We start with a deal on a 32GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad for just $670. Then there is the UrbanFlip Leather iPad case. We wrap up the deal spotlight with a 1.4GHz MacBook Air for just $949.
Along the way, we’ll also check out an 8GB iPhone 3GS from AT&T for just $9 plus activation. Details on these and other bargains (such as 93 percent of on select iPhone 4 cases) can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
Institutional Shareholders Service, an independent proxy-advising service, and the Laborers’ International Union of North America have endorsed a shareholders’ proposal to require Apple, Inc. to disclose a succession plan for Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs, according to a report Thursday at Bloomberg’s Businessweek.
Apple shareholders will consider the proposal, which would mandate Apple’s board disclose a CEO succession plan annually, at the next shareholders’ meeting on February 23.
Jobs announced his most recent medical leave of absence from the company on January 17, which led to new rounds of speculation in the media and blogosphere as to the Apple CEO’s health and his long-term prospects for continuing to lead the giant technology enterprise.
Tim Cook, Apple’sChief Operating Officer, has taken over responsibility for day-to-day operations in Jobs’ absence, but the board has offered no guidance as to who might take over in the event Jobs is unable to return to work.
As Verizon’s systems get crushed with customers eager to buy an iPhone 4, Apple has hinted that the iPhone 5 will be coming to the carrier in July.
Everyone knows that Apple will be refreshing the iPhone hardware this summer. But the big question about today’s Verizon launch is whether that carrier will get new hardware in less than six months. It seems likely. Apple is strongly rumored to be working on a dual-mode handset that works on both GSM and CDMA networks. But where does that leave VZW’s early adopters? How are they going to feel about buying a device made obsolete in a few months?
The New York Times columnist David Pogue asked Apple these questions. Here’s what Apple said:
Apple won’t say if there will be an iPhone 5 for Verizon this summer. (“Let’s put it this way: We’re not stupid,” is all an Apple rep would say.) But if it does, and you buy an iPhone 4 now, you’ll be stuck with an outdated phone in only five months.
To me, this reads like a tacit admission that the iPhone 5 will launch on Verizon and AT&T simultaneously this summer. Obviously Apple won’t pre-announce the iPhone 5 on VZW because no one that network will buy the iPhone 4 today.
As Apple says, “We’re not stupid.”
It looks like Nvidia’s fastest graphics cards could be headed for the Mac — courtesy of an unofficial hack.
The Russian hacker known as Netkas has hinted that he’s cracked Nvidia’s Fermi ROM, the firmware underlying its most powerful cards, which are currently Windows-only.
In a post titled “On the mac’s fermi ROM,” Netkas posted a winking smiley face — a hint that he’s cracked the drivers for Nvdia’s most powerful line of graphics cards.
Netkas is a highly regarded hacker, most famous for his Hackintosh EFI Bootloader hack, which allows generic PC hardware to run Mac OS X.
Given the hacker’s reputation, it is “certain that he has found a way,” says HardMac, which follows graphics hacks closely. Hardmac reckons Netkas was able to adapt the ROM of Nvidia’s Quadro FX 4000, which has Mac drivers.
HardMac is hoping to see Mac ROM for Nvidia’s GTX 580, the most powerful Fermi card available.
There’s a thriving hacking underground that unofficially adapts Mac drivers for Windows PC cards, which are usually much cheaper than their Mac counterparts.
The iPhone is only a gadget made of wires, metal and glass. However, as Verizon is learning, the Apple handset — and its enthusiastic fans — can also be a force of nature. Despite its planning and words of assurance, Verizon is being hard hit as the carrier’s Website takes a pounding from wave after wave of iPhone 4 pre-orders.
By e-mail and Twitter, buyers are reporting pages loading slowly and various errors. The dominant theme: Verizon is getting slammed. Potentially bringing a knowing smile from AT&T (remember the carrier’s formal apology over a round of pre-order snafus?), press accounts Thursday recall a fateful statement from Verizon made a year ago: “We are not going to have any flaws on the execution of the iPhone launch,” the president and CEO of the carrier’s telecom and business department said at the time.
Ken Segall, the advertising guru who named the iMac and coined the “Think Different” slogan, wants to bust what he calls the “last myth about Macs:” security.
Segall takes to task all the usual arguments – Macs are only secure because there aren’t that many of them and that Macs are actually more vulnerable, thanks to the known vulnerabilities.
So where are the viruses? Where are the hacks?
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With the launch of The Daily yesterday, Apple revealed a new subscription model for iPad publications.
You can currently check out The Daily for free for two weeks, then subscriptions run $0.99 per week or $40 a year. This model is currently only available for that publication, but is expected to be expanded soon.
The next time you download on iTunes, you’ll be asked to agree with the updated terms of service about in-app subscriptions.
The 347-word TOS specifies that subs are non-refundable, automatically renew and may hand over your personal details to publishers – which, to me at least, sounds like the same kind of hassle faced with analog magazine subscriptions.
Are you pleased that Apple has created a new, uniform model for subscriptions or are you going to stick to paper?
Let us know in the comments.
Most in the tech world for months have expected today to arrive, as Verizon Wireless begins accepting pre-orders for the iPhone 4. However, AT&T – although it has known about the potential impact of losing exclusive rights to the Apple handset for an equal period, is still offering a flurry of last-minute reasons why iPhone owners should stay where they are.
Attempting to reach the price-conscious, AT&T has doubled the amount of data iPhone owners can consume while paying the same rate. AT&T is also offering a wireless hotspot service, similar to Verizon’s, for smartphones – at the same price of tethering to a computer. No matter this feature was first provided Android users. However, like some late-night pitchman, wait, there’s more.
When the iPhone first came out, Steve Jobs — quizzed why Apple had eschwed a stylus — famously quipped that in his opinion, “If you see a stylus, they blew it.”
It’s a great quote, but in reality, it’s always been a little too dismissive of the benefits of styluses. In truth, there’s a lot of uses for a stylus on a touchscreen — for example, in creating digital art. Styluses are also of great people to people trying to use touchscreen devices who can’t keep their hand steady: my mother, for example, has a hard time typing on her iPod Touch without one because she has had tremors since a stroke a few years back.
It’s nice to see, then, that Apple is softening a little bit on their position against styluses… at least when it comes to filing patents.
Disappointed that the Verizon iPhone doesn’t make use of the network’s nascent 4G network? Well, your iPhone might not be able to suck in LTE, but your Mac now can, thanks to Verizon making time in an already busy week to release the latest version of their Verizon Access Manager for Mac software.
Why is this important? Well, thanks to the updated software, if you have Verizon’s Pantech UML290 4G LTE modem and are running Mac OS X 10.4 or higher, you’re now ready to skate along the cutting edge of mobile broadband.
Unfortunately, all the news is not good: LTE will only work on your Mac if you have that one Verizon 4G modem. The other one — the LG VL600 — still doesn’t support Mac, although it is expected to do so later in February.
Verizon has just begun taking pre-orders for the iPhone 4, and already there is concern the carrier may clamp-down on owners of the Apple handset, notorious for their use of data. The carrier reportedly is ready to reduce the bandwidth on the top 5 percent of its subscribers.
“If you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5% of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users” during peak demand, according to a policy paper obtained by a tech blog. The note surfaces amid early reviews, citing the Verizon iPhone as stable, but slower than AT&T.
The ripple effect of Apple’s decision to force e-reading apps like Sony Reader and Amazon’s Kindle to at least offer the option of purchasing content as an in-app purchase is already being felt in the publishing world, with several publishers across Europe already planning a summit in London to discuss the threat.
Describing themselves as feeling “betrayed”, the head of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association (a body which represents almost 5,000 members in 80 countries worldwide) are planning to meet with the European Online Publishers Association to “compare notes” on Apple’s new rules.
Why are they so upset? Simple: they have already set up their magazine and newsreader apps to go through their websites, because Apple was refusing to offer an iTunes in-app subscription service. Now, Apple’s introducing such a service… while simultaneously threatening to kick out anyone who doesn’t use it.
At long last, ladies and gentlemen, after all these years of waiting, we finally have it: an app that puts cheese on your head.
Other folks have been waiting for Duke Nukem Forever, or for a 15-inch MacBook Air, or for democracy in their dictatorships, or even for basic stuff like world peace and an end to disease. Oh, and flying cars, people are still waiting for those.
But for the rest of us – for those of us who have longed for an app that puts cheese on our head – the waiting is over. iCheeseHead fulfils all our virtual cheese-on-head needs, and costs less than most real cheese.
Rupert Murdoch can keep his $30 million iPad newspaper. We can all have cheese on our heads now, and nothing else matters.
When we talk about the massive anticipation for the Verizon iPhone, what we’re always considering is the regular customers, whether the guy from AT&T who has been waiting years to switch away from the mushy, dropped call maker, or the Verizon customer who has had to pretend an Android phone is just as good as an iPhone for years now.
We never talk about the Verizon employees though… a shame, since they probably want an iPhone more than anyone, if only to stop people asking them constantly when Verizon will have the iPhone and treating them like second-class citizens.
Unfortunately, if you’re a Verizon employee, you’ll have to wait a little bit longer to get your iPhone, at least if you want to link it to your Verizon-expensed business line. Try to activate an iPhone on your existing number and Verizon will detect it and change it to a personal number.
Is an iPhone worth paying for your calls? Apparently, Verizon thinks it just might be, because while they can’t stop employees from getting one personally, they have distributed a memo pleading with all employees to postpone iPhone purchases for themselves, their friends and their family until the initial rush is over.
We suspect many of you were up in the wee hours of the morn, smearing blood across the F5 key as you rubbed your index finger raw refreshing Apple’s website… but in case you forgot what day it is, since 3am EST, it’s been Verizon iPhone Pre-Ordering Day! Hooray!
Of course, you can’t just be one of the AT&T hoi polloi if you want to pre-order an iPhone from VZW: if you’re not an existing Verizon customer, you have to wait until February 9th with the rest of us suckers.
Care to get with the pre-ordering? You can do so either directly through Apple or through Verizon. Predictably, ordering from Apple is the smoother and more pleasant experience.
Who’s signed up? Let’s all have a congratulatory back-patting session in the comments!
The early Verizon iPhone reviews are in, and it’s basically the same story across reviewers: calls are better, but data downloads not so.
The VZW iPhone is a great phone, Wired.com reports, but data isn’t as speedy as AT&T’s.
WIRED It’s a better phone, period. More likely to pull a signal, even indoors — this could change the way we converse at bars. Hot-spotting is well-integrated and very easy to use. Has a whiter, slightly better-looking display.
TIRED Slow data transfers compared to the AT&T iPhone. Sluggish app installs take away from the App Store’s instant gratification. Video streams are compressed more heavily, so Netflix and YouTube are uglier. No simultaneous voice and data transmissions thanks to the limitations of CDMA.
Meanwhile, David Pogue at the NYT says: “…the Verizon iPhone is nearly the same as AT&T’s iPhone 4 — but it doesn’t drop calls.”
And Pogue brings up a good point about the VZW network buckling under the rush on new iPhones:
Consider, too, that if surveys are any indication, Verizon can expect an enormous stampede of new iPhone customers. Last time this happened — to AT&T — the weight of all those bandwidth-sucking iPhones swamped the network, causing interruptions that persist to this day. The same thing might happen to Verizon.
Verizon swears that it’s prepared for the onslaught. Then again, that’s what AT&T said, too.
The Verizon iPhone goes on pre-sale at 3am tomorrow. First deliveries are expected on Feb. 10.
Engadget did some speed tests and found AT&T’s network was significantly faster. Here’s the results:
The Daily, the made-for-iPad product from Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., made a much-anticipated world debut Wednesday at the Guggenheim in New York. News Corp marketing promised “a package that’s smart, attractive and entertaining.”
Too bad it delivers an experience that’s pedestrian, plain and vaguely creepy. Not to mention prone to crashing.
Nielsen have stepped away from their television statistic to crunch the numbers on current smartphone ownership in the United States, and some of those numbers are fascinating indeed.
Perhaps the most interesting revelation is that right now, Android, Blackberry and iPhones are all pretty much in a dead heat when it comes to market share. That makes this a pivotal time for Google, Apple and RIM. We know Apple is well placed this year for some big numbers, thanks to the Verizon iPhone and the forthcoming iPhone 5, but can even those handsets stop Android from increasing its lead on iOS?
Also intriguing: according to Nielsen’s data, Asians are the most likely people to own an iPhone, while African Americans love BlackBerries. Smartphone penetration is also much lower amongst Whites than Hispanics or Asians, and use their phones less too.
Interesting stuff. If you’re intrigued by smartphone demographics, plunge in here for more.
We’re on the iPad’s case today — literally. We start of the day with two cases designed for the iPad. The first is the colorful iLuv case with Tatz Graphics. Next is a faux leather case. We round out the iPad accessories with a five-piece kit either for the the Apple tablet or the iPhone.
Along the way, we also check out a sportswrap for the iPod nano, an iPhone wall charger and an Apple TV media receiver. We also look at some software for your Mac, including Microsoft Office 2011. As always, details on these and many other products can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
Earlier today, Apple spokesperson Trudy Miller explained the sudden crackdown on e-reader apps that use an out-of-app billing systems (such as Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s Reader app) in lieu of in-app purchases in order to sell users content.
“We have not changed our developer terms or guidelines,” Miller said. “We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase.”
Offending apps have until March 1st to comply or be yanked from the App Store.
It seems, though, from this wording that Amazon and Sony can comply simply by giving users the option of where they want to buy an e-book: directly from them via the web at the lowest price, or through in-app purchases at a higher price to take into account Apple’s 30% cut.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been seen hobnobbing around town with Steve Jobs on more than a few occasions, but now that Steve Jobs is sick and Eric Schmidt is voluntarily leaving his ten year stint as the head of the infamous search giant, journalists are starting to ask if Schmidt might be the successor to Jobs’ crown.
On Schmidt’s part, while being respectful of Steve and conscientious of his illness, he’s also being a little coy.
After months of being an open secret, News Corp’s iPad-only Newspaper, The Daily, is finally here… along with iTunes’ new in-app subscription API that will allow the Daily and other e-publications to finally begin to prosper. We’ve got the full details.
In an ironic twist, Apple is preparing to co-host unveiling an iPad-only newspaper that could save publishers, while also releasing guidelines limiting publishers’ app subscription options. The Cupertino, Calif. tech giant – which owns iTunes App Stores for the iPod, iPhone, iPad and Mac – is telling publishers to stop circumventing paying Apple’s 30 percent cut on sales.
The requirement to begin March 31 – which Apple spokespeople stress is not new – forbids companies such as Sony, Amazon and presumably others with ebook reader apps – from only initiating book sales outside the iTunes ecosystem. Others, such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times also offer apps but use only private billing systems.
The arrests of nearly 30 people are expected to be announced today in a New York-based cybercrime ring targeting Apple stores.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. will name names Wednesday of the dirty two-plus-dozen who forged credit card numbers to buy goods from Apple stores across the country.
The allegations involve a total of 27 people and roughly $1 million in ill-gotten gains from Apple stores across the country from New York to Los Angeles to Wauwatosa, Wis.
The indictment lists purchases in Apple stores including Las Vegas, Atlanta, Indianapolis and St. Louis, and smaller communities such as Altamonte Springs, Fla., and Stamford, Conn.
Group members of the group occasionally ran up sizeable tabs – more than $3,000 worth of products in one go — but other transactions were as small as a $53.45 tab for a laptop case, according to the indictment.
Accused ringleader Shaheed Bilal had thousands of stolen credit card numbers stored in e-mails and bragged on Twitter about using credit cards at restaurants, prosecutors said at his arraignment Tuesday.
It seems only appropriate News Corp.’s iPad-based “newspaper”, The Daily, will be officially unveiled today at the Guggenheim Museum, a repository of Post-Impressionistic artists. Like Cezanne and Manet, News Corp.’s Rupurt Murdoch and Apple’s Eddie Cue hope the application ushers in the age of Post-Print and Post-PC.
The ceremony is set to begin at 11 am Eastern, where reporters and analysts will gather to hear details of the project. So far, we only know there will be a $0.99 per week subscription cost. Will The Daily be a digital version of an actual newspaper, with staff, competition, ads and the rest? Can Apple finally find a subscription model that works both for the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant and the beleaguered print industry? Can the iTunes’ Eddie Cue really stand-in for the ailing Steve Jobs?
