Cult of Mac

I just confirmed that the iPhone 4 loses reception when the antenna band is touched. Plus, it’s enough to make the iPhone drop calls. This is a serious problem, and I can’t believe Apple let this slip through.

My new iPhone 4 drops from full reception (four-to-five bars) to just one bar in a matter of a few seconds when my fingers and thumb are touching the antenna band. See the video above. But when I take my fingers off the sides and hold the iPhone by its glass back, the number of bars quickly climbs to five again. The problem was first reported by Gizmodo, and seems to widespread, if not universal.

It’s enough to make the iPhone drop calls. I just tested it by calling my office phone. Holding the iPhone in my left hand, reception plummeted and the call dropped.

iPhone fail!

Today is iPhone 4 day and like the rest of you I got up early today. I’d say way to early since it was 4:00 am and I was surprised to find out that my alarm clock on my iPhone could be set to such an early hour. The engineers at Apple HQ in Cupertino could not have done a better job on that alarm, but for once I was wishing they’d screwed it up since I think it should be a crime for an alarm clock to ring before 5:00 am.

We start off the deals with “RedLaser,” a barcode scanning application for the iPhone. We also check out a flexible bluetooth keyboard for the iPad and a replacement dock for your iPhone 3G. Along the way, we check out a number of applications for your iPhone and iPad.

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

The best corporate profile of Apple since, well, Leander Kahney’s book Inside Steve’s Brain is in the July/August 2010 issue of Fast Company, published Thursday on the magazine’s website.

Author Farhad Manjoo does a fabulous job of “capturing something that feels like magic” behind Apple and the company’s success by delving into its relationships with current partners such as San Francisco design firm Eight, Inc., by speaking with former employees and others who have watched the company for years, and coming away with 10 essential lessons for any company wanting to become the Apple of its industry.

Of course it’s well known the secret to Apple’s success — notwithstanding Steve Jobs’ personal direction — is nothing more than “discipline, focus, long-term thinking and a willingness to flout the rules that govern everybody else’s business.” And yet, as Manjoo discovers, it’s also much more.

There’s a great series of photographs showing everyday, normal people dressed in the Steve Jobs “uniform” of jeans, running shoes and long-sleeve black mock turtleneck, from which one comes away amazed that only Jobs himself doesn’t look like a total dweeb wearing it. There’s a fabulous graphic by Jeremy Caplan, the iCensus (possibly available only in the print article), depicting who matters (and who doesn’t) in Apple Nation.

And in the end we learn how clues to the future are already built in to Apple’s most current products, and why “we’ll only be able to spot them in retrospect.”

Highly recommended.

Remember the days when Apple was considered a company with its majority of sales within the United States? Well, that was before the iPhone burst onto the scene. In 2010, international sales will account for 80 percent of iPhones purchased, an analyst told clients Wednesday.

Internationally, Apple has six times as many iPhone owners than in the U.S., according to Gleacher & Company (formerly Broadpoint AmTech) analyst Brian Marshall. Combined, Apple’s 150 international carrier partners have 460.7 million subscribers. AT&T, which has the exclusive U.S. iPhone market, offers just 65.1 million postpaid subscribers.

Just a quick note from my commute: the line at the flagship Apple Store in San Francisco’s Union Square is stunningly huge, spanning the enter length and width of the block, and then wrapping around the corner for who knows how far long.

This is subjective, but this line is dwarfing what I saw for the iPhone 3G launch, which was by far the biggest previously. If Apple has supply, they’re going to sell two million phones this weekend alone…

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Cable Car Turnaround,San Francisco,United States

Although the iPhone 4 has stolen some of the spotlight, demand for the iPad remains strong, suggesting Apple will have trouble into November building enough units, one analyst said Thursday. Apple is building 7.5-9 million iPods for the September quarter.

“Our checks in the supply chain indicate Apple iPad demand continues to outstrip supply,” Sterne Agee analyst Vijay Rakesh told investors Thursday morning. This indicates “solid preorder/order trends on the iPad given build visibility now extending into November,” he adds.

Now here’s a classic set of unboxing photos!  Over at Clone77’s 365 days project the newest iWonder gets the Imperial delivery and setup treatment from an industrious bunch of mini Stormtroopers.  Love the coordinated effort, and use of the lightsaber for cutting the plastic!

Clone77 appears to be on a yearlong project to expose his troopers to the wider world, very entertaining.  The iPhone 4 arrived on Day 133.

Thanks to the always-enjoyable iPhoneSavior for the tip.

If you’re about to buy a new iPhone 4, you should consider selling or trading in your old one.

If you want to sell your old iPhone on eBay or Craigslist, take a look at our guide — How to Sell your iPhone Online — which tells you how to wipe the data and good strategies for getting the best price.

Selling your iPhone online will get you the best price, but will likely involve a degree of hassle, of course. Probably the easiest, hassle-free way to get rid of your iPhone is trading it in with Gazelle, an electronics recycling service.

You can even trade in your iPhone from your iPhone. Here’s how:

Matt Haughey:

What happens when you strap a $1700 digital SLR camera doing full HD video to a $2k remote controlled helicopter? You get amazing freaking video.

Another example of what you can do with a few grand worth of equipment that would cost tens of thousands of dollars to do with a real helicopter (not to mention, would also be super dangerous)

Via Matt Haughey and Robot Wisdom.

If you’re eager to ensconce your iPhone or iPod Touch in the shell of a far inferior (but nostalgically remembered) medium of analogue music delivery, the iPhone Cassette Tape case looks like a great buy. Not only does it look pretty sweet, but once your iPod or iPhone is inside, all you need to do is flip the cassette shell around to make it functional as a stand.

Unfortunately, they are only available to purchase in bulk right now, but some geek-oriented web outlet is sure to start selling them individually as soon as their own orders are in.

[via Technabob]

Cupertino’s been having some problems lately when it comes to yellowing on their more ambitious displays, and it looks like the iPhone 4 is no exception: numerous owners are reporting that their iPhone 4 Retina Display have come with visible yellow bands and spots.

Gizmodo’s up to 27 cases of yellowing and counting, which certainly seems like a huge number given the fact that the iPhone 4 isn’t even officially on sale yet. And a reader poll on Engadget has the number of yellow iPhone 4 retina displays at over eight thousand, or a little over 38% of those with iPhone 4s polled.

Anyone out there with an iPhone 4 noticed the same issue? If this is true, between the antenna issues and the screen yellowing, this might be the most problem prone hardware Apple has released in a long time.

Just a few hours before the iPhone 4 officially goes on sale, Apple has dropped iMovie for iPhone onto the App Store.

The $4.99 app will allow users who own an iPhone 4 (and presumably future video-capable iPads and iPod Touches) to edit and share videos directly from their handset, adding everything from transitions, background music and titles to your clips before shooting them off to YouTube, MobileMe or to a friend via e-mail.

There’s nothing out there when it comes to mobile video editing like iMovie for iPhone, so if you plan on stitching together some movies on the go, this is your best and only real choice. Just one caveat: while you can export your videos to your computer at 720p, any emails you upload to YouTube, MobileMe or send out by e-mail will be downgraded to 568×320… almost definitely to help accommodate 3G network providers.

I’m an iPhone 3G owner, and am pleased that my “nearly obsolete” two year old iDevice qualifies for the iOS4 upgrade.  I understand (and am satisfied with) the trade-offs Apple made to minimize the performance hit on this model, but as others have reported I’ve noticed a distinct slowdown in my iPhone since upgrading.  Apps take longer to load, Mail messages open slower, the whole system just feels more sluggish.

A comment posted to MacInTouch suggests that a double Hard Reset of the phone may help minimize this problem, and indeed this has noticeably seemed to help with mine.

A couple of weeks ago, we posted a link to a stress test the guys over at iFixYourI performed on the iPhone 4, showing that while it was fairly bend proof, it easily shattered when dropped.

The problem with their test was that since the iPhone 4 hadn’t been released yet, they had simply conducted their test with an empty iPhone 4 case and display, which prompted our commenters to raise some excellent points that a hollow iPhone 4 was more likely to be easily broken than one with all the electronics innards tightly packed inside.

Here’s the follow through. iFixYouri have done another drop test on a real iPhone 4. Frankly, I’m surprised how well the real iPhone 4 holds up to dropping it from waist height onto concrete: three successive drops breaks the phone, while the fourth shatters it, but I’d actually consider that pretty good for an unprotected handset made largely out of glass, wouldn’t you?

Following the steps of their comic book competitors Marvel, DC Comics has just released their own iOSself-branded comic reading app for iOS, built for them by Comixology.

Like the Marvel app, comics cost between $0.99 and $2.99 an issue, and there are some free comics available… although the selection of those is quite paltry compared to Marvel’s offerings, although no doubt this will change. The best freebie right now is probably a black-and-white comic by Neil Gaiman and Simon Bisley that portrays the Joker and Batman as actors working on a television series.

Otherwise, if you’ve used Comixology or the Marvel app, you’ll be pretty familiar with how the DC Comics app works. It really only trades in Spider-Man for Superman.

According to LOOPRumors, Apple intend to host a special event in the next sixty days to reveal a refreshed, touchscreen iMac, and will come preinstalled with both OS X and iOS. A hybdrid iMac/iDevice, as it were.

Needless to say, it’s a lie, and you have to be pretty gullible to believe it. While it looks likely that Apple will try to merge OS X and iOS over time, it’s not going to happen in the next “sixty days.”

Those in the know of how cellular antennas work have been expressing misgivings about the design of the iPhone 4’s antenna for a while now.

As a simplistic summary of the problem, with the iPhone 4, Apple chose to essentially make the stainless steel band wrapping around the phone act as the phone’s antenna by separating it into three distinct chunks delineated by the gaps in the handset’s frame. Superficially, that should give the iPhone 4 more reception bars, but as MAKE’s Dave Matthews said two weeks ago: “Having been in the cellular business most of my career, I think it’s really odd that you’d want an antenna grounded by a moist hand.”

It looks like this fear may have been grounded in reality. Numerous users are reporting — with video proof — that the iPhone 4 loses up to four bars of reception when it’s actually picked up. If you don’t touch the bottom of the phone, you’re fine, but as soon as you connect the left side with the bottom of the phone… reception goes in the toilet.

TomTom is a popular turn-by-turn navigational app for the iPhone that has recently been updated to support multitasking and iOS 4. The new app released on Tuesday is version 1.4 and TomTom has advised all users to upgrade to this version immediately if they are running iOS 4.

If you’re going to jailbreak your iPhone or iPad, the first thing you MUST do is backup your device’s SHSH blobs.

With the release of iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch G3, Apple added an extra layer of security to prevent hacking, jailbreaking and unlocking. Apple is constantly closing the exploits used by jailbreak hackers by updating the firmware of its iPhone/iPt and iPad. If you accidentally upgrade your jailbroken device to Apple’s latest firmware, you can’t re-jailbreak it until hackers release new jailbreak software.

You can, however, downgrade your device to the previous firmware version which can be jailbroken — if you have your SHSH blobs on file.

You can extract these SHSH records and save them with the help of a utility called Umbrella. Here’s how:

These records are firmware specific and each time you update, you should repeat this process to save the records for the particular firmware version.

Russian President Dimitry Medvedev toured Silicon valley today.

Medvedev, who works on a MacBook and recently started using an iPad, posted a pic from his newly-inaugurated Twitter account of his meeting with Steve Jobs at Apple’s Cupertino campus.

It’s great to see a photo commemorating the visit, though their expressions are a little awkward.

Hmmm. This calls for a caption contest.

Best caption wins something Apple-related and cool.

Leave them in the comments, we’ll pick the one we like best on based on staff guffaws.

Waiting in line outside an Apple store is no longer just for fans: it’s business.  Two enterprising guys have put up tent space and chair space on website airbnb for spots in line for the iPhone 4 launch

A spot in the San Francisco tent — for the full-on can’t-wait-for-it fanboy experience — will run you $400 a night, more than the price of the new iPhone 4.

And you have to share the tent, too:

“Rent the tent I pitched outside of the Apple store in San Francisco and be the first person to get an iPhone. I have a 2 person tent and figured that if I couldn’t get my friends to join me, I would rent out the extra spot. I’m hoping to earn enough to cover the cost of my phone!”

Another airbnb listing offered a chair outside an Apple store for $200. It’s no longer being offered.

Perhaps the chair has already been occupied?

Via airbnb

Apple:

White models of Apple’s new iPhone 4 have proven more challenging to manufacture than expected, and as a result they will not be available until the second half of July. The availability of the more popular iPhone 4 black models is not affected.

We have two deals on iPod shuffles from MidnightBox.com: grab a 2GB iPod shuffle for $35 or a 4GB model for $45. Also, we have the latest crop of App Store freebies, including “ShapeMind,” a geometry puzzle game.

Along the way, we’ll also check out a number of other Mac-related items, including MP3 albums, silicon laptop keyboard covers for your MacBook Pro and software for your iPhone or iPod touch.

As always, details on these any many more products are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

About one-in-five (or 20 percent) of third-party Android apps available through its marketplace can steal and share private user data, researchers said Tuesday. Akin to spyware, the apps can place calls and send text messages without the owners’ knowledge.

As a result of the growth of smartphones and associated stores, “applications are currently available that have the potential to cause serious harm to devices, customers and to the broader cellular network,” Daniel V. Hoffman, technology chief for SMobile Systems, an Android security vendor.