Cult of Mac

To commemorate the launch of the official Steve Jobs biography in Taiwan, a bookseller handed out apples and bags printed with two portraits of the Apple co-founder.

You were supposed to be dressed in a Steve-esque black turtleneck to get the snack and commemorative bag at bookchain Eslite, but as the guy holding his bag wearing a Steve McQueen t-shirt shows, the rules for the giveaway weren’t strictly observed. (Or maybe all Steves look alike?)

The news comes to us from tireless Steve Jobs spotter Dan Bloom, who notes that Eslite’s sales of the bio are expected to outstrip Harry Potter.

Now that’s truly magical.

Via Dan Bloom

Here’s a question for the nervous flyers: would you be reassured to know that an iPad was scheduling your plane’s upkeep?

Flightdocs, a Florida-based company that helps airlines keep track of the moving parts that keep the friendly skies safe, has just launched an iPad app.

Brent Schlender has worked for a number of publications over the years, and has served in positions like lead technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Now serving as a contributor for Fortune, Schlender has covered Steve Jobs for the past 25 years on numerous occasions.

In a recent article on Fortune, Schlender tells of “chapters in his [Jobs’s] story I was never able to tell, either because they would violate a personal confidence or because what I had learned didn’t really fit into a typical analytical business story.”

Some particularly fond memories of Jobs are included in Schlender’s anecdotes, including Jobs’s plan to ‘fix’ AOL in 2003, the time he previewed the original Toy Story to a group of kids, and when he decided to take extended medical leave from Apple in 2008.

“BOOM!” That’s what Steve Jobs said when he demoed the Slide to Unlock gesture on the iPhone in January of 2007. Whether you’re on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you always have to slide your finger across that slider to get past the Lock screen. It’s become a staple aspect of iOS and Apple’s mobile products.

The United States Patent & Trademark Office granted Apple the patent for Slide to Unlock today. This means that no other company can use the gesture without infringing on Apple’s new patent. Boom.

Friends sometimes tell me I have a hollow leg, but they don’t really mean it: they just mean that my rampant alcoholism is frequently imperceptible. If it were literally true that I had a hollow leg, I’d probably be tempted to do something crazy with it… like, say, run an Apple Dock Connector up through it and turn my upper calf into an easily accessible iPhone dock.

That’s why I’m so green with envy reading this Telegraph story about Trevor Prideaux, a British man born without a left arm who modified his prosthetic to be a smartphone dock. The only problem? He crammed a Nokia in there, not an iPhone!

Popular accessory maker Twelve South has announced the “BassJump 2” USB subwoofer for Mac. Packing 8 more decibels of crystal clear sound and a sleek, aluminum build that Apple would be proud of, the BassJump 2 is an excellent Mac accessory for music lovers.

The BassJump 2 works with the Mac’s built-in audio to enhance the user’s listening experience with deeper and richer sounds.

Although for many years Macworld was the place where Apple showed off their new products, the company decided to orphan the expo in January 2009, claiming trade shows were now superfluous with the dawning of the Internet.

Of course, Macworld’s recreated itself since then as a place for third-party companies to show off their wares, but as Apple has increasingly emphasized its iOS side of the business, the Macworld name has started seeming anachronistic.

You probably won’t be surprised what Macworld’s organizer’s are renaming the conference. You may be surprised at what a charmless mouthful it all is, though.

During the initial iPhone 4S buzz we told you that Apple’s newest smartphone is among a class of new devices with Bluetooth 4.0. Apple’s most recent MacBook Airs and Mac minis also sport the technology.

Bluetooth 4.0 has been rebranded as “Bluetooth Smart” and “Bluetooth Smart Ready.” The technology focuses on low-energy consumption and will be present in all kinds of consumer products moving forward.

Did you buy a song off of iTunes for $1.29 before May 2010 with an iTunes Gift Card that said each song cost only $0.99? Thanks to the efforts of lawyers at Kurtzman Carson Consultants, you may be eligible for a class-action payout!

Make room in your piggy bank: you could be up to three dollars and twenty-five cents richer today than you were yesterday!

The class action lawsuit basically deals with iTunes Gift Cards that had been purchased when Apple was transitioning to $1.29 iTunes plus DRM-free songs from their previous standard of $0.99 DRM-protected tracks.

The cards claimed that each iTunes track only sold for about a buck, when actually, Apple had jacked the price of their songs by thirty cents. The class-action lawsuit filed by Gabriel Johnson in July 2009 claimed that consumers became confused by the discrepancy, and deserved their money back.

It seems ridiculous — Apple clearly wasn’t trying to rip anyone off — but the lawsuit continued for the past two years. It has now finally been reconciled, with both parties agreeing to settle out of court to prevent future expense.

If you’d like to file for your three bucks, head on over to Kurtzman Carson Consultants.

Forty percent of Blackberry owners say they want to switch to another smartphone. Following a service outage and an upcoming move to a new operating system, business professionals surveyed in the U.K. see Apple as the preferred alternative to trouble-plagued Research in Motion.

A poll of over five thousand consumers aged eight to twenty-four has found that Apple is the most popular electronic brand in America today.

Not that it’s in particularly flattering company. In fact, just looking at the companies kids today like, it seems as if most of our nation’s youth spend the majority of their time gorging themselves on junk food. Go figure!

In Apple’s own soothing Siri commercial, dozens of beautiful people living in utopian cityscapes and country vistas effortlessly interact with their iPhone 4Ses as if they were confabbing with the most soliciting of manservants.

In real life, though, things aren’t quite so pretty, as TBS’s Conan O’Brien is quick to point out in this hysterical parody video in which Apple’s original ad is intercut with two disheveled grossies asking Siri to direct them towards the fastest way to Diarrheatown, or compute the circumference of their manhoods.

It is, I’m sorry to say, a perhaps accurate depiction of at least my iPhone 4S post-launch Saturday night.

Back in 2001, a freelance copywriter named Vinnie Chieco who was hired to help Apple come up with a name for their MP3 player took one look at the device and exclaimed: “Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL!” And thus, the iPod was christened.

Chieco was making a tongue-in-cheek pop reference to Stanley Kubrick’s transcendental sci-fi masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a ship’s onboard AI, HAL 9000, makes an evolutionary leap after coming in radio contact with a monolith circling Jupiter. Acting erratically, HAL 9000 eventually lashes out, revealing a murderous new self-preservation instinct when his human charges want to shut him down.

Perhaps because HAL isn’t exactly cinema’s most touchy-feely computer, Apple wasn’t willing to embrace the association between 2001 and the iPod line. But now that HAL’s soothingly detached cadence and artificial intelligence capabilities have been mimicked by Siri, perhaps it’s time to revisit the connection with ThinkGeek’s new Iris 9000 voice control module that will let you Siri from across the room… or trapped on the opposite side of the pod bay doors rocketing through deep space.

Make HAL proud and help Siri touch the monolith. It only costs $59.99.

Add free hotel Wi-Fi to the list of services Apple’s iPad is making a thing of the past. The bad thing about the iPad being the best-selling gadget on the planet is, paradoxically, that the iPad is the best selling gadget on the planet. Turns out, the iPad sucks up quadruple the amount of wireless bandwidth as a smartphone — and hotels want to start metering your usage.

Six weeks before it officially goes on sale, Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire is shaping up to be the biggest tablet launch ever… and Cult of Android has the numbers to prove it.

A verified source within the Seattle based online retail giant has provided Cult of Android with exclusive screenshots of Amazon’s internal inventory management system Alaska (Availability Lookup and SKU Aggregator).

These leaked shoots show that orders for Amazon’s Android-based tablet are racking up at an average rate of over 2,000 units per hour, or over 50,000 per day.

In the five days since Amazon put the Kindle Fire up on their official site, over 250,000 tablets have been preordered. If this level of consumer demand for the Kindle Fire continues, Amazon will have 2.5 million preorders for the device before it officially goes on sale on November 15th.

Those numbers make the Kindle Fire’s launch likely to be the biggest tablet launch in history, beating both the iPad and iPad 2 in first month sales.

Having acquired the movie rights to Walter Isaacson’s authorized Steve Jobs biography earlier this month, Sony is now looking for a writer that can deliver Steve’s story to the big screen. At the top of the company’s wish list, according to a report from The LA Times, is Aaron Sokin, the writer behind The Social Network.

Steve Jobs’s quest for perfection was pursued down to the smallest details. It made him the father of some of the greatest products and interfaces in computer history.

As Walter Isaacson’s new biography on Steve Jobs makes clear, though, it could also sometimes make him nightmarish to live with… the sort of obsessive who could make even the most mundane seemingly household decisions into maddening, endless debates.

Depending on where you stand, a recent mobile advertising study was good news for Apple or Android. While Apple’s iPad and iPhone were the most connected devices for advertising, Google’s Android was the leading smartphone operating system, according to the report.

Tony Fadell is often referred to as the ‘father of the iPod’. He’s a former Apple engineer who helped develop Apple’s first portable music player along with Jeff Robbin, and he’s just announced a new 100-person startup called Nest Labs.

Having been a former DJ and overseeing 18 iterations of the iPod and the three generations of the iPhone, we’ve been keen to find out what Fadell and his company have been working on. But it isn’t a revolutionary new music player or communication device. It’s a thermostat.

While Apple is yet to open its iOS 5 Notification Center up to third-party widgets, developers have been hard at work creating awesome tweaks that can be installed on jailbroken devices. One of the best is a tweak called WeeSpaces, which makes it easier than ever to multitask on an iOS device.

First a China supplier of MacBook unibody cases was forced to spend millions on pollution cleanup, now an iPhone plant is under scrutiny for noise and gas pollution. Pegatron, just days from an investor conference, announced plans to update equipment and work closely with local residents.

Did you buy an app for your Mac that you later regret having bought? Or did you decide it was so terrible that you don’t want to be reminded about having bought it? Well, you are in luck, because now there is a way to remove purchases now from your Purchased history in the Mac App Store.

One thing you can be sure that Apple will improve with every iteration of its iPhone is the device’s camera. The original iPhone packed a 2-megapixel camera that wasn’t all that great at taking photos; things got significantly better two generations later with the iPhone 3GS. The 5-megapixel camera in the iPhone 4 received a ton of praise, but its 8-megapixel successor in the iPhone 4S is even more terrific.

So terrific, in fact, that the developer behind the hugely successful Camera+ application for the iPhone, Lisa Bettany, says the device “outshines” many of the high-end compact cameras currently on the market.

Apple’s iPhone 4S has been a huge success for Sprint since its launch on October 14, breaking both opening day sales and activation records. For many customers, however, life with the latest iPhone on Sprint isn’t all that fun, with painfully slow data speeds throttling the iPhone’s capabilities when away from a Wi-Fi connection. According to the carrier, however, its data speeds match those offered by its competitors.

Bloomberg reports that the original creator of iTunes, Jeff Robbin, is allegedly working on Apple’s upcoming TV set. Robbin also helped co-launch the original iPod with Tony Fadell.

The report cites “three people with knowledge of the project” and notes that Robbin’s involvement is “a sign of Apple’s commitment to extending its leadership in smartphones and tablets into the living room.”