Cult of Mac

Yet another analyst is predicting a gangbuster debut for the iPhone 4. Next week’s iPhone 4 launch could be a “2 mln – 3 mln iPhone event,” according to Susquehanna Financial’s Jeff Fidacaro. In a note to investors, the analyst said Apple could sell up to three times as many units compared to the 2008 launch of the iPhone 3G or the 2009 launch of the iPhone 3GS.

Fidacaro’s expectation is based on Apple’s announcement the Cupertino, Calif. company sold 600,000 iPhone 4s on the first day of pre-sales and what many believe will be a strong rush to upgrade existing iPhones – particularly iPhone 3G owners.

Until today, iPhone fans have had to settle for images of a nonfunctional iPhone 4 prototype or peaks during the handset’s unveiling at the Worldwide Developers Conference. However, now comes both photos, videos and text from a Czech Republic website demonstrating the unit Apple plans to ship next week.

The Jablickarc.cz website includes photos of the iPhone 4, along with images created with the units 5-megapixel digital camera and video camera. The website’s user claimed the phone is fast, responsive and can take demands of heavy use with little impact on its battery life.

Next time you leave your iPhone behind in a bar, there’s a free app from Apple that could help you find it.

The Find My iPhone app is now available for download on iTunes but requires a MobileMe account subscription.

It works like this: install the app on your “home base” (someone else’s iPhone, or an iPad, iPod Touch) and in the event that you lose your iPhone or it gets swiped, login to the app via MobileMe.

Dan Frommer reports for Business Insider that AT&T is making some interesting decisions in regards to customer data plans. This recent decision will probably stir the pot with customers already irate over recent iPhone data plan changes and affects customers that buy AT&T’s new 3G MicroCell product. We don’t think that the report might be fair after speaking to AT&T.

Two analysts appear to have differing opinions on the iPad’s future: one believes Apple is preparing to ramp up production of the tablet, while another says the good times may be coming to an end. First the positive outlook: the Cupertino, Calif.-based company is selling 1.2 million iPads per month and has signed a second supplier to meet an increasing demand.

DigiTimes, citing market sources, said Friday Samsung Electronics will join LG Display to supply 9.7-inch LCD panels for Apple’s iPad. The companies are expected to ship 300,000 to 500,000 panels each month.

Backing up your computer is like flossing teeth or mowing the lawn – something you know you should do but usually don’t. Apple has gone to great lengths to make Time Machine, the backup program included with Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard, easy and fun to use. Those aren’t terms which you typically hear applied to backup programs, and these efforts are to be commended.

Time Machine is easy to setup, but restoring files is not as intuitive. Many of my clients ask me for help with how to do this, and how to ensure that their backups are running reliably. Time Machine allows for restoration of files, folders, applications or an entire Mac, depending on your need.

A review of the process couldn’t hurt. Like chicken soup from Grandma …

This Penny Arcade strip on the WWDC WiFi Problems may not be timely, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to thinking this was exactly what happened to some poor grunt the second Jobs stepped off stage.

Steam for Mac is already pretty great and getting better, but Valve Software’s Rob Barris says that we can expect performance improvements in the near future thanks to driver updates from ATI, NVIDIA and Apple themselves.

“Performance is going to improve as drivers are updated,” Barris said “I would expect modest improvements in short term and larger ones in longer term. No, I can’t put dates on them.”

“We are making a lot of progress is identifying specific issues that need work inside the game and inside OpenGL and drivers. Apple, ATI and NVIDIA are all involved.”

Although most of the games that have been released on Steam for far have run just fine on the Mac, they don’t yet boast Windows 7’s speed of performance. Not a big deal now, but as newer and more sophisticated games are brought over to Steam for Mac, the gulf between Windows 7 and Mac performance is only going to get greater. It’s great to see improvements are on the horizon.

[via Crunchgear]

Over at the EE Times, they have posted an interesting comparison between Apple’s A4 CPU and the Samsung S5PC10.

The end results are that they find that the CPUs are similar in design, Apple has taken a chip originally engineered to meet the demands of a broad range of OEMs and reduced the complexity and footprint to suit Apple products, thanks to their partnership with Intrinsity.

[via Engadget]

As we watch in horror what’s happening in the Gulf (and ongoing in Nigeria), I’m proud to announce that CultofMac.com is now 100% solar-powered.

We have a new green host, AISO.net, which operates the world’s only 100% solar-powered data center.

Based in Southern California, AISO came highly recommended for quality of service, but I’m most impressed by the company’s green credentials.

Unlike other data centers, which often buy carbon offsets to assert their green bona fides, there’s no oil or coal in sight at AISO.

“Everything is powered by solar, including our office, all servers, a/c systems, networking and other hardware,” the company says. “We are the first and only 100% completely solar powered, carbon free hosting company that does not use energy credits.”

AISO’s data center is powered by a pair of solar arrays mounted on the facility’s roof. The center is cooled by low-energy, water-based air conditioning units, and its office computers will soon be powered by an ingenious wind turbine mounted in the air conditioners’ intake ducts. The company runs on sun, air and water.

“The sun is dependable and nobody is waging wars over it,” says the company’s founder, Phil Nail, who took the company solar in 2002.

To prove it’s purely solar, AISO put a live webcam on the roof to show its solar array in action. (Warning: it’s a very boring, very dry joke).

As well as CultofMac.com, AISO hosts websites big and small, including a couple of data-intensive sites for film industry clients in nearby Hollywood.

I couldn’t be happier that we’ve gone green. Renewable energy is clearly the future and as forward-looking, technophile site, it was an obvious choice to make.

We encourage you to join us. If you’re a webmaster and interested in signing up with AISO, please use this affiliate link. We’ll get some credit to apply against our ever-growing bandwidth bill.

The JooJoo Tablet has had a long and troubled history. Originally a project by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to build a $200 tablet and called the CrunchPad, the JooJoo came into being when its outsourced Singaporean developers violated their contract and decided to cut Arrington out and sell the tablet themselves… a mere month before Apple unveiled the iPad at a similar price point.

By March 30th, only 90 JooJoo tablets had been sold. But if you happen to have one of those 90 JooJoos, good news: you can now install OS X on it. None too surprising — the JooJoo boasts an Atom processor, which is compatible with Snow Leopard — but why would you even want to? OS X is an even worse tablet operating system than Windows 7, let alone the finger-based custom Linux distro the JooJoo ships with.

But hey, if you’re the kind of person who was willing to drop $500 on the JooJoo when you could have bought an iPad, you’re probably already prone to some truly questionable decision making,

We know that there are already over 600,000 pre-orders for the iPhone 4, but according to Boy Genius Report’s sources, that number doesn’t include iPhone 4’s that have been reserved for pick-up… and if a quick look at numbers from five Apple stores is anything to go by, that 600,000 figure might end up doubled on launch day.

• A “large” New York Apple store had over 2,200 iPhone reservations

• A “medium” sized Boston Apple store had over 800 reservations

• One store in California had over 1,000 reservations, and another in California had over 1,400

• A “small” Texas Apple store had over 900.

With AT&T’s own pre-order system experiencing a meltdown earlier this week, a lot of would-be pre-orderers went for the pick-up option instead. Expect lines at Apple Stores on the 24th to be even more bonkers than usual for a new iPhone launch.

Gaming thin client OnLive — which streams advanced PC games from the cloud to any device with an Internet connection — has just gone live for select guinea pigs, and if you sign up now, you can potentially get a year’s subscription to the service for free thanks to a partnership with AT&T.

That’s not to say the games will be free though: it’s only the $4.95 per month fee that’s being waived if you get in. The games themselves — which include Assassin’s Creed 2, Mass Effect, Bioshock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Borderlands and Just Cause 2 among others — will still cost money.

If the thought of playing cutting-edge PC shooters on your iPad or MacBook sounds good to you, you might as well sign-up today… although it looks like you’ll need to wait to see if you get in to download the client and start playing.

MobileMe went down for some ‘scheduled maintenance’ last night, and when it came back up it included a whole host of new features. As well as the Mail web application now out of beta, Apple’s list of improvements includes:

• Widescreen and compact views.
• Rules to keep your email organized everywhere.
• Single-click archiving.
• Formatting toolbar.
• Faster performance.
• Increased security with SSL.
• Support for external email addresses.
• Improved junk mail filtering.

In addition to the new features, Apple has updated the login page (above) and introduced a fancy new application switcher (below) that provides a nice new way to navigate between the MobileMe web applications.

Apple have also released a Find My iPhone app that now provides you with quick and easy access to the Find My iPhone service from each one of your iOS devices. All of the web application features are included like sending a message to your device or playing a sound, locking the device and even wiping your data remotely.

Apple has been busy releasing a few of their own iOS applications this week, and as well as Find My iPhone, we’ve also seen iTunes Connect Mobile which gives application developers the ability to monitor their app’s success in the App Store from their iPhone, and the Apple Store application allowing customers to make purchases from their iPhones and schedule reservations at an Apple Retail Store.

I’ve never been quite convinced about the prudence of combining the spatial-awareness requirements of augmented-reality iPhone activities with benders — but if I were in NYC, this pretty cool use of AR might just have made me risk barfing all over my iPhone.

Metaio, the company behind augmented-reality app Junaio, has partnered with the iconic NYC nightlife rag TimeOut New York (TONY) to point users toward hot offers at bars throughout the city via a new “TONY Summer Drinking channel,” included in the 2.0 version of the free app. Of course, tips on where to find these deals is available via less hip methods — aka “the Internets” — but that’s so 2009.

Oh, and keep your eyes peeled next week for another surprise from Junaio.

The flow of apps through the App Store is thicker than a swarm of locusts in a Biblical plague these days (though somewhat less icky, and considerably more beneficial).

So on August 24-26, a bunch of app developers and the sort will gather in the desert at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino for the inaugural Appcon to discuss mobile app development across all major platforms, hear speakers from, for example, Chicago-based NAVTEQ (the guys who provide all those cool maps for the likes of Garmin and Magellan), and probably indulge a little too much at all-you-can-eat buffets and the craps table.

And who knows — we might be seeing the birth of something close to an E3 if the importance and revenue gathering ability of the app market continues on its upward trajectory, right?

If you know (or care) anything about how computers work, you understand that RAM is one of the most important technical specifications by which a device’s overall performance capabilities may be judged. Simply put, more RAM generally equates to more performance, all other things being equal.

The original iPhone and the iPhone 3G each came equipped with 128MB RAM and if you’ve had the opportunity to use one of those devices alongside an iPhone 3G S (which added still camera zoom and video, among other things) or an iPad, you have seen the performance difference between 128MB RAM and 256MB. It’s why Steve Jobs went on about how blazingly fast the iPad is when he introduced it.

It’s only logical that with the dawn of multitasking in the latest iteration of iOS and with on-the-fly video editing via iMovie as well as video calling coming to iPhone 4, the latest hardware needs and is getting a RAM upgrade.

Which is yet another good reason explaining those 600,000 iPhone 4 pre-orders. And perhaps even a good reason for waiting on the next iteration of the iPad.

[via Macrumors]

We near the end of the week with a $999 deal for a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with widescreen 13.3-inch display. Also among the day’s top bargains: a bluetooth iPad keyboard with 25-foot range for $32. Finally, a new batch of App Store price drops, including “Build-a-lot,” a strategy game for the iPhone or iPod touch.

Speaking of iPods, we have a number, including a4GB iPod nano for $70. Also, to keep your new iPhone 4 unmarred is a shield from ZAGG. Along the way, we’ll check out many other deals, details of which are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

The belief that the iPad is eating the netbook’s lunch isn’t new. However, we can now mark the calendar: 2012. That’s according to one analysis firm which also dropped this bombshell: tablet devices will soon comprise nearly 25 percent of all PC sales.

The report released Thursday by Forrester Research shows tablet growth increasing over the next five years, from the current 6 percent to 23 percent by 2015. Meanwhile, the market for netbooks – which took off because of their low cost – is gradually shrinking. Currently 44 percent of PC sales, that figure drops to 17 percent by 2015, according to Forrester.

Who can say Apple doesn’t make it as easy as possible to get in on the application Gold Rush founded on its major Operating Systems, iOS and Mac OS X?

The company posted Thursday 100 in-depth technical sessions from WWDC 2010, offering would-be developers free access to advanced techniques, allowing code monkeys everywhere to better grok the revolutionary technologies in iOS and Mac OS X.

All videos are free for download to registered Apple Developers, and portable on Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

What’s it like to own an Apple product, all together too funny. Read the full comic strip at The Oatmeal

Responding to pundit John Gruber’s ongoing debate about website comments, our friends at MacHeist have just launched a Safari extension that adds comments to Gruber’s Daring Fireball site.

The DaringFireballWithComments extension can be found here. Simply download and double-click to install (Make sure you enable extensions in Safari first).

“Get ready for round two,” says John Casasanta, co-founder of MacHeist, who in February launched DaringFireballWithComments.net, a website that briefly mirrored Gruber’s site with, you guessed it, comments.

The site was up for a few days before it was taken down at Gruber’s insistence. It faced a lot of criticism for violating Gruber’s copyrights. However, the Safari extension skirts such issues.

“We’re totally clear this time,” said Casasanta via IM. “We’ll keep this running forever.”

For the last couple of days, Gruber has been debating website comments with writers Joe Wilcox and Ian Betteridge, among others.

“Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations,” writes Gruber. “They’re cacophonous shouting matches. DF is a curated conversation, to be sure, but that’s the whole premise.”

Not any more.

Apple put together a video love letter to itself where app developers from A-list firms talk about how delighted they are to work with the Cupertino company.

About halfway through the 5-minute or so video, the execs start talking about how much they don’t like working with other platforms. (Read: “Android?”)

“We’ve actually spent some time working with other platforms, it’s a night and day difference,” says Calvin Carter of Bottle Rocket apps who made the NPR app. “They are more difficult for the user, they don’t have the power or the tools available, they don’t have the distribution network. They don’t have the standards, both in hardware or software.”

“It is that handset fragmentation, if you will, that causes developers a lot of problems,” says Skarpi Hedinsson of ABC TV. “Because you’re now targeting individual devices.”

“It’s really evident in Apple’s APIs, in the developer’s tools, that you’re working with something really mature,” remarks Tom Conrad of Pandora. “Not something that was invented two years ago.”

Via Jordan Stark

Charles Parr wonders whether Apple’s wireless Magic Mouse would be any more enchanting if you didn’t have to change the batteries, so he whipped up the above prototype.

He says:
“I’m not a product designer by any means, but I know changing batteries all the time can be a pain… I would definitely like to have a rechargeable Magic Mouse that will utilize the same dock connector that Apple has on all their products.”

Parr sent the idea along to Steve Jobs, but hasn’t heard anything yet.
What do you think?

Via Charles Parr

The tech industry is known for its superlatives. However, in the wake of the iPhone 4’s introduction, analysts have been caught off-guard, using words like “ginormous” and “huge” to describe interest in Apple’s new handset. Now a prominent Apple-watcher believes the number of iPhone users could jump from last year’s 30 million to 100 million by the end of 2011.

Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty told investors Wednesday night she believes more than 50 percent of current iPhone owners will upgrade to the iPhone 4. If 50 percent of iPhone owners upgrade, that means Apple will sell 48 million handsets, she projected. Noted Mac analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffrey envisions a very similar outcome. Predicting Apple will sell 9.5 million iPhone during the June financial quarter, Munster pointed to a recent Wall Street Journal survey suggesting 62 percent of iPhone customers say they will upgrade.