Cult of Mac

Intel’s decision to marry their new mobile Core i5 and i7 CPUs with integrated graphics has reportedly not gone over well with Apple, who are rumored to be demanding custom-designed chips from Intel for an update to their MacBook and MacBook Pro line of notebooks.

But perhaps there’s another solution. Gizmodo noticed that NVIDIA, maker of the MacBook line’s ubiquitous GeForce 9400M GPU, is now teasing a new notebook technology called Optimus that is supposedly capable of achieving the performance of discrete graphics in a notebook while still delivering great battery life.

It’s probably just scalable performance, but if the Optimus tech is as good as NVIDIA is bragging, it would allow Apple to ditch the substandard switchable GPU configuration of current unibody MacBook Pros, which requires a reboot, to a discrete-only solution, like the earliest MacBook Pros and PowerBooks.

While it probably won’t encompass a 3D interface, there’s been enough background murmurings about the method users will employ to interact with Apple’s forthcoming tablet to expect something new. What that “new” is? Only Apple knows… but if our tipster is right, whatever the Tablet’s UI is, it’s going to be different enough from OS X or the iPhone OS to require a significant learning curve.

According to reader Tom: “I just heard [to] be ready for a steep learning curve regarding the “new” Apple product about to be released [and its] interface. This person is an employee of Apple and had just had a meeting regarding some of the new things coming. He/She would not go into details, but did say that he/she hoped we liked learning.”

Its publication conveniently timed to coincide with insistent talk about the forthcoming Apple Tablet’s unexpected new interface, Gus Santementes of the Baltimore Sun has spotted a new Apple interface patent that describes a touch-screen device with a graphical user interface for “manipulating three-dimensional virtual objects.”

In essence, the patent — filed by three Apple software engineers — describe a way for users to manipulate 3D virtual objects like an icon, a shape or a character. The patent states that “there is a need for electronic devices with touch screen displays [to] provide more transparent and intuitive user interfaces for navigating in three dimensional virtual spaces and manipulating three dimensional objects in these virtual spaces.”

It’s possible this is the patent office skeleton of the new Tablet UI we’ve been hearing about, but I doubt it. This doesn’t describe much more than a method of interacting with 3D objects on a touchscreen, which isn’t particularly revolutionary.

My guess is that if the new Tablet UI has the dye of the weird to it, it’s going to be a lot less pedestrian than a 3D shell plopped atop the iPhone OS. More interesting is the patent’s description of an internal camera that can be shifted by the user to either back or front mounted positions: that’s something I could easily see coming to the Tablet and future iPhones, if it works up to Apple’s standards.

[via Patently Apple]

If you read this site every day, it’s hard to imagine that you could have suffered the sort of massive cranial trauma that would prompt you — swollen tongued, googly eyed and phonemically fixated on an open-ended “Duhhhh…” — to waltz into a Best Buy and buy your next Mac. The online Apple store is only a click away, with free shipping even!

But yeah, yeah. I know. Snap decisions and all. Just promise me one thing: if you do, for some reason, make the decision to pick up your next Mac from your local Best Buy, don’t let their Geek Squad sell you a $40 optimization. According to Slate.com’s The Big Money, that optimization is just as much a waste of money as you’d expect.

LAS VEGAS — The first piece of hardware to take advantage of the iPhone 3.0 OS’s much-heralded hardware interface has finally surfaced at CES. And of all things, it’s a speaker clock from Sharper Image.

LAS VEGAS — Ed Curran is a reporter for WBBM-TV in Chicago, and he’s shooting CES using an iPhone.

LAS VEGAS — The biggest electronics show in America —  the Consumer Electronics Show (or CES for short) — opens later this week in Las Vegas, but several companies paid big bucks to preview their new wares to the hundreds of journalists at a special preview event on Tuesday evening.

And there, in the middle of the room, was this bright-red Apple TV. Yeah, a high-def, flat-panel TV shaped like an Apple. The question is, what idiot would buy a TV shaped like an Apple?

“It’s unique, it’s fun, it’s apples,” said the flak unhelpfully.

Made by an unknown-to-me Chinese company, Hannspree, perhaps someone thought it might be mistaken for a real Apple TV, made by, you know, Apple? It has a remarkably Apple-like logo on the front (see the pic after the jump). And it does remind you of the old toilet-seat iBooks of old; the transluscent plastic ones with the carrying handle.

But the company was also displaying TVs covered in fur that looked like Polar and Panda bears, so who knows?

The folks at ioSafe could adopt another oft-quoted tagline when talking about their new Solo SSD external hard drive: ‘When your data absolutely, positively has to still be there.’ The new storage device is said to withstand forces likely better than many humans could.

If the original Solo’s ability to endure a half hour of 1,550-degree fire and a month in 30-feet of fresh or salt water wasn’t enough, the Auburn, Calif. company has upped their game, introducing crush-proof (2.5 tons), fall-proof (20 feet onto a pile of rubble) and shock-proof (1000g) protection for your important data.

We offer some Mac deals for your listening enjoyment, including Logitech’s AudioStation iPod Speaker System for $68. The unit with iPod dock, wireless remote and AM/FM clock radio pumps out 80 watts of your favorite tunes. If you’ve already tired of the new cases from over Christmas, slip on this Pro Flexi graphic skin case (20 styles) for your iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS. Finally, maybe you’re stuck in a snow drift and nowhere to go? Try the all-in-one FM transmitter for iPhones and iPods from HHI.

As always, all the details on these and many more bargains can be found on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

A potential deal to bring the iPhone to Verizon’s CDMA network later this year may have hit a snag over pricing, one analyst said Tuesday. An iPhone that works on CDMA networks could appear by the middle of 2010, according to UBS.

“We believe a CDMA iPhone is also in the works,” analyst Maynard J. Um told investors. However, “Verizon Wireless and Apple may currently be apart on pricing,” he wrote. Apple receives an average of $700 per iPhone from AT&T, while Verizon pays $450 for the Droid, made by Motorola, estimates say.

This bang-whiz creation is the brainchild of Justin Adler plus the handiwork of  artist/costume maker/prop designer extraordinaire Ted Southern.

It’s the innards of two Apple G4s, plus a graphic card, turned into a the kind of table that will make any night feel like was-there-something-in-my drink? night, if the promo video is anything to go by.

Sure, it doesn’t have the cool linearity of the iPod table, but it’s better than the scrap heap.

Apple announced Tuesday its App Store reached the 3 billion download mark, or one billion downloads since September. The Cupertino, Calif. company passed 2 billion downloads for the iPhone and iPod touch just three months ago.

The new figure means 10.1 million apps per day were downloaded over the last 99 days, reports said. That improves on 6.9 million downloads per day set between April and July, 2009.

“Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months — this is like nothing we’ve seen before,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said. Jobs called the App Store “unlike anything else available on other mobile devices” with “no signs of the competition catching up soon.”

In July, on the App Store’s one-year anniversary, Apple announced more than 1.5 billion downloads. In late 2009, the service had more than 100,000 apps available for iPhone and iPod touch users.

The App Store’s success caught many insiders off-guard, including early investors. Apple would have been happy for only a fraction of the 2 billion downloads reported in October.

The App Store could host 300,000 applications in 2010, tripling the current number, analyst predict.

[Via Barrons and AppleInsider]

You’ve probably noticed that I tend to get a little overexcited about iPhone photography apps. I got so excited about the Lego Photo app that Pete mentioned the other day, I went and made a Flickr group for it. But this post is about another little gem I’ve found, under the name Hipstamatic.

As Google prepares to introduce its Nexus One smartphone, user interest in Android-based phones approaches that of Apple’s iPhone, a new consumer survey finds. However, unlike Apple’s monolithic brand identity with the iPhone, Android seems hobbled by its own success.

Although 28 percent of people who plan to buy a smartphone in the next 90 days want an Apple iPhone, 21 percent “prefer to have the Android OS on their new phone,” said the ChangeWave survey conducted in December. In September, Android was picked by just 6 percent of those surveyed.

The giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas later this week will be all about tablets, eBook readers and 3D TVs. But of primary interest to Apple followers will be the big gathering of iPhone App developers.

More than 100 iPhone developers and accessory makers will exhibit at the iLounge Developer’s Pavilion, up 150% from numbers announced in July.

Just before Christmas, we asked you: What were your favorite desktop apps of 2009?

Based on the responses we got, two apps got fractionally more mentions than most: Google Chrome, and OmmWriter. Neither of which were apps I expected to see topping many end-of-year lists.

I’m a bit mystified by the Airstash, the latest iPhone accessory to come out of CES.

It looks good on the tin: the AirStash is a dongle that allows you to greatly expand the internal storage of your iPhone or iPod Touch. You just plug an SD card into it, slap it into your computer, transfer files on over, then put it in your pocket. Now, as long as your iPod Touch or iPhone is in WiFi distance of your AirStash, you can access its contents. But those are all the details we have.

At first blush, those details are enough: who wouldn’t want more space on their iPhone or iPod Touch? But, really, what do we use our internal storage for? Movies, videos and apps. There’s the rub: the AirStash might expand storage, but it won’t allow you to launch apps that are stored on the dongle, and my guess is that it won’t integrate with iTunes for music and movies. That makes this peripheral fairly useless for a large number of people.

My guess is that the AirStash is mostly just a dongle for people who might need to email files that they can’t natively store on their iPhone or iPod Touch. Not bad functionality, certainly, but limited in scope.

Still, this is all speculation: we should know more about the AirStash, including availability and price, later on this week.

[via Engadget]

Current internet scuttlebutt has the next iPhone pegged for upgrading its current 3.2-megapixel camera to a 5-megapixel camera, courtesy of Omnivision. That will make the iPhone competitive with other camera phones, at least on the vastly overblown quality criterion of the megapixel scale.

But what if Apple one-upped everyone and slapped a 14.6-megapixel image sensor capable of shooting 1080p video at 60 frames per second into the next iPhone? That’s certainly an option: iPhone camera sensor suppliers Omnivision have just announced the OV14825, which is slated to go into mass production in the second quarter of 2010… just in time for a new iPhone.

Apple might go that route, sure, but let’s all slaughter some pigs on our aluminum unibody altars and pray that they don’t. There isn’t a smartphone on the market with a lens capable of taking advantage of even a 2-megapixel sensor, and there’s no advances to cell phone lenses on the horizon. 14.6 megapixels is sheer lunacy: sure, there’ll be 14.6 million dots, but 12.6 will be random noise.

[via Gizmodo]

According to Kara Swisher of All Things D, Apple is on the cusp of buying mobile ad company Quattro for $275 million.

No surprise here: Apple was just outbid on mobile ad company Admob by Google for $750 million. Apple is obviously interested in entering the mobile advertising space.

Optimistically, that’s because they recognize that owning the ad network that power all of their App Store apps would make them a killing… although given how poorly the App Store is maintained, one wonders if Apple has the customer service chops to run their own advertising network.

Pessimistically? Apple’s been flirting with some alarming patents for mandatory advertising within OS X. It’s hard to believe they’d go that route, but just the existence of such patents is enough to cause you to arch your eyebrow when Cupertino drops $300 million for an advertising company.

A laughably fake “iSlate development document” has been “leaked” to PhoneArena, possibly through a drainage shunt trephined through the cranium of some wishful thinking prankster.

The first clue that the document is phony is the fact that, two days later, Apple’s lawyers aren’t Q-tipping the gelatinous remains of PhoneArena’s site owners out from between their toes. But there’s other reasons to be skeptical.

First of all, the document claims that the Tablet will run OS X 10.7, codenamed “Clouded Leopard.” Ha, whatever. Not only is that name ridiculous, but we know that if the Apple Tablet is announced at the end of January that we can expect a launch by no later than June: Apple needs to give App Store developers time to tablet-ready their apps, but they can’t wait so long that the competition has time to catch up. More over, Snow Leopard was just released in August 2009, and the first developer build of its successor is rumored to be released at WWDC in June.

The bottom line: the tablet is going to come out well before the release of the next version of OS X. And it’s probably going to run something closer to the iPhone OS anyway, although I personally expect to see those operating systems as distinct entities begin to converge more drastically with the release of the Tablet.

Take the dusty and venerable name of the Wall Street Journal out of this otherwise pedestrian piece, and what you’re left with is a stock purple-print-and-pulp regurgitation of all of the current Internet rumors about the forthcoming Apple tablets, along with a few speculations and just a dash of WTF.

Apple’s January 27th surprise product announcement will see the introduction of the tablet, the iPhone OS 4.0 and an associated Software Development Kit for programmers, the French site Mac4Ever reports.

According to the Mac4Ever (Google translation), the SDK will include a tablet “simulator” to help developers port their iPhone/iPt apps to the tablet’s larger screen.

Several of our sources give us two pieces of information concerning the famous Apple tablet: In late January, in addition to its tablet, Cupertino should have a beta of iPhone OS 4, accompanied by an SDK. Our informants also tell us of a “simulator” specifically adapted for the tablet. Evidently, the major novelty of the SDK therefore concerns the interface, making it easier for developers to adapt to different screen resolutions. The new iPhone could also benefit from a higher pixel density.

Mac4Ever notes that the information should be taken with a grain of salt. But the site recently nailed details of Apple’s new iMac models and Mighty Mouse weeks before they were released.

Mac4Ever also recently claimed that the tablet will be “far different” than most internet mockups, a tantalizing tidbit bolstered by a NYT report that we will be “very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”

Confirming the rumors, Apple will make a “major” product announcement on Wednesday Jan. 27, reports John Paczkowski of All Things Digital website.

Paczkowski says “it’s going to be a big deal.”

Sources in a position to know tell me Apple (AAPL) is indeed planning a media event later this month at which it will announce a major new product. The gathering is to be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, a space Apple often uses for media events like these. According to other sources, it will occur on Wednesday Jan. 27, not Tuesday Jan. 26, as had been rumored.

No definitive word on what that product is, but I think we all have a pretty good idea of what to expect.”

As previously noted, the Yerba Buena gardens has no events booked for Jan 25, 26 or 27. Holding a product announcement on a Wednesday is unusual for Apple. The company usually prefers Tuesdays for announcements.

Major Apple Product Announcement Set for Weds. Jan. 27.

We start off the New Year and a fresh decade with a batch of Apple deals. The Apple Store has a refurbished 120GB iPod Classic for $189. If scanning the dial for some interesting police calls is your cup of tea, you can bring the excitement with you through the 5-0 Radio app for your iPhone or iPod touch. We round out the top trio with a bundle of Belkin accessories for your iPhone or iPod, including power adapter, headphone splitter and car FM transmitter.

Along the way, we check out the “Let’s Golf” app, 24 hours of classical music and a travel battery pack and charger from Kensington.

For details on these and many more bargains, check out the CoM “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Apple has acquired the “i-phone” trademark from a company in China, apparently clearing the way for the Cupertino, Calif. company to register its iPhone as a cell phone. Hanwang Technology said it had agreed to transfer the trademark to Apple, but refused to provide details, reports said Monday.

When Apple applied to trademark the iPhone in China in 2002, it did so only under “hardware and software” because Hanwang trademarked its own “i-phone” handset under the phone category. The company, also known as Hanvon, eventually discontinued the phone.