Cult of Mac

No matter where you fall on the 4G iPhone story, I think we’re all united in feeling bad for poor old Gray Powell, otherwise known as the most unlucky S.O.B. in the universe. Heartless automaton that I am, even I tear up a little bit when I think of what he must be going through right now. I think all of us — Powell most of all — need a dose of levity right about now.

Courtesy of McSweeney’s, then, comes this wonderful imaginary email from Gray to his colleagues at 1 Infinity Loop on the morning after he lost the iPhone.

If I could give back those last five beers, I would do it in a heartbeat. I don’t know why I let that girl look at it. That was a total disregard of our phones before hos mantra. Worst mistake of my life. I should have never taken the prototype out of its case, or taken the case from the protective cover, or taken the protective cover out of the lockbox. I should have never taken the lockbox out of the safe and I definitely should never have signed the contract that requires your right testicle if you lose the phone. It was a pretty painful morning, and I’m not referring to a hangover, though that didn’t help.

It’s worth a few chuckles, especially for this line “Mr. Jobs screamed at me so much that his turtleneck was totally drenched with sweat.” Somehow I doubt that’s very far from the truth.

It’s way buggy still, but hats off to jailbreak hacker David Wong who not only figured out how to get the iPhone to dual boot, but to actually run Google’s Android operating system.

Of course, the entire exercise is one of utter futility — why would you run Google’s inferior Android operating system when you can tool around in iPhone OS (my only tentative answer: maybe tethering?) — but even so: this takes some brain meats. Well done, sir.

Oooooh, take a look at this. Above you see a screenshot of MidiPad, a software controller for software sequencer Ableton that’s “coming soon” for iPad.

Macworld‘s founder David Bunnell’s first meeting with Steve Jobs is surprisingly genial. This time he gets to meet the REAL Steve Jobs. Plus he has one of the best ideas of his magazine career.

From the “oh that’s awesome” category — which quickly leads to the credit card coming out of the wallet  — some of the most unique and whimsical iPhone stands I’ve seen from Forked Up Art.

Stands are $30 each, come in portrait and landscape orientations, and are made of genuine used cutlery.  The best form of recycling I’ve seen recently. It’s earned a place in my kitchen!

Thanks to iPhone Savior for the tip.

As the focus of iPhonegate shifts to the legality of Gizmodo’s purchase (hint: it looks very dodgy), we have to ask: who would you rather be right now? The poor schlub who lost the iPhone in a bar? Or the guy who found it, made a half-hearted effort to return it, and sold it to a ferociously-competitive tech website, which may be on the wrong side of the law?

[polldaddy poll=3089952]

Twenty doctors are using iPads to keep track of patients in a trial program at a California hospital district.

At Kaweah Delta Health Care District in Visalia, doctors and staff already use smart phones, including the iPhone, to access the hospital’s network.  Over the weekend, the small group of doctors in a trial run were given iPads to keep abreast of patients, whether they are off site or in another wing of the hospital.

Technology director Nick Volosin has already ordered another 100 iPads to equip hospital employees including home health and hospice care workers, nurses, dietitians and pharmacists.

Before we get to the modern Macs on tap for today, there is another chance to buy a piece of computing history. There is a number of deals on older Macs, including a CRT iMac, running a blazing-fast 500Mhz G3 processor for just $39. Last week we had the MacBook Pro Lalapalooza and today we have the MacBook Pro Lalapalooza Part Deux. You can grab some unibody MacBook Pro machines starting at $929 for a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo model or pay $1,358 for the just-released MacBook Pros plus three years of AppleCare.

Along the way, we’ll check out the latest deals on iPhones plus new bargains on Mac software, including Mac OS 10.6. As always, details on these and many more items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Apple has filed a very interesting patent for a travel app called iTravel that books flights, hotels and car reservations. But the most interesting part is how it uses a radio chip to check you in at the airport, whisk you through security and allows you to wireless board your flight.

The iTravel app uses Near Field Communications, a short-range wireless technology that is starting to become widely used in cell phones for mobile ticketing, payment and electronic keys, especially in countries like Japan.

Apple is rumored to be adding NFC chipset to the next iPhone. If so, it could turn the iPhone into an electronic wallet, allowing you to for everything, from a cup of coffee to a subway ride. Your iPhone could unlock your car, pick up e-coupons at the local mall, and pay for all your supermarket groceries just by laying it on top of the checkout.

Scott Beale of Laughing Squid snapped this spiffy wooden stand cradling an iPad cash register at soon-to-be opened San Francisco coffee house Sightglass.

The iPad will ring up those double-ristretti with Square, an app with a peripheral credit card swiper (see the built-in one on the bottom of this wooden stand) that turns the iPhone and iPad into cash registers, accepting cash or credit card payments. Square can calculate sales tax, accept touchscreen finger signatures and then generate email or SMS receipts.

No word on who crafted the fab stand, yet, though.

Via Laughing Squid

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FW-lrMXLBE

This fierce edit of Steve Jobs’ April keynote by Neil Curtis — father of the 180-sec keynote is, like, um great. (Curtis reminds us that, uh, it’s all in good fun).

Very reassuring for anyone who has, like, uh, spoken in public, or, you know, heh, been interviewed for radio, or, um, so, done a podcast, and um been horrified at all the excess, uh, verbiage? and weird intonations? and half sentences (“We nailed?”) that, so, now, inevitably, you know, clutter up the way you, uh, talk.

What’s up with Google now? That’s the question being asked about the Internet giant’s acquisition of a mysterious startup run by former Apple employees. The San Jose, Calif. company Agnilux includes Dan Dobberpuhl, the former founder and CEO of P.A. Semi, purchased by Apple for $278 million two years ago.

First reported by Thomson Reuters’ PEHub, the deal with Google is raising eyebrows about the lengths being taken to keep the company below public radar.

If Apple needed another reason to consider adding more U.S. carriers offering the iPhone, its current exclusive domestic carrier, AT&T, provided more ammunition Wednesday morning. The carrier announced it activated 2.7 million iPhones in the last quarter, a 13 percent drop from 3.1 million U.S. activations during the December quarter.

Additionally, AT&T reported U.S. iPhone activations hit 2.7 million during the first quarter of this year, a 69 percent year-over-year jump from 1.6 million activations in the first quarter of 2009. However, the 69 percent increase in U.S. iPhone activations was outpaced by Apple’s reported 131 percent increase in global iPhone sales.

While much of the talk about the iPhone’s success had centered on the U.S. and Europe, it appears Apple’s entry into China has been a little-discussed but important reason why the Cupertino, Calif. company Tuesday blew the doors off analyst expectations.

Analysts were off by up to 30 percent, expecting Apple to announce almost 2 million fewer iPhone sales than the 8.7 million the consumer electronics leader actually reported. The reason for that gap could be China.

Even HP’s aware that they’ve got a tough fight on their hands convincing consumers that they want to give them their $500 bucks for an HP Slate tablet as opposed to the iPad… but the PC manufacturer may still be be too optimistic.

If an early review of the device is anything to go by, it’s not going to be a fight… it’s going to be a slaughter.

Landing Pad is a lovely piece of work; a blog that celebrates the beauty of the best-looking iPad apps around, in all their full screen glory.

No scrappy little thumbnails here; at Landing Pad, each app is shown full-size, as Steve Jobs intended it to be seen.

In all seriousness, for those of us outside the US who still haven’t even seen an iPad yet, this is the next best way of getting a good idea of what it looks like after watching Apple’s official (and somewhat too clean) videos.

Landing Pad is the work of the tech consultants at Thoughtbot. Writing on their blog, Chad Mazzola provides some background:

“The iPad and iPhone provide a platform that makes excellent design the standard, not the exception. The elegance and power of multi-touch technology and the iPhone OS, matched to restraints on factors such as screen size and browser, have allowed the creation of applications that fit perfectly in the environment they inhabit. More and more, websites and applications built specifically for iPhone OS are overtaking their desktop companions in ease of use and sheer beauty.”

Or, to put it another way, (i)apps are a threat to websites as we know them. Maybe.

With the fourth-generation iPhone making the display even bigger and more pixel dense, it looks increasingly unlikely that Apple has any plans for the much rumored iPhone Nano… but that’s not stopping just the scuttlebutt of a potential Apple product from inspiring competing phone manufacturers to release their own iPhone Nano clones.

The HTC HD Mini is just such a clone. It takes the 4.3 inch touchscreen on HTC’s HD 2 handset and squishes it down to a compact 3.2 inches, while also packing a 600MHz processor. It’s being touted as a budget version of the HD 2, and it could find its way to AT&T or even sold unlocked.

I definitely see the market for a tinier touchscreen phone, and the HD Mini is a cute little smartphone, but here’s where the bile rises: the Mini’s running the crapusculent Windows Mobile 6.5.1 operating system. Not even Android! I think I’d rather hold on to the fever dream of an iPhone Nano someday creeping out of Apple’s labs than ever sully my finger swiping it across a Windows Mobile homescreen again.

In Part 2 of My Close Encounters with Steve Jobs, Macworld-founder David Bunnell tells of seeing the Mac for the first time, and why Steve Jobs parks in handicapped spaces.

While there was, up until recently, at least one next-generation iPhone outside of Apple’s possession and in the wild, could there be another one still lurking out there… a golden ticket for one would-be “source” to sell to the highest bidding practitioner of checkbook journalism?

Over at TUAW, TJ Luoma made note of something I wasn’t aware of: about a month ago, Apple quietly removed the “Downloads” tab from the Apple homepage. The page continued to exist, but it appears that Apple is no longer updating it.

On the one hand, Apple’s own Downloads page was always inferior to the likes of VersionTracker, I Use This or MacUpdate. The editorial resources they were employing to keep it up to date probably didn’t make sense when there were better repositories.

On the other hand, though, Apple’s Download page served an important role: it was an software repository that Apple neo-nates could easily find the first time they booted up Safari, offering a quick library of all the cool software they could use on their new Macs. The other, third-party Mac software repositories don’t have that sort of visibility to new Mac owners.

My guess is that Apple eventually intends to employ their App Store strategy with Mac software, but I wouldn’t expect anything like that to happen until either the next major version of OS X or iTunes. In the meantime, I think a lot of new Mac owners will acutely miss the presence of an updated Downloads section on the Apple homepage.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOSSz5G41zI

Apple’s most recent iPhone ad, “Dog Lover,” is pretty clearly some Cupetino employee’s excuse to get their cute new dog some face time while simultaneously appealing to squealing canine lovers country-wide. That’s okay though. That pooch is pretty cute.

And that’s the bloody towel flying into the middle of the ring.

Software makers Adobe, mercilessly pummeled on the release of their Adobe CS5 suite by a new provision in Apple’s iPhone Developer Program License Agreement that prohibits apps made with translation tools, have just announced that they officially intend to abandon their iPhone app building technology included in the upcoming Flash CS5 software.

If you’re itching to Zerg Rush with the Windows world, great news coming from Blizzard: the beta to their sequel to the award-winning and still wildly popular space RTS, Starcraft II, will be coming to Macs next week.

It’s a bit belated, since Blizzard released the Starcraft II beta for PC users over two months ago, but welcome all the same. Blizzard is one of the few game developers who take releasing native OS X ports of their games seriously… a strategy which is looking increasingly prescient as Mac marketshare soars.

ePub Bud is a new site that simply describes itself as “YouTube for children’s books”. And it’s just right for iPad.

iFixit is famous for its authorative Apple product teardowns. I just emailed the CEO, Kyle Wiens, with some questions about Gizmodo’s teardown. Here’s Kyle’s take:

Gizmodo emailed me asking the same thing.

I asked them why they didn’t remove the (very removable) EMI shields.

It’s closer to production than I was expecting. I’d say this thing is very very close.

What sucks for Apple is if they have to cut features for some reason. Of course the prototypes would have all the features they’re considering (flash, camera, etc.). But realities force feature removal at the last minute, like they did with the iPod Touch. I’m sure the iPod Touch prototypes had cameras in them.