Will Apple unveil a new line of MacBook Pros today? Some signs point to the possibility the Cupertino, Calif. may announce new laptops with faster chips to coincide with this week’s Macworld Expo 2010.
The first tea leaf isa French gadget blog which quotes an anonymous source. The source “who works for Apple just tell me that the new MacBook Pro line will be launched tomorrow,” according to blogger Steve Hemmerstoffer. The MacBook Pro, which has not seen a major change since last June, could receive faster Intel chips.
Since 2007, they’ve also published the twice-weekly school paper dubbed “The Optimist” (a commentary on future journalists?) for the iPhone.
“The faculty as a whole and the department discussed it, and we said we have to do this,” Dr. Cheryl Bacon, chairwoman of the department of journalism and mass communications told The Daily Orange. “It’s just too good of an opportunity to pass up.”
Apple says it will stay “nimble” on pricing for its newly-released iPad, dropping the price to attract more customers. This comes as a new survey indicates a doubling of consumers not interested in buying the device once the tablet shifted from rumor to reality.
“Apple seemed to indicate it would respond with price cuts if demand for the device wasn’t revving up the way it liked,” Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope said. Shope met with Apple officials last week. Shope said Apple “will remain nimble (pricing could change if the company is not attracting as many customers as anticipated.)”
You can tell it's a party by the disco ball. CC-licensed pic by Steve Rhodes.
The best thing about Macworld was always the parties. MacWeek’s annual Mac The Knife Party was a drunken bacchanal for the ages; Peachpit and O’Reily put on nice literary soirees with cash bars; and Microsoft’s events always had fancy hors d’oeuvres.
Even Apple, a stranger to shows of public hospitality, once threw parties with generous helpings of food and booze. I got so ploughed at one event, I forgot my heavy laptop bag — computer, camera and all. Apple designer Jonny Ive kindly picked it up and lugged it about all evening until we ran into each other later at a nightclub, and he handed it back.
Peter-Paul Koch is a man with opinions about the mobile web. And his latest opinion is a trifle controversial: Mobile Safari, he says, is this generation’s Internet Explorer 6. All the rage now, but destined to be hated by webdevs of the future.
Photographer/podcaster Lisa Bettany is first in line for the 2009 Macworld keynote. CC-licensed photo by Scott Meizner.
Macworld 2010 opens today. It is the 25th annual gathering of Mac users. That’s right, 25 years!
But thanks to the absence of Apple this year, this “Mecca for Mac Heads” may be the last. So check it out while you can.
The show runs for 5 days. The Expo showfloor opens on Thursday at noon.
For the first time since the eighties, it now includes a Saturday. Expect big crowds, lots of kids.
There’s 250 exhibitors, down from 400 last year. Here’s the Exhibitor List.
Attendance is expected at about 30,000 visitors. (But most Expo visitors this year got free passes instead of paying the usual $25 fee).
People are hoping this isn’t the last Macworld but consider the history. As Jim Dalrymple notes: “Apple pulled out of Macworld Expo Boston/New York — it failed; Apple pulled out of Macworld Expo Tokyo — it failed; Apple pulled out of Apple Expo Paris — it failed.”
So this is the web that you don’t see; the web in text-only form. Ugly, isn’t it?
Yeah, ugly. But fast. By disregarding everything that isn’t text, browsers like Lynx display web pages at lightning speed. If all you want to do is read stuff, Lynx is useful to have around. And if you don’t want to do that, it’s fun to play with. For five minutes.
But not many people are comfortable enough with the Terminal to install it manually on their Mac. It’s not the kind of app that comes with a drag-and-drop installer.
Well, it wasn’t, until Lynxlet came along. Lynxlet gives you the best of both worlds: the text-only speediness and the drag-and-drop simplicity. Nice.
Lynxlet’s maker calls apps like this “Termlets”, and Lynxlet isn’t the only one available: you can grab a handful of others here.
Someone is looking for a Steve Jobs look-alike, like this guy, who was snapped at the San Francisco Dyke March in 2008 by photographer/comic Heather Gold.
Someone is looking for a Steve Jobs look-alike for an “impersonator event” on Friday and Saturday in San Francisco’s SOMA — the area around Macworld.
The actual job isn’t specified, but looking like Steve is important, of course, but so is “punctuality.”
“If necessary, we can provide a black turtleneck and glasses,” the Craigslist ad says.
Pay is $100 a day. Wanna bet it’s handing out Gold Club flyers?
Last month, we wondered how many people would care about the iPad’s restrictive DRM shackles, which makes Apple the only available supplier of software for the iPad through the fact that users can only download software onto the gadget from Apple’s App Store (unless someone figures out a way to jailbreak it — which’ll probably happen within the first 48 hours after it ships, considering the fact that the iPad’s OS is based off the continually jailbroken iPhone, and the supposition that every genius hacker on the planet is spending every waking moment thinking about it).
Books were just 3 percent of the apps tested for the upcoming iPad.
At the time, Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ remark about ebook pricing being the same whether sold by Cupertino or Amazon seemed rather optimistic. At the time, Amazon controlled ebook pricing and the ebook market, while Apple had just released the iPad. However, just weeks after the tablet was unveiled, Amazon will now adopt Apple’s price structure when the iPad starts shipping in March.
“By agreeing to accept a new pricing model, Amazon has publicly acknowledged the sudden emergence of a rival that may not only threaten its highly popular Kindle franchise but also its total domination of e-books,” the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend.
We start off the week with a number of Apple-related deals. First up is an iPhone accessory bundle that could serve as an emergency kit for those road trips. The $10 kit includes windshield mount, wired headset, travel and car chargers and USB sync cable. Has your internal Superdrive died or you need an extra when travelling? There is a deal on an external Superdrive designed for the Macbook Air. A powered USB port is required. The last stop on our top three picks for the day is a new batch of free iPhone apps, including Car Mania, a top-down driving game.
Along the way, we look at other bargains, including the perfect app if you plan to visit this year’s Macworld. As always, for details on any of the items, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
For those of you who’ve never used it, Omnigraffle is a wonderful visual design tool that can be turned to all sorts of tasks. It can create any manner of diagram, but works even better when enhanced with template themes that add specific visual widgets.
This particular set of widgets gives you almost everything you’d need to mockup an iPad app of your own. It includes drop-downs, alerts, the software keyboard, and loads more. Various bits of text are customizable, so your mockup looks as real as possible.
It will be even better when Omnigraffle itself is ported to the iPad – something that Omni Group boss Ken Case told us they would do as soon as possible (more about that here.)
The Internet can always be counted on to promptly deliver simulacrums of the latest announced Apple product created in two distinct geek mediums: LEGO and papercraft.
Last week, we had the inevitable LEGO iPad, so it was only a matter of time we got the origami version. Here it is, courtesy of Obamapacman: a DIY iPad papercraft mockup.
It’s a pretty simple project. Just print the model out on a color printer at 150 DPI, cut along solid lines, fold on the dotted lines and glue the yellow seams together; then off to the local cafe, prowling for Apple-loving geek girls, gullible suckers or both!
Late last week, a word of warning to iPhone and iPod Touch app developers was posted on Apple’s official developer site: “If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.”
It’s a strange little note. The iPhone’s Core Location functionality is already opt-in, and it seems useful from both a developer and user’s standpoint if advertisements are tailored to a user’s individual experience… and location is a big part of that.
The wording is also worrying: what does “primarily” mean? That’s another one of those vague App Store Review Process wordings that just leads to headache down the line.
There are a few interpretations on this. When Apple tries to launch their own in-house iPhone ad network, they may want to position location-based advertisements as a major advantage of their service. On the other hand, this simply could be about limiting advertising-based apps from needlessly hogging the GPS radio and draining battery life.
If I were to guess, I’d say the latter is true. Hopefully Apple will clarify matters in due time.
The first signs of how the iPad will be handled internationally are appearing, including talk of carrier subsidies. Months before Apple said it will announce international deals for the tablet, one carrier is already planning to sell subsidized iPads requiring two-year 3G contracts.
Hutchison Australia reportedly will begin offering the iPad with a $455 (333 Euro) rebate when customers sign-up for a two-year contract offering 5GB of data for $41, or 30 Euro.
After Super Bowl Sunday… Monday morning. A single artery slightly to the left of my pineal gland pumps gin-infused headache into my frontal lobe in simultaneity with the overhead clock’s incessant tick.
How to write about Apple products when the aftermath of last night’s alcohol-soaked football madness makes me incapable of doing anything but watch that staccato timepiece twitch towards some impossibly far-off time: to when my fingers can type their way out of their tremens; to when my mouth isn’t ash-dry as the taste of the Colts’ humiliating defeat, when I can spill out words of a new Apple product or rumor as readily as I am — here, now, in hangover hell — to vomit up my spleen?
Tic. Tic. To the feeds. And suddenly, a way out of my nauseous, neuralgic writer’s block. A clock, just like the one torturing me, but created from the casing of an old iBook G4, with the pendulum of an Apple mouse flowing into upwards into churning horological guts.
An Etsy find, sure, and already sold out… but this I can write about. Now if only the feeds would spit out some Apple-inspired hangover cure, or a video from the Woz about why the New Orleans Saints suck. Perhaps then I’d somehow find a way to make my way through the day.
Primate Labs’ Geekbench is a tiny little benchmarking application with one really neat funcitonality: run it on your system and it’ll upload the results to their servers, allowing users to easily compare benchmark scores across computers to inform their next purchasing decision.
That’s swell, but hardly news in and of itself… except that over the weekend, someone downloaded the GeekBench app and ran it on a system referring to itself as a MacBookPro6,1, the commonly acknowledged successor to the current MacBook Pro line. Oh, and it’s packing an Intel Core i7 M processor.
Was the iPad originally meant to be a killer TV platform? An analyst speculates the iPad would be the perfect platform for Apple to launch its vision for anywhere television, tying Apple TV, iTunes and network programming into one sleek and stylish portable DVR.
“Imagine a portable set top box, but with its own killer screen,” wrote Berstein Research analyst Craig Moffett. “Navigation of programming guides and iTunes listings would occur on the iPad, using an intuitive touch interface. Output would go directly to the widescreen TV on the wall.”
Without as many exhibitors (particularly Apple) what will Macworld focus on? It’s all about “community,” organizers say. The goal is to replace Steve and the home ship with enthusiasm ginned-up by the faithful. To help with the revival atmosphere, Macworld 2010 will feature New York Times tech columnist David Pogue, writer-director Kevin Smith, media maven Leo Laporte, Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber and probably the most-talked-about Apple product since the iPhone: the iPad.
Eltima Software has graciously given Cult of Mac 10 SyncMate licenses to give away.
We’ll post an official contest tweet on @cultofmac at 11am PST (2pm EST, 7pm GMT). The first 10 non-bot retweets of the official contest tweet will get their very own SyncMate license.
Of course, if you don’t win, you can pick up a copy of SyncMate from Eltima Software for $39.95.
The announcement of the iPad has done a lot of things: it’s stoked up excitement in the Mac using community, it’s got a bunch of developers feverishly coding exciting new stuff, and it’s got retailers and cell phone companies the world over drooling over the money they can make from it.
And it’s also somewhat upset my plans for buying a new Mac.
There aren’t many games on the iPhone platform that can match games on the big 64-bit boxes for production value — but Electronic Arts Mobile‘s Madden NFL 10 can, and does, fantastically. Unfortunately, it also has one gaping hole.
Google's Nexus One smartphone. CC-licensed picture by ekai.
It’s been a month since my review of Google’s “SuperPhone”, the Nexus One. Since that time, we’ve surfed, updated facebook, navigated, called, played endless hands of cribbage and even tried to freeze it to death on a trip to Dayton Ohio. Follow me after the jump to find out does the “SuperPhone” stand the test of time, or is it a phonebooth’d Clark Kent.
We close the week featuring two hardware and one software deal. Several MacBooks are being offered, starting at $749 for a 2.13GHz white model. Also, a Mac mini (2.53GHz Core 2) with 4GB of RAM and two 500GB drives for $985. The App Store has a new batch of freebies, including “Paradise Monkeys,” a version of the classic whack-a-mole game.
As always, you can get details on these and many other bargains at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
