Cult of Mac

Another rare item from Cupertino, an Apple Lisa 1, hit the auction block this week.  The successor to the Apple II and the predecessor to the Macintosh, the Lisa originally shipped back in 1983.  Born of the pioneering work done at Xerox PARC and refined by Apple, it was the world’s first commercially available computer with a Graphical User Interface.

The first Lisa used two proprietary 5.25″ floppy disk drives known as “Twiggy” drives.  These were problematic and unreliable, and were replaced in 1984 with the Lisa 2 and a 400k 3.5″ floppy drive.  Most original Lisas were updated to the 3.5″ disk package, so very few Lisa 1 systems survive today.

As of this writing, current price on eBay is $15,000 after 4 bids, with 4 days left to go.  Check back late next Tuesday for the results. Following the recent Apple 1 sale, looks like another possible record in the making!

[via MacNN] [9to5mac]

We wrap up another week with a variety of both hardware and software deals. First up is a 13-inch MacBook Air, powered by the Core 2 Duo running at 2.13GHz for $1,125. (We have a number of other hardware deals for other MacBooks, as well as iMacs.) Also on tap are a number of apps for your iPhone and iPad. EA has various well-known games, such as “Scrabble” for the Apple tablet. The iPhone App Store releases a new crop of freebies, including “Battle Bears -1.”

As usual, details on these and many other items, can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

We all love Dropbox, right? For two years, it’s allowed us to keep our most important files synced across multiple computers and devices, complete with a generous 2GB freebie limit (easily expandable by recommendations and promotions).

It’s hard to believe that such an awesome service wasn’t even version 1.0, but apparently not: last night, Dropbox rolled out their first whole point release, bringing along a huge slew of improvements including — most importantly — selective folder sync.

Selective Sync allows you to select which folders and files within your Dropbox get shot down to your other computers, which can be determined in each computer’s control panel. This allows you, for example, to save some of your poor MacBook Air’s paltry 64GBs from the sheer bloat of your Dropboxed media collection. Lovely.

There’s more improvements than that, naturally. The 1.0 updates includes hundreds of bug fixes, reduced resource usage (50 percent in memory alone) and some user-friendly interface tweaks.

You can grab the 1.0 update here.

In the immortal spirit of Nigel Tufnel, our 2010 Year in Review of the best in Audio gear and apps for Mac and iOS devices goes to 11.

If you missed any of these or didn’t get a chance to check them out for some reason or another, don’t fret — they each should be around to help you discover dulcet tones and make sound memories for a long time to come.

11. iDJ – iPad Music App ($9.99)

iDJ’s music management system is a simple, streamlined way to quickly build club-quality playlists using the music in your iTunes library. With patented BPM detection technology, iDJ fuses your music together with the finesse of a professional mixmaster. As you add songs, iDJ analyzes their sonic-waveforms, calculates tempos, and then automatically performs optimal transitions throughout the playlist. Playlists can contain an unlimited number of songs and iDJ supports audio in WAV, MP3, and AAC formats. Plus, your iDJ library can be managed through iTunes. iDJ is the first true music-mixing application for iPad that both beginners and professionals can enjoy.

Sure, this is a pretty big gimmick, but we’re impressed none the less: behold an 11-inch MacBook Air driving four displays at once. From right to left, the MacBook Air is driving a 20-inch Apple Cinema Display through the Mini DisplayPort a 7-inch Mimo 720-S display through USB, its own internal display and an Apple IIc running a terminal session through a serial cable, presumably through another USB adapter. This, my friends, is the most lurid Mac porn you’ll see all day,

Not to continue to pimp our own Infinity Bladeelegiac masterpiece.

Interestingly, though, it turns out that Infinity Blade — a game that seems like it would be impossible to pull off on any other console — was not designed for iOS to begin with.

In fact, as Chair co-founder Donald Mustard makes clear in a recent interview, it wasn’t designed for an iPhone or iPad… it was designed for the great gaming device that Apple missed out on: Kinect.

Here’s how a subsidy on your smartphone is supposed to work: in exchange for a shorter upfront price, you agree to a two year contract for cellular services. Baked into your mobile bill is a certain amount of surcharge that helps pay off the full price of your phone, but after twenty four months, you own that phone entirely, and should be able to bring it to any network you care to, because after 24 months, you’ve paid it off.

As you probably know, though, this is not a position on mobile phone subsidies that is likely to get you a lot of sympathy at AT&T. In fact, there’s no official way to unlock an AT&T iPhone once your 24 month contract is over: even though you now own that smartphone, it’s still locked to AT&T’s service.

Honestly, that’s crap, and has driven a lot of American iPhone owners down the road to jailbreak. Canadians, though, seem to have it a lot easier: if you’ve gotten your iPhone from Rogers, a $50 fee at the end of your contract is enough to have the network unlock your phone to work on a competitors’ network.

Thursday was a big day in insider trading busts, as four new arrests were made by the Securities and Exchange Commission cracking down on insider trading.

One of those arrests, though, is particularly interesting to Apple enthusiasts: Walter Shimoon, an executive for Flextronics (an Apple supplier), was one of those busted on Thursday, and as it turns out, one of his violations was to pass on information about both an iPhone update and the iPad before they were official.

Way out, man. That might encapsulate the Thursday remarks by a Research In Motion executive on whether the Waterloo, Ontario-based company’s upcoming PlayBook can compete with Apple’s iPad. “I think the PlayBook redefines what a tablet should do,” RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said in what some members of the media termed “a several minute rant”.

The tablet market will move away from “a proprietary SDK and unnecessary apps,” Balsillie said in response to a question from JP Morgan analyst Rod Hall. The comment, aimed at Apple, was RIM’s latest attack on the Cupertino, Calif. company’s grip on the nascent tablet market.

Apple’s iTunes continues to dominate digital music sales, gaining three percent compared to last year and comprising 66 percent of the market, according to news reports. Amazon, Apple’s closest competitor, with just 13 percent of digital music purchases, tied Walmart, which relinquished first place to the Cupertino, Calif. firm in 2008.

The week-to-week struggle for digital music domination is even more cut-throat, according to the Wall Street Journal. Record label insiders told the newspaper Amazon holds on to just six to 10 percent of digital sales each week with Apple cruising along at near 90 percent of the market.

Word Lens is the app making jaws drop all over the internet this morning, thanks to this appropriately jaw-dropping demo video:

The video says it all, but you might be left wondering: is it a hoax? Can it really be as good as that?

Etch-a-Sketch, our childhood friend, returns again (in spirit) with this adorable case for the iPhone 4. Joining existing models available for the iPad and older iPhones, the slide-on hard case has cutouts for home button, cameras and microphone. $25 from Headcase.

Now you can relive those moments playing in front of the living room TV – or waiting in the dentist office…

[via iPhoneSavior]

Let’s face it, fanboys and girls love getting Apple related gifts for the holidays. But if you are lucky enough to have an Apple nerd in your family, you have by now realized that most Apple inspired gifts are usually boring or total crap. Fear not, though, friends, I present to thee 10 gifts that are guaranteed to make your Apple obsessed loved one squeal in glee.

Most Apple gifts out there have been made in this decade. But for the diehard Apple fan, vintage gifts are sure to please. This genuine Apple projector pen hides a special power—an Apple logo projector! I’m not quite sure what if any utility this might have, but I think we can all agree it’s a surefire way to impress the ladies.

FaceTime. Email. Text Messaging. Twitter.  Your iPhone is your personal communicator, allowing you to keep in contact with friends, family and your social network.  The web, the internet – gateways to information and productivity.

But technology has a downside, and anyone who’s battled internet addiction or just taken a weekend off from being plugged-in understands the need for balance.  My colleague Professor Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, has been studying this phenomenon for decades and researched how relentless connection can lead to a new solitude:

Thirty years ago we asked what we would use computers for? Now, the question is what don’t we use them for? Technology promises to let us do anything from anywhere with anyone. But it also drains us as we try to do everything everywhere.

With the CultofMac so chock full of bike geeks, it’s no wonder we pretty excited to see the arrival a few months back of one of the first gadgets that fall into the app-enhanced category — a gadget/app mashup that manufacturer New Potato Tech cleverly calls an “appcessory.” In this case, the $99 LiveRider combo of an iPhone bicycle mount and sensor/receiver package with its own dedicated app turns the iPhone into a flexible, jumbo-screened bike computer.

It’s not the only sensor/app combo on the market; Enki Sports offers a more complete and expensive solution, and newcomer Wahoo Fitness recently arrived with a flexible, modular approach (with sensors that look remarkably similar to Enki’s). But we figured New Potato’s kit would provide a simple, relatively inexpensive setup for intermediate-ish cyclists wanting their data fix. We were mistaken.

According to a recent Houston Chronicle story an iPhone has once again saved the day and solved a crime. This particular iPhone was stolen from a female jogger, who was jogging with a friend, during an armed robbery that occurred in the 700 block of Brittmore on the west side of Houston, Texas.

The alleged robbers exited a pickup truck and confronted the two women according to Houston Police Department (HPD) spokesman John Cannon.  An Apple iPhone was turned over to the robbers by one of the women and fortunately neither of them was hurt.

The kitchen computer is a wonderful, wonderful prospect — recipes to be references, emails to be responded to over cooking — except for the prospects of smoke and steam and spatters of hot grease. Doubly so the prospect of cooking with an iPad, which is simply too beautiful, too pure a device to put near an open flame.

Enter various rack solutions, none of which have caught our eye for their permanence, but this is pretty ingenious: The Original Kitchen iPad Rack, an acrylic rack that temporarily hooks into an installed mount on the underside of your hood or cabinet for when you need it. Otherwise, you just slot it off and take it away.

Works for iPad quite well, natch, but it also works on other recipe-accessing tablets, including the Kindle and Galaxy Tab. For only $29.99, this may well make a good last minute stocking stuffer.

Oh, sweet Bacchus. Forget those other iPod Nano watchbands we’ve seen: here’s the only one that matters. Called the “Richard Tracy Nano Watch Strap,” this project — kicked off via Kickstarter, only to ignominiously fail to raise its funding,– is not only one of the first Nano watch bands to have a high quality leather strap, as opposed to some plastic nonsense… the frame even contains a built-in beer opener, perfect for helping to remove the childproof cap from some brews, thus medicating your delirium tremens.

Like we said, this failed to get a following over at Kickstarter, so you can’t actually buy it. Maybe spreading the word, however belatedly, will inspire them to give it another go.

ACHTUNG: Creator Jason Hilbourne says that these are, indeed, for sale… just at Think Geek. Only $49.99!

We’re pretty up on the iPhone’s Bing app; its ability to combine the useful functions of several different stand-alone apps earned it a spot on our 23 Essential Apps list for the iPhone earlier this year.

But Microsoft is apparently even more ambitious: they’ve just updated Bing with some new abilities — including location-based reminders, a Google Maps Street View-like feature and more — to the point where it seems as if Microsoft is trying to turn Bing into some kind of uber-app. The whole thing’s also been given a facelift, and the results pages are less cluttered (even though the front page still needs work). It’s worth a download, even if, at the very least, just to gawk at its application of technology. Here’s a list of all the new stuff:

Google’s Marissa Mayer (and the rest of us plebs) must be disappointed to hear that Steve Jobs has not been awarded Time Magazine’s 2010 “Person of the Year” award. Instead, it was awarded to Mark Zuckerberg, the translucently pale lizard man who created Facebook pictured on above.

Steve didn’t totally get the short shift, though. He was declared one of Time Magazine’s “People Who Matter.”

“With each passing year Steve Jobs and his sleek Apple products not only succeed in impressing the techiest of tech addicts, they also manage to create a whole new batch of gadget enthusiasts,” the magazine noted, pointing to the iPad and the redesign of the MacBook Air as examples.

They also noted that this year, under Jobs’ leadership, Apple became the largest technology company in the world.

This isn’t the first time Jobs has been denied the “Person of the Year” award by a thin margin: in 2009, Jobs was one of the top seven finalists. He’ll make it one of these years.

Bargain-hunting just got more interesting — Metaio has added yet another augmented-reality channel to their AR iPhone app, Junaio. This time they’ve partnered with eBay and created a channel that lets users scan their surroundings for deals in eBay Classifieds, itself a newish, local version of eBay.

It works just like any other Junaio channel; looking around through the iPhone with the eBay channel switched on will, in this case, display local eBay Classifieds listings — apartment buildings will show unit listings superimposed, shops might show discounted stuff available, etc. The channel is also searchable by keyword.

What goes around comes around: one of the disc jockeys busted with running a six-figure iTunes scam has admitted his role.

Lamar Johnson, 19, admitted he was involved in this modern take on chart rigging, pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud in court.
Nine British djs are charged with using 1,500 stolen or cloned credit cards to buy their own tracks to the tune of £500,000 (about USD $780,000). They were paid £185,000 (USD $288,000) in royalties before getting caught.

Apple reportedly has added two more iPad 2 touchscreen suppliers, making five the total number of firms churning out displays for the Cupertino, Calif. firm. Apple expects its iPad 2, believed to appear in early 2011, to sell six million units per quarter, compared to four million quarterly shipments of the current tablet.

Chimei Innolux and Cando have been added to the suppliers list, which already contains Wintek, Sintek Phototronics and TPK Touch Solutions, according to a Taiwan-based industry publication. The new suppliers reportedly will begin shipping touchscreens for the iPad 2 in January or February of next year.

Should your six-year-old have an iPad? At least one educator says yes.

“Think of devices like the iPad, and its little brother, the new camera-equipped iPod Touch, as the bicycle of the digital age,” said Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children’s Technology Review and an educator, education researcher and parent. “These devices are at the center of a modern child’s play. They capture and manage information.”

Buckleitner made the statement in response to a parent who wonders whether fulfilling the request from her Montessori-educated first grader for “an iPad like her daddy has” is a good idea.

At the beginning of the month, Adobe put Flash Player 10.2 up for download, which added a new feature called “Stage Video” to the mix which Adobe claimed would allow for high-performance video playback while using “just over 0 percent CPU usage.” How? Basically, it offloaded the whole video rendering pipeline to your Mac’s GPU.

Sounds like a step up from the current status quo, but there was only one problem: it wasn’t backwards compatible, so sites across the Net would be required to update to the new code to take advantage of Stage Video.

Now Adobe says that many of the bigger players in Flash Video — most notably YouTube — have updated their Flash Player to take advantage of the speed increase.

Nice to hear, of course, but we’ll stick to HTML5 for the moment, until we see some power efficiency benchmarks come down the pipeline. In the meantime, enjoy the video above, in which an Adobe engineer wears a vintage Starfleet shirt that is comically too small.