Cult of Mac

On the eve of Macworld, who totally nailed the products Steve Jobs unveiled? Was it Think Secret, or Mac Rumors?

No. It was Kevin Rose, founder of Digg and a former presenter of the Screen Savers TV show.

The night before Jobs unveiled the intel iMac and the MacBook Pro, Rose had it all, including the pissy iPod FM radio/remote.

Rose also claimed to have been tipped off to the iPod nano two days before his Jobness pulled it from his hat.

Will Rose and his secret tipster bag Apple’s “fun products” event on Tuesday morning?

Photo of Rose and friends at Macworld pinched from Leo Laporte.

There’s an Apple retail store in the Second Life virtual world that sells iPods, iMacs and even Newtons.

Trent Lapinski at AppleXnet reports:

“Even in an online world the allure of an iPod and those sexy white earbuds exists. Much like the Apple Store down the street, there is an user created Apple Store in the online world of SecondLife. At the store one can purchase wannabe Macs that display video, as well as iPods, or even a Newton.”

Run by Linden Labs, Second Life is a massive 3-D virtual world filled with buildings and objects built by its “residents.” Its “Linden dollar” economy is worth about $2 million a month, according to Wikipedia.

It’s nice for once not to be utterly alone in my opinions.

Earlier this week I wrote the recent security “threats” to OS X are overblown in a column entitled Mac Attacks a Load of Crap.

Most people disagreed. John Dvorak, for example, says malware is “good news for Mac users because now security holes will be fixed early, and users will learn to become aware of these things. It’s a little bit like getting the mumps. You do not want to get this ailment as an adult.”

But veteran tech reporter Tom Yager at Infoworld, who’s as sober and levelheaded as they come, says the panic is much ado about nothing. He writes:

“… rather than marking the first viruses to infiltrate the Mac OS X fortress, as many press reports claimed, the vulnerabilities are among many potential security risks that Apple continuously and proactively tracks. Furthermore, the “critical” label affixed to the viruses by security vendors are alarmist, inciting a code-red threat level for potential security risks that Mac users can avoid through commonsense precautions.

A media feeding frenzy has erupted over the OS X Leap.A worm and the Safari browser filesystem metadata proof-of-concept exploit. It is a nonstory that has been given legs by virus software vendors that get their names in the papers by branding as extremely critical malware that’s been harmless to date — the very same vendors that then admit that one check box’s worth of tilting the balance between convenience and safety is all that’s required.”

Also in the comments to the MacShrine post below is a link to a news story about this obviously phony iPod/Newton hybrid, which purports to sport a 260GB hard drive, runs “OS X for Handhelds,” is loaded with a bunch of lite iLife aps, and has WiFi and Bluetooth.

Wasn’t this posted a couple of years ago to the iLounge mockup galleries or The Apple Collection? I don’t have time to go look, but I’m sure I’ve seen this before.

Anyway, from the MacShrine comments comes the following translation:

G5 (imagine display? I guess it’s a new apple product line)

260GB 128MB FLASH EPROM
capacity:260GB, stores 1202000songs; 128MB FLASH EPROM

500MHz
CPU: Motorola Dragonball 500MHZ

MAC OS X for Handhelds 7.1
OS:MAC OS X for Handhelds 7.1

Safari 1.1 Quicktime player Handheld Editon 7.1 iTunes 5 Address Book 1.3 iPhoto 4 Handheld Editon Salling Cliker 2.1 Apple Media Manager 2.1
Firmware software: Safari 1.1 Quicktime player Handheld Editon 7.1 iTunes 5 Address Book 1.3 iPhoto 4 Handheld Editon Salling Cliker 2.1 Apple Media Manager 2.1

WiFi
Connectivity: Wifi, bluetooth, firewire

[ ]
The dude’s name. Mr. Liu

Is this picture from MacShrine the new video iPod — the one that may be unveiled next Tuesday at Apple’s secret “fun products” event?

One analysis at Flickr pegs the pic as genuine — the reflections on the edges match up, and the light bleeding through the label is hard to fake.

But at MacShrine, most commentators think it’s phony. One says:

“Good way to check authenticity in Photoshop is to remove distracting color information, and make the image B&W. Then adjust the Levels in real-time, this usually highlights copy and paste: luminosity is often a problem for fakers. The horizontal black line at top and bottom of the screen and the two black areas are much darker than any other black in the picture, this points towards fake: i.e. the colour screen in the middle being pasted in.

The light blooms around the bright whites are well done if faked, as are the red and cyan colour illuminating the sticker.”

Another Engadget commentator adds:

“I am 95% sure this is a fake.

The artist mirrored an ipod video to get black around the edges, and cloned the middle. Then overlayed a colorbars photo and painted the diffusion. If you gamma-up, you will see the erasure of the dense blacks in the color bars, revealing the lifted blacks of the ipod video screen. If you gamma-down, the whites crush and reveal weird artifacts. FAKE.

The quality of the handwritting is amature – not the way someone who is fluent in chinese would write it.”

Perhaps this pic from TechEBlog is the real thing? The comment consensus over there though is that it’s a pocket mirror or some such trickery.

This is what an exploded PowerBook battery looks like. You wouldn’t want that in your lap when it happens.

Unfortunately, I’ve no idea how it happened. The pictures were posted to the forums at 99Mac, a Swedish website. Not only do the forums require a lengthy registration procedure, they’re in Swedish.

However, there’s a post about it in German at Fscklog, which when translated with Babelfish says:

“A Forumsthread with 99mac (registration necessarily) shows pictures of a PowerBook Akkus exploded. The associated text is in, to that extent Swedish held I unfortunately not too smart from it, was hurt however hopefully nothing and nobody. Whether the Akku was part of Apples of last recall action, might be able to be determined with the current density hardly posthum. It obviously concerned in June 2005 acquired 1,67GHz a PowerBook G4.”

UPDATE: Adrian from 99mac kindly translated the original forum post. Here’s the full, terrifying story!

No one got hurt this time, but he says he doesn’t want to think about what would have been the result if this would have happened when he had the PowerBook in his lap or if he wasn’t at home at the time.”

There’s a nifty iPod teardown at MIT Technology Review showing the internal components of the weeny player. Unfortunately, there’s no direct link — Hit the “Click here” link in the last paragraph.

The latest mockup Mac from amateur Apple designer Isamu Sanada is a reimagining of the Mac mini with iBook styling.

There’s no info on Sanada’s site, but I guess this is how he imagines the anticipated media Mac will look. Maybe we’ll see it at Apple’s “fun products” launch event next Tuesday.

UPDATE: I’m kinda late to clue into this, but as Trent Lapinsky of AppleXnet pointed out in the comments, this looks suspiciously like one of Apple’s Design Award trophies. Thanks Trent!

MacDailyNews has a totally fishy but intriguing picture of what purports to be an Apple-branded media cube.

Supposedly, the blurry picture was snapped with a camera-phone and sent to the site anonymously with the following note:

“I was only able to snap one quick shot of this as I was only in there for about 30 seconds. I sort of stumbled upon it – can’t say more about how or why. I only got about half a sec to look around back – there are a bunch of ports (and maybe a button or two) neatly arranged on the back (?) of the cube in a line along the bottom edge. It’s about 8-inches square and 8-inches tall – a perfect cube. It seems to be made out of a similar material as a Power Mac – aluminum perforated with a round hole pattern, but they’re smaller holes than found on a Power Mac. The top is the same material as the sides with the addition of the Apple logo, even though it doesn’t look like it in the photo – I had to snap it quick, sorry.

I don’t have any real detail on exactly what it’s designed to do, but I know from other things I can’t mention that it’s media-related. Apple “Media Cube,” maybe? Anyway, thought you guys would be interested.

With all the speculation about a tablet Mac from Apple, it may soon be possible to buy one from a small company that plans to convert a batch of iBooks into tablets.

Though it has not yet been built, the iTab is a 12-inch iBook with the screen removed and the keyboard replaced with a touch-sensitive screen. The company plans build 100 iTabs as it sells them on eBay, starting at $1,500.

According to the iTab website:

“The iTab is built one at a time from modified Apple iBooks. It has the same specs and hardware as the originating iBook (except for the touchscreen and the lack of keyboard, trackpad, and one less USB port). Its screen will be fastened to the body of the originating iBook, making it more durable. The width and depth of the iTab is the same as the iBook. Its height should also be the same, but might vary slightly.

As well as missing a bunch of hardware, the iTab will have no warranty (Apple’s not going to fix it) and the touch-screen doesn’t work with Apple’s highly-regarded InkWell handwriting recognition, which seems like a major drawback. Isn’t that one of the key features of a tablet? To enter text, users are recommended to buy the KeyStrokes virtual keyboard.

There is one cool feature though. Thanks to the iBook’s built-in sudden-motion sensors, which are designed to park the hard drive heads in the event of a fall, the iTab will play the Labyrin3D maze game simply by moving it up and down and backwards and forwards in space. (You can also play the same way on any of Apple’s new laptops, but you won’t have to deal with the screen flapping about).

UPDATE: There’s a lot of debate about whether this is a real worm, or merely an elaborate, executable script that the user is tricked into running. It appears to be a worm — it’s self-containing code that replicates itself over the Net (def.). But it also requires the user to agree to accept it as an iChat file transfer, which is a Trojan trait. It does not require the user to enter a password to be installed, like an OS X application. Nor does it warn the user they may be dealing with an executable file, as Safari does when downloading software off the Net. So it’s more than a simple script-kiddie Applescript. Also, it may be mostly harmless now, but will likely lead to much nastier versions in the future, according to this analysis from the programmers at Rixstep: “Future versions of the same worm or spin-offs from it are bound to be destructive and much more intrusive. By exploiting several weaknesses in Apple’s file system, (Leap-A) and its successors will work.”

Oh yeah, the graphic comes from the Symantec website.

The first Mac OS X malware has been spotted in the wild, but it appears to be something of a damp squib.

Called Leap-A by anti-virus companies, the worm appears as a JPEG file that spreads via iChat to contacts on the infected user’s buddy list.

According to a Symantec press release:

The worm makes use of the Spotlight search program, included in OSX, and will run each time the machine boots. It identifies any applications being started, and if iChat begins to run, the worm uses iChat to send the infected file — latestpics.tgz — to all contacts on the infected user’s buddy list. Those on the buddy list will then be asked to accept the file. If they do, the file will subsequently be saved to their hard drive. Files infected by OSX.Leap.A may be corrupted and may not run correctly.

There is some disagreement about what the worm does. Anti-virus firm Sophos says it deletes files and leaves other “non-infected” files on the computer. An email press release from Computer Malware Enumeration says it “prevents Macintosh OS X from working properly and infected applications from launching correctly.”

Nonetheless, Leap-A appears to be the first OS X malware “in the wild.” A previous OS X nasty — a Trojan horse dubed MP3Concept — turned out to be a proof of concept only.

Leap-A first appeared earlier this week as a link on the forums of Mac Rumors that purported to be spy screenshots of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

Symantec classes the worm is a low threat because it doesn’t automatically infect other’s machines. The company says it has infected less than 50 machines.

“… this worm will not automatically infect, but will ask users to accept the file, giving potential victims a heads up and the opportunity to avoid infection,” the company said. “The important piece of advice for any iChat users running OSX 10.4 is not to accept file transfers, even if they come from someone on a buddy list.”

However, as CME notes in its statement, the worm is a wake-up call for OS X users with a false sense of OS X’s invulnerability: “Now that Leap.A has been discovered in the wild, copycat media-craving individuals will likely launch similar attacks in 2006.”

There’s talk over at ThinkSecret that the next video iPod may feature a big screen covering the entire front of the device. The screen will be touch-sensitive, allowing the iPod to be controlled by a virtual click wheel that will appear when a finger brushes the screen.

Apple was recently granted several touch-screen patents. The filings (here, here and here) include illustrations of a hand making circular motions as if it were using an iPod clickwheel.

But the patents may also refer to a tablet PC. They mention rotating and centering pages, zooming in and out of documents — and recognizing complex gestures from multiple touch points on the screen — all of which sounds like a multipoint gesture interface developed at NYU.

In New York, researchers have created a working prototype of an amazing touch-screen interface for a computer that, unlike most touch screens, supports multiple touch points — or multiple people.

Running on OS X, the interface is reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s fictional, gesture-based UI in Minority Report — but much cooler.

In a demonstration video (You Tube link), a user can be seen rearranging digital pictures scattered across a virtual desktop, and resizing them by squeezing their fingers together or splaying them apart. The user also creates some digital art, zooms in on a map and scoots around, and types rapidly on a virtual keyboard.

I’m not a tablet expert, but all the tablet PCs I’ve seen present a standard UI with some gesture controls, substituting the mouse cursor for a greasy finger.

The NYU research seems like a radical rethink — a real haptic interface, appropriate to hand control.

There’s been lots of rumors of an Apple tablet lately. If it has this kind of interface — it’d be a killer.

(Via Robot Wisdom)

Picture courtesy of Geek Culture.

There’s a couple of data points about today’s Cult of Mac column on Wired News that didn’t make the cut because of length, so I’ll post them here.

The column concludes with an anecdote about the opposing design philosophies of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. While Woz advocated open, commodity hardware, Jobs pursued closed, proprietary designs. And this of course, is the story of the PC industry. While Intel-compatible PC makers developed a standard, open hardware platform, Apple plowed a closed, proprietary route.

Apple has always been criticized for this, of course, but Woz eventually came to sympathize with Jobs’ approach. As he told Macworld in an interview:

“… I see two things that make Apple successful now where others aren’t. They are really a tight monopoly. They’re a hardware monopoly, and there’s no hardware monopoly on the other side. So that gives them some advantages in control and in pricing to have profits. A company isn’t going to be a good company and really develop better and better things if it can barely squeak by and doesn’t have good profits. Apple can have the profits that it needs to make these great, exciting products that are steps forward, instead of just kind of sitting in the competitive consumer throwaway product category everyone else is.”

The other thing I’d like to have included in the column is the delightful story Gary Wolf tells at the end of his insightful Wired magazine profile of Woz from 1998. The tale is the most appropriate I’ve read about the man:

“Among his other activities, Woz collects phone numbers, and his longtime goal has been to acquire a number with seven matching digits… after more months of scheming and waiting, he had it: 888-8888. This was his new cell-phone number, and his greatest philonumerical triumph.

The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrong numbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible to misdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there was never anybody talking on the other end of the line. Just silence. Or, not silence really, but dead air, sometimes with the sound of a television in the background, or somebody talking softly in English or Spanish, or bizarre gurgling noises. Woz listened intently.

Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Woz heard a woman say, at a distance, “Hey, what are you doing with that?” The receiver was snatched up and slammed down.

Suddenly, it all made sense: the hundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies. They were picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom of the handset. Again and again. It made a noise: “Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep.”

The children of America were making their first prank call.

And the person who answered the phone was Woz.”

An interview I did with the charming Dr. Moira Gunn of Tech Nation about iPod mania, iPod culture, and my Cult of iPod book is currently airing on various NPR stations. Dr. Gunn is such a skilled interviewer, she even makes a stuttering idiot like me sound reasonable.

The interview is also available as an MP3 download from the IT Conversations website.

The Blueye is a clever iPod/PSP accessory that turns your earbuds into a cell phone headset.

Pair the Bluetooth device with your cell phone and plug it in between your iPod and your earbuds.

When a call comes in, the Blueye mutes the music, and a built-in microphone transmits your voice. The Blueye has voice recognition — answer a call with a voice command.
When the call’s done, the music resumes.

It has standard 3.5mm audio jacks and is compatible with most music players, the company says. It’s available from the UK for about $60 ($100) — the company says it ships overseas.

The iPod nano is now shipping in a smaller, cheaper version. Available immediately is a 1 Gigabyte model for $150, Apple said in a release.

This is a great deal. The nano is a fully functional iPod and a gorgeous piece of electronic jewelery. With a fabulous little color screen, the 1 gigabyte nano holds up to 240 songs or 15,000 photographs.

Apple also cut the price of the screen-less iPod shuffle: the 512 megabyte version now costs $70 and the 1 gigabyte model costs $100.

Worth noting quickly: The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” video is number one on the iTunes Music Store.

Says Bryan Chaffin at MacObserver:

Postal Service may be unhappy with Apple about the shot-for-shot creation of their video made for Apple’s Intel Mac commercial, but the resulting attention has led to that video, originally released in 2003, being the #1 download on Apple’s iTunes Music Store.

Image by Alan Rhodes via Mike Davidson’s Design a Steve Jobs Movie Poster

I’ve started writing a biweekly column for Wired News and calculatingly chose a controversial subject that’s been on my mind for a while: whether Steve Jobs is worthy of our slavish devotion?

The column was tricky to write and looking at it now, I don’t think I quite pulled it off. Based on the feedback, there seems to be some confusion about what I was trying to say.

The column was not a critique of Jobs’ achievements, which are monumental and undeniable — he’s been a driving force of the PC industry for 30 years — but with the way the press and public project a progressive image onto him, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary.

I was also questioning my own reverence for the man. He’s quite magnetic, but should I really admire him that much? My heroes — most of them British punk singers from the seventies — hated capitalists like Jobs. And in public at least, there’s no sign he’s anything but a captain of industry.

The same could be said for Bill Gates, of course. I used to revile Gates, but his philanthropy, which seems earnest, is beginning to redeem him. Even though he earned his fortune in reprehensible ways, there’s salvation in the ambition to give it all away before he dies.

What do you think? Wired News’ comment system is temporarily down, so please contribute your thoughts here.

Several people sent me email that made good points I’d like to share. Here’s a couple:

Andrew Mayne said:

“You also make the classic mistake of equating net worth with liquidity. The vast majority of Jobs wealth is in stock. His salary from Pixar is $52 a year and $1 from Apple. His billions are in Pixar stock and options in Apple (to a much lesser degree). So far he has liquidated very little of his stock from either. He lives far from an ostentatious lifestyle compared to others of his own net worth.”

And John Kwo wrote:

“… while I certainly agree that Elvis Presley was never the outspoken activist that John Lennon was, Presley was incredibly generous in private. The following is from the official Elvis Presley website: … ‘Most of Elvis’ philanthropic endeavors received no publicity at all. Throughout his adult life, for friends, for family, and for total strangers, he quietly paid hospital bills, bought homes, supported families, paid off debts, and much more.’

Uh oh. Looks like there may be trouble brewing in the spat between Apple and The Postal Service.

In “a note from Ben” on the The Postal Service’s website, singer Ben Gibbard chastises Apple for the shot-for shot remake of the band’s cleanroom music video.

It has recently come to our attention that Apple Computers’ new television commercial for the Intel chip features a shot-for-shot recreation of our video for ‘Such Great Heights’ made by the same filmmakers responsible for the original. We did not approve this commercialization and are extremely disappointed with both parties that this was executed without our consultation or consent.

– Ben Gibbard, The Postal Service

John Venzon, the former-curator of Newton Museum who recently sold his collection of every Newton made on eBay, writes:

“I can now let you know that the winner of the Newton Museum was none other than Walter Smith, one of the creators of the Newton. He was responsible for, among other things, the unified data model which ties the Newton software together, the compiler, interpreter, and runtime library for NewtonScript, the language used to write Newton applications and the Newton object store, where all the persistent data in a Newton resides.

I have transfered the www.newtonmuseum.com domain to him as well, so the Newton Museum lives on, and in GREAT hands.”

Wow. What a knockout quarter Apple had — posting income of $5.75 billion, it’s best ever. Most of the cash came from 14 million iPod sales — three times what it sold this time last year. But the company also saw 20 percent growth in Mac sales, shifting 1.25 million Macs. What surprises me is these were lame duck machines — soon to be made obsolete by new Intel boxes.

Wall Street’s a little bit worried though about the current quarter, which Apple said will be lower than projections due to “a pause” in Mac sales as the product lineup switches to Intel, according to the Wall Street Journal.

There was also “a pause” in sales the previous quarter, Reuters reports. If that’s true, what will sales of Intel Macs be like when the lineup is filled out this year? A quick skim of the earnings call reports doesn’t mention any guidance about supplies — but my gut is it’ll go gangbusters, but supplies will be constrained and Apple won’t be able to keep up. I think Apple’s going to have an unbelievable year, and this is just the beginning.

I must admit, I’ve got the hots for first lady Laura Bush. And now I find she uses an iPod, just like her evil nincompoop husband. She’s got abysmal taste in music though.

Reports the Washington Times:

Mrs. Bush also revealed that her IPod listening includes songs by Tina Turner and Dolly Parton. She said her musical tastes are somewhat different from those of her husband.
“He likes country music a little bit more than I do, although I actually really am very fond of country music, as well,” she said. “One of the songs on my IPod that I love is Dolly Parton singing ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ So that’s sort of a combination, country and pop.”

Image by Ben McLeod on Flickr.

(Via iLounge)

There’s a simple explantion why Apple’s new cleanroom ad looks just like a music video for The Postal Service: they were both made by the same people.

Sarah Moody of Sub Pop Records, The Postal Service’s Seattle record company, writes:

“… the Apple commercial is indeed very similar, it wasn’t licensed in any form, and was made by the same directors as the Postal Service video. We weren’t alerted to the fact that it existed until the day it came out.”

Moody didn’t say, but The PS’s Such Great Heights video was made by directing duo Josh Melnick and Xander Charity, whose working name is Josh & Xander.

Apple’s ad agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

After my story last week about pilgrimages to Apple’s HQ, Mac loyalist Jonas Hallen wrote to tell of his all-too-common experience of visiting the mothership.

He writes:

“In March 2002 Alexander Ruas (Sweden), Jesse McBride (U.S) and I (Sweden) did our Haij to Infinite Loop 1. We took our picture and seconds later a security guard sent us off the premises. We didn’t feel too bad about it, though. Apple has never been ‘service-minded’ in the common sense, and a part of being a Mac Geek is living through the company’s lack of commitment, disinterest and sheer abuse of it’s most loyal fan base.”

He added:

If Apple decided to open Infinite Loop to visitors or even arrange for a museum, it would be a flagrant breach of tradition and I would then feel obliged to follow the wise words of Groucho Marx:

‘I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.'”

Tomi from PodBrix writes:

“We are releasing a new apparel product tomorrow (1/17) at 9:00pm EST and I wanted to give you some information about it.

The product is called the Wozwear 6502 and is a custom made shirt featuring an image of our previous Woz minifig holding a 6502 processor chip. The interesting aspect is that we use an actual 6502 processor chip and attach it to the shirt with a magnetic clasp. See the attached image to get a better idea of the product. As I’m sure you will recall this is the chip used in the classic Apple II line of computers. With Apple’s recent switch to Intel processors I thought it would be interesting to offer a product capturing the nostalgia of the old Apple II processor.

The 6502 chip attached to the Wozwear is purely cosmetic, but it is in working condition and if plugged into an old Apple machine it would function properly. You can easily remove the chip from the Wozwear shirt to launder it.

As is standard for PodBrix products, the Wozwear 6502 is a signed limited edition of 300 units. The Wozwear shirt is available in five sizes (S, M, L, XL, XXL) and is individually screen printed to order to ensure everyone can receive the desired size without exceeding the 300 unit limited edition.

The Wozwear 6502 is available for $34.99 each and will go on sale tomorrow night (01/17/06) at 9:00pm EST. International orders are welcome.”