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Video and lyrics by Anthony Sigalos. I have to say, voice synthesis program Alex doesn’t really deliver much emotion, does he?

Via Fake Steve

Not content to chronicle the fake life of Fake Steve Jobs, author Daniel Lyons has expanded his scope a bit this week by introducing guest blogger Fake Bono of U2, who showed up to present the totally non-existent White Beatles and Product (RED) U2 iPhones. The Beatles model comes with the complete Beatles catalog, plus the band’s solo work, and the U2 model comes with all of Rock and Roll. Read for yourself:

Edge and I hate to be left behind, so we’ve come up with an even bigger idea we’re going to pitch right here where Steve has to read it. Why just buy the Beatles? What you really want is to buy rock and roll. All of it. Presenting the U2 Rock and Roll iPhone. 64 gigabytes of Product (RED) iPhone packed with all of rock and roll. Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, Sabbath, U2 of course, plus Nirvana and Pearl Jam all the way up to the complete Arcade Fire and Mike Doughty. If it rocks, it’s in here.

Yeah. Seven posts in all, and now Fake Steve has posted an elaborate tale of account hackery to explain how Bono seized control in the first place. All in good fun. Nice Thanksgiving prank.

Via iPhone Savior 

Being in an extended turkey coma this morning, I didn’t quite get out of bed early enough to hit the brand-new Apple Store in San Francisco’s Marina, but fortunately the amazing SFist (t-shirt picture) and IFO Apple Store (all else) were all over the opening. Based on the reportage, it sounds pretty stunning. And hey, 1000 free t-shirts!

Gary Allen of IFO Apple Store had a lot of nice things to say:

The store is definitely unique, combining individual features from various stores–or no stores at all. The facade lacks the usual stainless steel and uses white masonry like the Lincoln Road store. The ceiling is about 15 feet tall, unlike any other store. There are no window displays, which would obscure the view of the store interior. And the suspended Apple logo duplicates the Fifth Avenue store. It definitely establishes a presence for Apple in another neighborhood of San Francisco.

Nice. You have to love Apple’s commitment to not stand still with their Apple Store recipe. Each store has its own unique qualities. Fabulous.

Is there anything more re-assuring in life than knowing that Fake Steve keeps being funny even after the disclosure of his true identity? He’s now featuring simply hysterical Zune 2 parodies with custom backs poking fun at Microsoft and a certain dancing CEO…

Just in case you don’t already have plans to get trampled at Best Buy or Target this Friday, Apple announced that it will open its third San Francisco store at the end of this week. Though it’s highly unlikely that the shop will offer any $25 BluRay players from Taiwan, Apple usually provides goodie bags to the first bunch of customers at its newest stores, even when it doesn’t tie into the scariest shopping day of the year. Anyone going to be in line? Anyone already in line? Get in touch if you want to share the experience. The madness starts at 9 a.m.

Via AppleInsider
Picture from Fireside Camera’s Flickrstream

Few ad campaigns inspired as much mockery as “Dude, You’re Getting a Dell!?!” which plagued the airwaves for years in the late ’90s and earlier part of this decade. Essentially, an annoying looking guy, played by Ben Curtis, would yell out the stupid catchphrase, and then people would pretend to be excited that they were receiving a cut-rate PC with all the classy styling of a kitchen wastebasket. But times change, and stars get fired for marijuana possession, and Curtis has now turned up as a waiter at Tortilla Flats in New York. My friends over at New York Magazine have the exclusive interview.

What’s the most extreme reaction you’ve gotten?
There was a group of women in their early forties, one of whom was bawling. I walk over and they said, “Our friend just passed away. We thought you might be able to cheer [us] up, we know who you are and you’re an incredible human and you’ve been through a lot and you’re an incredible actor. We’re all DEA agents, and we think you should smoke as much pot as you want to. And we love you.”

Well, you would have to, to get excited about about a Dell.

Via Engadget.

Technorati Tags: dell, dufus, karma

Few people, other than Michael Scott on “The Office,” like Applebee’s. Recognizing this, the company just redid its logo, and, well, it kind of looks like Apple’s logo.

Applebee’s Old Logo:

Applebee’s New Logo:


Apple’s logo. The main similarity I see is in the font. A bit too close for comfort. Thoughts, Apple legal?

Applebee’s images via BrandCurve.
Apple logo courtesy Pycomall

Our pals over at Wired’s Gadget Lab have gathered together 15 of the most foul-smelling Apple forecasts ever, including a number of hits from the ever-prescient Rob Enderle. This is my all-time favorite:

Hewlett Packard iPod To Be a Winner

“The expectation on the iPod is that HP’s version will probably outsell Apple’s version relatively quickly.” Rob Enderle, quoted in MacObserver in August 2004.

The whole list is hilarious. It still doesn’t include my favorite of all time, delivered by (among many others) Cliff Joseph, which was that in 1998 Apple was ready to move into the Internet Set-Top Box game with a sub-$1000 product called “Columbus.” This was a done deal. As you might recall, Columbus was the iMac.

Check the list and report back. Any you think they missed?

I didn’t keep up on the Apple-related halloween costumes as well as I like to, but I did see one that I thought you guys just had to see. It’s Bobby Hartman and Reko Rivera as a pair of iPhones with functioning displays. According to the page about their costumes (weighing in at 60 pounds and using LCD-TVs hooked up to Video iPods for their feeds), Reko is a DJ, so this is all old hat to him.

The clip is killer.

Thanks, Scott!

I love the NBC and Apple feud so much. Sometimes, the companies overtly bash each other. For every other moment, there’s fun speculation. Take for instance, the latest volley, which likely has nothing to do with the epic rumble between Jeff Zucker and Steve Jobs, but it’s fun to pretend otherwise. Here’s the set-up: NBC’s Saturday Night Live had a sketch featuring an iPhone that Gizmodo believes to have the illicit installer app that graces all jailbroken iPhones — and then, today, Apple issues iPhone firmware 1.1.2 on UK iPhones, which closes the exploit that enables the current group of jailbreaks. Coincidence? Or distant shots in a hundred-years war?

(No further word on features for 1.1.2. Best not to install for now.)

Via digg.

Illusionist Andrew Mayne is using a special filter in iChat to make it look like he’s bored to death or his soul is being ripped out.

It’s pretty effective.

Check his page for video of the effects in action.

Instructions for using the quartz filter called “HoloGit” is here on MacRumors.

Remember when Mac OS X only ran on Macs? That era is a thing of the past, as a group of hackers have already managed to install Leopard on vanilla PCs, with only a modicum of effort required. As DailyApps reports:

Well its been only a day since the Mac OSX Leopard was released officially by Apple and the hackers have managed to create a patched DVD that everyone like you and me can use to install Leopard on PC’s without having to buy a Mac. Please note the tutorial that I am going to post is still experimental and things might not work the right way simply because it is still early days in hacking Leopard to work on PC’s. Well if you don’t mind your PC getting screwed then go ahead and try out this tutorial.

I always expected that this was a possible consequence of Apple’s shift to Intel processors, but this still boggles the mind. Has anyone else tried to non-suckify their Wintel box yet? And does the vibrant iPhone hacker community have anything to do with this change?

Hack Attack : Install Leopard on your PC in 3 easy steps! | dailyApps
Via Laughing Squid

Tags: leopard, hacks

Do you Hulu? Well, you might just be the only one. Hulu is the new, still closed-to-the-public video service from NBC and the Fox network’s parent company. Originally mooted as a corporate-friendly alternative to Youtube’s freewheeling territory, recent events have helped position the site as a competitor to the iTunes Store, Cable On-Demand Service, and even a floorwax/dessert topping. Though the parent companies involved clai that their service will immediately start to steal eyeballs from its more seasoned competition, it remains to be seen what they have to offer that, you know, everyone else doesn’t already deliver.

A private beta of the service launched this morning, though they haven’t sent me an invite yet (I registered in August). But check out this screenshot from the home page, I mean where else are you going to go to check out reruns of “Pretender” or “Rob & Amber.” Steve Jobs must be quaking in his boots right now.

Anyone gotten in the door yet? Is it corporate-tacular?

Hulu, NBC-News Corp Online Service Launches GigaOM

Tags: tv, hulu, itunes

Watch this video interview with MS CEO Steve Ballmer and see if you don’t conclude he’s a coke head.
Ballmer sniffs and snorts throughout and he’s constantly rubbing his nose as if he’s dying to take giant snot snorts.
If you were sitting in a bar with him, there’d be no doubt he just did a couple of fat rails.

As promised in Friday’s NY Times, Apple aired an updated and official version of Nick Haley’s brilliant homemade iPod Touch commercial. I caught it during the pre-game for the World Series. Apple calls the spot “Nylon,” which is a search term during the Safari demo they show. The commercial is very faithful to Haley’s ad, but with a few additions. From what I can tell, the new stuff includes showing a Foo Fighters video, lingering a bit longer on a web page, and then really emphasizing iTunes online. Other than that, it’s the same.

Watch Apple’s official version here, and then click through to watch Nick’s ad for comparison.

Oh, Apple. You shouldn’t have. It’s far too accurate (discovered by David R. Perek)

Via Digg.

Having spent a lot of time on Twitter (You can follow my goings-on there for up-to-the-second mac thoughts) now, I’m starting to get a sense of the community. As I poked around, I found that the micro-blogging community (or “Presence” app, to be buzz-wordy) is full of people posing as Steve Jobs — 7 in all. Consider this post the official guide to the Many Steves of Twitter.

1. Fake “Fake Steve Jobs”
Seen above, an earlier Twitterer claimed the territory of the web’s most famous fake CEO in micro form — only he’s obviously not the real Fake Steve Jobs — he isn’t half the writer of the genuine artificial article: ” Backstage – having some probs with the Powerpoint to Keynote file convertor. I wonder if they notice if we used Powerpoint (on Vista…hmmm)” Pathetic.

For the rest of the list, read on…

Anyone who has followed Apple for long has seen activists from Greenpeace or other environmental groups bash the company’s use of toxic or difficult to recycle materials in its products. The company recently trashed Apple’s iPhone for what it claimed were extraordinarily high levels of toxic chemicals the company had pledged to stop using. Of course, Apple only promised to stop using them by the end of 2008, so…

Those clever troublemakers over at Gizmodo cited an industry group that challenged Greenpeace’s methods for determining the contents of the iPhone — they only detected Bromine, not which compounds were present. This led to a lot of furor from Greenpeace, as you can imagine. The rebuttal is quite long, but the last quote from its spokesperson is worth the reading:

If you think we just protest against Apple then look out for soon a report covering a wide range of manufacturers as we have done in 2006. While it might not make as many headlines as the iPhone it doesn’t mean that we are not focusing on all manufacturers to remove toxic chemicals from their products.

That sounds like an admission to me… Apple is moving out ahead of its competitors here. Maybe it would help the cause to admit that, guys…

Via Slashdot

Is the future of advertising embedded devices that measure the progress of your life? If the New York Times is right, Nike is already headed in this direction, using its relationship with Apple to move out ahead of the competion. The Nike+iPod Sport Kit is explicitly designed to provide performance feedback. Implicitly, it’s there to make Nike a constant presence in the lives of its users and drive traffic to Nike’s website.

Nike’s global sales have climbed in the last four years to more than $16 billion from $10 billion. And executives say the new type of marketing is a part of that trend.

The company plans to use the Nike+ idea in other sports categories, which could include basketball, tennis and soccer. While $29 for a Nike+ sensor hardly covers the cost of the device and the site maintenance and customer service, Mr. Edwards coolly points out that Nike+ is as much about marketing as it is about product.

People have complained since the Nike+ launched that it’s only for running. I’m glad to hear that the company is expanding into other sports. If they make a cycling model, I’m there.

Via Quantified Self

Tech Prognosticating Really Not Paying These Days [Fake Steve]

Many Methods for Free Jailbreaks on iPhone [TUAW]

Patents Point to Multitouch MacBook? [Machines That Go Bing]

GUI for iPod Classic Brought to 5G iPod [iPod Wizard]

DListed gets the pics as Woz and his lady love Kathy Griffin show up together at the new Diablo’s Cantina at the Monte Carlo in Las Vegas. I guess this is real. Weird, huh?

Via the Raw Feed.

Can you guys keep a secret? This is the first post I’ve written in more than a month that I created on my Mac. Right at the end of August, I opened my faithful 12″ Powerbook only to be greeted by the unwelcome sound of the Click of Death.

If you’ve never had a hard drive die, you might have never encountered the Click of Death. Count yourself lucky. It’s a sad sound. A heart-breaking sound. The sound of things falling apart. A tap, a skip, a whir and failure. Over and over and on into the future. And so, part way through a major writing project, my computer was beloved Mac and constant companion was rendered utterly unusable. Not immediately equipped to pay for the repair, I had to hold off until this last week to get a new drive.

I have walked in the valley of darkness, oh my brothers, and I am more convinced of the Mac’s superiority than ever. Fitted with a new drive, my little Mac feels dozens of times faster than the year-old ThinkPad I have to use at work. It just feels like being home. To make it more like home, over the course of the weekend, I’ve been restoring my Mac to just how I like it. I have five easy steps for doing it yourself, so click through to learn how.

Remember 1988? Bill McEwen certainly does. And that’s why he’s the CEO of Amiga, Inc., a little company still churning along based on the stellar reputation that Commodore’s Amiga enjoyed back in the late ’80s. For awhile there, some actually thought the Amiga would really duke it out with Apple for supremacy. And Bill McEwen still thinks it can happen, as he lays out in a baffling interview on Amiga Web:

16) You’ve claimed earlier that OS5 will be better than Mac OS X. Can you tell us in what way?

Details for OS 5 will be made public in the 4th quarter of 2007, and then you will have a much clearer understanding and I will let you decide if what I know to be true is accurate.

Also:

28) In the era of the Mac mini, iPhone, $100 laptop, and Efika, what innovative products can Amiga Inc. bring to the information technology market?

Our plans and product strategy take all of the above question items and others into account. Until I am able to show it to you, I will just have to say that there is plenty of places for Amiga to succeed.

You hear that Apple? A company that thinks this weird picture of a woman with a cell phone belongs on the front page of their website is taking the Mac mini and the iPhone into account. So there! Just consider yourself accounted for! I love true believers.

Via Slashdot

The Apple blogosphere hills are alive with the sound of rumors!

So, it’s pretty clear that Apple’s iPod and iPhone product line is locked down for the holiday season following last month’s “Beat Goes On” event, right? Right. What’s that leave for new product updates? Why, the glory of the Mac, of course.

The always-enthusiastic, rarely-on-the-money Mac OS Rumors claims that a bevy of big product announcements are coming from Apple “between now and mid-December.”

These include the MacBook Nano (another spin on the long-rumored MacBook Thin) and a rather oddly muddle rumor about both an AppleTV product line featuring optical disc drives (presumably HD-DVD or BluRay) and also a new, even smaller Mac mini replacement called the Mac nano. Now, I have to say, that sounds like exactly the same rumor to me, unless Apple really wants to position the AppleTV as a DVD-player replacement instead of a new device. Personally, I’d rather see them just install some DVR software. But really, would Apple introduce a new AppleTV with a disc slot and lower the profile of the Mac mini? They would look exactly the same.

What are you expecting for Christmas from Apple this year?

Image via Guardian.

What can send dozens of Mac-heads and Apple Geniuses running faster than a basket full of free iPhones? Why a fire alarm, of course. Sunday morning at the main Apple Store in San Francisco, everybody hit the street after a two-alarm ire cleared the space and firefighters tramped around the space.

Some Life Blog has the complete story, but the video above is worth watching just to see the parade of Apple Store employees returning to work after getting the all-clear sign. I don’t know if I’ve seen that many black T-shirts since I last went to a Raiders game!

Via SFist.