Cult of Mac

Last week, we got our first sneak peek at iPhone OS 4.0, and if history’s any guide, we shouldn’t expect to see Steve Jobs strut back on stage until WWDC in June to introduce the fourth generation iPhone and iPod Touch models.

What day should you block out? According to ModMYI, June 22nd, on which date Apple has once again booked the Yerba Buena Center for Arts at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Needless to say, Cult of Mac will be collectively turning our nostril hairs white as we tensely live blog the announcements.

It’s about two weeks later than Apple usually holds its WWDC event, but if you’re waiting to pick up a video-conferencing iPhone HD packing an A4 CPU, history suggests you can expect it within a couple of weeks of June 22nd.

I think I speak for many Europeans when I say that Apple’s promise of a late April international iPad launch elicited a small incredulous groan. Coming just a few weeks after the US April 3rd ship date made it appear like Apple’s international launch date was flexible according to the supply demands of US consumers. With the iPad likely to be a smash success just based on Apple’s previous iDevice home runs, I didn’t put a lot of stock in Apple’s late April promise, no matter how earnestly they seemed to mean it. The US market would come first.

Looks like I was right to be cautious: Apple has sent out a press release this morning explaining that because of strong domestic sales of the iPad, they are delaying international delivery by a month to late May.

Yesterday’s news of updated MacBooks indicates Apple has placed a wager, putting its new iPad device up against a growing pack of low-cost PC netbooks. But will the Cupertino, Calif. company win this bet?

“Apple is betting [the] iPad’s form factor, engineering, design and rich interactive content experience, with Apple’s brand, can create and lead a new portable computing metaphor where Apple has first mover advantage (product, install base, content/apps momentum,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky told investors Wednesday.

‘Conventional Wisdom’ (and the rumor mill) suggest that Apple will remain on the Xenon platform for it’s Mac Pro line. Yet, while browsing Geekbench results, I came across this result indicating an i7 powered Mac Pro 4,1, published less than a Half Hour Ago on Geekbench (which also if we remember broke the existence of i7 powered Mac Book Pro’s a couple of months back).

It’s not too far fetched that Apple might use i7’s in its entry-level Mac Pro. While previously the single and dual processor versions of Apples top box were effectively the same, with the only difference being the number of processors installed, the current version changed that. The current Mac Pro’s have already segmented the line with the entry level being powered by Intel Xeon X3540 processors (which can not be deployed in a dual processor configuration), and the top model being powered by the Intel Xeon X5570.

This split is important because for the first time it require Mac Pro’s to have different motherboards, EFI, etc depending on the variant of the pro machine. Since they’ve already segmented the line based upon architecture, it’s all the more reasonable that they might use the i7 in the low-end Mac Pro.

The only argument against this is performance. As bench-marked, the alleged i7 pro-box scores lower than the current entry model. Turning lemons into lemon-aid however, perhaps this is the mid-level (ie between the Mini and the Mac Pro) tower many of us have been waiting for forever.

A new survey shines more light on just who is buying Apple’s iPad. The survey, by Morgan Stanley, found 4.6 percent of Americans asked said they were “extremely interested” in buying an iPad, with 16.4 percent “somewhat interested” in the tablet device.

The survey of 2,500 U.S. consumers indicates 4-5 million iPads could sell in the U.S. over the first year, or 7-9 million globally, analyst Katy Huberty told investors Wednesday.

The weirdest thing about using Apple’s iPad Keyboard Dock is that you are constantly reaching for a mouse — a mouse that isn’t there, of course. The iPad doesn’t support mice. Instead, you should be tapping and swiping the screen.

Using the keyboard to work with the iPad takes you out of the multitouch mode and puts you back in mouse/keyboard mode. And while you can use the keyboard in a limited way to navigate the iPad, you can’t use many of the desktop shortcuts you’ve learned over the years, like Command-Tab to switch apps.

So using an iPad with a keyboard takes a little getting used to, but the $69 iPad Keyboard Dock is a very handy accessory, with a couple of caveats.

Of all the accessories for the iPad, a networked-attached storage device may not be the first thing that comes to mind, but a NAS may actually prove to be very handy.

A NAS allows you to store all your memory-hogging media cheaply and in one place. Instead of buying the more expensive 64GB iPad, which will soon get filled with movies, music and other media, get the 32GB model and invest $100 in Iomega’s iConnect Wireless Data Station.

The iConnect is perhaps the easiest and fastest way to get an iTunes share on your home or office network.

This is Iggy. Along with this cat, Iggy is the first in a new generation of iLolcats. They will appear on YouTube in ever increasing numbers, playing with their owners iPads until somebody makes an app called CatToy or CatNip or iNip or PadCat or something.

Wait, I typed that as a joke, then searched the App Store. There are already several cat toy apps. Whatever happened to balls of string?

This cat, on the other hand, totally fails to get it.

Most people on this planet do something in order to live. Some catch bad guys, some heal — others yet write pithy reviews about tiny games.

A relatively new game has another suggestion, by dint of its title: “Tilt To Live.” If you do wind up with this little $2 gem in your hot hands, though, you’ll find it usurps any other activity you might have been engaged with in order to live.

While the Emoji keyboard is not new to the iPhone, it seemed as if it was disabled in iPhone OS 4.0 .

For those of you developers big into the Emoji keyboard, here is how to regain the Emoji keyboard while still using iPhone OS 4.0 :

Earlier today, we mentioned how the iPhone’s iPod Out feature will make it safer to play DJ while driving. But SoundMan Car Audio have taken it one step further by building a custom dash that allows an iPad become the centerpiece.

I’ve been messing around with Opera Mini as much as I can today, and here’s what I make of it so far.

First thing: it’s fast. Most of the time, you get your complete web page downloaded and readable quicker than you would using Safari.

It also does a great job of downloading over crummy network connections. I spent most of the afternoon on a beach, at the bottom of a cliff that blocks out all but one bar of my phone network signal. 3G? Forget it. Even so, I was able to read about the new MacBook Pros, and even go browsing on apple.com to check out details, using Opera Mini.

We’ve looked at the Dock, and we’ve looked at the Menu Bar. Today we’re taking our first look at Finder.

This is what you’ll see when you first start to use Finder in Mac OS X. Broadly speaking, it does the same job as Windows Explorer, but it does many of those things in different ways.

Before we go into any more detail (which we will, in forthcoming tips), it helps to understand the layout of a Finder window.

Steve Jobs has sent another of his off-the-cuff customer emails, this time about the not-so-fast chip in the new 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Some observers are complaining that the 13-inch MacBook still sports a rather lowly Core 2 Duo chip, which also powered the previous generation machine. Meanwhile, the 15-inch and 17-inch MacBooks got speedy Intel Core i5 and i7 processors.

One MacRumors reader sent Steve Jobs a note about it, who responded that Apple chose to offer better graphics and battery life rather than an increase in CPU performance.

Customs officers in San Francisco confiscated a shipment of 2,000 iPhoneys they estimate to be worth $1.2 million.

The faux iPhones flew in via Taiwan before being ferreted out by customs agents on March 9.

They must have been pretty good fakes it took about a month to verify that they were, in fact, fraudulent.

A video from local ABC station show some pretty heavy-handed knock-offs sans Apple logo on the back.

One of the tip-offs: the almost-iPhones had a sliding back cover to remove the battery while on the real deal, the battery compartment is sealed.

The iPad is a total babe magnet, writer Jim Colgan has discovered.

Colgan took his new iPad on the streets of New York and got so much attention, he says it’s better than borrowing a puppy to talk to girls.

“If you’re looking for a dating aid, leave your friend’s dog alone and borrow an iPad,” he says.

Newsweek has its pom-poms out, leading a cheer for team U.S.A. This week’s cover story about how business is bouncing back for the “comeback country” cites Apple as a company whose innovation turned profits, despite the downturn, comparing the iTunes model to the efforts of Thomas Edison.

But more important is the rise of systems innovation, like Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse building electrical systems. “That leads to new models of infrastructure and new kinds of consumption.”
Apple launched the iTunes Music Store in April 2003 with a single product: songs selling for 99 cents. Seven years later, iTunes is a much larger business: hardware like the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad; audiobooks, movies, ringtones, apps, and e-books.

It’s a boon for retailers, movie studios, independent coders, analytics firms, and accessories makers—the market for cases, sleeves, and headphones for i-devices is north of $1.5 billion annually. In late March, the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers doubled the size of its two-year-old iFund, which backs app makers, to $200 million.

Summing up the 2,561-word pep talk — where Google and Apple are hailed as the new iconic American brands, taking the place of Chevrolet and McDonald’s (you pick which is which), the journalists conclude:

“If the U.S. continues to adapt as it has, and if it produces a few more game changers like Google and Apple, there’s no reason that the expansion that started in July 2009, against all the odds and predictions, can’t last just as long.”

Via Barron’s

In case you doubted that an iPad jailbreak was imminent, this gorgeous little image posted by hacker extraordinaire George Hotz should prove the point: Cydia running on the iPad. Now stop being coy and give us a hint at a release date already, George!

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iPhone OS 4.0’s new iPod Out functionality didn’t get a lot of attention when it was briefly shown at last week’s event, but TUAW has posted a good overview of what to expect, along with the informative video above, which prominently features the horftastic caterwauling of country singing nightmare Wynonna.

iPod Out is a new application that displays a simplified, iPod Classic like interface for controlling music playback, with the menu system piped to the display of a car stereo system, which could not only handle the iPhone’s audio but support hands-free integration.

TUAW only mentioned stereos, but obviously, as long as the connector required isn’t to esoteric, this could potentially be used when hooking the iPhone up to a television as well. The only problem with the latter theory is the current lack of support for video in iPod Out, but that feature may simply be MIA until the official unveiling of the next iPhone model, which will hopefully be able to output video through HDMI.

The less-expensive versions of the iPad (16GB and 32GB) have become the Zhu Zhu Pets of the tech world. Remember the news footage of parents going from store to store, only to find shelves bare of the mechanical hamsters? The same thing is happening to Apple fans searching for something other than the 64GB iPad.

J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz surveyed 15 stores this week, finding 11 stores had the 64GB iPads compared to just four stores able to sell a 16GB or 32GB version of the popular tablet device.

Lengthily discussing Apple’s heroic focus on iPhone OS 4.0 for the past few month’s, Daring Fireball says not to expect the next version of Apple’s other operating system until at least 2011.

Gruber writes:

A few months ago, I heard suggestions that Apple had tentative plans to release a developer beta of Mac OS X 10.7 at WWDC this June. That is no longer the case. Mac OS X 10.7 development continues, but with a reduced team and an unknown schedule. It’s my educated guess that there will be no 10.7 news at WWDC this year, and probably none until WWDC 2011.

Frankly, this doesn’t concern me too much. Snow Leopard was a solid effort that deep cleaned and tightened the bolts on an already excellent operating system. Short of the addition of multitouch or the addition of deeper integration with the iPhone OS, I’m hard pressed to think of any new features I would really like to see in OS X… although knowing Apple, they’ve thought of some I have not.

Either way, even in 2011, OS X 10.7 won’t be overdue: Snow Leopard’s barely been out for eight months, and it took thirty months to see Tiger transition to Leopard. The real question is whether or not the proud and noble Bornean Clouded Leopard (pictured) can gain enough support in the next two years to get the nod as 10.7 spirit cat.

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Atomic Antelope’s Alice in Wonderland app for the iPad is certainly plenty frabjous — and makes a strange case for the iPad as the twenty-first century’s digital successor to the pop-up book — but what I really want to see is how the iPad changes the reading game when it comes to drier books.

As beautiful as this adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is, it’s also an easy approach. But how will people use the iPad’s capability to expand upon the text of a book like Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan or Nabokov’s Ada, or Adror, or Eco’s The Name of the Rose, or other less playful and anarchic works? I can’t wait to see.

To help you handicap next week’s earnings report set for April 20, we’ve compiled analyst expectations for iPhone sales during the second quarter of 2010. The range is from a high of 7.85 million from independent Apple analyst Turley Muller, who blogs at Financial Alchemist, to a low of 6.0 million from Citigroup analyst Richard Gardner. Even if Apple’s results are on the low side, it would mean a 58 percent increase over the same period in 2009.

If Muller is correct — and he’s often right on target — Apple could announce a 107 percent jump in handset sales. You be the judge.

Woe be Verizon. After chasing AT&T for a share of the iPhone piggy bank, a report recently emerged claiming the carrier could sell a CDMA version this summer. That word was quickly pounced upon by doubting analysts. Now another expert suggests even if Verizon could sell iPhones, the handset would be a drain on revenue. The iPhone would be a “mixed blessing” Bank of America analyst David Lynch told investors Monday.

“While clearly accretive to market share in our view, it is not accretive to earnings, even assuming steady pricing, until 2013,” Barden writes. In other words, although the iPhone would boost Verizon’s market share, it wouldn’t see any money from the deal until another three years.