Cult of Mac

“My God, we can build a phone with this.” That was Apple CEO Steve Jobs reaction when a designer at the Cupertino, Calif. firm turned an early version of the iPad into what later became the iPhone. “So we put the tablet aside and we went to work on the iPhone,” Jobs said, recalling the moment in an interview Tuesday during Wall Street Journal’s D8 technology gathering.

Jobs initially had the idea of a glass display permitting people to to type with their fingers. Within six months, Apple engineers created the display. In an ironic twist, the iPad outsold the iPhone’s debut, when the tablet device was finally introduced in April. Apple sold one million iPads in 28 days, a milestone that took the iPhone 74 days to reach, the company announced in early May. (The Cupertino, Calif. company recently announced it sold more than 2 million iPads in less than 60 days.)

We all know what Steve Jobs thinks about Flash, and the steps he’s taken to keep it well away from his mobile devices.

But Flash is a fact of life on the web, and avoiding it on your desktop computer isn’t quite so easy. But not impossible.

If you like to power your way round the web, you’re probably in the habit of opening lots of links as background tabs to read later. If those tabs contain Flash content, things can quickly get annoying. Either stuff starts playing automatically and you can’t find the right tab to stop it, or too much stuff loads and your computer’s fans start whirring as if their lives depended on it.

Iomega has just released a new slate of eGo portable external hard drives, and at least a couple happily have support for Apple’s own Firewire standard.

The first Mac-friendly eGo is the 1TB eGo BlackBelt Mac Edition, which has both FireWire 400.800 and USB 2.0 connections, as well as Iomega Drop Guard protection and a Power Grip band around the casing which will protect your data against falls of up to seven feet. It’s a pricy drive, though, at $229.99.

Iomega’s second Mac-happy eGo is the Mac Edition eGo Desktop Hard drive, which comes in flavors between 1TB and 2TB, and again comes with FireWire 400/800 and USB 2.0 support. It costs between $149.99 and $229.99.

Additionally, all drives come with a complimentary 12 month subscription to Trend Micro Smart Surfing software for Mac, Iomega QuikProtect backup software, EMC Retrospect Express backup software and MozyHome Online Backup service. That’s a pretty impressive list of software extras.

You should be able to find both drives at Apple stores later this month.

Looking for a display just as big and gorgeous as the iMac’s 27-inch screen for your MacPro? HP has just announced a new 30-inch monitor that will finally give your beautiful machine the LCD it deserves.

The HP ZR30w boasts a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels in a 16:10 aspect ratio, and — according to HP — achieves more than 64 times the colors available on mainstream LCD, with 100 percent accuracy in sRGB colors and 99 percent accuracy in Adobe RGBs. The end result is red, blues and greens that are visibly more lurid.

The new display comes with DisplayPort and DVI-D inputs, as well as an integrated 4-port USB hub and a 6-way adjustable stand. It all comes in dark but decidedly un-Mac-like brushed aluminum.

It’s a gorgeous, albeit slightly beefy display, make no mistake. Unfortunately, the big issue here is the price: the HP ZR30w is a lot of monitor, and it costs a lot of money. $1,299, to be exact. Consider the price of the 27-inch iMac, which is only $400 more expensive: it really is like Cupertino just sold people a top of the line display and threw an amazing Mac in there as a heavily discounted bargain.

Although Steve Jobs seems to think the Foxconn suicides are being overblown, Apple’s “all over” the problem, a new email exchange reveals.

Responding to an Apple fan who forwarded Jobs an e-mail campaign protesting the way Foxconn workers are being treated in China, Steve responded:

“Although every suicide is tragic, Foxconn’s suicide rate is well below the China average. We are all over this.”

Our good friend Graham Bower likes to occasionally send some of his gorgeous Apple product mock-ups our way. His latest creation is a direct response to the recent rumor that the next Apple TV will be a $99 iPhone OS device that streams media to your television set, and answers the question: how do you control a multitouch operating system without a touchscreen?

The answer: make the remote a touchscreen. Graham’s idea is that Apple would ship the new Apple TV with a remote similar to the Magic Mouse, along with a built-in accelerometer.

I’ve mulled over this idea for the Apple TV’s remote before. On first blush, it seems like a great solution, but here’s the problem: the only way a device like this can work is if it introduces some sort of pointer to iPhone OS. For multitouch to work on a display divorced from the actual input device (ie: for multitouch to work when you’re not directly touching the screen on which graphical elements are displayed), you need some sort of icon to show you where your “fingers” are.

Patents are usually dry, dull affairs, but this latest Apple patent has an elegant beauty to it that is more than a little bit breathtaking.

Yes, it’s for a solar-powered iPhone, but Apple being Apple, they’ve got a better solution to solar-charging than just a bunch of ugly panels stuck to the back of the device: the energy collection cells are actually hidden underneath the display. The iPhone itself would look no different, but lay it out in the sun and it will juice itself up.

After just two months of (perhaps overconfidently) offering a $29.99 unlimited, month-by-month data plan to purchasers of the iPad, Ma Bell has already killed it off… and are now replacing it with a vastly inferior and more pricy plan.

The new plan — called DataPro — offers 2GB of data per month for $25. Go over 2GB in a month and you’re charged another $25, with your 30 day window to use that 2GB resetting itself.

Think that’s bad? It gets worse. AT&T is also canceling unlimited data for the iPhone. Current subscribers get to keep their $30 all-you-can-eat plans, but when you new customers or contract renewers will now only get 2GB of data.

The positive side? After over a year of waffling on it, AT&T are finally bringing tethering to the table with iPhone OS 4.0. But you have to pay an additional $20 a month for it, and you’re still only limited to 2GB. To put this in perspective, this is twice as much as Verizon charges for 5GB of tethering data on a $29.99 unlimited monthly data plan.

Our succinct thoughts on the matter, after the jump.

The Chinese are always quick-on-the-draw with their knockoffs, but this may be the first time we’ve seen a iPhone doppelganger before the handset its emulating is even officially announced.

It’s called the GPS iPhone, and it looks pretty convincing. You know, except for the telescoping television antenna. Somehow, I think Ive would choose to do that a little bit differently. You could gouge your eye out on that thing.

AT&T announced today that, on June 7th, unlimited mobile data plans for new users are going bye-bye in favor of two new “limited” data plans. It also provided new details on its U.S. iPhone tethering plan.

Two new data plans

AT&T currently offers an unlimited data plan for both the iPad and iPhone for $30 a month. A 250MB plan is available for the iPad for $15 a month. Both these plans are being nixed in favor of two new plans that will be available for both devices:

As a former Londoner myself, I can give you clear advice from the outset: don’t take your car into London. It’s slow, expensive, and bound to end up a frustrating experience.

Never one to let an opportunity to explain a technology with a metaphor pass him by, Steve Jobs compared the transition from PCs to tablets as similar to when people stopped buying trucks and started buying cars (which is a dubious view of history, but let him run with it). From Engadget:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.

I actually think Steve is both right and wrong about this. What’s more likely is that a lot more households will again become one-PC homes as the need to do intense writing, coding or other keyboard horsepower activities gets more evenly distributed as other kinds of applications migrate to tablets. Only time will tell, of course.

The subject of Google and Android’s major in-roads in the mobile space inevitably came up during Steve Jobs’s interview during the Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference this evening. Steve’s take? Google went after Apple, not vice versa. Per Engadget:

Walt: But how about Google? Something has changed. What happened?
Steve: They decided to compete with us… so they are.

Jobs noted that Apple hasn’t gone into the search business and has no plans to. He claimed that he kind of woke up one morning and heard about Android. Given his feelings about loyalty (and the fact that the iPhone was well-underway and had Google working on apps for it), it’s no real surprise that Steve is showing some signs of feeling hurt about the situation. I think he genuinely believed Google wouldn’t try to eat his lunch, even if he’s as ruthless as they come himself.

He ultimately got tired of the line of questioning and tried to end the conversation with a non sequitur: “My sex life is great!”

For the very first time, Steve Jobs spoke publicly at the Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference about the much-discussed prototype iPhone that found its way into the hands of Jason Chen at Gizmodo last month. Without going into much detail (and certainly not acknowledging that the model that was being tested had final industrial design, Steve shared more than anyone else from Apple has to date about the incident. As reported on Engadget’s live-blog:

There’s an ongoing investigation. I can tell you what I do know, though. To make a product you need to test it. You have to carry them outside. One of our employees was carrying one. There’s a debate about whether he left it in a bar, or it was stolen out of his bag. The person who found it tried to sell it, they called Engadget, they called Gizmodo.

The person who took the phone plugged it into his roommates computer. And this guy was trying to destroy evidence… and his roommate called the police. So this is a story that’s amazing — it’s got theft, it’s got buying stolen property, it’s got extortion, I’m sure there’s some sex in there (huge laughs)… the whole thing is very colorful. The DA is looking into it, and to my knowledge they have someone making sure they only see stuff that relates to this case. I don’t know how it will end up.

If I recall correctly, the details about trying to destroy evidence and the roommate calling police is news. It’ll still be awhile before we know the whole truth of the situation, but it’s certainly been fun keeping an eye on the brouhaha…

Y’know those popular kids in high school? The ones who get along with everyone, are easy on the eyes, fun to hang out with, good at everything without being exceptional in any one area, and don’t ever seem to run out of energy?

That’s Casio’s EX-H10. Aside from one ridiculously high-performing attribute, the EX-H10 isn’t really exceptional in any one arena; rather, this point-n-shoot is a collection of quality and smart features brought together in a relatively high-value, good looking — if stoutish — container.

Super Monkey Ball was one of the first games that introduced us to the possibilities of gaming on the iPhone & iPod Touch when it was previewed back in March 2008, along with the announcement of the App Store. As the biggest selling game on launch day, Sega set the standard for other 3D games with superb graphics, an intuitive control system and incredibly fun gameplay. Now Super Monkey Ball 2: Sakura Edition is available on the iPad, so does this super-sized version live up to the expectations we’ve come to expect from those little monkeys?

I hope our U.S. audience had a safe and enjoyable Memorial Day weekend. For everyone else, let’s get straight to today’s deals. First up is an Apple Store deal on unibody MacBook Pros, starting at $929 for a Core 2 Duo 2.26GHz machine. Also: the latest batch of App Store price drops, including “Robin Hood – the Return of Richard.” Pretty soon, we’ll be finding iPod Shuffles in our boxes of Cracker Jacks. Until then, the next best thing: a 2nd generation 1GB Shuffle for $39.

Along the way we’ll take a look at other Apple software, such as NAVIGON’s MobileNavigator software for the iPhone and MacCleanse 2 to erase sensitive data. As always, details on these and many other items are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Panasonic just announced the addition of a new wide-angle, 5x zoom camera to their line, the slim Lumix FX75.

Somewhat notable here is the ultra-wide 24mm lens equivalent on this camera, but we like the wide-open f2.2 aperture even more — definitely on the fast side of the spectrum for a PnS, and pretty nifty for creating shots with a shallow depth-of-field. A souped-up Venus Engine HD II image processor should help keep things snappy, and the camera also shoots HD video video in AVCHD Lite at 720p and 30 fps. And of course, like the other models toward the high-end of Panasonic’s range, the FX75 is equipped with a Leica lens.

Panasonic also festively included a “Happy Mode” in the FX75, a setting that adjusts the brightness, saturation and color to ramp up an image’s cheeriness (presumably for tourists visiting London). No word yet on ship date or pricing.

On the increasingly small off chance your computer doesn’t have it’s own webcam (or you’ve blowtorched it because those aliens from Tau Ceti II were spying on you), German developer Drahtwerk has a clever solution: an app that lets you turn your iPhone into a wifi-tethered webcam.

iWebcamera ($5) includes a pause-mode, two quality options and a “send drivers by e-mail feature,” which is apparently some BS that Windows users need to deal with.

The bad news is that iWebcamera is only for Windows boxes; the good news is it’ll work with any iPhone, even the Original.

Much has been made over the last 24 hours about the fact that Apple has managed to sell two million iPads in just 60 days — a pace dramatically ahead of the original iPhone, which took 74 days just to get a million units into the hands of the public. Much less-debated, but potentially more interesting for Apple’s long-term future, is that the iPad has grossed more than $1 billion in revenue by hitting the 2 million mark. At $499 a pop and units as pricey as $829, they’ve cleared that barrier by a flying leap in record time. For context about just what a monumental achievement this is, consider the fact that when FedEx reached $1 billion in gross sales in its tenth year of operation, that was the quickest rise to a billion dollars in revenue without acquisitions in the history of American business.

Apple’s growth machine has hit a new gear with iPad, and I’d like to take this post to due some geeky quick and dirty analysis in the manner used at my day job to get a sense of Apple’s expectations for the platform and to guess as to whether its rapid take-off is a good sign or a sign of danger.

It appears many analysts couldn’t get the word out fast enough after Apple announced over the Memorial Day holiday how well the iPad is selling. Analysts increased predictions on how many tablets Apple would sell and how high the Cupertino, Calif. company’s stock would rise.

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster told investors Monday he expects Apple will sell 6.2 million iPads during calendar 2010, up from the 4.3 million he had previously projected. Despite warning investors to “keep iPad expectations in check” due to international and domestic iPad supply problems, Munster also boosted to $330 his target for Apple shares, up from $323.

Well, Apple has shuttered LaLa, its streaming music service. The sign appeared early Tuesday morning, but while the closure comes as no surprise, what is unsettling is the dead air that replaces the web-based music application. What’s more, don’t bet the farm LaLa will be reborn as some streaming version of iTunes.

“I have a hunch we’re not going to see one soon,” opines Peter Kafka at the Wall Street Journal‘s All Things Digital. Although it could be just a teaser for Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ appearance tonight at the All Things Digital conference, Kafka notes web-based music services are on life support and the music industry’s legal eagles control the oxygen supply.

CNN paid a visit to Foxconn, the Chinese factory complex where 10 workers jumped to their deaths this year.

What did they find? A super-concentrated complex in Shenzen where sleeping quarters, restaurants, hospitals, supermarkets and swimming pools are packed into 2.3 square kilometers (about 0.9 square  miles).

It’s a factory town, they report, that feels more like a “heavily secure” university campus.

Apple has sold more than two million of its iPads in under 60 days, a sign demand for the tablet device is not slowing. The Cupertino, Calif. company also acknowledged it was having difficulty keeping up with the fast-moving sales amid reports of short supplies.

“Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do,” CEO Steve Jobs announced Monday. “We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone.”

At this week’s Computex expo in Taipei, Hitachi-LG unveiled their new HyDrive: an amalgamation of a Blu-Ray DVD drive and solid state drive that could afford us a look at the direction future MacBook hardware will take to slim down chassis design.

The HyDrive is interesting: the current models offers 64GB of NAND flash memory with a read/write speed of 175MB/60MB per second, although capacities should increase. The SSD and Blu-Ray drive are then connected through SATA II. The end result is two drives — one optical, one solid state — that take up half the room as their separate counterparts in a laptop.

We all know how much Cupertino likes efficiency. If Apple chose to use a combined solution like this in their next MacBooks, they’d significantly cut down on the size of their internal components, leading to slimmer, lighter notebooks that have Blu-Ray functionality to boot.

The HyDrive will launch in August 2010, and while there’s no official price yet, they’re still definitely priced for luxury laptops: it’s been hinted that a HyDrive could add $200 to the price of a standard notebook.