Cult of Mac

You have to wonder if users of Apple’s MobileMe online service have a ‘kick me’ sign. For the second time this year, phishers posing as Apple sent e-mails asking for credit card information of MobileMe subscribers.

The e-mail warns MobileMe users their subscription is about to expire, but their credit card information needs to be updated. The message, which appears to come from Apple, asks e-mail recipients to click on a link.

However, the e-mail from “noreply@me” comes not from Cupertino, Calif. but a computer in the UK, according to Apple Insider. What’s more, the e-mail was composed on Microsoft Outlook Express and sends people to http.apple-billing.me.uk, which the news site described as a “sketchy URL.”

Despite grumbling by some shareholders about how Apple handled health news of CEO Steve Jobs, the acting head of the media company expressed confidence the firm will continue to succeed.

“I’m confident in the future,” operations chief Tim Cook told shareholders during an hour-long meeting at Apple headquarters.

In terms of market success, Cook’s comment appeared to be on mark. Sales of 9.7 million Macs in 2008 were triple that of anemic PC demand. The iPod, a maturing product many thought was nearing the end of its lifespan, sold 55 million units. The iPhone, a key product for Apple, exceeded expectations, selling 13.7 cell phones, trouncing Apple’s goal of 10 million handsets in 2008.

What may be the largest investor fraud committed by a single person may have been hatched on a Mac.

These are shots are from ABC’s 20/20 recent special about Bernie Madoff, showing him in his Manhattan penthouse whiling away the hours (without remorse, they suggest) on a MacBook Pro.

Called “The Hunt for Madoff’s Money” it aired on Feb. 20, but you can watch it online here.

Via Macenstein

The software keyboard on the iPhone has been seen as a dealbreaker for some consumers from the very beginning.

For example, when I interviewed blogger/developer Erica Sadun for a MacLife piece when the original iPhone came out, she told me under no circumstance could she take a phone without a tactile QWERTY keyboard seriously as a tool for business.

Many others have complained at various times about the inexact science/art of using the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard and I must admit, as much as I love my iPhone, I avoid using it for tasks that require a lot of typing.

Now, however, there’s a simple little jailbreak app that takes a least some of the pain out of using the soft keyboard by adding a 5th row, giving users access to numbers without requiring navigation to a sub-menu. Access to symbols is easier, too — just hit the “shift” key and the numbers turn to symbols.

Say what you will about jailbreaking the iPhone, the “outlaw” development community keeps coming up with solutions that many an iPhone user has pined for since Apple’s first smartphone came to market in the summer of 2007.

Via Gizmodo

Steve Jobs missed leading an Apple shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday for the first time since his return to the company in 1997, but the founder and visionary CEO remains “remains deeply involved in strategic decisions,” according to director Art Levinson, who spoke to reporters at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California after the meeting.

Despite his absence from the meeting, shareholders sang Happy Birthday to Jobs, who turned 54 yesterday. Reporters were barred from taking laptops, iPhones or other communication devices into the meeting, but a few attendees were apparently able to sneak in wireless handhelds to post notes during the meeting, according to a report at Fortune.

Details on shareholder actions at the meeting after the jump.

Boxee software and data remains intact on Apple TVs, despite the appearance of having been wiped from the media center device by Apple TV’s latest software update.

“Boxee does run on the updated 2.3.1 software,” Andrew Kippen, Boxee media relations spokesman told Cult of Mac. “Each firmware update from Apple will normally erase non-Apple menu items from AppleTV,” he explained. “Boxee users simply need to re-apply the patchstick to add the menu item back.”

After the patchstick has been re-applied, user logins, media sources, preferences, etc. will be just as they were before the upgrade.

It’s taken almost eight months, but Apple seems to finally have the mobileme cloud services product firing on all cylinders after an update Wednesday.

A redesigned log-in page is the most obvious cosmetic change but a perceptibly faster UI and better integration among calendar/mail/contacts appears to bring the service up to a level worthy of the hype that accompanied its launch last July.

See the Apple support document for details and let us know in comments how you feel about mobileme. Is it worth $100 a year?

Japan mobile carrier SoftBank Mobile has begun offering a free 8GB iPhone to entice customers to sign-up for lucrative two-year data plans.

As part of its “iPhone for Everybody Campaign,” Softbank is giving away the iPhone, which previously sold for $238.21 in Japan.

Through May, the carrier is also discounting the 16GB iPhone, charging just $4.96 per month, or $119.11 over the two-year contract.

If you take the Basic Lessons on GarageBand ’09, your improving finger work on the guitar and piano will be thanks to a guy who introduces himself at the beginning of each segment as just “Tim.”

That’s Tim Blane, a Boston singer-songwriter with a decade of live performances under his belt. Other credentials include ringtones for Pepsi, he also opened for Guster and KT Tunstall and writes his own soulful pop tunes.

When Blane received an e-mail from an Apple guy last summer saying that he’d seen Blane’s clips online and wondered if he would be interested in auditioning for a job, he jumped at the chance.

“I thought maybe they needed someone to show up at a trade show,” recalls Blane, who was sent a script and flown to LA for an on-camera audition. Nearly a thousand actors and musicians auditioned for the gig.  Four screen tests later Steve Jobs selected Blane, who has never taught a lesson in his life, to be GarageBand‘s music instructor.

“They didn’t want a preachy vibe, but more a vibe of sitting down with your little brother. I had a great time, although I had to wear super HD makeup on my face and hands and arms. I think I ate more makeup than lunch.”

Via MacDaily News,  Boston Globe

Meetings at daily news organizations are generally pretty lively affairs. Now journalists at outlying bureaus or on assignment at UK daily The Guardian can participate in the daily pitching and griping — without having the odd pen thrown at them or having to deal with the face-melting scowls of colleagues.

Another Apple TV update has disabled the popular free media-streaming Boxee software. The side-effect of the Apple TV 2.3.1 update was reportedly unintentional on Apple’s part.

Although the specific conflict is yet unknown, Apple sent the update last night to all Apple TV owners. One potential solution is to disable automatic updates.

This isn’t the first time an update of Apple’s increasingly-popular device which streams video and photos from your computer to your TV has caused problems for Boxee fans.

Pop duo Little Jackie’s single “Liked You Better Before” makes iPhones sound a little like the SUV of the cell phone world:

I liked you better
When you weren’t popular
Trends didn’t matter to you

But now you’re all into the way you look
Your iPhone ringing off the hook

You can listen to it on their site, rest of lyrics here.
Any other recent pop songs with iPhones in the lyrics — and are they all about jerks?

Image used under CC license,  thanks to ryanoelke.

Apple’s annual shareholders’ meeting today could be more about the elephant in the room, not sliding profits and job cuts which have become increasingly common topics in American business.

With Mac sales above the anemic numbers of PC makers and the iPhone continuing to make marketshare inroads, the financial side of the annual meeting is without surprises.

“Don’t expect too many fireworks,” advised CNBC’s Jim Goldman.

OK, so you’ve installed the Safari 4 Beta and found, perhaps to your mild surprise, that you no longer have Safari 3 around and that your default browser is now beta software. (For what it’s worth, I think this beta period will be pretty short, and that a proper release is not far away. Anyway.)

But there are some things you don’t like. Perhaps you’d like the tabs to appear where they used to. Perhaps you liked the old loading progress bar – the blue one that filled the address bar, instead of the new spinning wheel which only displays *activity*, not progress. Or perhaps you hate the new Top Sites feature and want to disable it completely (not much need for this, as it’s easy to switch off, but still).

While most of the Mac blogosphere has been occupied with a certain other browser release, the OmniGroup, a stalwart of NeXT and OS X software development, has made four of its own previously commercial apps, including the very appealing OmniWeb browser, completely free of charge. The other applications in question are presentation improver OmniDazzle, useless file remover OmniDiskSweeper, and developer tool OmniObjectMeter.

Back years ago, pre-Safari and Firefox, my brother and I would debate constantly about which the best OS X browser. He said OmniWeb, and I always argued in favor of Chimera (which turned into Camino). The reasons were pretty clear. I was a college student and poor, and he was gainfully employed and could afford to pay for his browser. Also, I had a 12″ Powerbook, and he had a 17″ model, so the large amount of screen real estate needed to take advantage of all of OmniWeb’s cool features was no sweat for him.

A lot of time has passed since then, Camino has improved dramatically, and so has OmniWeb. I’m still no convert, but I’m more tempted than I have ever been. And free DiskSweeper! That’s awesome!

Hat tip: Gruber

Now that iTunes is the world’s biggest record store, it’s probably important for Apple to spotlight worthy artists who don’t have a giant promotion engine behind them. Fortunately, the company recently launched the (iTunes link)  Indie Spotlight channel to bring attention to relatively obscure bands.

On the other hand, they also recently created the (iTunes link)  “Original Music From the Original Artists As Heard on (American) Idol” channel, so who knows?

To my eternal shame, my job requires that I use Windows at work. Lately, that’s been extremely interesting, because I just got a new machine at the office, and it’s spec’d similarly to my beloved 2.4 Ghz Unibody MacBook. That means that I actually get a pretty clear sense of the relative performance of Windows XP v. Mac OS X (what, you expected Vista). Honestly, for most tasks it’s a wash. I don’t do a lot of heavy graphics work on either platform, and web browsing is kind of web browsing. I typically use Chrome (fastest Windows browser) at work and Camino (fastest Mac browser at home).

Today was really interesting, however, because I tried out Safari 4 for Windows before I got to it for Mac. And I was extremely disappointed. It ran no faster than Chrome (maybe a bit slower), and it misrendered at least 50 percent of the sites that I visited — it couldn’t find thumbnail pictures, and it was flat-out ignoring CSS sheets on several sites. Within about an hour of starting use, I uninstalled it and moved back to Chrome. The beta is just about as beta as anything bearing the name I have ever seen. Running the Acid 3 test crashed the browser.

Installing Safari 4 to Mac, however, was as far removed from it as I can imagine. Animations were smooth out of the thumbnail Top Sites page. The browser aced the Acid 3 test on the first try — and each successive one. Twitter loaded like it was an app on my hard drive. A heavily Javascript driven message board I visit popped up faster than anything I’ve seen it since I was on text-based USENET in the mid-90s. It lived up to the hype, and it actually provided a worthy contender to Camino as the best browser on the platform (although I ain’t switching anytime soon; ).

I’m left at a bit of a loss from all of this. On the one hand, I’m delighted to have a blazing-fast new web browser for my Mac. On the other hand, I can’t believe Apple would ship such terrible software for Windows. How are you going to convert anyone when your product is inferior to the status quo?

You’ll need to understand French to grok the audio in these two video looks at a PearC, the German Mac clone that even its manufacturer admits will probably not be around too long.

The machine sports an Intel Core 2 Duo (E7300) 2.66GHz processor, 4 GB DDR2 1066 MHz RAM, 750 GB hard drive ( 7200 rpm), Nvidia GeForce 8400GS 512 MB, a 22x DVD burner, a FireWire 400 card (3 ports on the back and front), six USB output (two front), a PCI WiFi 802.11 b / g / n with external antennas, with analog audio inputs and outputs, but no Bluetooth, which is apparently “optional on a USB key.”

With Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.6) in a sealed box and a homemade boot CD, the whole package is about 700 Euros.

Via MacGeneration

MacBook Pros are the hottest selling items in Apple Retail Stores, according to a report issued Tuesday by The Channel Checkers.

Apple’s premium notebook computers, ranging in price from $2000 – $2800 outsold the rest of the company’s systems at three quarters of the stores in in the independent survey of 15 brick and mortar outlets, with one store in Houston reporting the 13″ aluminum MacBook as its hottest item and a store in New York moving more 2.4gHz iMacs than anything else.

One third of stores reported February sales were up, while 87% of the stores surveyed reported no discounting in order to drive sales. Channel Checkers concluded that demand for Macs remains strong enough to support Apple’s premium pricing model.

“Apple products are selling more slowly in February,” the firm said. “However, despite the slower sales, demand remains strong enough that Apple does not need to discount products on a wide scale basis.”

With recent industry analysts expecting Apple sales for the quarter ending in March to be around 2 million units, down just 6% from last year’s record-setting pace, the steady popularity of the company’s high-end notebooks is a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy economic picture.

Via AppleInsider

Apple released an Apple TV update Tuesday evening that, not surprisingly, removes third-party add-ons, such as the popular media center application Boxee.

Apple TV users who are willing to hack their device to extend its functionality are likely to be savvy enough to have disabled auto-update on their machines, but it’s also likely some may wake to an unpleasant surprise on Wednesday morning.

The Apple TV support page had not been updated at press time with fixes and improvements in software version 2.3.1. Readers are invited to let us know in comments what amazements, if any, come with the update.

Via AppleTV Junkie

eBay officials took down an auction listing for a pre-release beta copy of the first-generation iPod Tuesday after being informed by Apple the attempted sale would violate the company’s intellectual property rights.

Mike Evangelist, who writes the WritersBlockLive blog, “was one of a bunch of internal testers for the iPod,” according to a post describing the result of his attempt to sell his device on eBay. After internal testing for the iPod was completed, all the beta testers were given opportunities to turn in their beta units in exchange for an official first release device, but Evangelist never did.

Facing “some unexpected expenses,” he figured selling the rare piece of Apple history on eBay would net him several hundred dollars. “There was great interest in the auction before it was pulled,” he writes, adding “I expected the final price to easily exceed the $450 reserve I had set.”

After the auction unexpectedly disappeared,he received a note from eBay saying “The rights owner, Apple, Inc., notified eBay that this listing violates intellectual property rights. When eBay receives a report of this type of violation, we remove the listing to comply with the law.”

So now Evangelist is just selling the thing through his website. From the several pictures he has available on the site, it looks to be in great shape, too.

At press time, the device remains unsold, with a high bid of $700.

Via EdibleApple

Apple Tuesday introduced an iTunes Pass program, bringing to digital music downloads a concept already familiar to TV viewers.

The new program downloads to iTunes music and video content matching user specifications. The first example is a pass that keeps Depeche Mode fans up-to-date on the band’s latest creation.

While the $18.99 “Sounds of the Universe” Pass is about twice the price of the band’s $9.99 album, fans also receive an exclusive remix and other related content until June 16.

Two analysts Tuesday downgraded Apple shares, trimming sales expectations a day before the Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s annual meeting.

Calyon Securities analyst Shelby Seyrafi warned clients Apple’s pricing “is vulnerable in today’s recessionary environment.” As a result, the analyst lowered Apple stock to Underperform from Outperform.

Seyrafi also lowered his Mac sales forecast for March to 2.19 million units from 2.35 million.