There’s another Apple 1 on the eBay auction block, this one comes with enough collateral to stand as its own museum exhibit.

The starting bid is $50,000, the auction is on for another two days.

The owner, who wished to remain anonymous, told us how this Apple artifact got there.

CoM: How did you get your hands on an Apple 1?

Anonymous Owner: I came to own the Apple 1 through a very convoluted story, but in short I found a guy in Minnesota who bought it from the original owner in 1990 and, eventually, he sold it to me.

CoM: What made you decide to sell it?

AO: It is killing me to sell it but I’m on very hard times and I’ve sold everything else of value. I want to keep this magnificent piece of history forever. There is no price I would willingly put on this item…but I have kids and of course that takes priority.

CoM: How did you decide the price?

AO: I set the opening price because a) an Apple 1 has sold for as much as $43k and b) if I have to sell my most prized possession and I sold it for an inadequate amount I’d have to take my life.
So, really, the price is all about saving lives. lol.

CoM: In the selling info, you say that Woz looked at it and said that it probably wouldn’t boot because the first batches of Apple 1s used a brand of chip they later replaced because they blew out easily.

How did you meet Woz?

MagicHour is a world clock app with great information presentation.

In one screen, the app displays a wealth of info about time, daylight stages and moon phases in different cities. Edward Tufte would cream his pants. All world clocks should be like this.

Via tumbly.dotsar and Robot Wisdom.

MagicHour is $3.99 from the App Store.

Are you looking for a way to keep you iPod or iPhone charged, but not happy with the bulky options out there? PhoneSuit introduces the Primo battery, a compact mini battery unit that attached to your dock connector port. The unit’s 800mAh battery claims to power your iPod for up to 45 hours of music playback, or three hours of talk time on your iPhone 3G. The lithium-ion battery is good for 500 charges, according to PhoneSuit.

To charge the Primo, simply use the included USB cable to plug into any USB 2.0 or USB 1.1 outlet. A LED meter displays the battery’s remaining charge – when the LED turns blue you are fully charged.

The Primo costs $35 per unit or $89.95 for a three-pack. The mini charger comes with a 1-year warranty.

[Via Company and Engadget]

We end the week with three hardware deals. First up is a 120GB iPod classic for $189. Next is Apple’s 24-inch Cinema HD Widescreen LED display for $800. Our top trio rounds out with a 500 GB Time Capsule. Along the way, we talk about various accessories, discounts and skins for your favorite iPhone or iPod.

As always, for details on these and other items (like Logitech’s Pure-Fi Elite Stereo System for the iPod or iPhone, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

AT&T has fired back against Verizon Wireless, telling customers its rivals’ recent ads “are so blatantly false and misleading, that we want to set the record straight about AT&T’s wireless data coverage.”

The letter to AT&T customers claims that it covers 97 percent of the U.S. population and has twice the number of smartphones than Verizon.

This presentation is the work of Freek Bijl, a Dutch internet strategist, and in it he makes a lot of very interesting points.

Rogue Amoeba becomes the latest developer to quit the App Store in frustration over Apple’s lengthy review process. The developer “no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare,” according to a Friday blog post.

On Thursday, Joe Hewitt, developer of the iPhone Facebook app, announced he’ll stop developing for the iPhone out of a “philosophical opposition” to the reviews. Like Hewitt, Rogue Amoeba developer Paul Kafasis told App Store customers the Cupertino, Calif. company was “acting as a gatekeeper” and preventing developers from getting software to users.

Just in time for iTunes Store customers to send family and friends links to their favorite songs, Apple has created the iTunes Preview Web site. Now clicking on links to iTunes media no longer requires launching the full iTunes media software suite.

iTunes Store customers can use the “Copy Link” feature to send links to an iTunes Preview page.

The iTunes Preview Web page allows you to browse artists and albums, read biographies and get more information on song prices or customer reviews. Browsers will still need the iTunes software to listen to song snippets. The iTunes Preview site includes a “View in iTunes” button. Although the iTunes Store offers music and movies, the new Web site currently supports only music.

Apple updated its iTunes 9 software in October. The iTunes 9.0.2 included support for the new Apple TV 3.0 and gave customers the option of also viewing iTunes LP or iTunes Extras through Apple TV.

[Via AppleInsider and 9to5Mac]

The 21-year-old Australian behind the first iPhone virus got a death threat, media interviews and job offers as the result of his efforts.

Ashley Towns, who said the result was an “experiment that got out of hand,” created a worm that  switches iPhone wallpaper for an image of 80s pop singer Rick Astley. Astley, who sang the 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up,” who morphed into the Internet prank known as “Rickrolling.” The bait-and-switch worm replaces an ordinary video with one of Astley.

Here’s how it happened:

“I was reading a blog that said in bold letters to change your passwords and I wondered how many had.”

It turned out that most of the people on his network had not.

“So I started writing it from there. I stayed up all night and when I was half asleep I decided to test it.

“I didn’t really think about legal consequences at the time. I honestly never expected it to go this far.

“I thought it would spread to no more than 10 or 15 people.”

Continue reading

Let’s say you’ve got $30 grand to blow on a gold and diamond iPhone but the idea of just buying one without the thrill of an auction bores you.

Two of these tricked out iPhones are up for sale from “bespoke luxury communications” (read: cell phones that go bling-bling along with ring-ring) purveyor Stuart Hughes on BillionaireXchange.com, a site that launched this week billing itself as the first online marketplace for, uh, billionaires.

The pink 3GS model above, coated in 18-carat solid rose gold, was designed entirely by hand and dusted with 53 pink diamonds on the Apple logo. Each phone takes four craftsmen months to make. If that’s too girly, there’s also the 22-carat gold model with a white diamond logo.

Retail price for both?  Nearly £22,000 ($36,000). Starting bid on the auction site is £18,000 ($30,000).

Both auctions say the reserve price has already been met, so maybe diamond-encrusted iPhones aren’t the white elephants of the aughts.

Well, no. It’s actually an 8x fixed optical telescope that attaches to the iPhone’s lens.

The package (ahem), available from USBFever.com, includes the scope, a stand and an iPhone hardcase that is used to attach the scope to the lens.

What could it be used for? A handy promotional video seems to suggest perhaps spying on your neighbors in the pool, and a Mashable post wonders if the telescope could be used by “predators with less-than-pure motivations.” Although with its bulky length — the scope looks like it’s almost the length of the iPhone (4.5 inches, in case you were wondering) — it’s probably not something a budding James Bond could easily…uh…whip out of his pocket.

The scope kit runs $28.99 and the site says it’ll ship “on or before 25 Nov 2009”

There’s also a 6x version available that’s $10 cheaper and ditches the stand. Although, with all the hand-shake jitteriness displayed in the video with the 8x, the stand is probably a good idea to save yourself an eyestrain headache — even though the 6x’s susceptibility to hand shake is probably reduced.

[via Mashable]

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

According to Wikipedia, which is where I’ve learned 92 percent of the useless stuff I know, the phrase in Latin above means something along the lines of “don’t make things more complicated than they should be, dumbass.”

The V-Moda Vibe II with Microphone fits this explanation so exquisitely, you might well see them being whipped out as a teaching aid by your Latin instructor when the above phrase comes up.

Carpe diem. (Seize the day. Best way would be by clicking on the link for the rest of the review.)

Screens of all shapes and sizes can end up cluttered with windows and palettes all over the place. On tiny little MacBook screens you get everything overlapping everything else; on ginormous 27″ iMac screens, everything’s so far apart you have to crane your neck to take it all in.

Step forward Zooom/2, a utility designed to make managing all those windows a little bit easier.

There are only thought to be about 50 Apple 1s still in the wild, this is the second one up for auction on eBay in a month.

The last one sold for about $18,000, several thousand over its estimated value, to an anonymous computer collector who also tipped us off about the sale of this 1976 progenitor of the personal computer. The starting bid is $50,000.

So why is  this Apple 1 , which the seller states won’t boot up,  priced at 177% more than the other one?

It’s pretty much a capsule history of early Apple: the wise person who first bought it for Electric City Radio Supply in Montana kept everything — the invoice, the box (which shows the return address as Steve Jobs’ parents house), a cassette with BASIC,  the operation manual and a typed letter on ring binder paper from Steve Jobs answering questions about it, including how to hook up a keyboard. Even  if you don’t have the cash, the photos are worth checking out.

We wrote to the seller, more when we hear back.

Hit the jump for the letter signed “Steven Jobs” on notebook paper and more details…

Popular Science has published its Best of What’s New 2009 list, with Apple a winner in the Computing category.

Gizmodo toured Apple’s just-opened retail store on the Upper West Side, and calls it a “temple” to the company’s products.

I call it a temple because the architecture conveys a nearly religious aesthetic, a place to worship Apple, beyond any other Apple store you’ve ever been to. The top floor’s a vast open space, enclosed by spartan stone walls which support a massive glass ceiling. The rows of tables in the main room feel like pews.

I can’t tell you – and the pictures can’t show you – how utterly open and expansive the room feels. Apple says it has more demo units than any other store in the world. To give you an idea of the space, the walls are 45 feet tall, and could fit 11 Apple 5th Avenue Cubes inside. It’s the spareness that’s breathtaking. It’s cold. Not literally, but the stone walls, the glass, the sheer space rob it of any sense of warmth or feeling. The only sense of life in room is the products. It’s a temple to them, really.

More pictures after the jump.

Today’s bevy of bargains starts with a bundle of nano applications from MacHeist. Included in the offer is VirusBarrier X5 for free. The VirusBarrier barrier is part of MacHeist’s nanoBundle: twitterific, mariner write and four other applications. To partake, you’ll need to register and post a Facebook announcement. The deal ends today. Also on tap: an iPhone 3GS for $149 and a number of MacBook Pro laptops, including a 1.83 GHz version sporting a 15-inch screen for $750.

As always, for details on these deals and more, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Apple’s iPhone now accounts for 17 percent of global smartphone sales, propelled by a nearly 50 percent growth rate for the third quarter, new research released Thursday indicates. Cupertino’s rising star in worldwide smartphone demand is expected to only increase as the iPhone becomes available in China and more carriers begin offering the popular cell phone.

During the September quarter, Apple shipped an estimated 7.04 million iPhones – a 49.2 percent jump over last year, making the company the third-largest smartphone maker behind Nokia and Research in Motion. Apple had 12.9 percent of the market during the same period in 2008, according to Gartner.

Microsoft has blamed one of its own, calling “inaccurate and uninformed” comments Wednesday that its new Windows 7 operating system was inspired by the Mac. Wednesday, Microsoft partner group manager Simon Aldous told a magazine the software giant’s OS aimed to mimic the Mac’s graphics.

“Unfortunately this came from a Microsoft employee who was not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7,” Brandon LeBlanc wrote at the Windows Blog Wednesday evening.

This latest comment appears to back-pedal on an interview Aldous gave to PCR, in which he stated: “What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics.”

Consumers have commented on how some graphic elements – such as the Windows 7 taskbar and the Mac OS X doct – behave alike. Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg had also noted the similarities.

[Via Apple Insider]

Joe Hewitt, the developer behind the iPhone Facebook app, the most popular application on the App Store shelves, announced he’s had it with Apple’s review policy. Hewitt, also known for his work on the popular Firefox browser, told his Twitter audience he blamed the review policy required to approve apps.

“My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies,” Hewitt told TechCrunch. “I am philosophically opposed to the existence of the review process,” he said.

So it’s nearly the middle of November, which means that those of you doing NaNoWriMo this year should be almost half-way through your novel. Assuming you’ve kept up the daily word count.

Among NaNo writers there’s a thriving subculture of AlphaSmart users.

“AlphaSmart?” you say. “What on earth is that? Doesn’t sound like a Mac.”

BBC reporter Sharif Sakr took a top-of-the line Yamaha PDX50 dock (about $250 plus the iPod) and put it up against a secondhand stereo system (with CD player, amps and speakers) estimated cost, $80.

Then he wrangled about 10 passersby to get an earful of Pavarotti warbling. They told him which sounded better — though they couldn’t see which device was pumping out the opera.

Almost everyone — 8/10 — preferred the secondhand stereo, to the highly-rated Yamaha dock calling the sound warmer, fuller and more crisp.

Like a lot of people, I’ve got an iPod dock, but it’s not replacing my stereo. It lives in the kitchen, where sound (as in listening to the Car Talk podcast while flipping French toast) more than sound quality is important.

How many of you just use an iPod dock instead of a stereo system?

Via BBC

The mystery object in Monday’s contest is an Apple IIC. This time, we weren’t even trying to make it especially hard, but kudos to everyone who noticed that it was a European version.

We picked it out of the line-up of fabulous Apple products from yesteryear from Paolo Tonon’s flickrstream. Paolo took the shot of it and others, including a Macintosh Portable and Newtons, from an Italian retrocomputing group.

Winner named after the jump.

November 11th is internationally recognised as a day of Remembrance; in the US it’s Veterans Day, and here in the UK is known as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day.

iPhone ‘worms’ haven’t been much of a threat till now. However, things have changed with a new malware, discovered by Mac security firm Intego. Identified as iPhone/Privacy.A, it is a major threat for the privacy of many jailbroken iPhone users who have installed and activated SSH. Note: Non-jailbroken phones are not affected by it.

This malware acts through the SSH just like the others. It infects through client software installed on an attacking Mac, PC or even iPhone, which scans for jailbroken iPhones nearby. If they are vulnerable, they are then injected with the malware using the default filesystem password.

Previous exploits like iKee just changed the lockscreen background but after injection, this new malware copies private data, such as contacts, e-mail, contacts, SMSs, calendars, photos, music files, videos, which it then sends back to the source machine. It is even possible to send it as a malware to a Mac or PC which will then scan and copy the information from nearby jailbroken iPhones or iPod Touch and then send back to the source.

Even though it is not widespread yet, the amount of information it steals is a great deal. Intego currently recommends it’s own solution, Virus Barrier X5, which detects and removes this malware from a Mac but as far as other platforms are concerned, there’s currently no solution. This means that there is a high chance you can be affected as well. Therefore, we recommend you to take a simple precautionary step by changing the filesystem password on your jailbroken iPhones with SSH installed or turning SSH off when not in use with the help of SBSettings available in Cydia.

You can also have a look at our guide on how to change the filesystem password.