Cult of Mac

Apple will be giving away 5,000 of these free commemorative t-shirts this weekend at the grand opening of its flagship store in Shanghai.

Note what is says on the back: “Designed in California, Made for China.”

It’s a subtle but important play on Apple’s traditional credit line, which says: “Designed in California, Made in China.”

Given the controversy at Apple’s supplier Foxconn, I asked our Chinese blogger friend Chris Chang if the statement was appropriate. Some may feel that Apple’s relationship with China is exploitative.

“The statement is appropriate,” says Chang. “It’s actually the most attractive part of the shirt. I can’t say that Apple has an exploitative relationship with China, but according to Ron Johnson’s speech in the Shanghai Apple store, I believe that Apple is trying to build up a relationship with China.”

During the store’s press preview, Johnson — the head of Apple’s stores — said the company is planning a big push in China and will open 25 retail outlets there by 2012.

Check out these awesome pictures of Apple’s new Shanghai store, courtesy of our friend Chris Chang of M.I.C Gadget.

Chris’ pictures clearly show how and why Apple is making a killing right now. While other companies are going out of business, Apple is building great glass and steel monuments to its brand that broadcast its growing influence and power  — and make tons of money at the same time.

The Shanghai store is the biggest and boldest yet. It’s a big statement of the company’s success in glass and steel. What other corporation anywhere in the world is building such huge architectural monuments to itself?

It harkens back to the old days, when powerful companies built huge skyscrapers or endowed concert halls and libraries. Of course, thanks to the economy, no one is doing it these days — except Apple. And these monuments (Upper West Side, Sainte-Catherine, Carrousel du Louvre, Fifth Avenue, Regent Street) make more money than Tiffany, square-foot-for-square-foot.

You’ve got to marvel at Apple’s cojones.

We start the day off with two hardware and one very soft deal. First up is a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini for $499. Then we take a look at a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro for just $1,540. Finally, we wrap up our highlighted bargains with a leather case for your iPad.

Along the way, we check out many other items for your iPhone, iPod and iPad, including iPad and App Store freebies and price markdowns, as well as cases and software. As usual, details on these and many more products are at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

As unusual as it is to find an electronic gadget manufactured in the U.S. these days, it’s even more unusual for that gadget to hail from New York City — but that’s exactly where Grado’s SR60i is made. Appropriate, because just like the city, these cans have an unpolished-but-genuine persona that’s a little off-putting at first, but incredibly charming once you get past the gritty exterior.

I gawped in disbelief at this picture in the New York Times of Apple’s new store in Shanghai. At fist glance, I thought it was a special effect from a sci-fi movie. The spaceport-looking thing in the background is the Oriental Pearl Tower.

New York Times: Apple Making New Push Into China

A growing number of large US businesses are arming their employees with the iPad,  proving that the tablet computer’s usefulness goes way beyond keeping the kids quiet.

Recent corporate converts to the iPad include Wells Fargo, SAP and Telllabs.

“This iPad thing has taken the world by storm,”  Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. told Bloomberg.  “It came in as a consumer product and very quickly the people who actually bought them were business people.”

Japan’s third-ranked mobile carrier Softbank reported Wednesday it had 229,500 cell phone subscribers in June, topping the country’s biggest carrier NTT DoCoMo Inc., which recorded 164,000. Second-ranked KDDI Corp. had just 61,300 new subscribers. Softbank is the exclusive iPhone provider in a country where nearly three out of four smartphones are made by Apple.

In April, Softbank’s head, Masayoshi Son, said “the iPhone is selling so well that we are really feeling a boost from it.”Apple sold 1.7 million iPhones in Japan, 72 percent of all smartphones in that country. Indeed, the iPhone is credited with doubling the smartphone segment over 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Predicting sales of a new product based on demand from eager early adopters can be risky. However, one analyst made such a leap. Bernstein Research analyst Tom Sacconaghi told investors Thursday Apple could sell 25 million iPads in 2011. But, then again, it might sell 18 million tablets next year. It kind of depends, you know?

“An analysis based on extrapolating sales trajectories of [the iPhone, iPod and all netbooks] suggests that Apple could sell a staggering 25 million iPads or more in fiscal 2011,” the analyst wrote. This seems to go along with Apple reporting selling three million iPads in the first 80 days.

There’s no shortage of choices available for gabbing with buddies these days, but instant messaging remains a favorite (I’ve actually worked in at least one newsroom where the primary method of communication was IM).

There’s no lack of IM iPhone apps either; but a clean interface, wealth of features, ability to connect with practically every IM service in the galaxy and availability for free makes Meebo the best of these.

Apple’s Shaghai China store opens Saturday. With the impending opening comes comparisons with the Cupertino, Calif. company’s New York City flagship. Yep, the same glass cylinder, the same hoopla, the same moat. Moat?

Yes, along with a 40-foot high glass cylinder (with possibly the largest glass panes in the world) is a moat filled with water. While Apple Senior Vice President of Retail Ron Johnson wanted to focus on the “stunning architecture,” the site Shanghaiist wanted to talk about that moat. “There is an inexplicably shallow moat of water surrounding the store, tripping up those who don’t watch their step,” a writer comments. We aren’t sure about that architecture feature, ourselves. Could it be a concession to China’s government leaders, perhaps a way to track potential troublemakers; look for the wet socks?

If Apple were interested in marketing their computers to people who live just to print, they’d probably use a slogan like: “Macs: PDF everywhere.” Or something.

Because it’s true. The ability to turn anything that’s printable into a PDF file is built right in to the OS X operating system. And it’s easy to get to from anywhere.

The iPhone 4 videochat feature FaceTime may not be televising the revolution any time soon, but at least one pair of doctors have used it to consult on a patient who risked amputation.

In what may be the first documented iPhone 4 medical video consultation, University of Arizona surgeon David G. Armstrong, connected via FaceTime to give with Los Angeles Surgeon Lee Rogers’ a look at a patient who had undergone foot reconstruction at the University’s Southern Arizona Limb Salvage Alliance (SALSA). The virtual consult came in handy since Dr. Rogers was attending the American Diabetes Association meeting in Orlando, Florida when he took the “FaceTime” call from Armstrong, who had returned from Orlando to his SALSA clinics a day earlier.

New Apple Friend Bar Gives Customers Someone To Talk At About Mac Products

Another chunk of genius from The Onion, poking fun at those of us who love our Apple products a little too much.

The Apple Friend Bar, it says, is a new service where ordinary Mac fanatics can book appointments with experts who will be happy to just chat about Apple products. All. Day. Long.

My favorite part is when the Friend Bar employee is quoted saying: “Unlike your girlfriend or co-workers, we’re not going to get tired of discussing the wireless networking capabilities of the Snow Leopard operating system.”

Concept designs in general tend to be wishful-thinking affairs, but we can’t help but wish that this smart packaging design by Sverre Wiik Øberg uses the iPod’s own packaging as a charger. The box protects the iPod during shipping, then out pop the prongs to juice your iPod in any wall socket once it arrives.

What a snazzy design. Apple’s been increasingly moving towards minimizing its packaging in the interests of green friendliness over the past fe years. The next obvious step seems to be something just like this: discourage customers from throwing away their packaging to begin with by making it legitimately useful.

For the last few days, numerous iPhone users in major AT&T network hubs have noticed apparent 3G upload throttling. AT&T has just released a statement concerning the problem: its a bug with the Alcatel-Lucent HSUPA hardware, and they are working on it.

“AT&T and Alcatel-Lucent jointly identified a software defect — triggered under certain conditions – that impacted uplink performance for Laptop Connect and smartphone customers using 3G HSUPA-capable wireless devices in markets with Alcatel-Lucent equipment. This impacts less than two percent of our wireless customer base. While Alcatel-Lucent develops the appropriate software fix, we are providing normal 3G uplink speeds and consistent performance for affected customers with HSUPA-capable devices.

In other words, something went kablooey, and until Alcatel-Lucent gets around to fixing the problem, users with HSUPA-capable devices like the iPhone 4 will be limited to regular 3G UMTS upload speeds.

Wonder if you’re affected? If you’re in NYC, Central Jersey, Boston, Orlando, Seattle, South Jersey/Philly, Columbus, Cleveland, West Houston, Phoenix, Northern Colorado, St. Paul/Minnesota, Suffolk County/Long Island, Quad Cities, South Jersey, Denver, Detroit Metro, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Kansas City, Fairfax and Minneapolis… well, could be.

By many people’s estimations, the iPad is missing anywhere from between one and two cameras, and Apple’s curious choice to eschew adding at least one web cam to their tablet when they already had their video-conferencing standard FaceTime in the wings is often cynically described as a move to encourage customers to quickly upgrade to the second-gen unit once it pops out of Cupertino’s manufacturing shops.

Why wait until then, though? This iPad Cam-Case design by Chet Rosales adds a swiveling camera to the enclosure. Of course, without proper support from Apple (and a port of FaceTime to iPad), a case like this would be pretty useless… but we’re hopeful, if not optimistic, that Apple might choose to sell something like this themselves when the camera-equipped, second-gen iPad comes out sometime in the next year. Let’s not leave the early adopters behind.

This gorgeous pinhole camera on Etsy isn’t just elegantly simple in its design, but its made out of an old iPhone box. Load a standard 35mm film reel into its spool and you’ll be able to take simple pinhole snaps with the best of shoebox toting grade schoolers. It even has a built-in advance and rewind reel, enabling you to “shoot a picture, advance to the next frame, use the entire roll of film, rewind it back into the canister and take it to the drug store for processing!” Who needs iPhoto?

When some intrepid young capitalist coats a new gadget in superglue and then rolls it in Swarovski-brand crushed glass then reprices it for a few thousand dollars more , we usually decry the resulting product as a tacky, shameless money grab aimed at Cristal-swilling rappers, bling-encrusted divas, porn star kingpins and the like.

This $299 iPhone 4 case, on the other hand? What can we say? Has Steve ever looked so bedazzlingly fabulous?

Earlier today, Apple made a new job posting on their official site, calling for an iTunes Fraud Prevention Specialist to work in Austin “canceling fraudulent orders” and “researching and resolving fraud escalations from various sources.”

It was a well-timed posting. A couple of days earlier, developer Thuat Nguyen and his dev company “mycompany” was caught hacking into the accounts of 400 iTunes users and funneling money from their accounts into a number of cheesy, crappy, Dragonball-themed e-book apps… a transparent money-funneling move that got Nguyen banned from the Apple dev program.

Since the job posting appeared, though, it seems that Apple has rethought lending any publicity to the fact that they think, internally, they need to do more about iTunes fraud: the job posting has since been pulled. No need to be cagy about this, Apple: credit card fraud happens, it’s not really your fault, and it’s good that you’re hiring more guys to protect us. Don’t worry about it!

After the fashion of their many other great infographics, GigaOm has continued their series of informative high-res JPEGs with iPhone: The Art of the Launch, which puts into perspective just how huge the iPhone has become… and some of the problems that have faced previous launches.

The most interesting part of the infographic to me? The citation of Gizmodo’s Brian Lam back in 2006, ahead of the iPhone launch: “The iPhone Will Be Announced On Monday. I Guarantee it. It isn’t what I expected at all. And I’ve already said too much.” Considering that four years later, the same site would strip a stolen and still unannounced iPhone 4 down to its bolts for its readership, that seems like an awfully coy admission of insider knowledge for Gizmodo to make, in retrospect.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkcLLI6Yv8I

The guys over at repair shop TechRestore have put together this goofily sinuous and retro-styled stop-motion video of an iPhone 4, doing a strip tease down to its very frame. Consider this the technological equivalent of a burlesque dancer slowly undressing herself down to her skeleton in a dust-free clean room. Or don’t, because that’s just plain creepy.

[via 9to5Mac]

Elusive as some albino cryptozoological flora, the white iPhone 4 has been snapped in all its glory by Japanese blog Impress Watch. It looks exactly how you’d expect it to look, but since this is the iPhone 4 many of us wanted to be holding in our hands a couple of weeks ago, Impress Watch’s catalog of unboxing shots can be classified as a bit of late night gadget pornography starring that elfin, ivory love who somehow got away.

YouTube’s mobile website has just gotten a lot more iPhone-friendly, thanks to some hefty HTML5 optimization.

A new spartan, icon-driven dashboard now greets the YouTube visitor coming in through Mobile Safari, offering quick and easy access to subscriptions, playlists, favorites, your videos, search and settings. It’s all a lot more finger friendly.

When it comes to video viewing, you also now have a lot more options, including the ability to play a video in a higher-quality format, vote it up or down, write comments or view related videos.

The biggest change, though, is speed: videos load much quicker than the native YouTube player, as well as gaining higher-definition options for watching on the likes of the iPhone 4’s Retina Display.

If you want to check it out, just point Mobile Safari to youtube.com and check it out.

With the release of iOS 4, Apple has erased many of the advantages competing platforms — most notably Android — had previously enjoyed. But while much noise has been made about the iPhone’s new multitasking trick, news that the iPhone can now use image recognition to create a more accurate augmented-reality experience has been far less trumpeted.

Maybe that’s because it’s not really an ability of the iPhone itself, but rather an API that Apple has made available to app developers with the release of iOS 4.

It works like this: The app uses a particular API to capture live video from the iPhone’s camera, then shunts the feed back to servers that use image-recognition software to figure out what the iPhone is looking at; the server then sends a graphic (or graphics) back to the iPhone that’s overlayed onto what the user is looking at (we’ve got instructions on how to easily demo the new tech later on in this post).

Super Badminton 2010 by Rolocule is the one and only 3D badminton game available in the App Store for iPhone & iPod Touch. Despite no current competition, this game still boasts “hyper-realistic physics,” HD quality graphics, a slick UI and realistic sound effects, all of which go towards keeping Super Badminton at the top of its game.