited viewing online. The service claims to stock over 14 thousand movies and 1,200 TV shows including pre-purchase-able rights to upcoming seasons.

Amazon claims to be the only digital video service in the US offering the choice of streaming as well as downloading webertainment content.

Shouldn’t the Dems be on the Left and the Repubs on the Right?

Just in case you didn’t get enough of the Democratic and Republican conventions from the mainstream media during the past fortnight, Apple has kindly made the speeches from both conventions available for free on iTunes. The collections include audio files for almost every speaker as well as audio and video for the more prominent ones.

Given how often politicians are known to be for something before they are against it, these could come in handy someday.

I just caught the “Pizza Box” Get a Mac spot during the Top Design premiere, and it struck me. Not because it’s particularly brilliant — it hits the same mark exactly that all the other college-related Apple ads have lately — but because I realized it was the first time I had actually paid attention to a Get a Mac ad in almost three months.

Nor have I talked about one with anybody in more than a year. People don’t even get upset about it or make parody ads anymore. PC and Mac have been up there so long that I’m expecting them to introduce their children at any minute. Worse than being annoying or controversial, Apple’s core Mac marketing campaign has become the one thing the Cupertino Collective can never allow itself to be: boring.

Apple’s been here before. Switch had its (rather desperate) day. Think Different saved Apple during its darkest times. But each of them eventually outlived its usefulness based on where Apple was as an organization.

Today, Apple has become a powerhouse in media and a top-three computer maker. The iPhone is poised to become as ubiquitous as the iPod. And Get a Mac‘s playful jabs are starting to make Apple look small. “Able to run Microsoft Office” isn’t news to anyone who could be swayed by a TV ad. What’s the next narrative? How does Apple start its next growth curve, whether through marketing or design?

If you’ve accumulated any amount of gadgetry in the past several years you may consider from time to time the carbon footprint you lay down charging their batteries up every day and overnight.

Well, if designer Vivien Muller ever gets production funding for her concept solar charger, you’ll be able to rest easy and get visitors talking about your impeccable taste in futuristic decor.

Via Gizmodo

Although not a Mac itself, iPhone instigated a major shift in the personal computing market not unlike the original Mac, and its arrival has propelled Apple’s remarkable turnaround onward–the one started by the Bondi Blue iMac, itself something of a successor to the original Mac. Therefore, at the very least, iPhone deserves to be on this list, because its success means a healthier Apple, which in turn means healthier Macs. However, it also has to be on this list, because iPhone undoubtedly provides a glimpse of what the future of the Mac will be.

Craig Grannell:
Of our list of 25 Mac moments, this is one of the most contentious for me. The iPhone is not a Mac. Its operating system is OS X, rather than Mac OS X. And the only obvious relationship it has with a Mac is that a typical iPhone user is somewhat likely to plug their iPhone into one at some point.

However, some commentators argue that the iPhone is effectively the next-generation of the Mac, and even if that isn’t the case, it’s pretty clear Apple’s smartphone is in one sense a sounding board for the future of its company, and that technology from the device will eventually trickle down to future Macs. And for that reason, iPhone justifies its place in our top 25 Mac moments.

Pete Mortensen: As an audience member when Jobs took the wraps off the iPhone, the biggest impact that it left on me was this: that Apple’s business plan was not just a pattern of steady upgrades across an established product portfolio. This was a company prepared to not just make the best media players and computers in the world, but one that was prepared to bring about world-changing innovations that are years ahead of the competition. It was confirmation, once and for all, that the iPod was never a fluke, but a signal that Apple could do something far more than what it was doing today.

In short, the iPhone made it exciting to think about where Apple is capable of going in the next five years.

Leigh McMullen: See now, I absolutely believe that iPhone is a Macintosh. It’s more powerful than all but the top of the line Macs from the 2002-2003 era.   As we move more towards “cloud computing” processing power “in hand” becomes less important than connectivity and functionality. iPhone may just be a phone / ipod / camera / blender today, but it is also very much the future of both Apple and Macintosh.

Photographer Pat St. Clair has a couple more panoramic images from Thursday’s big night for the Democratic Party at Invesco field in Denver.

Above is a still shot from his vantage point near the Jumbotron behind the media pavillions. St. Clair made it from three fisheye images stitched and interpreted usung PTGui Pro 7.8 on a McBook Pro. The original size image is here.

Go here for a dynamic four-image shot that captures the enormity of that historic evening.

Unlike St. Clair, I was in Denver without the benefit of a Press Pass or professional photographic equipment and struggled to capture my own memories with the rudimentary camera in my iPhone.

Judge for yourself the quality of the iPhone’s camera by clicking on the gallery thumbnails. Large pics and descriptions after the jump.

The hilariously named VPILF.com — a site devoted to Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin — is made on a Mac, which is excuse enough to mention it here.

More importantly, Palin supports the teaching of creationism in public schools, according to Wired.com.

Photographer Pat St. Clair shot a super-cool QuickTime panoramic photo from last night’s historic session of the Democratic Party’s convention at the Pepsi Center in Denver, CO.

Working on assignment for LightSpeed Media, St. Clair shot the DNC image using a new Canon XSi with a Sigma 8mm f3.5 circular fisheye lens. It was four shots around on a custom rig, with the camera set to ISO 1600 and aperture priority metering.

He shot RAW files, used Photoshop Camera Raw to render them to tiffs, stitched the panorama in PTGui Pro 7.8. and authored the final pan in Cubic Converter, all on a MacBook Pro.

Apple wants to know what you’re thinking about your new iPhone 3G and has been sending out email surveys asking questions such as where you’ve gone for iPhone help, whether you’ve returned your handset to your carrier for repair or replacement, whether you primarily use Windows or Mac, whether you primarily use your iPhone for work or play, whether it’s your first Apple product, and general demographic info.

The company promises not to use your responses to sell you products or services.

Via iPhoneBlog