Cult of Mac

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As the frenzy commences on iPad 2 Friday, this image from The Register last week seems to sum up the zeitgeist of the moment nicely. Apple launch days are always amazing. Got your new iPad yet?

I plan to wait a bit myself. But that’s what I said when the original iPad came out too, that didn’t last long…

[via The Register]

Remember when logicboards were one of the biggest components of a computer? Not any more.

An iFixit teardown of the iPad 2 reveals a logicboard the size of a couple of matchbooks. By contrast, the three batteries consume almost all the interior space.

The teardown is being published live on the iFixit site.

The iPad 2 isn’t easy to open, iFixit says: it’s sealed with a ton of glue.

Here’s a couple more shots of the internals:

Almost shamefully, I’ve waited in line on launch day for every iPhone and iPad. Each waiting experience has had it’s highs and lows. All have definitely been memorable, but today’s takes the cake. Waiting in line at Apple’s Store at Biltmore Fashion Park in Phoenix, I was surprised to run into Phoenix Suns basketball player Mickael Pietrus waiting at the front of the line to get his hands on the iPad 2.

Today is iPad 2 day and like the rest of you I got up early today. I’d say way to early since it was 2:45 am CST and I was surprised to find out that my alarm clock on my iPhone 4 could be set to such an early hour. The engineers at Apple HQ in Cupertino could not have done a better job on that alarm, but for once I was wishing they’d screwed it up since I think it should be a crime for an alarm clock to ring before 5:00 am.

Feast your eyes on this gorgeous combination of old and new, as photographed and (at least in part) brought bang up-to-date by Pedro Moura Pinheiro.

It’s an original Power Mac G4 Cube, circa 2000, but with a few modifications to its insides. The original 450MHz G4 processor and 256MB of RAM have been replaced with dual G4 chips and 1.5GB of RAM. Those changes were made by its original owner, but Pedro wanted to take things a step further when he bought the machine. It’s now zippy enough to run Photoshop CS4 without any trouble.

Pedro says: “The only thing I did was get an Intel 40GB SSD, place it in an external Firewire 400 enclosure, and install Leopard on it – basically, Firewire 400 is much faster than the internal IDE interface, so the speed benefit is greater than trying to install an IDE SSD inside the Cube.”

He knows what he’s talking about. Check out this stop-motion video of him dismantling, then re-assembling, a G4 iMac. Great stuff.

College student Amanda Foote sold her place at the head of the iPad line at Apple’s 5th Ave. store for $900.

Who did she sell it to? The guy right next to her apparently. Why? No one knows.

She camped out for two nights for the $900. She plans to buy tickets to Lady Gaga.

More at Mashable.

“line is around the block” — Paul Arrington in Charlestown, SC.

“Hmmm, I wonder what these could be?!?” — Joey Egan at Apple Flagship Store in San Francisco.

“Its crazy how many ppl r standing in line 4 the new iPad,” tweets Tracie Cooke-Wilkes from the Oxmoor Mall in Louisville, Kentucky.

Here are some more pictures from around the U.S.:

Send your own to [email protected] and we’ll post them up.

If you’re thinking of visiting Target for an iPad 2 later today, better think again.

We just got a report from the stockroom of one Target store, which has only five iPad 2s in stock for sale at 5PM today. They are all 64GB, WiFi-only models in black.

An employee at the store just sent us the following message with the picture above:

“stockroom we only got 5 of the 64gb wifi only black models insulting right.

Stock levels at big box retailers like Target and Best Buy were expected to be much lower than Apple’s retail stores, but this is shockingly low.

It’s not clear if this is the inventory level at all Target stores, but I’d say it’s typical. Apple is offering the iPad 2 for sale at about 10 different retailers, so stocks are likely to be stretched thin. Obviously, retailers are keeping their inventory levels secret: they don’t want to scare potential shoppers away.

The Target employee summed it up nicely: “Better off waitin outside apple or best buy.”

We close out another week of deals with probably one of the most-awaited items on the recent past: the iPad 2. The next-generation Apple tablet is said to improve on the original device, released last year. Apple is selling a 16GB Wi-Fi version of the tablet for $499. Online sales are already underway, while brick-and-mortar retailers will offer the gadget later today.

Also on tap: a 1.33GHz iBook G4 laptop for just $240. Finally, whether your own an iPad, an iBook or other Apple computer, they all need some maintenance and optimization. MacUpdate.com has a deal on Coctail 4, a software toolkit to get or keep your Mac in tip-top shape. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

The president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank came under fire after a comment that sounds oddly like the 2.0 version of “Let them eat cake.”

President William Dudley was peppered with questions about food prices from the public during a meet-and-greet session with business leaders in Flushing, Queens. As they asked him about issues of the day, ranging from oil prices to employment forecasts, they began to accuse him of being out of touch.

As he tried to explain how rising commodity prices translate into supermarket sticker shock, the audience asked him when he actually did his own food shopping last.

In a few short hours, the iPad 2 will go on sale at Apple Stores and approved retailers across the country, and if you’re anything like us, you’re probably discouraged by the up to three week wait times on online orders. Maybe you’re even considering dropping by an Apple Store after work and seeing if you can’t pick up an iPad 2 then. What are the lines like, though?

Short answer: it’s all over the place, but in front of most Apple Stores, there are lines, often substantial ones. New York’s Apple Store lines are reportedly crazy, and even at lesser known Apple Store locations like this one in Indianapolis, people have been reportedly lining up since 4am.

Where there don’t seem to be as many lines is at the big box retailers selling iPads: Wal-Marts, Best Buys, AT&T Stores and the like. Searching Twitter, it appears that at a lot of big box retailers, there are no lines at all… even where a line waiting area has been set up for the iPad 2.

All of this is anecdotal though. What about you guys? Where are you seeing lines for the iPad 2, and how long are they? Please drop us a comment if you’ve seen a line (or a conspicuous lack of one). At the very least, you might be able to help a fellow Apple fan out.

The UK-based ARM Holdings, which produces chips for about 95 percent of the tablet market, would seem to be nervously biting its corporate fingernails on chatter that Apple’s supreme dominance of the sector could leave component manufacturers for competing devices high-and-dry. Instead, the company’s stock is up on analyst comments dismissing the concern.

Recently, JPMorgan Research warned investors rival tablet makers could see almost 50 percent of their devices unsold amid Apple’s dominant market position. Such talk naturally spurred worries in the component manufacturing arena potentially producing parts for devices that won’t sell. Pshaw, replied an RBS analyst Friday.

Although online sales began just a few hours ago and brick-and-mortar sales of the iPad 2 are set for later Friday, analysts already are expecting Apple’s new tablet to outsell the original device. The Cupertino, Calif. company could sell 600,000 iPad 2s this weekend – double the 300,000 first-generation iPads sold during its first 24-hours of availability.

“Apple has such a huge lead,” Creative Strategies’ analyst Tim Bajarin told Bloomberg News early today. “Competitors are going to be chasing Apple for many years,” he adds.

The only way to ensure that you have an iPad 2 today is to buy one from one of the many retail outlets. However, all retailers are not treated equally, so I’ll be giving you the run down on the best places to purchase your iPad 2 from.

Your best, hassle-free bet is to pick one up from an Apple Specialist. Here’s why:

Boom. A mere three hours after it first went up for order, iPad 2 shipping times have already slipped from 3-5 business days to 5-7 business days.

What does this mean? Exactly what we thought it meant when Apple refused to take preorders before release to begin with: Apple knew they couldn’t satisfy demand for a nine day preorder. They’ve got constrained supply.

If you want an iPad 2, either prepare to get in line or order it now. That shipping time is only going to rise as the day goes on… I wouldn’t be surprised to see it hit 2-4 weeks by the end of the day.

Edit: As of 8:38am, it’s now 2-3 weeks shipping date. Hope you got your order in, guys.

Apple’s obsession with thinness is well-known, but its latest patents might be one of the company’s most interesting pursuits of that obsession yet: they describe Apple’s attempts to make an iPod thinner than the headphone jack you have to plug into it.

The patents describe various ways to make this idea work. For example, one patent describes an audio socket that’s less than fully circular, allowing a portion of the jack to actually protrude from the socket. Another mention a flexible material covering the opening of a semi-circular socket that would expand when a jack was inserted. The last method uses a hinged housing, or two doors that swing open, when a jack is inserted.

This isn’t the first patent we’ve seen from Apple for smaller audio jacks. In September of last year, we reported on an apple patent that used deflectable pogo pins instead of cantilever beams inside of a headphone socket, making it even smaller. At the time, we lamented that Apple’s efforts in miniaturizing the headphone socket were necessarily limited by the size of the headphone jack itself… but it looks like Apple’s figured out a way around even that.

Applejack is a command-line application for rescuing your computer when disaster strikes, or threatens to strike.

Don’t let the “command-line” bit frighten you off. Applejack is probably the easiest-to-use command-line application I’ve ever seen. It was built for ordinary people to use, and won’t bamboozle you with geekspeak.

The popular Flipboard app was updated on Wednesday, adding Instagram support and search across social networks. But it also included a surprise for users with jailbroken iPads.

Is this the iPhone 5? iDealsChina sure seems to think so. They say this is an engineering diagram of the next-generation iPhone, and while it shares the same form factor as the iPhone 4, there’s one obvious difference: a larger display made possible by shaving the side bezels down to the thickness of a razor blade.

Writer’s notes: this handy dandy guide was made with love to help you with your purchase of the iPad 2. If you’re looking to buy “the new iPad” which will be released on March 16th, 2012, click this pretty link for our updated guide.

We’ve been getting a lot of questions from readers and friends over which iPad 2 you should buy. Should you go with WiFi only, or the 3G version for when you’re not around a hotspot? How much storage do you need? And most importantly, how do you choose between black or white?

The answer is that you should get the 16GB WiFi-only model in black. Here’s why:

iMovie and GarageBand — two of the most exciting new applications for the iPad — went live in the App Store yesterday, and although GarageBand is supported on the first-generation iPad, iMovie unfortunately isn’t. There is a workaround, however, and you don’t need to jailbreak!

Just a few minutes ago, after a nine day wait, the iPad 2 went up for order… and even if you dropped you order within seconds of them becoming available, Apple’s estimated shipping delay was between 3-5 business days. Worse, free shipping is your only option with the iPad 2: there’s no way to overnight it.

For a guy like me, the fact that the iPad 2 won’t be shipping out for almost another week was a problem. I have an obvious professional interest in having an iPad 2 as quickly as possible. Yet as I considered my options, I ended up hitting the order button anyway, because I just don’t think I can be part of the Apple Store launch day spectacle this time.

If you’re up right this second, there can only be one possible reason: to order the iPad 2. As you can see from the image above, iPad 2’s went up for order a little before 1AM PT / 4AM ET. All models came with an estimated 3-5 business days shipping delay, and there is no option to get overnight shipping: free shipping is the only option.

The only problem? Seconds after making the above order, the order page appears to be down again. Was 3-5 business days delivery just a technical blip, and will the iPad 2 come back up sometime soon with a more aggressive shipping date? Or is Apple already sold out? (Edit: Nope! Back up again, with the same 3-5 business days estimate!)

We’ll keep you updated. Anyone grab their iPad 2 yet? Which one’d you end up ordering and why?

Steve Jobs has jumped almost 40 places on Forbes’ list of the World’s Billionaires. He is the 43 ^rd richest person in the U.S. and the 110^th richest in the world.

Jobs’ net worth has jumped almost $2 billion in one year, from $5.5 to $8.3 billion, Forbes estimated. The leap is thanks to Apple’s surging stock, bouyed by a successful year of iPads and iPhone 4s. Jobs has been on Forbes’ 400 list for the last 11 years. He’s grown his net worth more than 500%. Not bad for a college dropout.

Here’s Jobs’ profile on Forbes, and the annual list of filthy rich.