Cult of Mac

If the forthcoming Apple Tablet does indeed run on the iPhone operating system, which seems likely, it stands to reason that it’ll be a major evolution of the OS, with new multitouch gestures and features that will selectively trickle down to the smaller handsets, even as the app format is expanded to a sort-of “universal binary” system to allow one executable to run on two significantly different hardware conditions.

If that’s all true, then it’s no wonder that Apple is sitting on the release of the next update to the iPhone OS until after the Tablet is officially announced. A source speaking to iPodNN has now confirmed that that is indeed the case: while the iPhone 4.0 firmware is in deep internal testing, it hasn’t been released to developers because there are too many references in current builds to functionality of Apple’s upcoming tablet.

Other than that, iPodNN’s source is tight lipped, but goes on to describe the tablet as an “iPhone on steroids” with multi-touch gestures that are “out of control.” He also claims the internal model number of the Apple tablet is K48AP, running an extremely fast ARM CPU, designed by PA Semi.

Oh, Woz. How can your allegiances be so fickle? We always supposed that when your heart finally exploded in a bright toxic sludge of congested cheese curl powder, you’d die on your Segway with an iPhone in each hand. You were a goofy hirsute geek with an unflappable allegiance to the company you’d helped create. And now what do we hear? Your new favorite gadget is, the HTC Nexus One.

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Well, that certainly didn’t take long. Less than a day after Gawker announced an up to $100,000 bounty for information about the forthcoming Apple Tablet including images, video or hands-on time, Apple’s lawyers have already sent them a cease-and-desist letter, demanding the “bounty” to be withdrawn by 6:00PM PST today.

A recent Intel contest ad “confirming” a forthcoming transition to Intel’s new Core i5 mobile chips for the MacBook Pro had all the hallmarks of a corporate gaffe…. and so it was. Intel has issued a statement, clarifying that they never meant to use MacBook Pros in the ad in the first place.

According to Spanish site faq-mac.com, which broke the story, Intel has now revised the promotion to give away HP Envy notebooks, which do contain a Core i5 chip, instead of the MacBook Pro. They’ve also apologized for the confusion, blaming the error on a lack of communication from their central marketing agency.

That’s not to say the Core i5 MacBook Pro isn’t likely to be unveiled sometime in the future… as usual, it just goes to show you can’t take a contest entry form as a prophetic glimpse into the future of Apple products.

We start off with several MacBook Air laptops from the Apple Store, including a 1.6GHz 13-inch model for $1,099. Also on the price-chopping block: a $30 saving on a 64GB solid-state drive from Super Talent, plus BlueAction’s BAE Bluetooth headsets.

Along the way, we also look at DVDRemaster Pro 6 for the Mac, the Genius EasyPen tablet and assorted other gadgets. As always, for details on these and many other bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

The Copenhagen climate talks last December might have been a political disaster, but here’s another project from the same city that might make a difference for some. And yay – it’s iPhone friendly.

The Copenhagen Wheel is an ingenious hub that you can fit to almost any bike, instantly turning it into a hybrid electric bicycle and data capture device.

Clip your iPhone or A.N.Other smartphone on to the handlebars, and it can talk to the wheel over Bluetooth.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KVFmE8la6w

Why spring for a Wacom tablet when you can transform your existing unibody Macbook trackpad into a graphics tablet? For $24.95, Ten One Design will do just through their impressive Inklet OS X application.

The demo is both swank and intuitive. When not in use, the application sits in your menu bar, but Control+Option+i overlays the screen with a bright translucent box, showing you where, exactly, your penstrokes will be inputed. Draw on your trackpad with a finger or stylus and it converts the input into digital ink; hit the Inklet hotkey again and you can use your trackpad as normal. Simple, elegant and efficient.

Of course, there’s some caveats: the Apple trackpad won’t register stylus pressure like a real graphics pad, so Ten One Design recommends buying a Pogo Stylus from them for $14.99 to recreate that functionality. Needless to say, the trackpad also doesn’t have the surface area of a Wacom tablet. Still, for the idle doodler, occasional Photoshop artist or even the professional designer who wants to work portably without dragging a tablet around, this seems like a great little app.

The iPhone app Busted! Real Mugshots serves up police pics from around the US with full names, birth date, age, arrest date/time plus the offending crime.

Dubbed “Facebook for criminals” by a pithy CoM reader, the app, offered gratis on iTunes, launched January 11, generating controversy faster than an ACLU lawyer can say “FOIA.”

Cult of Mac talked to Jeff Jolley, president of the app’s maker Fountain Dew.

He told us about getting the app approved (easier than you’d think), the “bad karma” aspect, and more importantly, how to get your mugshot removed after that artsy late-night prank ended in tears.

CoM: How did you get the idea?

Jeff Jolley: We read an article on the popularity of mugshot pages on newspaper websites
and thought that could be extended, in a more interesting, mobile and viral manner, to the iPhone.

CoM: How do you get the photos?

JJ: We search the Internet for publicly available (and regularly updated) mugshots, and then make them available for use in the app.  We continue to look for new sources to expand the available repository of mugshots.

CoM: Are the mugshots storeable and searchable?

JJ: Not at this point.  You always stream the photos and you always start with the most recent mugshot available.  This could be a good future feature.

Eastman Kodak sued Apple Thursday, claiming the Cupertino, Calif. company infringed patents used to preview images on the iPhone. The lawsuit, before the U.S. International Trade Commission, seeks a stop to the alleged infringement and unspecified damages.

RIM’s BlackBerry is also named in the lawsuit.

A celebrity gossip blog squarely targeting the lives of Silicon Valley eggheads, anti-socials and mouthbreathers has always been one of Gawker founder Nick Denton’s stranger and least accessible publication ideas, and it’s not so surprising that the once prolific Valleywag has gone from its own website to a mere tag over at Gawker over the last year or two. Odd to see Valleywag, then, announce a bounty of up to $100,000 for information about the forthcoming Apple Tablet… a bold play at relevancy, to be sure.

Back in November, our own personal Aleister Crowley of Cult of Mac, Leander, sat down and interviewed Ken Segall, the originator of the iMac name. According to Segall, Steve Jobs recognized he was “betting the company on the machine and so it needed a great name.” The only problem: the name Jobs had his heart set on was so bad it would “curdle your blood.” The original product name? MacMan, says Gizmodo.

Luckily, at the end of the day, iMac won out… but it wasn’t because Jobs let himself be swayed, according to Gizmodo’s sources, but rather because the name was already trademarked by a company called MidiMan, who had released a serial-to-MIDI adapter under that brand name. Apple made an offer; Midiman declined; Steve Jobs fumed and Segall got his way.

As everyone prepares to hear how Apple did financially during the first fiscal quarter of 2010, analysts are releasing numbers on the Cupertino, Calif. company’s success during the fourth quarter of 2009. IDC said Apple’s U.S. sales rose 31 percent for the quarter, a day after Gartner researchers announced a 24 percent jump.

Apple’s 31 percent growth rate was higher the most computer makers, who saw a 24 percent jump during that three-month period, according to IDC. The Mac maker is in fifth plan, selling 5.6 million Macs for 8 percent of the market, according to IDC.

Although the Tablet is obviously prompting a degree of speculative slathering unlike anything we’ve seen for the last years, the last month has seen a persistent trickle of next-gen iPhone rumors coming out as well. The latest is courtesy of Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Chan, who claims (amongst some “no duh” predictions like a 5-megapixel camera and a June release) that the 4G iPhone will have a new plastic casing similar to that used by Apple’s touch-panel Magic Mouse.

Apple has lost more than $450 million from App Store piracy, according to a published report Wednesday. “A conservative estimate of the average piracy rate is that for every paid application developed and sold at the App Store, three more are pirated,” a financial blog claims.

The $7 game Rally Master Pro 3D has a 95 percent piracy rate, according to publishers Fish Labs. The $1.99 game Tap-Fu has a 90 percent piracy rate, says publisher’s Neptune Interactive and Smells Like Donkey. Even developers of applications costing less than $1 suffer piracy. The 99 cent iCombat has a 75 percent piracy rate, publisher Web Scout said.

Ever have that feeling that you’ve had a rotten night’s sleep, and the last thing you want to do is get up out of bed?

Yeah, me too.

Sleep Cycle is an iPhone app that says it might be able to help.

We take pictures to remember our own lives better and tell stories about the people who matter most to us. In older days, we had photo albums. These days, we have gigantic digital libraries on our computers, and a lot of the time it’s pretty disorganized. Sure, the most important photos are grouped into albums and what-not, but little else is. The meaning behind the pictures isn’t obvious.

Apple has taken steps to address this in iPhoto 09, adding in face detection and the ability to take people in pictures for searching by participant and searching by geography via GPS data, but these elements aren’t well-intertwined — and it does a bad job of considering the long view. That’s where MemoryMiner, a very nice piece of shareware from GroupSmarts, steps in.

Creating an iPhone app is one thing, but making something that stands out in an increasingly deep, expansive crowd is something else entirely. And yet Tapbots have managed just that. Describing their trio of apps as “robots for your iPhone and iPod touch,” Tapbots has managed to infuse the most utilitarian of concepts with genuine personality, and this is largely down to playful and innovative interfaces. We caught up with Paul Haddad (“the programmer”) and Mark Jardine (“the designer”) to find out more about how Tapbots was born, the thinking behind its apps, and what their newest creation, Pastebot, can do for your Apple device.

Preliminary United States PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 4Q09 (Thousands of Units)

Note: Data includes desk-based PCs, mobile PCs and X86 servers.
Source: Gartner (January 2010)

Apple’s Mac shipments grew 24% in Q4 2009, riding the industry’s strongest growth period in seven years, according to new numbers from research firm Gartner.

Worldwide, the computer market bounced back in a big way at the end of 2009, Gartner says, largely on the back of low-cost netbooks and consumer laptops, which were heavily-discounted for the holidays.

“These preliminary results indicate the recovery of the PC market on a global level,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner in a statement.

Worldwide computer shipments grew 22.1%  in Q4 (numbering 90 million units).

Hewlett-Packard displaced Dell as the biggest PC maker in the U.S., and Acer established itself as the low-price leader.

In the U.S., Apple saw gains of 23.2% compared to Q4 2008 (which was dismal). However, competitors like Toshiba led the PC pack with 70.7% growth, trailed by Acer (48.4%) and HP (45.9%). Dell lagged with only 5.5% growth, largely because it didn’t discount for the holidays. “Dell was not as aggressive on pricing as its competitors in order to protect profits,” Gartner said.

Growth was driven by the consumer market — not the business market — and the Windows 7 was did not create additional PC demand, although Gartner said “the launch was a good market tool during holiday sales.”

“It was the strongest quarter over quarter growth rate the worldwide PC market has experienced in the last seven years,” Gartner said in a statement.

Full release after the jump.

Got your iPhone ready? Great.

Go here. See the pretty animation. You just got Flash on your iPhone.

And people said it would never happen.

It’s midweek, a thaw seems to be sweeping the frozen U.S., and hardware and software are our highlighted deals of the day. Let’s start with a deal on MacBook Pro laptops from ExperComm. The computers feature a 17-inch screen and powered by a 3.06GHz processor. The laptops also include three years of AppleCare, all for $2,949. The same company is selling 27-inch iMacs powered by a 2.66GHz i5 with 8GB of memory. Like the MacBook Pros, the iMacs come with three years of AppleCare, for $2,198. Lastly, we all like free stuff, and a new batch of App Store freebies is available, including Pro Camera Basic.

Along the way, we check out the miniStack storage from NewerTech, giving your Mac mini the perfect storage companion.

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

Maybe a Jan. 27 date where many expected Apple to announce a tablet, could center on a more powerful MacBook Pro laptops, using Intel’s latest Core i5 processor. That’s the suggestion following a promotion for retail workers offering 2 MacBook Pros powered by the i5.

The promotional January contest offers retail employees “2 chances to win one of 2 MacBook Pro laptops with the accelerated response of an Intel Core i5.” The ad was part of an e-mail sent to members of the Intel Retail Edge Program.

You can add one more Apple tablet rumor to your list. The device, which some believe could be unveiled later this month, bears a striking resemblance to an “iPhone on steroids.” The tablet and the handset are so close internally, the Cupertino, Calif. company has delayed updating the iPhone OS to prevent technical details from leaking, according to a new report.

“There hasn’t been an updated iPhone OS build because there’s too much tablet-code/references in the OS,” according to the Boy Genuis Report, citing “close Apple connects who haven’t steered us wrong.”

Keeping to the straight and narrow often sucks: bloviating co-workers, passive- aggressive clients and hobbling back to the homestead to an empty fridge after a long day.
Still, it’s not as bad as being in jail. Or arrested, for that matter.

Busted! Real Mugshots, offers some handy, much-needed schadenfreude for the working stiff, as per the description:

“Real people! Real Arrests! Real Mugshots!”

The iPhone app, gratis on iTunes, serves up police pics from around the US with full names, birthdate, age, arrest date/time of arrest as well as the offending crime. (At least in the first release, it doesn’t give location and does not appear to be searchable).

How do you help a company without officially going to work for the firm? Answer: join a private investment firm that owns a portion of it. That’s how former Apple executive Dr. Avadis ‘Avie’ Tevanian explains his move to Elevation Partners, which owns 25 percent of Apple-rival Palm.

Former Apple senior vice president Jon Rubinstein is now Palm’s CEO. Remember Rubinstein, he recently denied ever using an iPhone.

Hoping to blunt the headlines of yet another former Apple executive joining Palm, Tevanian Wednesday says he’ll spend “almost no time” dealing with Palm. Instead, he’ll help Elevation assess new investments and technology.