We’ve been following the stories of Burrell Smith for a while now and gotten to know him and how he thinks. Of course, Burrell was not the only person invested in the Macintosh’s success. The sheer amount of work put into the project could not have been achieved by the team if it weren’t for Steve Jobs’ special brand of encouragement. Andy Hertzfeld’s stories describe Jobs’ powers of persuasion using an analogy to Star Trek: the reality distortion field.
Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field convinced people to agree to absurd deadlines, work much harder, and even agree to stay at Apple when they really wanted to quit. Burrell watched his colleagues at Apple try in vain to leave. Eventually, Burrell came up with the perfect plan to “nullify the reality distortion field” for when it was his time to quit:
“I’ll just walk into Steve’s office, pull down my pants, and urinate on his desk. What could he say to that? It’s guaranteed to work.”
Check out this gallery of incredible art, a selection of the winners in a digital art contest sponsored by Macworld for the 2009 Conference and Expo that ended yesterday in San Francisco. Click on each thumbnail to get a full-size view of the image.
Please note, the images you see here I captured by photographing the original artwork that was displayed in the underground passageway between the North and South Halls at the Moscone Center, where Macworld 2009 was held. My images are handheld photographs made in sub-optimal lighting conditions and as stunning as I feel they are, they do not capture 100% accurate representations of the artworks themselves.
If you click through to each piece, you’ll find links to the original artist’s web page, where they provided one. You may also see all the winners at Macworld‘s website.
In this Monday night CBS sitcom about what happens when a pair of physics geeks meet the beauty next door, Apple products crop up first, as far as I can tell, for use by the distressed.
In the third episode of the first season (Big Bang is now in its second season) roommates Leonard and Sheldon are playing a MMORPG with friends. Though all the computers are covered with stickers, it looks like the only Mac user is Raj, another university researcher who is so flustered by Penny, the blond neighbor, that he is always mute in her presence.
Despite nearly universal appraisals among the Apple press calling it “underwhelming” and “disappointing” and “lackluster,” Macworld 2009 proved to be a worthwhile and successful venture for many less well-known exhibitors, whose continuing support may determine the expo’s future viability.
I hit the floor for the final day of Macworld 2009 fully expecting to find an arena filled with weary exhibitors staring at empty aisles, counting the hours until they could pack up their booths and say goodbye, perhaps for the final time, to this seminal conference and expo dedicated to all things Mac and more.
Instead, the floors in both halls appeared to me to have as many people walking around, crowding into interesting demos and learning exhibitions as on any other day this week. Such interest is not traditionally shown on the final day at large industry trade shows such as Macworld, and may be even more notable in the case that that other big consumer electronics event got into full swing a day ago, several hundred miles away in Las Vegas.
Official attendance figures were not yet available for this year’s event according to a spokesperson in the Sales office for conference promoter/organizer IDG, but the participation of both attendees and exhibitors has been “in line with expectations” given uncertainties in the larger economy, and factoring in disappointment surrounding Apple’s decision to quit the event after 2009.
Follow me after the jump for the thoughts and impressions of several exhibitors whose enthusiasm may point to a less dire future for Macworld than some seem to expect.
New numbers out Friday suggest Apple’s iPod Touch may become a threat to sales of the pricier iPhone. The Touch is gaining fans while the iPhone may reportedly be suffering during tight economic times.
Ads sent to the iPod Touch nearly tripled in December, compared to November, mobile ad firm AdMod announced Thursday. The Touch was served 292 million ads last month, up from 86 million in November. The Touch is now the No. 2 mobile device in the ad company’s network.
At $399, the iPod Touch is more expensive than the $299 iPhone, but the device actually costs less by avoiding monthly contract fees required by AT&T in the United States. AT&T charges between $69 and $130 per month for a required two-year iPhone contract.
Your iPhone could be displaying high-definition and three-dimensional graphics by as soon as 2010, according to a company partly owned by the maker of the popular touchscreen handset.
Imagination Technologies used CES to introduce its PowerVR SGX543 chipset, said to produce 33 megapixel frames at 30 frames per second. The speed could “produce reasonable 3D at HD resolutions,” according to one report.
The chip is also compatible with the Apple-backed OpenCL standard, expected to be used in the upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
Attempting to survive a post-Apple environment, Macworld Expo may pull up stakes and move after 2010, general manager of the tradeshow indicated in an interview published online Thursday.
“IDG is absolutely open to considering other venues and pricing structures after the 2010 Expo,” according to an Ars Technica interview with Paul Kent, Macworld Expo vice president and general manager.
Kent suggested the show will likely remain in the San Francisco Bay Area due to the dense number of tech companies. However, the Expo leader left open the possibility of moving from San Francisco’s Moscone Center after next year.
Of all the surprises to come out of the CES show this year, Palm’s revival as a serious player in the handheld device market is perhaps the biggest of all.
Most people – myself included – had long since consigned Palm to the dustbin, confident that it would never re-invent itself out of the hole it had fallen into, out-manouevred and out-featured by rival devices.
Not so.
The initial reports coming from CES are that the Palm Pre is an excellent device and offers the iPhone some proper competition.
And at least some of that success might be because the team at Palm has a few former Apple employees on board.
“How Apple centric is the new Palm team? Well, Chris McKillop is director of Software at Palm … One of the PR people at Palm did PR at Apple. Jonathan Rubinstein, who runs the Palm Pre team and led off the announcement, was a key person in development of the iPod and lots of people followed him from Apple to Palm.”
Partly because my first ever PDA was a Palm, and I was a happy Palm user for many years. I don’t want to see the company fail. And partly because any serious competition for Apple is a good thing – anything that gets people umming and ahhing over whether they should buy an iPhone or a Pre will make Steve Jobs sit up and start paying attention when people ask for simple, basic stuff like copy/paste and syncable text notes.
UPDATE: I’ve just noticed that this post is very similar to another post by my esteemed Cult colleague Mr Mortensen not four hours previously. My apologies for the repetition. At least we can be sure that two great minds here think alike. I’m not having a good week, am I?
Shake with fear, GarageBand developers! Cower before us on your knees, Steve Jobs! Bow down and acknowledge how cool we are, Phil Schiller!
For we are Microsoft, and we make Songsmith, and now NOTHING CAN STOP US.
(What you DIDN’T know is that the above video is NOT an advert for Songsmith, but in fact a cleverly disguised ad for another new Microsoft product called Adsmith. With Adsmith, you think up the coolest, most amazing idea for an advert, for any kind of product, and Adsmith automatically generates a high definition video, using just your thoughts as a starting point! That’s right, you don’t even have to sing or talk to it, it just READS YOUR MIND.)
((What you DIDN’T DIDN’T know is that Apple spies have been operating within the Microsoft marketing team for some years now. Their job is not so much espionage but sabotage – they are not there to discover Microsoft’s secrets (Steve Jobs isn’t really interested in them), but to ensure that as many Microsoft adverts as possible contain video footage of a MacBook Pro.))
My other blog has gone Apple this week as we close in on the launch of our book Wired to Care. I’ve just gone live on the Empath-o-Meter with a poll to rate how widespread empathy is at Apple. By empathy, I mean the ability of people inside the company to understand the needs of the folks out in the world that they’re trying to serve. As a Macophile, I obviously feel very well-served by Apple, but I have trouble knowing whether it’s because the folks inside the company really get where I’m coming from — or just that Steve Jobs has an amazing intuition for what’s going to connect with people like me.
Check it out — I’m anxious to see your votes and your comments!
I have a guilty secret to confess: I’ve been secretly hoping that one of the zillions of so-called “iPhone killers” might prove to be. After all, if the rest of the mobile industry continues to crank it crummy wannabes like the BlackBerry Storm or the Samsung Instinct, Apple will have far less incentive to actually take their own product to all-new heights of greatness. Apple makes awesome stuff, but they make even more awesome stuff when threatened.
And so it was that I was very heartened by the announcement of the Palm Pre at the Consumer Electronic Show. If you haven’t had a chance to read up on the phone, I highly recommend that you do. It’s small, relatively sleek, has a nice keyboard, and it’s got the best UI for a mobile phone that I’ve seen outside the iPhone. And for some tasks (app-switching, most notably), it’s already better.
Now, have no fear, I have absolutely no intention of buying a Pre. The music syncing looks suspect, there’s no video support of any kind for the version set to launch this year, and I don’t need a full keyboard to be happy. All that, and it’s going to be Sprint-exclusive, and I travel enough that a GSM phone is pretty much a necessity for me.
I am excited that the Pre is good enough to actually make Apple work hard, particularly on the software front. The Palm Web OS has a clear point of view, an attractive look, and some genuinely innovative features, such as the gesture bar and the very cool “wave” application launcher shown above. The Pre cribs a lot from the iPhone — not to mention OS X’s Expose feature — but it brings these ideas together in a way that even Apple hasn’t yet.
And the good news is that now Apple has a reason to go beyond the interface created for OS X iPhone 1.0. I wouldn’t be even slightly shocked if we see an Expose for iPhone update in firmware 3.0, or even before. And Apple needs to get more serious about rolling out the multitasking Push API it promised last July.
Kudos to Jon Rubinstein and Palm for pulling off a far better phone than I thought them capable of. It’s the first serious mobile platform that’s even coming close to besting the iPhone (sorry, Android), and it’s clearly going to have a life beyond its initial release. And hey — it’s got cut, copy, and paste!
Apple is ditching MacWorld to instead exhibit at CES next year instead, according to one source.
The source, citing “friends who work at Apple,” insisted the company is ditching MacWorld because it will “go large” at CES, which typically runs concurrently with MacWorld in early January.
The International Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, is the big annual gathering ot the consumer electronics industry. Held in Las Vegas over several days, it attracts more than 2,700 companies from all over the world, including technology giants like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.
Apple has never had a presence at the show, exhibiting at MacWorld instead. In 2007, Steve Jobs managed to eclipse CES by unveiling the iPhone at MacWorld, but typically the technology press prefers CES, which has more companies and therefore more news.
If Apple were to be a presence at CES — with Steve Jobs possibly giving a keynote speech — it would no longer have to compete with CES for press attention.
In addition, Apple is now more of a consumer electronics company now than a computer company, making CES a much better fit than MacWorld, the source said.
The source insisted his information was solid, not just speculation.
Sold in a package made to look like a candy bar, this brown silicone case wraps your iPhone 3G in yummy goodness, though it does bloat the sleek line of the device.
The fatten-up might make a high-tech phone look slightly tired, though it does bring to mind Wired co-founder-cum-chocolatier Louis Rossetto.
Say you lose your iPod or iPhone and some good Samaritan finds it, but there’s no way for them to get it back to you because there’s no contact info on it.
If you’ve got an iPod Touch or iPhone, enter an $0.99 USD app called DogTag, which adds an ID icon and allows you to put the contact info of your choice.
Even If you’ve got a passcode, the info is still accessible as a DogTag wallpaper. The brainchild of Ian Cinnamon, who has been programming since age seven, the app was released a few days ago, and so far the handful of reviews are mostly positive.
For older iPods, one quick way is to name your device with an email address (my iPod nano and older pods support the “@”). This way, if the iPod is plugged in, your contact info pops up on the desktop and in iTunes.
You can also add your info to “contacts” or “notes” on iPods, too so they don’t have to plug it in to go looking for you. (Although if they really dig, the name information you assign will come up, too, in the settings>about screen).
I hit on naming mine with an email address after spending a frustrating 20 minutes at the gym trying to convince the guy at lost and found that yes, the iPod containing, among other things, just the contralto part of “Lacrimosa” and three cover versions of “Mah Na Ma Na” was, in fact, mine.
Have you devised a good way to ID your iPod or iPhone? Any luck with getting it back?
Sharing is caring, let us know in the comments.
The concept does sum up a lot of iLife for infants, but the trouble with these iPooed and iPeed onesies is that once your baby soils the Apple-inspired jumpsuit, you’ll have to change them out of it.
About $16 for a set of two on Etsy. They come in a range of colors (white, pink, blue and green) and sizes to fit babies up to 34 pounds.
Photo: Cishore/FlickrWhile CEO Steve Jobs received his traditional $1 annual salary for 2009, three top execs each received $100,000 raises, Apple told federal regulators Wednesday.
Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook, finance head Peter Oppenheimer, and Mac hardware senior vice president Bob Mansfield had their paychecks boosted, as well as their stock portfolios.
Cook, often mentioned as a possible replacement for Jobs, will earn $800,00 per year. Oppenheimer, Apple’s Chief financial officer, will make $700,000 per year, while hardware chief Mansfield will make $600,000.
Macworld announced its 10 Best of Show picks for 2009 Wednesday afternoon, reinforcing the uninspired pall Apple’s looming withdrawal has cast over this year’s entire event.
From the hundreds of thousands of feet of floorspace taken up by Conference exhibitors at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, Macworld editors’ only significant hardware find was the Windows Home Media Server from HP.
My purpose here is not to pick apart each official choice, or even to come up with my personal alternative Best of Show picks – though give me another couple of days to walk the Expo floor and I might. I aim only to point out that when your top hardware pick at a trade show dedicated to Apple and Macintosh-oriented computing is a device that requires a Windows-based PC for initial installation, it’s cause for a little existential self-reflection.
Macworld did ferret out one item at the show that looks quite promising in my view – a Bluetooth Web Cam from ecamm network. To be available by spring 2009 at an MSRP of $150, the ecamm BT-1 streams 640×480 H.264 video and 48 kHz AAC stereo audio from up to 30 feet away from a paired Mac.
Your Mac has a built-in web cam you say? Well, with the BT-1 and its mini flexible tripod, you get the freedom to adjust the position, pan, and tilt of your web cam imagery. It’s also mountable on any standard camera tripod to give you further flexibility in filming. You and the editors of Macworld seem to have forgotten that old slogan Apple rode to the success from which it now abandons the Macworld Conference and Expo:
Among the underwhelming upgrades to iWork Apple announced Tuesday, I thought the ones made to Keynote seemed at least interesting. Call me crazy, but I’m rather fond of Apple’s presentation software and given the ubiquity of Powerpoint used in the business world, I’m always impressed when someone shows up with a Keynote presentation instead. It just tells me the person cares, you know?
Helpfully, Apple itself has created Keynote Remote, an app for the company’s mobile devices that lets you control your Keynote slide presentation on your computer from your iPod touch or iPhone.
Swipe to advance or return to the previous slide. In portrait mode, see your presenter notes on your iPod touch or iPhone. In landscape mode, preview your next slide. Keynote Remote works with your Wi-Fi network, so you can control slide playback from anywhere in the room.
Great stuff, really. But, uh, you’ll need to drop another 99¢ in order to make it happen, even after you’ve bought the copy of iWork 09 needed to use the mobile app. Amazing.
Evidence, if it were needed, that even writers of the Best Mac E-zine Of All Time need to stop for a sit down every now and again.
Here, thanks to the CC-licensed photostream of TidBITS writer Glenn Fleishman, we can see the TidBITters relaxing between frantic article-writing. It’s funny that even the awesome TidBITS team ends up crouching on the floor, huddled up by the power sockets just like the rest of us.
But wait, who’s this walking past – possibly also on the hunt for an empty power outlet? Why, it’s none other than equally great Mac writers David Pogue and Jason Snell. Pogue, Engst and Snell all together in one image: congrats! You’ve collected the full set!
An Australian pilot program using the iPod touch as a classroom tool has some high school students doing more homework, others puzzling over the device.
Though the small program — eight 14-year-olds — using iPod touches is far from giving a scientific answer of how they might change learning, a few interesting things have cropped up.
One: Louise Duncan, the teacher who started the program at Shepparton High in Victoria, found that some of the kids had trouble using them.
“We assume that 14-year-olds are really technologically savvy, but they’re often not,” she told Perth newspaper Western Australia Today.
Students use the hand-held media players to search the internet, download music, do quizzes, research and submit assignments and work with students in Singapore.
Duncan found that students in the test program were more willing to come to school, did more homework and used their iPods more than laptops or desktop computers.
The iPods are on loan from Apple and run on the Study Wiz platform; the test is part of a global mobile learning project.
You could add this hand sewn iPod Shuffle in felt to your iPhone, a key chain, or otherwise adorn yourself with it, making the cuddly gadget just a bit more useful than the felt version of Apple’s phone that can’t be used even as a dog toy.
Cuter than cute, the 1″ x 1.5″ plush iPods are the handiwork of a woman in the Philippines with, as you might imagine, a declared love of kawaii stuffed toys.
iPod Shuffle charms come in blue, gray, pink, orange, red and green (specify your color pick in advance) at just $4 a pop on Etsy.
Lost in the verbiage over Apple’s decision to expand the number of DRM-free songs on iTunes was a fee some are calling Apple’s ‘music tax’ potentially worth $1.8 billion to Cupertino.
iTunes users will need to pay $0.30 per track ($0.60 per video and 30 percent of the price of an album) to use Apple’s one-click conversion to DRM-free listening pleasure. While offering copy-protection free iTunes songs is viewed as a ‘win’ for consumers, it may also further enrich Apple’s coffers.
Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch estimates Apple would earn $1.8 billion if each of the 9 billion iTunes sales were converted to non-DRM.
Among the more interesting things I’ve come across so far at Macworld is an innovative calling application from Freedom Voice, called Newber. Somewhat similar, but with a couple of key differences to Grand Central, Newber lets you route every phone call made to you though a single number and, using GPS location awareness, lets you take the call on any phone that happens to be nearby.
If you’re in the office at your desk, Newber will send calls to your work phone. At home it can ring the house phone. On the road Newber will ring your iPhone, the phone extension in your hotel room, even the payphone at the gas station in the middle of nowhere where you’re getting a flat fixed – if that’s where you want it to ring. Your callers have one number for you and you can receive their calls anywhere.
I saw the app in a demo at a press event on Monday night and spoke further yesterday with David Gerzof, president of Bigfish Communications, the PR firm representing Newber, about the difficulty Freedom Voice has had getting the Newber app approved for distribution in the AppStore. “Newber was submitted in October and Apple authorized the product manager to contact them by phone, which he does every day,” Gerzof told me. “They haven’t said it will be approved or that it won’t be approved, in fact we can’t see from our activity logs where they have even begun testing it. It’s very frustrating.”
As a result, despite having already put several hundred thousand dollars into developing the platform for iPhone, Gerzof and Newber aren’t putting all their eggs in Apple’s basket. A Demo application for Blackberry is already operating and the company is also working on one for Android. “We love Apple and began work first with the iPhone SDK because we wanted it to be the launch platform, but if they aren’t interested, we have to move forward with the others,” Gerzof says.
