Apple has settled claims with state regulators who allege the company mishandled electronic waste. Photo: Thomas Dohmke
Apple announced it will hold its annual shareholders meeting on February 25. It will be the first since 2009, when CEO Steve Jobs didn’t appear due to health reasons. The company Tuesday urged shareholders reject several environmental-centered proposals and will amend its policy to allow greater executive compensation.
Although Jobs will take his usual $1 annual salary, he has 5.5 million Apple shares, outdistancing other executives. The Apple co-founder will receive $4,000 in compensation for using his private jet in 2009 for business. The amount is a far cry from previous years. In 2008, Jobs received $871,000 in compensation for using his Gulfstream. In 2007, the Apple leader received $776,000 for business-related private flights.
Image used with a CC-license, thanks FHKE on Flickr.
Online police reports always turn up a few interesting tidbits. Here’s one from the roster of misdeeds that took place in Elyria, Ohio on January 11:
1:46 p.m. – 3300 block Livingston Ave., iPod Touch reported stolen during a party; also, someone is using victim’s iTunes account to download songs.
My first thought: dumb thief. My second: maybe not, if they don’t keep it up for very long.
As an iTunes account holder abroad with a US credit card, I’ve managed to get locked out of my own iTunes account (shockingly simple to do, time consuming to set right again) and there are a few tales of hacked iTunes accounts with fraudulent credit card charges that took a few rounds with Apple to get straightened out. (If it happens — first step: contact your credit card company).
Magic Mouse users over at the Apple.com Discussion Board have been complaining that their multitouch mice require almost weekly battery swaps for a couple of months now. Apple has yet to officially acknowledge the problem, but an experiment by Softpedia confirms the issue.
The good news? It’s not really the Magic Mouse: it’s an issue with the Magic Mouse’s power management software. The bad news: that doesn’t really change anything until Apple issues a fix.
The experiment was simple: Softpedia plugged a fresh set of batteries into their Magic Mouse then let the batteries drain until the Magic Mouse software reports the batteries are dead. Softpedia then took these “dead” batteries and plugged them into an old Mighty Mouse. Voila! According to the Mighty Mouse software, the batteries still had as much as 40% charge remaining.
That’s a pretty astonishing bug. According to Softpedia, even a 50% charge isn’t sufficient to power a Magic Mouse in some cases. If Softpedia’s experiment is true, Apple needs to fix this bug, pronto.
Now, I’ve long since sworn off trusting Apple to sell me a mouse, so I can’t confirm this: that leaves it up to you. Anyone willing to give Softpedia’s experiment a shot and let me know how it goes for them in the comments?
Excepting only the iPhone platform, Apple’s never been serious about gaming on its computers, often lagging far behind not only PCs but their own hardware in programming support for the latest graphic technologies into its operating systems. Snow Leopard’s no exception: although the OpenGL 3.0 standard was unveiled in July of 2008, and although all Macs currently shipping have graphic cards which support it, Snow Leopard 10.6.2 implements only 15 of the 3.0 standard’s 23 extensions.
Thankfully, Apple appears to be serious about finalizing support for OpenGL 3.0 in the forthcoming Snow Leopard 10.6.3 update. According to a post at netkas.org, 22 of the 23 extensions are now supported in the latest developer build, which should improve the graphics performance of all current Mac computers.
Unfortunately, these are just extensions, with most of the specific OpenGL 3.0 functions still unsupported. And OpenGL 3.0 isn’t even the most recent standard: OpenGL 3.2 was released on August 3rd of 2009. Still, progress!
An archeologically stratal cross-section of the port placement of Apple’s metal-skinned professional line of notebooks over the course of the last decade, courtesy of photographer and Mac enthusiast Robert Donovan. Fireflies dance in the background.
From top to bottom, the notebooks pictured are:
• The 13-inch Unibody MacBook Pro (2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo)
• The 15-inch Titanium PowerBook (400MHz G4)
• The 15-inch Aluminum PowerBook (1.25GHz G4)
• The 15-inch MacBook Pro (2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo)
For me, this is morbidly erotic. It’s like four ex-lovers stacked nakedly atop each other, two of whom were dumped for their younger, hotter sisters, one of whom ran off on me because of my drinking problems, and the last so emphysemic from passive smoking that she’s due to cough up a lung any day now… a medical emergency definitely not covered by Apple Care.
GigaOm’s been releasing a slew of admirable, Apple-oriented infographics lately, leading with a fantastic look at the money at stake if AT&T loses the iPhone, and now following with a through vivisection of the thriving App Store economy.
Here’s the jist: 28,000 developers have generated over 133,000 apps to date. Surprisingly, the average approval time is only a little under five days,which is shockingly lower than the collective complaints of Internet developers about long App Store turn-around times… although it’s worth noting that that statistic only applies to apps that are approved, not ones that have been rejected.
In general, the average iPhone or iPod Touch user downloaded 3.7 apps in December, only 25% of which were paid apps. Ninety nine cents is the most popular price for paid apps, although the average app price goes as high as $2.59. Even given the low margins on most apps, though, December saw renuews of $500MM, with $350MM of that going to developers.
When Shawn Ahmed travels to places such as Bangladesh to fight poverty he counts on iPhones and Macs to help him do battle.
Ahmed is the founder of a one-man global relief effort he calls the Uncultured Project and is using technology and social media in inventive ways to engage people across the globe in their common humanity.
In partnership with the Save the Children Foundation and USAID, Ahmed went last summer to a cyclone devastated village in Galachipa, Bangladesh to distribute non-food relief items to victims of the disaster. He provided individual donors to Uncultured Project real-time receipts for their generosity using his iPhone and TwitPic.
As seen in the clip above, Ahmed used his iPhone to show villagers in another Bangladeshi community videos made by the people in the west who helped bring safe, clean drinking water to their lives. “This is not a charity,” Ahmed said, “it’s an experiment in community.”
The 28 year-old native of Toronto, Canada quit his scholarship graduate studies at Notre Dame University after being inspired by Dr. Jeffery Sachs (author of The End of Poverty) to try and make the world a better place — one meaningful difference at a time.
“I’ve also been using the iPhone to report real-time in the field,” Ahmed said in an email. He makes extensive use of Twitter and YouTube to break down the distance between his supporters and the communities they support. Connecting to them with his iPhone, Ahmed said, “I hold votes on how I should help people in Bangladesh. Voting has led [to] school supply distributions to orphans and much more. And, of course, all my videos are edited on a MacBook.”
The Uncultured Project’s YouTube channel just went over 10,000 subscribers and Ahmed is hopeful for the prospects of his unpaid, unemployed, uncultured journey to help the poorest of the poor: “It’s about inspiring others to believe that we can be the generation that ends extreme poverty.”
Apple is back with two hardware deals, including its 27-inch iMac and the iPod shuffle. For iMac fans, the desktop computer is rated 3.06GHz, using a Core 2 Duo processor. If you’re tired of hearing about the iPod touch, you may welcome a change of pace with the tiny shuffle – either the 1GB or 2GB version. Lastly, we highlight Kensington’s LiquidAUX Deluxe car kit for the iPhone or iPod.
We also take a look at more iPhone cases, software and assorted gadgets. As always, for details on these or many other bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
Apple’s next iPhone could be more powerful and arrive in limited numbers as soon as April, according to Tuesday reports. Although no name was leaked, the new handset would include a dual-core processor, an OLED display, improved graphics and a better camera.
Korean carrier KT will begin offering the fourth-generation iPhone in April to corporate customers as part of a “litmus test,” The Korean Times reports. The newspaper, quoting a “high-ranking KT executive”, said the handset would be distributed locally in June. Apple traditionally has unveiled new iPhones in late June or early July.
Has Apple become a vacuum for components, first cornering the market on flashmemory for its iPod and iPhone, and now emptying the shelves of OLED displays for its rumored tablet? That appears to be the implication from a report that the displays have nearly vanished. Apple “pre-ordered them all,” an anonymous designer recently complained.
OLED displays are popular with manufacturers because they eliminate the need for backlighting a display. They also consume less energy, which equals longer battery life and offer owners a better picture, a feature needed for video or reading. Although Google’s Nexus One and Microsoft’s Zune HD also use OLED displays, a report points the finger at Apple because the shortage is in 10.1-inch OLED displays. Apple’s tablet device reportedly uses a 10.1-inch display.
While smartphones have certainly upped their resolutions in recent months, Apple’s iPhone line doesn’t usually garner negative reviews based upon the quality of their display panels, at least as far as their accuracy is concerned. The guys at MOTO Labs have come up with an easily reproducible DIY test that anyone can do to see exactly how accurate their smartphone’s touchscreen is. No surprise here: the iPhone’s is best of class, when compared to the HTC Nexus One, the Motorola Droid and the HTC Droid Eris.
The test works like this: opening a drawing program on your smartphone and slowly draw a grid of intersecting diagonal lines across the touchscreen with your finger. If the lines are smooth, the engineers of the smartphone have managed to seamlessly integrate the hardware components and software of the touchscreen display; if they are jagged, something’s off.
According to MOTO Labs, you need to go slowly because “on inferior touchscreens, it’s basically impossible to draw straight lines. Instead, the lines look jagged or zig-zag, no matter how slowly you go, because the sensor size is too big, the touch-sampling rate is too low, and/or the algorithms that convert gestures into images are too non-linear to faithfully represent user inputs.”
This is, of course, hardly a scientific test, but it’s hard to look at the comparison images between, say, the iPhone and the Motorola Droid and not see a major discrepancy in terms of quality. Apple’s flawless implementation of reliable touchscreen displays in the iPhone line is certainly a feather in their cap compared to the competition, and a great example of just how hard Cupertino works to get the details just right.
Apple announced it will release its earnings for the fiscal first quarter of 2010 on Jan. 25, two days prior to when many expect the Cupertino, Calif. company could introduce a long-rumored tablet device. The earnings report could be $11.98 billion, nearly 18 percent above last year’s.
Apple had suggested revenue for the three-month period ended Dec. 27, 2009 could range between $11.3 billion and $11.6 billion. The company often announces a conservative guidance figure ahead of actual earnings.
Over the weekend, the New York Times claimed that word from several inside sources indicated that the new Apple Tablet would have a multi-touch interfaces that required a “somewhat complex new vocabulary of finger gestures…. making use of technology [Apple] acquired in the 2007 purchase of a company called FingerWorks.”
It appears that the New York Times might have managed to pinch zoom right over the truth of the technology behind Apple’s latest product: a couple days later, and Fingerworks.com has quietly been shuttered.
Stéphane Richard, the CEO Delegate of Orange.fr has seemingly confirmed the forthcoming announcement of the much anticipated Apple Tablet in response to questions posed to him by journalist Jean Pierre Elkabbach of Radio Europe 1… but the whole interview could just as easily be the mindless corporate boasting of a mouthpiece not really listening to the question.
This video is all over Twitter this morning, and you can see why.
Never mind a rotating Lego iPhone dock – here’s one with added steering wheel, so you can use it to play all your fave tilt-to-steer racing games.
Expect crappy plastic versions of this to appear pretty much everywhere in the coming months, all of them priced 20 bucks and none of them any good. If you really want one, build your own.
At CES, Toffee cofounder Natasha Sullivan (left) and Tegan Ledford show off one of the company's popular leather briefcases. The lightweight briefcase has a pair of retractable handles and elastic straps inside to hold the MacBook in place.
LAS VEGAS — I’ve never paid much attention to laptop sleeves, but as they get fancier and fancier, they are becoming perhaps the most popular MacBook accessory out there.
At least, that’s according to one high-end sleeve and case maker from Australia.
LAS VEGAS – Pineapple Electronics’ Rumble KW Headphones have an unusual design, which makes them 100 percent waterproof. Unlike most other earbuds, the Rumble KW Headphones are good for swimming laps, snorkeling, or just taking a shower.
The in-ear style buds create sound not through sound waves, like traditional headphones and earbuds, but through bone conduction. The Rumble KWs vibrate bones in the listener’s skull, creating sound in the inner-ear.
“See, it has no holes whatsoever,” said Pineapple’s Philip Kye, as the Rumble Headphones played in a glass of water.
On the show floor of CES, the KW’s sibling headphones — Pineapple’s Rumble K Headphones, which aren’t waterproof — sounded pretty good, if a little muddy. The bass is outstanding, and they create a freaky buzzing and thumping in your ear.”The technology is tuned for lower frequencies, more bass,” Kye said.
The KWs are limited to 100 decibels, so can’t damage the listener’s hearing. They seemed well-suited for gaming — or listening to music while cleaning the hull of a boat.
LAS VEGAS — Out of the seven (!!) new Cyber-shot models on display at the sprawling Sony “booth,” the two at the very top end grabbed my attention and shook it vigorously. The 14mp, $400 DSC-TX7 and the 10mp, $350 DSC-HX5 are quite different from each other, but share four really cool features.
Speakerball, anyone? The G-Note 14's wireless speakers.
LAS VEGAS — I’d never heard of Florida-based Augen before running into the tiny, gadget-strewn booth at this year’s CES.
That’s because, says VP of Product Dev Daniel Gofman, they’ve been working to produce tech for other companies the last few years; 2010’s CES marks the first year they’re striking out on their own into the already over-saturated iPod/iPhone dock market. But Augen has a trick or three up their sleeves worth looking at.
LAS VEGAS — The iTamtam is perhaps the strangest iPod dock yet conceived — but also the most practical. It’s a sturdy iPod speaker that doubles as a stool. It is based on a famous stool from the sixties that’s now featured in the Museum of Modern Art.
“It’s a speaker you can sit on,” said Patrick Parma, a spokesman for Branex Design, the Parisian firm that holds the rights for the Tam Tam stool.
The seat was updated as a speaker for its 40th anniversary. Called the iTamtam, the speaker/stool has an iPod/iPhone dock on top and a pair of 25-watt speakers built under the seat.
Model Nicola Gigante shows off one of Deos's Swarovski Crystal-covered earbud covers.
Apple’s iPod earbuds are the next earring, says Deos, a New York jewelery company which makes crystal covers for the ubiquitous white earbuds.
“Coming from the fashion business, we asked ourselves: ‘What is the next earring?” said Deos partner Charles Siebenberg.
“This is the next earring,” he said, holding up a pair of white earbuds.
Encrusted in Swarovski Crystals, the $98 earbud covers snap right on the earbud speaker housing. Each pair has more than 200 Swarovski Elements and is available in solid colors, floating colors (gradient mixed) and patterns.
As well as Swarovski crystals, the company also sells covers with Swarovski Crystal cuffs, and covers made from diamond and titanium, aluminum, and sports silicone.
Ivyskin's Federa Hedayatnia with the SmartCase. The iPhone case has a removable backplate that can be swapped for a rechargeable battery or a card carrier.
Of all the cases at CES, Ivyskin’s SmartCase looked to be one of the best. Made from tough polycarbonate in a range of colors, the SmartCase is a nice-looking iPhone/iPod case with a removable back plate that can be swapped out for an interchangeable battery pack (hit the jump for more photos of Ivskin’s Federa Hedayatnia showing how it works).
