The iPad may be too popular for its own good:  Apple seems to be imposing limits on how many you can buy.

When a hospital district wanted to buy 100 of them to equip medical staff, they ran into trouble:

Apple’s ordering system automatically canceled Volosin’s purchase, informing him that he could not order more than three.
“They were limiting people form ordering too many, which I thought was interesting,” he says. “They’re used to dealing with consumers and not bulk orders.”

Now, a medical student who endeavored to buy a bunch of iPads for his pals at the NeoGAF gaming forum, ran straight into “lifetime limit.”

Apple has finally seen fit to update the design of its 85-watt MagSafe Power Adapters to use an all aluminum tip instead of a plastic one, mimicking the design of the 45-watt MacBook Air’s adapter.

Not only will this minimize the 85-Watt MagSafe’s physical footprint, but ditching the plastic should prevent the occasional melting problems we sometimes hear about. It also happens to look a hell of a lot better.

The 60-Watt MagSafe Power Adapter hasn’t been updated yet, but all things in good time. Hey, look at that! As Charli points out in the comments below, they just were.

[via TUAW]

With the iPad kinda bridging the chasm between iPhone and MacBook, it becomes increasingly likely a 70-page legal brief some lawyer’s been working on for months will be lost when junior accidentally flings the iPad into the pool while taking a turn a little too hot in Real Racing HD.

That’s where DriveSavers comes in. Located about a half hour north of San Francisco, these guys are experts at recovering data from hard drives and the NAND flash chips used in the iPhone — and the iPad. The only difference is the iPhone has one set of chips, while the iPad has two.

It’s not cheap, though — DriveSavers says the average bill for recovering data from an iPhone runs about a grand. Ouch. They will, however, provide a free evaluation on an iPad mailed to them, explaining what can be recovered and how much it’ll cost.

The lesson here? Back your stuff up. And maybe get junior a helmet; kid seems a little accident-prone.

When Jobs announced the iPad, declared the netbook to be dead and claimed that the iPad was a decent productivity machine, I was cynical. Lustful for an iPad I was, but as a blogger, the ability to type in one window while referencing a source in another is invaluable. Simply put, my netbook allowed me to do that, but the iPad didn’t… and until it did, there was little chance I’d ever do serious work on it.

I should have taken account the ingenuity of app developers though. Desktop for the iPad essentially allows you to split screen your iPad. You can specify what functionality you want each split screen panel to have, but for my purposes, I could browse a page in Safari on one side of the screen while using the “Email Composer” on the right side to type in text.

What a perfectly elegant little solution, especially for just $0.99.

The iPhone’s popularity in Japan just keeps growing. Apple’s handset has grabbed 72 percent of the smartphone market on the gadget-obsessed island nation.The Cupertino, Calif. company has doubled its shipments to Japan, hitting 2.3 million all together, according to Tokyo-based researchers.

The iPhone, which began Japanese sales in July 2008, shipped 1.69 million handsets during the fiscal year ended March 31, MM Research Institute Ltd. announced Thursday. Some 3 million smartphones could sell in Japan during the year started April 1, reports say.

Spotlight is the built-in search system in Mac OS X. You can get to it at any time by clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the very top-right corner of your screen.

Welcome to MacRx, a new category dedicated to some common setups, problems and headaches of All Things Mac. As we all know, how things should work isn’t always how they do work.  Sometimes a little assistance can be in order.

This week an issue I’ve seen many users struggling with, Managing Bookmarks in Safari. As a Mac consultant I frequently run into clients who can’t find the bookmarks they’ve added to their systems, or have so many bookmarks saved that the list is virtually endless and unuseable.

Getting to know the ways in which Safari stores bookmarks, and coming up with a simple organizing scheme you can follow, will go a long way in preserving your sanity – or at least help save some time occasionally.

In Part 4 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s memoirs about the Mac, Steve Jobs tells a publishing mogul to “belly up to the bar” and hangs up on him.

How’s this for customer service? Steve Jobs personally intervened to get a dodgy iMac replaced. Author Michael J. Weber bought a new iMac, but his Apple machine was a lemon. Perhaps emboldened by Steve Jobs’ recent email responses to customer emails, Weber didn’t waste any time going straight to the top to complain about it:

Steve,
Received a 27″ i7 iMac today that would only boot in verbose mode. Whatever happened to “It Just Works”? This was a top of the line unit built to order in Elk Grove, CA — not China. And it booted like a Gateway 2000!

Continue reading

Jonathan Seff at Macworld has posted a detailed review of the new 13″ MacBook Pro, which has one interesting finding: the computer’s battery life doesn’t quite live up to Apple’s claims of 10 hours.

Does the iPhone make the man?

If you think your gear speaks volumes about you, a survey of 1,500 women says you’re kinda right.

A little over half the women surveyed by mobile phone purveyor Phones4U, 54 per cent, said they’d be more likely to give their digits and date an iPhone owner than a non-iPhone owner. (Though it appears the 46% of females unswayed by Apple devices may be more street smart, see below).

iPhone owners were also deemed better groomed, more likely to have a good sense of humor and have the gift of gab than other mobile phone owners.

Most (if not all) of the cases we’ve reviewed here at the Cult during the past three weeks of iPhone Case Week just lay around lazily like some muscle-bound Miami Beach sunbather, looking good and maybe keeping the pretty iPhone from getting beat up. But the Mophie Juice Pack Air is different; It doesn’t just sit around, man. It’s charging up and down the beach — and it wants to take the iPhone with it.

The team at Patently Apple mined a patent granted today to find what may be future gold: more evidence that the Cupertino company is toying with the idea of touchscreen iMacs and MacBooks.

After slogging through patent no. 20100100947, titled “Scheme for Authenticating without Password Exchange,” they discovered a flowchart illustrating a touchscreen that could be associated with both a Macbook and a small desktop.

In a patent that even these document hounds defined “obscure,” the flowchart they sniffed out points to a touchscreen component not restricted to the iPhone.

Continue reading

We start off with a deal on an iBook. For $300, you get a 1.33GHz G4 machine with a 12-inch screen. Next up are two deals on the latest Core i7 MacBook Pros. Both run at 2.66GHz with a 15-inch screen. The first, for $1,969 includes your standard gear, but the second for $2,559 throws in three years of AppleCare.

Along the way, we check out new software for the iPhone and iPad, along with cases and stereo systems for your iPod. As usual, you can find all the details on these and many other items after the jump.

Mirror, Mirror, on the iPhone…

The iSkin Solo FX iPhone case has a special mirror film that allows you to gaze at yourself when your iPhone is off. It can be a bit frighting — especially in the morning. But used like a compact, it’s great for applying lipstick.

Those iPhone images Gizmodo released earlier this week are likely those of a near-final design, one report suggested Thursday. The proof is a barcode indicating the handset “lost” in a California bar was a late pre-production version of a next generation phone widely expected to be released in June or July.

The barcode attached to the prototype handset is “N90_DVT-GE4X_0493.” Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber tapped his Apple sources, who helped decrypt the code.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvplGbCBaLA

Virtuoso pianist Lang Lang gave concert goers something special by playing “The Flight of the Bumblebee” on an iPad.

This unprecedented encore happened — where else?– in San Francisco. Lang Lang played the song, part of it one-handed, thanks to Smule’s Magic Piano iPad app.

The $0.99 app, from the makers of Ocarina and I Am T-Pain,  lets users easily play music by touching light beams that stream down from the top of the screen. Full disclosure: Smule sent Lang Lang an iPad pre-loaded with the app in the hopes he’d take it for a spin.

Wonder if Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who penned the interlude over 100 years ago, would forgive Lang Lang’s occasional flub as he struggles to get it right on the unfamiliar device.

Via WSJ Digits

The war of words between Apple and Adobe over the Cupertino, Calif.’s company decision to block Flash apps on the iPhone has reached a breaking-point. Adobe now says it will court other handset makers, including Apple-rival Google.

“We’ve done everything we can,” Adobe vice president David Wadhwani told the Wall Street Journal Wednesday. Wadhwani said its relationship with Google continues to strengthen as the San Jose, Calif. software maker courts Android-based smartphones following the public split-up with Apple.

$0.69 for an iPad stand? Bah, we say. Ian Collins shows us all how to make up to four free iPad stands out of its own packaging materials. Ghetto? Perhaps. We prefer to call it recycling.

[via Laughing Squid

In a world of plastic cases, Trexta’s iPhone covers stand out.

Made from natural materials like leather and wood, they bring back fond memories of bowling trips in the old two-toned station wagon.

In other words, they’re retro badass.

This adorable little device looking something like the offspring of EVE and WALL-E is the Mint, a robot mop for your floors similar to the Roomba, but unlike the Roomba, the Mint complies with Jobs’ own requirements for absolute silence in his devices.

Since it lacks a vacuum or spinning brushes, the only noise you’ll hear as the Mint whisks across your floors is the a barely audible squeegeeing.

The tiny robot uses NorthStar Navigation to prevent it from mopping the same spot twice. It costs $250, which doesn’t necessarily beat the alternative — a Polish maid scrubbing your floors in a tank top — but is certainly cheaper in the grand scheme of things than the resulting temptation, and the lawsuits that might follow.

[via Gadget Lab]

Investors on both sides of the Atlantic are abuzz with a rumor Apple is considering acquiring UK chipmaker ARM for $8 billion. If true, such a deal could be a blow to a wide swath of competitors.

Although there has been no official comment on or off-the-record on a Wednesday report by the Evening Standard, the rumor pushed stock prices for the Cambridge, UK chipmaker up 8.1 percent. Along with powering a wide arrange of electronic devices ranging from Blackberries, Microsoft and Android cell phones, ARM chips are used in Apple’s iPod, iPhones and the iPad’s A4 processor.

“They [Apple] could stop ARM’s technology from ending up in everyone else’s computers and gadgets,” the Standard quoted one UK trader.

ARM was founded in 1990 as a joint venture among Apple, Acorn Computers and VSLI Technology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKPxl5qdYhU

Steam for Mac is finally available in private beta form, bringing the popular gaming delivery system to OS X for the first time.

It’s looking pretty good compared to the PC version, although that charcoal color scheme is as dreadful as ever, and like most of the initial forays into Mac software development made by PC guys, the UI’s not quite up to Snow Leopard snuff.

None the less, Steam for Mac looks good enough and seems to work pretty well. I’m really excited about this: I really think a good delivery platform is exactly what is needed to galvanize more serious OS X game development.

[via 9to5Mac]

Here’s a typical Finder window:

And here’s mine:

What’s different?

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.