Cult of Mac

Giving iPhone 4 customers free cases will cost Apple about $175 million, Apple executives said during a conference call with Wall St. analysts.

Apple reported another blockbuster quarter thanks to record sales of iPhones and Macs, making the most money ever in company history: $15.7 billion.

Even more unbelievable, Apple is projecting $18 billion in revenue next quarter—and the company is known for lowballing estimates.

Apple is likely to equal Microsoft in annual revenues this year, and may even pass it’s long-time rival. Apple is on track to make more than $60 billion in revenue this year, which is almost equal to Microsoft’s $61.5 billion. Apple already surpassed Microsoft two months ago as the world’s most highly-valued tech company.

Apple sold boatloads of Macs and iPhones. The iPad is also a big hit: Apple has shifted 3.27 million iPads since launch. The only downside was iPod sales.

Here are the key numbers:

• Macs: 3.47 million Macs sold, the most ever in a single quarter, and 33% more than last year.
• iPhones: 8.4 million sold, up 61% year-over-year.
• iPods: 9.41 million sold, down 8% from the year-ago quarter.

In addition, Steve Jobs hinted at even more new products this year:

“It was a phenomenal quarter that exceeded our expectations all around, including the most successful product launch in Apple’s history with iPhone 4,” Steve Jobs said in a statement. “iPad is off to a terrific start, more people are buying Macs than ever before, and we have amazing new products still to come this year.”

Here’s the full press release:

Number seven in our series is free, streamlined, an absolute joy to use — and here’s the biggie — syncs seamlessly with one of several desktop companions (which are also free); it’s also the first essential in our series that fully replaces a native app.

It’s made big waves at the Japanese iTunes Store since its launch in March (not surprising as it was developed by Japanese developer Inforteria), and this morning Twitcal — an app that allows its users to import and update their calendars via tweets — has landed in app stores elsewhere.

The app looks pretty nifty: Just follow another user’s calendar, and your calendar is automatically updated anytime they make a change. Users-sans-Twitcal aren’t left out completely though, because the app can also send event notifications via email. As expected, Twitcal also syncs with Google Calendar and iCal.

The Pogoplug is a great little gadget that connects up to four hard drives to the Internet. It’s very handy for serving up files, music and movies to anyone, anywhere. We reviewed it very favorably.

Now there’s about to be a business version, the Pogoplug Biz, which adds a bunch of features for small and medium business (SMB) users. It’s like Dropbox, except the data is not on some other company’s servers. The Pogoplug Biz is available for pre-order for $299 and includes lifetime Pogoplug service.

We start the day with a faux leather case cover for the iPhone 4 – just $2 until July 23. Next is a blast from the past, Disney’s TRON for the iPhone or iPod touch. We top things off with a series of iPhone App price drops, including “Modern Combat: Sandstorm.” Along the way, we also check out some deals on other software, including a family pack of iLife ’09, as well as Poser 8 and Pandora 2 for the Mac.

Details on these and many other items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Although we won’t know for certain how Apple did during the third financial quarter until after the markets close tonight, analysts this morning came out with their usual prognostications, including a surprise reduction from Oppenheimer on the target price for the Cupertino, Calif. company’s stock.

Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner told investors this morning he is concerned the negative publicity over the iPhone 4’s reception problems could hurt sales. “We believe the iPhone 4’s antenna performance is comparable to that of other smartphones, but in the court of public opinion, perception is reality,” Reiner writes. “The perception — created by a scoop-hungry media and Apple’s newly-emboldened wireless adversaries — is that the 4 is faulty,” the analyst adds.

There are several excellent iPhone apps available for cyclists. Abvio’s entrant into this category is called Cyclemeter, which turns your iPhone into a GPS-based cycling computer. The $4.99 app has been updated to allow multitasking and full iOS 4 integration.

In many ways, Cyclemeter is pretty similar to other apps such as B.iCycle or iMapMyRide. It offers full integration with Google maps and iCal. You can control your iPod from within the app. It can save your routes and post rides to your Twitter or Facebook accounts. And it will produce some pretty impressive charts and graphs to help analyze your performance. Battery consumption is also on par with that of other cycling apps.

Apple’s due to start sending out free cases to beleaguered iPhone 4 owners at the end of the week… and while that’s great for customers, it’s bad news indeed for companies planning on selling their own iPhone 4 cases. How do you compete with free?

Incipio is trying. They’ve just started a cute “We love our customers too” campaign. It works like this: once you receive your free bumper from Apple, you can send it in to Incipio for five bucks off one of their premium iPhon cases.

Obviously, this is only a good deal if you’re looking for a higher-quality case than the bumper, but still, it’s a nice gesture. The question is: with Apple intending on sending out third-party cases along with the bumper, what will Incipio do for people who get another free case instead? Will the same discount still apply?

With the iOS 4 update, a surprising number of iPhone and iPod Touch users are reporting a mysterious and contentless email popping up in their mailboxes, straight from the past: December 31st, 1969. Let the conspiracy theories commence!

The emails only seem to appear in MobileMe or GMail accounts, and appears without a sender, subject of content. Even stranger, the email can’t be deleted: once you’ve been 1969ed, you can’t easily go back.

The good news is there are fixes, but they are often temporary, and one involves 34 distinct steps. No official word from Apple yet on whether they’ll fix it, or what it all means… but somehow, I’m guessing, it all ties in to Roswell.

[via DVICE]

Artist Xylo planted these fake iPhones to protest the working conditions at Foxconn, where electronics giants including Apple make their gadgets.

Defined by the artist as “street protest art about the iPhone prison death camps,” the outcry iPhones are made from a fine cement mixture, painted by hand and currently hanging around London.

As we await Apple’s third-quarter earnings report, analysts are offering their opinion on what the Cupertino, Calif. company may announce. Will ‘Antennagate’ hurt iPhone sales, can the Mac escape the iPad’s shadow, and will the iPod continue its downward decline?

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told investors Monday he foresees Mac sales of between 3.1 million and 3.2 million for the quarter, up 11 percent. This after sales of the Apple machines grew 35 percent in May and 39 percent in April. Apple likely will top the 2.94 million Mac sales Apple reported earlier in 2010, according to Munster.

Apple has just brought their Filemaker database software to iOS devices for the very first time, and while FileMaker Go isn’t going to replace your Mac when it comes to database creation, it is a slick way to access Filemaker databases on the go.

Filemaker Go allows users to update and modify existing databases on their iPhone or iPad after they have been created and designed through Filemaker Pro. You transfer them to your device through iTunes or email, or even access an existing database online by clicking on a web link.

Filemaker Go requires iOS 4.0 or higher on the iPhone. Filemaker Go for iPad requires iOS 3.2 or better, and it will read database files as old as Filemaker 7. At $19.99, it’s not a cheap app, but for professionals who do a lot of work in Filemaker database, it’s the best solution out there.

With the iOS 4.0 update, Apple finally figured out how to bring free major updates to the iOS operating system to non-contract devices like the iPod Touch…. which makes this rumor coming out of Stuff.tv pretty questionable.

According to their app developer sources, a paid update to iOS 4 for the iPad is a “definite.” That’s a pretty big contradiction of Apple’s own iPad EULA, which reads:

Apple will provide you any iPad OS software updates that it may release from time to time, up to and including the next major iPad OS software release following the version of iPad OS software that originally shipped from Apple on your iPad, for free. For example, if your iPad originally shipped with iPad 3.x software, Apple would provide you with any iPad OS software updates it might release up to and including the iPad 4.x software release. Such updates and releases may not necessarily include all of the new software features that Apple releases for newer iPad models.

Of course, Apple’s free to change course on this, but if they figured out how to bring iOS 4 to the iPod Touch without a fee, there’s little doubt in my mind they can manage it for the iPad… even if Cupertino was tempted to go back on its word.

Fantastic. 25 years after it was first written for the Mac, Apple has chosen donate the source code of MacPaint and QuickDraw to the Computer History Museum, making one of the earliest and most efficient pieces of art software ever available to public scrutiny for the first time ever.

Originally released back in 1984, MacPaint was a revolutionary piece of software that first introduced common image editing conventions like the lasso tool and the paint bucket. From a programming perspective, though, MacPaint is even more impressive: it was so efficiently programmed and its memory constraints were so tight that MacPaint actually revealed bugs in the underlying system that could only be exposed by running so close to the edge of available memory.

According to a whimsical Steve Jobs, up to twenty-four man years went into the writing of MacPaint. If you’re interested in taking a glimpse at coding perfection spread across 5,804 lines of Pascal and 2,738 of assembly, go take a look.

After Apple changed its privacy policy to collect geo-data from customers, lawmakers called on Apple to explain exactly how and when it collects that information.

The answer? If you have an iPhone running OS 3.2 or iOS 4, Apple collects location information from you every 12 hours.

The GPS on Apple mobile devices collect data, encrypts it, then sends it back to Apple every 12 hours using wi-fi. The GPS data comes with a random ID number the phone generates once every 24 hours. Individual users cannot be identified. Apple also reminds lawmakers in the letter that customers can always turn off all location-based services. You can read the full 13-page response, here (pdf.)

What It Is: The Bubble Slider case is a distinctive hard shell from Hard Candy Cases that’s saved my iPhone 4 on several occasions now.

Why It’s Cool: When I show people my iPhone 4, they often spend as much time admiring the Bubble Slider case as the device itself.

iTunes 9.2.1 is now available for download and finally fixes the numerous bugs many of us have been experiencing:

• Disables older versions of some incompatible third-party plug-ins
• Addresses minor issues with dragging and dropping items
• Addresses a performance issue when first syncing to some devices with iTunes 9.2
• Addresses an issue upgrading to iOS 4 on an iPhone or iPod touch with encrypted back-ups
• Addresses other issues that improve stability and performance

You can get this update via Software Update on your Mac, or download it directly from the Apple website.

Apple has released an update to its iBooks application for the iOS and the latest version brings with it a few nice new features.

As well as the ability to now choose between 6 different fonts for your books, you can also double-tap images to see them in greater detail; and experience books that include audio and video.

In addition to new features, we also get welcome bug fixes, or, “stability and performance improvements.” I’ve lost count of the number of errors I get when opening a book in iBooks, so I’m hoping these issues are now fixed. So far, so good.

The full list of features from the app’s description is as follows:

• Double-tap an image within a book to view it in greater detail.
• Experience books that include audio and video.
• Enjoy substantial performance improvements when reading PDFs.
• Look-up definitions to English words inside books without a specified language.
• Addresses an issue that may have caused some book downloads to not complete.
• Includes many stability and performance improvements.

You can download the update through iTunes or the App Store on your device, or grab iBooks from the App Store for free if you don’t already have it.

Image via AppAdvice

The new issue of Wired, featuring a futuristic Will Ferrell on the cover, includes an absolutely devastating take on the long, troubled partnership of Apple and AT&T by Fred Vogelstein. Things really couldn’t be worse. Just picture Steve Jobs at his most furious, then make him work on a near-daily basis with a company that can’t pull off basic stuff (even if some of it might be Apple’s fault). Then imagine that they ask him to wear a suit to meetings.

Apple and AT&T have bickered about how the iPhone was to be displayed in AT&T’s stores: Apple insisted the phone be presented on its own display stand, away from other models. They have even fought about wardrobe: When an AT&T representative suggested to one of Jobs’ deputies that the Apple CEO wear a suit to meet with AT&T’s board of directors, he was told, “We’re Apple. We don’t wear suits. We don’t even own suits.”

Ouch! Other revelations include the fact that Apple has long thought about leaping to Verizon (duh), and that Scott Forstall even led a team down to Qualcomm to discuss creating a CDMA iPhone as early as 2007 because AT&T demanded that Apple make YouTube WiFi-only, use low-resolution video, or limit clips to one minute. Basically, Apple has spent every day of the last three years wishing that it had a company as ambitious as itself running its network, while also being keenly aware of what a bad business proposition that would be.

In all honesty, the story is one of the best I’ve read for really considering the business complexities of the emerging connected lifestyle. The carriers all want people to use the most popular devices, but the devicemakers want more bandwidth at a lower price than any carrier is ready for. The death of the unlimited data plan might well clear the hurdles that have made AT&T act so awful when it comes to allowing new iPhone features beyond the initial set, but it’s early days yet.

This much is clear: the dreadful 3G infrastructure in the U.S. is in no way equipped to handle the rise of the App Phone, and it will be a painful several years before 4G makes up for it. But it’s always this way: computers that were powerful enough for the web were out a long time before broadband was available in the home, and now cable modem speeds are plenty fast for most users, and chokepoints have evaporated. Let’s just hope we’re only a few years away from a similar breakthrough in mobile.

Via Fast Company

We all gave up the ability to jailbreak and tether our iPhones when we updated them to iOS 4 or purchased an iPhone 4. Hackers have been teasing us that an iOS 4 jailbreak is imminent, but now you don’t have to wait for them or the jailbreak to have tethering again. You can have tethering on your iPhone now — using an open source project hosted on GitHub called iProxy.

Tired of paying for ringtones for your iPhone? In this tutorial I will walk you through on how to create a ringtone from within iTunes using any song. This tutorial works on any song you may have purchased or ripped into iTunes. Read the full tutorial after the break.

PR expert Matt Seeger said Apple did issue a recall last Friday by providing iPhone 4 customers with free Bumper cases.

“From my perspective, this was a classic case of a recall,” said Seeger, who is chair of the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit. “They said, ‘Bring the product in, we’ll retrofit it.’ It’s not what most people think of as a recall, which is a safety issue. But this was a recall.”

The FCC has approved Apple’s Magic Trackpad, which means the device could be announced as early as this week.

A device known by the model number A1339 and described as a “Bluetooth Device” has just shown up in the FCC’s database. Given how quickly Apple has in the past announced devices that have just approved by the FCC, the Magic Trackpad could be officially launched within days.

The device would act as a big touch-sensitive trackpad for desktop computers, such as an iMac. It looks as though the device supports handwriting recognition, as well as the swipes and gestures found on the Magic Mouse and MacBook Pro trackpads.

Here are some more leaked photos of a prototype:

Apple has removed the Chatroulette-like app, iChatr, from the App Store because of flashers.

Apple pulled the app this weekend after eight days because users were inappropriately exposing themselves to strangers while using the app.