Details are now emerging about how closely-involved Apple’s co-founder became during the search for a stolen next-generation iPhone that later was splashed across the front page of a prominent gadget blog. According to court records released Friday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs contacted the site around April 19, asking for the phone’s return.
Soon afterwards, Gizmodo editor Brian Lam e-mailed Jobs, telling him the blog would return the device only after Apple acknowledged it came from the Cupertino, Calif. company. A letter asking for the return of “a device that belongs to Apple” was sent to Lam by Apple attorney George Riley. Talking with lead San Mateo County Sheriff’s investigator Detective Matthew Broad, the lawyer had said the prototype’s return was “invaluable” and the potential damage from its loss “was huge,” according to an affidavit.
Quickerteck has done it again! First they brought us a charge monitor for the iPad that indicates if you’re getting enough juice to charge your pad. Now they’ve brought us a 10 watt foldable solar panel for the iPad that comes with the aforementioned charge monitor.
Quickerteck states that the panels will charge your iPad as fast as using a wall charger and they can be yours for a cool $250.
The name of the product is the best part: Apple Juicz.
My questions to you: Would you use this? Is it reasonably priced?
It looks like in-flight entertainment will become a little less annoying in July 2010.
Bluebox Avionics has announced its Ai IFE which “leverages the power, flexibility and quality of the most advanced consumer device ever produced” (apprently that’s the iPad). Flight attendants would either pass out iPads or chain them to your tray tables and you could enjoy a Airline specific iPad experience thanks to Bluebox’s proprietary security solution and custom apps.
I’m not sure how practical this is, but it would be nice to move away from the seat-back touchscreens with the hidden credit card swiper.
It’s common knowledge that plugging a regular SIM into the iPad is as simple as cleaving it down to microSIM dimensions… but what if you want to use the unlimited AT&T iPad data plan on your iPhone? Over at HiJinks Inc, they’ve posted a great guide to doing just that.
Put this firmly in the rumor file for right now, but Macsimum News is reporting that a live streaming version of iTunes will debut at this year’s WWDC, building upon Apple’s December purchase of online streaming service Lala.
At first blush, I absolutely loved this iPhone speaker dock, crafted in the GlaDOS style aesthetic of an old iMac arm. And, undeniably, it looks great.
The problem is, it’s not a speaker, per se. Instead, it uses resonance to transmit the sound from your iPod, iPhone or other MP3 player into the hard surface of the table underneath it. The audio output is rated at 12W, with a built-in amp for a bit of a boost, but the inevitable result here is still going to be terrible sound.
What a pity. I always loved the lamp-style iMac. At $42, though, this is a waste of money as anything besides a conversation piece.
The same hackers who got the Android operating system running in a dual-boot configuration on the first and second generation iPhones are now working on porting the hack to the iPod Touch.
In a new blog post, Linux on the iPhone is reporting that the binaries of the iPod Touch port are coming soon for jailbreakers to play with.
With the hatchet between Apple Computers and Apple Records long buried and the digitally restored catalogue sounding better than ever, the continued absence of The Beatles from iTunes is a bigger mystery than ever. Don’t blame Apple, though… either Apple. According to former Beatle Paul McCartney, it’s EMI gumming up the works.
“To tell you the truth I don’t actually understand how it’s got so crazy,” Sir Paul told Newsbeat. “I know iTunes would like to do it, so one day it’s going to happen.”
“It’s been business hassles”, he said. “Not with us, or iTunes. It’s the people in the middle, the record label [EMI]. There have been all sorts of reasons why they don’t want to do it.”
On their part, EMI say that discussions are ongoing, and claim that they would love to see The Beatles’ music available on iTunes. Translation: they want a much bigger cut of the iTunes pie, and you’ll have to rip your Beatles’ tracks yourself until Apple caves… which I seriously doubt Cupertino has any intention of doing.
All hail Vietnam, new Xanadu of surprising Apple leaks! Vietnamese site Tinthe — the very same site that leaked video of the fourth generation iPhone last week — somehow managed to get their hands on pictures and specs of the next MacBook.
Don’t expect anything too boldly different from the case: the new MacBook appears to be identical to the old unibody plastic. This is mostly just a hardware refresh to make the MacBook more competitive with the baseline 13-inch MacBook Pro, and like the latter laptop, the new MacBook gets a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and an NVIDIA GeForce 320M GPU.
With Twitter gaining so much popularity in the mainstream, there seem to be hundreds of Twitter clients available for Mac. But what about us Tweeters who still have old Macs and are running OS X Tiger or even Panther? Twit Menulet fills the gap for those Mac users who still want to Tweet without having to upgrade their entire system. Read on for the full review and an exclusive offer for the Cult of Mac audience:
Steve Jobs and Gawker haven’t seen eye-to-eye lately, so it’s somewhat surprising to see the Apple CEO engage in a lengthy email exchange with Gawker’s Ryan Tate over the App Store’s walled garden ecosystem and Apple’s ongoing feud with Adobe and other intermediary APIs.
Less surprising is the fact that Gawker’s Tate, in response to Jobs’ polite, reasonable and clear-headed replies, quickly resorted to disrespectful dickhead mode (partly fueled, it seems, by one too many cocktails.
The exchange begins with a simple question by Tate: how does Jobs think Bob Dylan would feel about Apple if he were still 20 today? “Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with revolution? Revolutions are about feedom.”
Jobs’ response is to say that the iPad is about freedom: freedom from spyware, freedom from poor performance and (lamely) “freedom from porn.”
“Some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is,” Jobs wrote.
Reader “Romeo From Brazil” wrote in to share an awesome tip: how to quickly and easily get a U.S. iTunes account anywhere in the world.
Romeo’s method works like a charm. You don’t need a credit card and it is far easier than other methods we’ve seen. Best, it works in ANY country, so if you’re in the U.S., you can use it to buy music available only in the U.K. And if you’re outside the U.S., you can use the account to buy apps and music not available in your country, like Apple’s iWorks suite.
Kyle Buckner has come a long way from sketching fantasy Apple accoutrements for school projects, though even he admits he’s set “a fairly big price” on his latest work – an elegant iPhone docking station that’s part art piece and part kick-ass speaker system.
After making inquiries about getting his prototype design mass produced for more economical sale, Buckner has decided for now to let his one-of-a-kind item fetch what it will on eBay, with a starting bid just shy of $3K.
But making and selling pricey one-offs isn’t the talented designer’s idea of success. “I would love to design new products for companies,” he told us in an email exchange. “I love making prototypes for my ideas but with no way of easily mass producing them, I’ll never make it.”
So Bucker’s focused his attention on looking for work with manufacturers on product design, industrial design, furniture design….anything that would put his talents to more effective (and less risky) use.
We wrap up another week of deals with a trio of free, or next-to-free items. First up is a new batch of App Store freebies, including “Extreme ExposeIt! Awesome Ford Mustangs 2005-2010!” (Liberal use of exclamation marks also apparently thrown in for free.) Next is an acrylic case for your iPhone for under a half-buck. Finally is Pollux for the Mac, a music organization assistant for $7.
Along the way, we’ll also check out various gadgets that caught our eye. As always, details on these and many other bargains can be found on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.
This time, we review Azkend HD, Dizzypad HD, GTA: Chinatown Wars, LetsTans 8-in-1, Plants vs. Zombies HD, Scrabble for iPad, Scrabble Tile Rack, and The Catching.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, Tivoli Audio has introduced an attractive new iPod Dock, the Connector, which allows you to hook your iPhone up to any radio… although the wood panel design of the Connector indicates that it is specifically meant to be paired with Tivoli’s own $199 Model 10 table radio.
A bit rich for our blood at $129, especially when you can hook an iPod fairly easily to any speaker system that accepts audio-in, but technology enthusiasts who have absorbed their sense of design from the aesthetics of Mike Brady’s living room might give the Connector a go.
British telecom company BT is readying a device similar to the iPad, but executives were reticent to compare it to Apple’s tablet device. BT CEO Ian Livingston told The Guardian newspaper the unnamed device is seen as a touchscreen telephone for the home.
“Someone else made a reference to it being a bit like the iPad but it is not,” Livingston said. “It is a different size and shape apart from anything else, but it is meant to stay in the home,” he added.
Foxconn Technology, the world’s largest electronics contractor and main supplier of most of Apple’s componentys, is once again in the news over the welfare of its employees in China after it racked up its sixth employee suicide this year.
The most recent suicide occurred in Foxconn’s factory city in Shenzen, where one of their 300,000 workers leaped to her death from her rented apartment. This follows a suicide last week by a 24-year old male factory worker, who also jumped to his death from the top of a dormitory building.
“We regret to see the recurrence of such incidents,” Foxconn said in a statement.
Apple has had bad publicity due to the way Foxconn treats its workers before.
In 2006, Apple launched an internal investigation over the matter of Foxconn “iPod Cities in which hundreds of thousands of employees worked in extreme squalor for pennies a day, and ultimately rejected the claims of abuse, noting that most workers’ biggest complaint was that they couldn’t work more overtime.
Foxconn’s latest slate of worker suicides calls into question the veracity of that report, as does a strike of 2000 workers earlier this month at fellow Apple contractor Wintek over 47 cases of hexane poisonings at the company’s Suzhou factories.
Not only did a survey by a local agency in the case of the Wintek poisonings find that managers at Wintek repeatedly deceived investigators trying to figure out the cause of the poisonings, but that none of their interviewees had ever even heard of Apple’s contractor code of conduct, which is meant to be enforced at the factories of all of manufacturing partners to guarantee the well-being of employees.
In America, Apple is one of the best and most employee-conscious companies in tech, but consistent reports of worker abuse and unhappiness in China really does raise the question: is Apple having the wool pulled over its eyes by companies like Foxconn and Wintek over the well-being of the workers who make our MacBooks and iPads?
Possibly not, but at the very least, it seems like its time for another internal Apple investigation… and a statement reaffirming Apple’s interest in the emotional and physical wellness of their contracted workers overseas.
The iPhone and iPod Touch have the industry’s best touchscreens, but some people still find the lack of true tactile feedback a barrier to adoption. Various companies have been working for a solution to that problem, but Toshiba’s new Senseg E-Sense technology seems ready for prime time now: slapped as a film on top of the display of an iPod Touch radically amplifies the tactility of objects on screen.
The film works by producing weak field changes in the area of the touchscreen touched by a user. This allows, for example, a swipe of the screen to offer the slight feel of resistance, or for an on-screen button to feel like it is actually protruding.
That’s genuinely exciting, and better yet, it’s cheap: Toshiba says that the Senseg E-Sense film, available now, costs as little as $0.11 per unit. Would you be interested in this sort of technology on your iDevice?
When Greg Hughes’ first revealed his amazing Wi-Fi Sync app a couple weeks ago, it didn’t take a genius to realize Apple was never going to let it on the App Store. Sure, there was no actual rule preventing it, but Apple has shown time and time again that they don’t want anyone messing around with iTunes sync. Plus, the very existence of the app makes Apple look bad: why the heck don’t we already have this functionality in iTunes? Apple was bound to kill it.
And so they have. Curious about Apple’s reasoning, Hughes’ even called them up, and was told that while the rep he spoke to agreed the app didn’t technically break any rule, it ” encroached upon the boundaries of what they can and cannot allow on their store.” Plus, you know, unnamed security concerns.
Still, not to fret if you’re a jailbreaker. Wi-Fi Sync was also bound to hit Cydia in case of an App Store rejection. And so it has, for a steep $9.99.
There’s nothing like a lawsuit to start the morning. The U.S. International Trade Commission announced Thursday night it would investigate Apple’s claims of patent infringement against Kodak. On April 15, the Cupertino, Calif. company alleged the imaging company violated two patents involving digital imaging and digital cameras.
The trade body said it would announce in 45 days when it expects to complete the investigation. Last month, Apple alleged Kodak violated Patent No. 6,031,964: a system and method for using a unified memory architecture to implement a digital camera device; and Patent RE38,911: modular digital image processing via an image processing chain with modifiable parameter controls.
In February, the trade court began investigating Kodak’s claim against Apple. Kodak claims the iPhone infringed upon a patent allowing other applications to “ask for help” in executing certain features.
Gradaddy’s song “Jed’s Other Poem” off of their album The Sopftware Slump has to be one of the most sweet and lonely ballads ever ostensibly written by a sentient robot, but Stewart Smith’s retroactively official “music” video for it — which prominently features an Apple IIe running a hand coded AppleSoft II program illustrating the lyrics — is probably what has made the song so famous.
Now, that music video has come, in a round about way, to the iPad. Smith, the original video’s programmer, happened to notice that the guys from Panic Software had an old Apple IIe sitting around, so he asked if they could run his animation on it. They didn’t have the old cassette drive to help Smith out, but they did have an iPad… and that worked just fine.
What it is:We Rule is an addictive world-building iPhone game that blends Sim City with Facebook’s Farmville. Set in medieval times, you must build a prosperous kingdom by micromanaging the peasants and expanding trade with other online players.
Why it’s good: The game blends the best empire-building aspects of Sim City with the social aspects of Farmville.
As a teenager, I was totally addicted to games like Sid Meier’s Civilization, and Sim City. Even though they had terrible graphics and long load times on my old Pentium 1 PC, the sense of being a ‘god’ and having power over all those little guys made it a deep and immersive experience. Now Ngmoco has brought this gaming experience to the iPhone.
Fruit Ninja incorporates the speed and simplicity of games like Doodle Jump with an innovative control method that makes the game addictive. I love this game. The graphics look like crap but the game proves the old adage — gameplay is king!
