Meet Rob Baca. He’s a serious vintage Mac collector, with a total of 75 machines in his possession. He’s also the man who co-directed the documentary Welcome to Macintosh, which counts among its interviewees our very own Leander Kahney.
One of Rob’s computers – bought from a friend on the condition that Rob would give it a loving home – is this original 128k Mac.
What can you tell us about it, Rob?
Here are two iPhone home screens. On the left, my iPhone home screen from a few months ago. Everything normal.
On the right, my iPhone home screen from yesterday. And something weird has happened.
An additional line has been added to the status bar at the top, pushing all the app icons closer together. It displays only the characters “O2” – the name of my British network provider. Which is already displayed, of course, in the main part of the status bar. What, as they say, the frak?
The Apple Mactintosh Division, 1984
The Macintosh Division, 2009
Apple’s Macintosh Division had a 25th Anniversary reunion at the home of Alain Rossman (software evangelist) and Joanna Hoffman (the division’s conscience and first marketing person) to celebrate the unveiling of the Macintosh on January 24, 1984 – and Guy Kawasaki has a bunch of pics up from the event, complete with interesting tidbits and backstory info on the people and events that drove the evolution of Apple’s groundbreaking invention.
He’s also got a couple of interesting videos up, one of which we’ve posted here, showing Steve Jobs unveiling the Mac for the first time.
Time flies when you’re having fun, eh?
Apple’s advertising for the iPhone is changing in interesting ways. When the product was brand new, all of the attention was on the interface, just introducing people to the idea of multitouch. Now, the focus has shifted to what you can do with an iPhone that you either can’t do or is too much harder to do on any other phone. The one above, “Fix,” is all about the little everyday problems the iPhone can solve, like finding a taxi, calculating your tip, or checking how level a shelf is. All of the featured applications (Rocket Taxi, Tipulator and Multilevel) are third-party, and each has a nice UI and a cool hook into signature iPhone 3G features, like GPS or the accelerometer.
Another new ad fits the same pattern, this one entitled “Read,” which goes into the many things you could read on the iPhone, including restaurant reviews (Yelp), an MRI (!) (OsiriX), or, well, a book (Classics). I’ve embedded it after the jump.
It’s a really smart way for Apple to make the App Store its own…killer app. How long until Apple makes the “Fart” commercial?
Via iPhone Savior
Very cool new iPhone app just out called Air Photo that allows printing directly from an iPhone to a printer connected to a computer. Basically, you download a Mac or Windows software program called Air Photo Server, then head to the iTunes store to pick up the Air Photo client, which is $2. Then you can just use WiFi to connect your computer and your iPhone, and away you can go.
For owners of HP InkJets, this technology already exists in a free app called HP iPrint Photo, but this is the chance for people with other kinds of printers to get in on the action. I think the scenario of use for this technology that I like best is treating the iPhone kind of like a Polaroid camera at a party. Walk around taking pictures, then have them start printing from across the room. Just get more of a keepsake feel to the whole process. More organic.
Lifehacker via Gizmodo
MacHEADS – The Movie, the recently-released documentary on the interesting, outspoken community of people who believe Mac is the Holy Grail of personal computing, went up on Amazon VOD Monday, where you can “rent” the film for a week for $2.99 or buy it outright for $9.99.
MacHEADS debuted at Macworld Expo 2009 with over 1000 people attending the premiere. In an interview for BBC director Kobi Shely added, “The movie explores everything from the early days to the current days. Central to the success of the Mac has been the community that has supported Apple through the good times and the bad. That included the years when the company was written off as having lost its way and the ink on one of its many obituaries was all but dry.”
The film also features footage and commentary from multiple Mac evangelists, including Apple Chief Evangelist and savior Guy Kawasaki; the first official employee of Apple inc., Daniel Kottke; publisher of the first Apple newsletter Adam Engst; Chicago Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihantko; and a special guest appearance by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
MacHEADS is due to be available on the iTunes store next week.
Proof once again that it’s the *software* that makes the iPhone camera, QuadCamera is my latest favorite thing from the App Store.
It turns your iPhone into something like a Lomo Action Sampler, only one with much, much more flexibility than the its traditional film-loading counterpart.
You’ve seen this guy. Maybe, in an unguarded moment of early-adopter smugness, you’ve even seen a friend who acted like this guy, trying to impress with a cool playlist or two.
Enter the Hipster Pod, a new “device that tricks people into thinking you’re hip.”
How does it work? If your bad taste in music prevents you from getting dates, the Hipster Pod projects cool music outwards (Velvet Underground, Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth are mentioned), while you get to listen to guilty pleasures, including bubble gum pop and Kenny Loggins.
The two-minute parody stars an everyguy named Mark who tries to impress but gets caught out listening to Celine Dion on the subway and then use the Hipster pod to rather surprising results…
It’s the first jab at tech from a team called Barely Digital, the same folks responsible for the viralicious bikini-clad “Obama girl.” Now that a Mac President is in the White House, they’ve turned to tech satire to give themselves something to do.
Funny? Yes. If there were a female version, it’d be a little too cringeworthy to laugh at, though.
Delays in shipping Apple’s new iMacs are due mostly to “business reasons,” Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu told clients Monday.
Chief among the reasons are decisions on which chip to use in the iMacs and the timing of Apple’s release of its upcoming Snow Leopard operating system.
“Apple is in the midst of figuring out whether to power the new iMac line with Intel quad-core processors or more high-powered dual-core processors with larger caches,” Wu wrote in his report.
In a technological tale of two cities, Microsoft reported quarterly sales of its Zune media player fell by 54 percent as demand for Apple’s dominant iPod rose by 3 percent.
The $100 million drop in Zune sales came amid word Friday Microsoft would lay off up to 5,000 employees.
A number of factors are part of the contrasting sales picture. “It’s the category, it’s the business, it’s the economy,” Zune marketing director Adam Sohn told Macworld.
The BlackBerry Storm, RIM’s first touch-screen handset, has gotten off to a rough start in its bid to compete with Apple’s iPhone, according to a report Monday.
The phone, plagued by technical problems, sold 500,000 units a month after RIM unveiled the device Nov. 21, according to the Wall Street Journal. By contrast, Apple sold 2.4 million iPhone 3Gs in its first quarter.
Jim Balsillie, RIM’s co-chief executive, said swatting bugs after a product hits the shelves is now the “new reality” as cell phone makers attempt to duplicate Apple’s success with the iPhone.
A new trojan horse variant has been found in pirated versions of Adobe’s latest version of the Photoshop suite, security researchers warned Monday. The trojan horse is considered a “serious” security risk, opening Macs to malicious takeover by remote users.
The Trojan horse, OSX.Trojan.iServices.B, is included in Photoshop CS4 cracking software distributed on file-sharing networks such as BiTorrent, according to security software developer Intego.
“The actual Photoshop installer is clean, but the Trojan horse is found in a crack application,” Intego announced in a statement.
James Savage from the RetroMacCast got in touch to share his story of original Mac ownership.
James owns up to having a collection of 170 Macs. I’ll let him explain more…
When a computer gives up the ghost, there are a lot of things you can do to keep it around the house.
Here are a few ways we’ve found, if you’ve found a new way to give new life to your dead Mac, let us know.
Macquarium: when your mac is swimming with the fishes.
There are a ton of these — flickr counts nearly 700 — but this slick black version was made by Dave D’aranjo who rescued a Mac from a Singapore sidewalk and turned it into an aquarium. He spent a couple of months fashioning the fish bowl, following the how-to in low end Mac, then adding his own touches and getting a custom logo to give it a screen-saver look.
This is a page from The Magazine, an ezine-in-an-app that’s now available on the App Store for a dollar.
By itself, it’s not much to write home about in my opinion. The presentation is amateurish and the content not terribly interesting. And there simply isn’t very much of it. Not my kind of magazine at all, frankly.
But what’s more interesting is the concept of a mag-as-an-app.
Canadian freestyle skier Sarah Burke started out on the wrong foot at the Women’s Superpipe Finals at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colorado.
The tricks weren’t working, her rhythm was just a little bit off.
Then, according to the AP, the freestyle skier suddenly discovered her flaw – she wasn’t pumping Dr. Dre on her iPod. Burke cranked the hip-hop artist on her final run, dropped into the pipe and flawlessly hit all her stunts to win her third straight Winter X skiing superpipe title Friday night.
“Dr. Dre always pulls me through,” the 25-year-old told journalists.
With her alley-oop maneuvre slightly off, Burke decided to bag it, going with a nice, easy run on her final attempt. It was her third straight superpipe gold.
What do you put on the iPod to get you through?
White noise is getting me through the daily slalom of late…
Is there anything an iPhone app cannot be programmed to do?
CubeCheater is an amazing app for iPhone and iPod Touch that, given the current state of your Rubik’s Cube, will tell you how to solve the puzzle in just a few moves.
You can either input the cube’s state using the color palette and tapping in the colors, or you can just take a picture of each face of the cube and CubeCheater will use advanced computer-vision techniques to recognize the cube for you. (The camera feature is obviously not available on iPod Touch)
The app uses the famed Kociemba algorithm to find a solution quickly. It finds optimal or near-optimal cube solutions in only a few seconds. Even a really mixed-up cube will only take about 20 turns to solve, compared to hundreds of turns for a typical human algorithm.
By getting all Beatles Revolution #9 on it, you can also use CubeCheater to put your cube into pretty-looking patterns. Start with a solved cube, input the pattern you want, and solve it. Play the solution backwards to put your cube into that configuration.
The app’s most recent update adds support for different styles of cubes, such as the Blue-opposite-White cubes sold in Japan. You can also specify your own custom cube configuration if you have a non-standard cube.
Australian Cult reader Dirk Spennemann is one of those lucky people who, on starting a new job where everyone’s on Windows boxes, can insist on a Mac. His fabulous photo set demonstrates just how much he admires these old Macs, but we wanted to know how he got his hands on that 128k.
Over the last 25 years, Apple has put out legions of Macs. In honor of the anniversary of the world’s greatest computer, I’ve taken the liberty of classifying all of Apple’s industrial design into six eras, starting with putty, and continuing to the current black and aluminum hey-day. Click through and come take a trip with us back to 1984!
SOURCES
Walking the desolate streets of the Information Superhighway this morning, I thought I’d never find that slippery textured, geometric laptop modification of my dreams…
*(and it's not owned by Apple, inc)
Lacking the network of preexisting business customers, and B2B distribution channels of it’s principal rival IBM, Apple’s success was midwife’d by a hodge-podge of independent resellers and enthusiasts.
It seems apropos, on this the 25th anniversary of the Macintosh, to celebrate one of the few that remain of this early band of crazy ones, misfits and rebels, without whom Apple Computer would be little more than a footnote.
Image © 2009 Nik Fletcher
This post is really more about Macworld, the trade show and conference, than it is about the device that spawned it. But for 24 of Mac’s 25 years, the two have gone hand-in-hand.
While indications seem clear the Mac and Apple are both healthy and vital at 25, with years of relevance and innovation ahead despite whatever rough patches the economy may present in the near term, the fate of what has been for many years the Apple community’s most anticipated event is very much up in the air.
Of course the entire world is aware by now Apple decided to make 2009 its final appearance at the huge trade show held the first week or so of January at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The smart money immediately proclaimed Apple’s move to quit Macworld spelled doom for the event.
Rumors swirled during this year’s show that Apple itself might be moving next year to the larger, far more ambitious International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held in Las Vegas right around the same time as Macworld.
Just this week, iLounge announced plans to fund a high-profile unified pavilion area for iPod and iPhone products at CES in 2010.
Blogger John Gruber penned Friday a misty paean to the City and the Expo, one of the smarter, more comprehensive assessments of the overall picture I’ve yet seen.
Gruber and I agree on a couple of points worth noting: as he wrote,
1) “There is nothing else like Macworld Expo, and if it fades away, there will be nothing to take its place.” With Apple gone, Macworld will be different and if it is to survive, it will have to be different in a way that keeps it vital and active for the diverse mix of large and small exhibitors that make up a healthy event; and
2) The great majority of exhibitors who make up Macworld, 90 percent of whose products are not available at the Apple Store, want the conference and expo to survive, but almost to a one they confirmed to me, as I walked the floor at this year’s conference (and to Gruber as well), – they will wait and see who else is going to stay on board.
This week a quiet campaign began, led by the community of Mac-o-philes who most definitely want to see Macworld survive and prosper. IDG, the event promoter, has agreed to give anyone who pre-registers now for next year’s event, January 4 – 8, 2010, a free Expo pass. Not buy one get one free, just register now and go for free.
IDG has also placed a big SUGGESTION BOX graphic on the front page of the website, a mailto: link the IDG PR representative I spoke with assures me the promoter will pay close attention to for feedback from attendees and exhibitors alike.
It may well be true that Apple no longer has a need for Macworld, that its growing chain of Retail Stores and increasing market awareness make it a bad business decision to spend millions of dollars to be the anchor tenant at the sprawling event.
For the hundreds of other businesses who’ve come to rely on Macworld as an opportunity to get their products in front of and tell their stories to thousands of people over four days in San Francisco, the stakes are very different.
Story and photos by Natalie Guillén
SANTA FE, New Mexico — As Arch Sproul unpacked half a dozen Macintosh Classic IIs, all six of his employees hovered around in excitement.
It was fall of 1992, and most of the employees had never used a computer before.
Today, four of those original computers are still in use, working overtime seven days a week at the Virginia Trading Post arts and crafts store, nestled next to dozens of other shops downtown. They are used mainly as cash registers, scanning bar codes, and keeping tabs on inventory.
The machines are rare examples of aging Macs that are still in daily use. They are a testament to the utility and longevity of the Mac, which celebrates its 25th anniversary on Sunday.
Times they have changed: a quarter of a century ago, reporter Michael J. Miller was on the West Coast bureau of Popular Computing. (Now he blogs for PC mag.)
A few choice extracts about his trip down to Cupertino to see the first Mac:
“I met with Steve Jobs, who was then Apple Chairman and heading up the Mac project, along with key designers including Burrell Smith, the original hardware designer and software designers Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson.”
“Most of the time I was meeting with other members on the team, but I remember Jobs coming in — he was very charismatic: intense, proud of the work and a bit prickly about any criticism. He and his folks were quick to put down the IBM PC and its clones for not pushing the envelope and settling for “mediocrity.”
“Jobs and the team were rightly proud of the new machine, which was very different from the IBM PC that then dominated the industry. Maybe it was the famous “Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field,” but even then I was entranced by the new machine and the possibilities it offered – particularly the graphical user interface.”
Miller’s trip down memory lane — complete with anecdotes about the Mac II, Apple’s first laser printer and the role of industrial design at Apple — is well worth a read.
Some iPod nano owners may being getting refunds after Apple agreed to pay $22 million to settle a class-action lawsuit, according to a report Friday.
Consumers who purchased the original nano introduced in 2005 could receive $25 as part of an agreement yet to be signed by the court, CNBC reports.
“Apple has agreed to provide a cash settlement of $22.5 million,” the Cupertino, Calif.-based company told nano owners this week. A $25 refund will be given to nano owners who purchased the digital music player without a “slip case,” designed to prevent the screens of early nanos from scratching.