Cult of Mac

Three years after opening doors in Beijing, China has Apple’s highest-grossing stores worldwide, outselling New York’s iconic Fifth Avenue “cube” location.

“Apple has an iconic product, and they are well-positioned in China,” said Ted Dean, president of Beijing-based technology consultant BDA China told Business Week. “There is a category of consumer in China that wants the best-in-class product, and they are willing to spend to get it.”

Apple’s Fifth Avenue store sells the equivalent of a Mercedes-Benz C300 in iPods, MacBooks and iPhones per square foot and is the top-selling store on the tony street.

But the four Apple stores in China generate, on average, the highest traffic and highest revenue of any company stores in the world, Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said during the Apple earnings call recently.

Apple plans to open doors on 40-50 stores worldwide in 2011, over half of them will be outside the U.S.

Looks like we should update our bucket list of Apple stores to visit.

Via Business Week

Nokia. Remember them? They are the world’s largest seller of cell phone. But then came the iPhone and Android, and the spotlight mostly left the Espoo, Finland company. Perhaps that was the meaning behind a statement Thursday by Nokia’s CEO. “Nokia faces some significant challenges,” former Microsoft exec Stephen Elop remarked. In the memorable words of Homer Simpson: well, duhhh.

Although Elop didn’t mention Apple or Google by name, the Nokia leader obviously had them in mind when the phone maker reported a drop in net income to $1.02 billion, down from $1.29 billion during the same time last year. Additionally, Nokia’s share of the smartphone market during the last three fiscal months of 2010 fell to 31 percent, a drop from 40 percent during the fourth quarter of 2009.

A city in Northern California is crowdsourcing first responders with an iPhone app.
Called Fire Department, the app is the aimed at the 20,000 people in San Ramon trained in CPR.

Developed by the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District for the city about 34 miles east of San Francisco, the free app sends citizens 911 alerts, including requests for CPR.

If the cardiac emergency is in a public place, the application uses GPS technology to alert citizens about urgent CPR requests. The app also tells citizen rescuers to the exact location of the closest public access Automated External Defibrillator (AED).

“It’s volunteerism in an entirely new way,” said San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District Fire Chief Richard Price.”It’s volunteering 2.0.”

Back at CES last month, when Scosche unveiled its new line of gear, I was particularly taken by the flipSYNC II, the successor to their first gen key fob that transformed, in a pinch, to an iPod cable. I’ve been eager to have one ever since, and today, I get my wish, as they are now available for sale.

The flipSYNC II is a transforming key chain accessory that makes sure you’re never without an iPod cable when you need to charge or sync your device, even in a truly rare pinch. When not in use, the flipSYNC folds up into a black dongle similar to the one you might have on your car keys to turn off the alarm when the neighborhood brats start jumping on the hood. Yank the ends, though, and out comes an iPod Dock Connector and a USB appendage.

We’ve heard before that Apple intends to update their A4 chip for the next-generation of iOS devices to a so-called A5 dual-core SoC , which would not only allow the iPhone 5 and iPad 2 to run more intensive apps even faster than they currently do, but would quadruple the A4’s graphics and video capability.

Now Digitimes is jumping aboard that rumor, claiming that “the chance is high” that Apple’s next-gen SoC will adopt a dual-core processor in time for the iPhone 5.

It appears that at least some existing Verizon customers will be spooning instant coffee directly into our mouths and shoving match embers between our finger webbing next Wednesday night: the Verizon iPhone preorders will begin at 3am EST on February 3rd.

The $99 second-gen AppleTV has already supplanted the iPad in at least one metric: Netflix has just announced that more content is Watched Instantly on the iOS set-top box than on the best-selling tablet.

I’m not quite sure I’d hold your breath just yet, but a new MacBook Pro refresh might be due soon, if reports of near-empty stocks of both the 15-inch and 17-inch unibody models are anything to go by. If that refresh happens, it’s likely to be a long-overdue update from the Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs that Apple currently uses to the newest Sandy Bridge processors.

Multiple sources in both Apple Stores and third-party resellers are reporting that they are running low on supplies of Cupertino’s premium notebooks, with even Amazon listing a one to two month delay on shipping the 17-inch MBP.

In a striking example of what the iPhone can mean for carriers, AT&T – once the exclusive provider of the iconic Apple handset – announced Thursday lower profits and fewer new subscribers than analysts expected. The No. 2 wireless carrier reported $1.09 billion in quarterly profits, down from $2.7 billion announced during the same period a year ago.

Perhaps more significantly, the carrier reported gaining 400,000 postpaid subscribers, far fewer than the 504,000 some analysts were expecting and less than half of the 872,000 customers rival Verizon gained during the same period. Starting Feb. 10, Verizon will sell the iPhone, ending AT&T’s three years of exclusivity.

On The Job is an excellent tool for small business owners, freelancers, contractors, and anyone else who needs to charge clients for work.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — If there’s one thing we’re hearing over and over at Macworld this year, it’s the word “enterprise.” There’s a lot of companies getting ready for a huge wave of iOS deployments by enterprise in 2011.

One company ready to jump on the enterprise bandwagon is FileMaker, whose FileMaker Go iOS app allows FileMaker databases to run on the iPad or iPhone. That means businesses can make custom database apps — everything from email clients to iTunes clones — without going through Apple.

“A lot of people think they have to develop their own app to do something but its not necessarily necessary to do an app,” said FileMaker spokesman Kevin Mallon. “If you’ve got FileMaker Pro, you’ve got an app.”

According to FileMaker, its database software is currently the only way enterprise can get custom apps on the iPhone or iPad without coding a custom solution and submitting it through the App Store.

The pharmaceutical company Merck, for example, created an iOS app to share the company lexicon of drug names, special acronyms and competing drug companies’ names and terms.

“You don’t have to be a serious programmer to do an app,” said Mallon. “It’s dead easy.”

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — The world was supposed to go paperless decades ago, but we’re still swamped with paper. You can take pictures of business cards and receipts every now and again, but for serious paper junkies, something like Fujitsu’s ScanSnap S1100 Mobile Scanner may fit the bill.

The ScanSnap S1100 is claimed to be the smallest scanner in the world. Powered by USB, the sheet-feed scanner can suck up everything from receipts to multi-page AT&T phone bills.

Launched at CES earlier this month and being shown at Macworld this week, the ScanSnap S1100 can scan directly into desktop software like iPhoto and Word, or cloud-based apps like Google Docs and Evernote. The scanner costs $199.

The iPad is a lot heavier than it looks, isn’t it? Holding it with one hand can be unwieldy and make your hand tired, but holding it with two hands makes it hard to use.

Well we discovered a nifty little device that can help. It’s called the HandeHolder and it allows you to strap your iPad to your hand, making it much easier to hold and use.

Business isn’t usually this cool, but who wouldn’t want this iPhone-dock-cum-desk-phone? Just plug in your iPhone, and it becomes your office phone.

Brand new at Macworld 2011, Altigen’s $169 iFusion Smartstation iPhone dock features a Bluetooth speakerphone and receiver that you can cradle under your chin, Don Draper style.

Paired with the company’s PBX app which provides eneterprise-level phone management features, it allows your iPhone to replace your office phone as well as your home phone. Bye bye landlines.

When President Obama gave his annual State of the Union speech Tuesday night, he dedicated a significant portion of it to the dismal state of America’s education system.

Some educational experts responded by noting that that mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad could potentially improve the American education system’s “productivity.”

I wonder whether this is a valid point, or yet another manifestation of Americans’ infatuation with technology.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — If you’re goin’ to San Francisco, flowers in your hair are always a nice touch but this week the iMacworld app on your Apple mobile device could win you $1000.

The free app, available on the iTunes App Store, will not only help you get around the giant Conference and Expo happening Thursday – Saturday at San Francisco’s sprawling Moscone West convention center, but it also has interesting tips and information valuable to locals and visitors alike.

Through a promotional tie-in to another free app called AskLocal — one lucky user is going to win $1000 in a cleverly designed Treasure hunt.

Familiarity with Ask Local will be an advantage to anyone hoping to win the prize, according to a message that greets visitors to the Community button on the iMacworld main page, so if you’re headed to Macworld, you’ve got more to learn about than you thought.

This just in from the remains of CES: Italian design firm Lavatelli has created a prototype emoticon keypad which plugs into a USB port. Soon you’ll be able to express joy, sadness, cheekiness and other ASCIImotion with just the touch of a finger! Email users and internet forum readers are atwitter in anticipation – or perhaps for some, dread.

No word yet if this will be Mac compatible. What would really be handy is a way to add a virtual emoticon keyboard to your iPhone or iPad – now that would be useful! :)

[via Geek.com]

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Despite the demise of the xServe, Apple products can be and are a good fit in the enterprise, according to John Welch of the Zimmerman Agency, who spoke on Apple in the Enterprise at the Macworld Industry Forum Wednesday at Macworld 2011.

First of all Apple is not an enterprise company — it is not Microsoft, not Cisco, not IBM.

But Apple doesn’t need to be an enterprise company to be a source of solid products that work well in the Enterprise, said Welch, who spoke from 20 years of experience deploying Apple products in business.

This is pretty amazing. Hacker Apoc269 has somehow figured out how to make 3D icons on the iPhone’s home screen — and without glasses.

Check out the video. The icons appear to be 3D when the iPhone’s screen is rotated and  looked at from diffferent angles. Very cool.

Coming soon via Cydia, Apoc269 says. So get jailbreaking now.

Via 9to5Mac.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Apple is perceived as closed and proprietary, but the company has been very generous to the open web, and that generosity has benefited Apple in turn, says pundit John Gruber.

Speaking at Macworld 2011’s opening Industry Forum, Gruber noted that most of the best browsers on the market today are based on Apple’s WebKit, an open source browser engine developed and supported by Apple.

Apple allows its competitors to base their browsers on Apple’s technology, including Google, Nokia and Palm. Indeed, Palm’s entire webOS is based on Apple’s Webkit.

Why does Apple do this?

Because an open web is beneficial to Apple. Ten years ago, most software vendors developed for Windows and Apple was locked out. Napster is a good example, Gruber said. Napster was built for Windows, and Apple users were was largely excluded until third-party Mac clients were build much later.

These days, software companies build for the open Web. Twitter and Facebook, for example, were built for the Web.

“When Windows was the baseline platform for the industry, Apple was left out,” Gruber said. “But these days, if companies develop for the Web, Apple is included.”

This wouldn’t have happened if Apple hadn’t supported and encouraged the web as a development environment, partly by giving Webkit away.

“Apple has benefited tremendously from the rise of the Web,” said Gruber. “And the Web has benefited from contributions from Apple.”

Is OS X’s built-in Terminal app just too modern for you? Miss the days of phosphorescent emerald text burning through the convex black screen of an old cathode ray tube, slowly updating itself at 300 baud as it de-syncs and interlaces like crazy?

Me too. Cathode is a new terminal app that uses OpenGL and Cocoa to emulate the look of a vintage terminal, right down to the curve of the screen, the flicker and the jitter.

Geeky? Exquisitely so. As someone who grew up playing Rogue on an ancient IBM terminal, though, Cathode is right up my alley… especially given Nethack’s excellent OS X Terminal port. Now that’s the way a rogue-like is meant to be played!

Cathode is shareware, but use it for too long and the image quality will slowly degrade until you pay $20 for a license.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 –There’s no great secret to understanding what Apple has up its sleeves, according to Jason Snell, editor-in-chief of Macworld magazine, who spoke to attendees about “How Apple Does It” at the Macworld Conference and Expo Industry Forum Wednesday morning.

Anyone who makes a habit of keeping up with technology news understands one of the longest running games in the business involves predicting what Apple will do next.

Despite its reputation as an obsessively secret company that consistently produces products no one ever thought they needed until Steve Jobs invented them, Snell described Apple as a consistent, rational company that doesn’t do anything unexpected — and doesn’t rely on crazy mind control to achieve its success.

From the company’s very founding, the roles Jobs & his cofounder Steve Wozniak played suggested Apple’s future: Jobs understood marketing and Woz was technically brilliant at making complex technology work. One of them understood products and the other understood technology; the way they worked together would become Apple’s greatest strength and one day set their company apart from all others in American business.

I generally don’t like corks that I can’t rip out with my teeth or suck on when there’s no booze in the house, but the Kork case for iPad might change my mind: it’s a cork board approach to protecting your tablet that isn’t just environmentally friendly — each case is made of recycled cork — but is also pretty attractive.

$67 will get you one: I’m tempted just so I can attach girly postcards to the back with pushpins.

The Verizon iPhone does not support the carrier’s blistering new LTE wireless network, but a future 4G iPhone will says China Mobile chairman Wang Jianzhou.

“Apple has made it clear they will support TD-LTE,” Wang recently said at the Davos Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We hope that when they develop the next-generation models, since Apple can create CDMA, they can also consider developing TD-SCDMA.”

There’s little doubt that Jianzhou is right, but while there’s little doubt that Apple will eventually take the plunge and release an iPhone 4G, it’s the “when” people are curious about.

Last June, AT&T killed off their iPhone unlimited data plan, replacing it with a slightly cheaper plan with a 2GB data limit, which they said was pretty much all the data that anyone used anyway… so this was actually saving you money. No one bought it, but there was nothing to be done. Where else were you going to get an iPhone?

Now, things are very different. It’s seven months later, and Verizon’s not only got the iPhone, but they’re rolling it out with their own $30 unlimited data plan. Predictably, we’re not hearing reports that AT&T is backtracking and quietly offering customers who were previously on unlimited plans all-you-can-eat data… as long as they don’t switch to Verizon.

There’s only one verified example of this so far. Jose Argumedo of Brentwood, NY says that he and a friend were switched to an unlimited plan after they called AT&T’s customer service.

That’s hardly very solid evidence of a mass reversal of policy, but AT&T’s actually not denying that they’re offering customers unlimited data to stay, with spokesman Mark Siegel saying: “We handle customers and their situations individually, and we’re not going to discuss specifics.”

Basically, it looks like AT&T is offering users the option to switch to unlimited data right now, as long as they have had the unlimited version in the past. If that sounds like you, today’s the day to try calling up Ma Bell and seeing what they can do for you.