Cult of Mac

Third party iPhone app developers may be able to update and execute arbitrary code from their applications at will, circumventing Apple’s App Store approval process, according to a report at TechCrunch.

The exploit stems from a trick documented by developer/blogger Partick Collison, who figured out a workaround to allow for the display of dynamic default.png images that load when an app is opened on the phone.

Jason Kincaid, who writes for TechCrunch, believes this security flaw makes it possible that “using the same technique with arbitrary code would likely allow a developer to update and execute whatever code they’d like at will.”

Kincaid notes that this is only an issue insofar as Apple purports to retain control of everything that appears on the AppStore. Developers enjoy the capability of running malicious code in just about every Windows or Mac desktop application you can buy without a screening process similar to the one Apple maintains before allowing iPhone and iPod touch applications to be distributed through the AppStore.

It’s also worth noting that no developer or application has been found to have used this particular exploit to run malicious code to date, and that Apple could act to close the loophole before anyone’s phone is put at risk.

Google’s Android-based G1 cell phone cost $143.89 to build, less than Apple’s iPhone 3G, according to iSuppli Corp.

A teardown of the 8GB iPhone 3G’s discovered the bill of materials for the Apple handset was $172, iSuppi analyst Tina Teng told Cult of Mac.

Nearly 20 percent ($28.49) of the G1 hardware costs are in the ARM processors used for multimedia and modem, iSuppli announced Tuesday. In October, Intel blamed the ARM for speed problems with the iPhone 3G.

iPhone developer and model rocket enthusiast Michael Koppelman performed a hobby mash-up by launching an iPhone rocket.

He used the packaging the iPhone came in to develop a cradle that fit inside the rocket. The iPhone had its own parachute, just to be on the safe side.

Koppelman developed an iPhone app to monitor the iPhone’s GPS and accelerometers, logging them to a file and sending GPS data over the Web so that the unit could be easily located if it became lost.

The airborne iPhone didn’t break or go missing.

Check out his site for the data or the video of the launch and an interview at Make…

The trailer for Nim’s Island, a Jodie Foster movie about a house-bound adventure writer, starts off with her character Alex Rover dancing a jig in front of a Mac and shows her computer about five more times in the space of a minute or so.

Apparently, the movie is Product Placement a go-go for 12 companies, so much so that at least one pundit complained. The Mac count? Three different computers show up a total of 10 times. Still, if you’re going to be a bogus travel writer, better do it with a Mac.

If you’re the kind of person who loves iChat so much that you want to snuggle up to it on the couch, these pillows from Throwboy are likely to be just your cup of tea.

You can choose from Finder, Dashboard, iTunes, iPhoto, iChat, and Photo Booth. Each one is hand-made with fleece and filled with polyester fiber.

You can nerd up your living room for just $30 per pillow, or $149 for the set. I don’t think they do special requests for niche apps (Camino users, let’s hear a weak cheer from you – ahh that’s lovely). But there’d be no harm in asking them to expand the set would there? What might they add next? Is a BBEdit pillow going too far, do you think?

More on the Throwboy blog. They do pumpkins too, you know.

Ferrari Scuderia Spider 16Ms, recently unveiled in all their Batmobile-meets-James Bond glory, will have an optional iPod built in to the dashboard.
The 16GB touch, black with the prancing horse logo, will come loaded with Ferrari images and sounds — the famous engine purr, maybe?

This is the kind of kit Ferrari owners will love, since the detachable iPod allows them to take the brand with them in places (like the gym, shopping) where it wouldn’t be obvious otherwise that they were Ferrari owners. (I once worked briefly on the Ferrari owners’ site. As a person who let their driver’s license lapse and uses a bicycle to get to work, it was a challenge). And the iPod can keep you company when the car is kept safely in the garage for more practical transport or serve as a memento when you sell it.

The base price for the limited-edition car is $277,000, no word on the extra cost for the iPod upgrade.

Via iPod Nation

Though we’re still several months away from the launch of either Mac OS X Snow Leopard or Microsoft’s Windows 7, America’s Finest News Source The Onion has already decoded the coming OS war in a handy chart, which you can read after the jump.

I have to say, I’m really impressed that MS is getting close to getting the spontaneous combustion thing under control. Dare to dream!

First made available through the iTunes Store on April 28, 2003, the timeless power ballad “Don’t Stop Believin'” has become the top-selling catalog track in iTunes history and the sole catalog track to have crossed the 2million (double platinum) threshold.

Following its original release in 1981, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” the second single from Journey’s groundbreaking chart-topping “Escape” album, peaked at #8 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart and at #9 on the Pop Singles chart. Propelled by what the All Music Guide has called “one of the
best opening keyboard riffs in rock,” “Don’t Stop Believin'” quickly established itself as one of Journey’s signature songs while helping to spawn the “arena rock” genre.

“Don’t Stop Believin'” hit a grand slam in 2005 when it became the unofficial theme song for the Chicago White Sox, World Series Champions. Journey frontman Steve Perry performed the song at the World Series Championship celebration in Chicago.

The song enjoyed a massive resurgence in popularity in June 2007 after serving as the soundtrack to the climactic final set-piece of HBO’s hit mafia family television series, “The Sopranos.” Download sales
of the song on iTunes rocketed an incredible 482% for the period from Saturday, June 9th (the night before “The Sopranos” finale) through Tuesday, June 12th, of that year, at which time Hillary Clinton also chose it as her presidential campaign theme song.

Brian Hines has made a little video that sums up almost everything you might ever want to say to potential switchers from Windows to Mac OS X. They might be asking themselves what makes the Mac experience so much better, and if it’s worth the investment of time and money to get started on a new system that might be alien to them.

Thing is, says Brian (and most of you reading this know it already — but maybe you know people like Brian, or the people he made the video for, and you might want to make the point to them) the Mac is simply a superior machine with a superior operating system.

The Mac is “pretty slick”, he says. The PC is “much cruder”. The software supplied with the Mac provides almost everything you might need (although he would appear to have invested in iWork, and added Firefox alongside Safari).

Brian concludes with this: “If you want to believe that the Mac is a much more pleasant machine to use, that’s absolutely the truth.”

Exactly.

Proving that Macs are the computers of kings, here’s a shot of
Saudi Arabian King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud with an impressive 30-inch cinema display. It makes Medvedev’s laptop look a little modest.

Via TUAW

Apple may report $11.29 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2009, more than $1 billion better than Wall Street experts are projecting, blogger-analyst Andy Zaky wrote Monday.

The blogger, who beat analysts in his prediction of Apple’s fourth quarter numbers, wrote experts have been “absurdly bearish” with revenue estimates that “no longer reflect even a scintilla of financial reality.”

“The analysts have been consistently wrong in predicting Apple’s earnings results and this time they’re going to get their ‘hats handed to them,'” Zaky wrote on his blog Bullish Cross.

In October, Apple’s Chief Financial Officer, Peter Oppenheimer forecast revenue of $9 billion to $10 billion for the December quarter. The Wall Street consensus is a slightly higher $10.08 billion.

Forget about what they manage to crank out of Cupertino. What is it about Apple that drives such innovation all over the rest of the globe?

The iPhone 3G became just the latest reason why Motorola is no longer king of U.S. cell phone sales. After losing its market lead Friday to South Korean Samsung, Moto Monday received more bad news: Apple’s iPhone 3G dethroned the slimline RAZR handset as the best-selling mobile phone in the United States.

The RAZR was the last big hit for the Schaumburg, Ill. handset manufacturer which has seen its market share slip away. Motorola slipped to second place behind Samsung, controlling 21.1 percent of the U.S. market, compared to the Korean’s 22.4 percent U.S. market share, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

Apple’s iPhone 3G outsold the RAZR in the U.S. during the third quarter, according to consumer analysts at NPD Group. For three years, the RAZR was the top-ranked handset.

The keen Mac cultists among you will already know the story behind the cloverleaf Command symbol (⌘) but for those of you who don’t, this photo (by cogdogblog on Flickr, used under CC license) tells the story rather well.

The ⌘ was discovered for Apple by bitmap artist Susan Kare in a dictionary of symbols, where it was said to be commonly used in Scandinavia to identify places of interest or camp sites.

Cogdogblog’s photo shows the symbol alive and well in Iceland, 1300 miles or so away from Stockholm but culturally close nonetheless.

Where else has the command symbol been spotted? In a jellyfish. In a bakery. In a bedroom. If you’ve seen it anywhere interesting, do let us know.

It’s no secret than I’ve been a less-prolific blogger over the last, oh, six months or so. Part of this is fairly dull personal life details (marriage, etc. Hi, honey!), but a bigger part of it has been the very quiet development of my first book, Wired to Care, which I co-wrote with my dear friend and colleague Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates. The book won’t be out until January, but our new blog is live now.

Now, far be it for me to avoid any shameless self-promotion, but I bring it up for another reason. The top post of the moment is my epic manifesto on why it is that Apple has never made significant in-roads in the enterprise space, while IBM remains the machine of choice more than 30 years after Steve Jobs declared war on Big Blue. It’s tied tightly to the theme of the book, but I think it can be regarded most as a guest appearance by Cult of Mac at the Wired to Care blog. Plus, it has the Apple Lemmings ad:

“Steve Jobs doesn’t have a clue about how to sell anything to business customers. From 1981’s defective Apple III to the $10,000 NeXT Computer to Apple’s current efforts, the offerings that Steve Jobs has created for enterprise technology customers have universally flopped. The company’s current high-profile effort in that arena is the xServe, a sleek metal computer meant to handle the file-sharing needs of a small or medium business. While beautifully designed in the way that all of Apple’s products are, the xServe screams to the world of business that it was not designed with them in mind. People working in technology at companies want to buy something that looks reliable, fast, and, most importantly, too complex-looking for ordinary people to manage. Simple hardware doesn’t connect with its intended audience, and the xServe has no traction whatsoever with business customers.”

I have a lot more to say on the subject, and I hope you do, too! Let the argument begin in the comments thread at W2C, and I’ll keep you updated whenever there’s more Apple content over there!

A federal court judge on Friday granted a preliminary injunction requested by IBM that ordered Mark Papermaster to cease working for Apple until further notice.

Apple announced on Tuesday this week that Papermaster would be joining the company immediately in his new role as the head of the engineering teams that make the iPods and iPhones, reporting directly to CEO Steve Jobs. After Friday’s ruling by the court in the southern district of New York, Apple said Papermaster would comply with the court’s order.

“We will comply with the court’s order but are confident that Mark Papermaster will be able to ultimately join Apple when the dust settles,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said.

Kenneth Karas, the U.S. District Court judge in White Plains, New York, where the case was filed, didn’t immediately explain his ruling, saying he would release a full opinion in the future. He scheduled a follow-up meeting for November 18 to map out a time line for the case.

The suit grew out of Papermaster’s 26 year employment at IBM, where he was responsible for many of that company’s innovations in the development of silicon chip processor technology. He signed an agreement not to compete in similar employment with another company for one year, but quit abruptly on October 24th and planned to start at Apple this week.

Via Reuters, Trading Markets

UPDATE: This post has been edited for statistical clarity.

iPhones fail at roughly half the rate of Blackberry smartphones after one year of operation, according to a study by Square Trade research. Square Trade, a company that sells add-on warranties covering electronic devices beyond their manufacturer warranty periods, looked at the failure rates of 15,000 phones covered under its plans. According to their data, the malfunction rate for iPhones after one year is 5.6 percent, compared to 11.2 percent for the Blackberry and 16.2 percent for the Treo.

The study projects the failure rate for the iPhone after two years will be between 9.2 and 11.3 percent, compared to actual two-year failure rates of 14.3 percent for BlackBerries and 21.0 percent for Treos.

Of course, the sample size producing these numbers is a tiny fraction of the millions of smartphones on the market and may or may not be a truly accurate picture of the actual failure rates of the three kinds of phone.

Interestingly, the study found neither battery life nor call quality problems to be major issues for the iPhones that did fail. As was true with all three models in the study, the predominance of failure-related issues had to do with the touchscreen interface.

One area where iPhone does appear to lag its two main competitors is in failure due to accident: 12 percent of iPhone failures happen because the owner drops it, spills liquid on it, or otherwise stops treating it like the sensitive mobile computing device it is.

Via MobileCrunch

Now that Tina Fey can abandon her rock-hard chignon and go back to playing Liz Lemon on 30 Rock, we can admire the view from her boss, Jack Donaghy’s desk, namely his 24-inch iMac.

Wonder if it’s a coincidence Alec Baldwin is on the phone here. Be nice!

Via MacSmack

Artist Catherine Forster began examining the world through a microscope as a biologist, now she uses technology to talk about the world.

Her installation “Golden Oldies” features four silent videos inspired by pop songs (“Karaoke classics” she says) played on iPods.

These visual landscapes are inspired by “Tiny Bubbles” (Don Ho, 1966), ‘Under the Boardwalk” (Drifters, 1964), “Spinning Wheel” (Blood Sweat and Tears, 1969), and “Starry Starry Night” (Don McLean, 1971).

“Golden Oldies” was meant to be a humorous take on how people cut themselves off from the world by creating iPod retreats.

Right now, it’s part of a Biennial show in Kentucky, but Forster says the ongoing project include new videos from the 1960s to the 1990s. You can check out the videos up close from her site.

Earlier this week I seem to have touched a chord with a post about Tony Fadell’s “transition agreement” and the reimbursements Steve Jobs gets from Apple for expenses incurred in the operation of his private plane.

Several readers took me to task for illustrating the post with a hastily-cadged, photoshopped fake of a Gulfstream jet with a big Apple logo on it, which is fair enough, if somewhat lacking in the sense-of-humor department.

With thanks to reader Hihosilver, who sent in a real picture of Jobs’ plane on the runway at the San Jose airport, I was led to a couple of interesting airplane fan sites, where more pics of the Apple CEO’s gorgeous jet can be found. For your pleasure and amusement then, here’s a gallery, so the next time you see a Gulfstream Aerospace G-V at cruising altitude or taxiing on a runway near you, you’ll be able to tell if it’s likely to have Steve inside.

The drumbeat continues as Barclays Capital Friday became the latest analyst firm to trim its projection of iPhones sales for the first quarter of fiscal 2009. Citing the weak economy, analyst Ben Reitzes believes 5 million handsets will be sold during the quarter, down from the previously expected 6.2 million.

In a note to investors, Reitzes cited a “continued weakness in the economy” and an inventory already flush with 2 million iPhones.

Barclays also cut its target price for Apple shares to $121 from $125, however retained the Cupertino, Calif. company stock as overweight.

Apple will report $9.6 billion in revenue for the December quarter and $35.7 billion for fiscal 2009, down from $36.1 billion, the note predicted Friday. Apple reported $7.8 billion for the quarter ended Sept. 31.

Say Hello to Steve! is a Flickr pool that celebrates, even embraces the highly reflective screens on recent MacBooks and iMacs.

A lot of people have complained about the glossy screens. They have expressed their displeasure with protests and polls. Some wish that Apple still offered a matte alternative. Others have tried the glossies and found that, because the LCD panel display is so much brighter, they’re not so bad after all.

But the folks at the Say Hello to Steve! group are happy with their glossy screens. They like to see themselves – and their surroundings – reflected in the screens when they’re dark. The upshot is some nice, sometimes quite artistic, photographs. What can you see in your screen when your MacBook’s not switched on?

(Photo by Mojo.D, used with permission.)

Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple is finding a warmer reception in Europe than at home, two new surveys indicate. The iPhone, which sold 6.9 million units during the third quarter, now owns 17.5 percent of the smart phone market, beating RIM for second place among European mobile phone users.

Analysts at Canalys reported Thursday Apple experienced 523 percent growth during the quarter, outpacing RIM, which registered an 83 percent increase to 15.2 percent market share compared to 2007.

Apple’s rise trimmed Nokia’s market leadership, the Finish handset giant slipping to 38 percent of European cell phone sales, down from 51 percent a year ago.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a developers’ conference in Australia yesterday he thinks the idea of using Webkit as the rendering engine for Internet Explorer is “interesting” and that his company “may look at that” as the Microsoft web browser continues to evolve.

Asked directly why IE remains relevant and what is the value of a proprietary rendering engine “when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster,” Ballmer responded by admitting that Microsoft would need to consider the future of the browser and determine if there is any lack of innovation for the company to capitalize upon with “proprietary extensions that broaden its functionality.”

Since defeating Netscape, once the lone challenger to its dominance of the browser market, IE has been wildly outpaced by the likes of Firefox, Safari and Opera in the past five years, while the speed and standards compliant advantages of Webkit have led a number of developers to make it the foundation for their web browsers and other web related tools. Among them are Nokia’s mobile browser, Google’s new Chrome, and of course the mobile Safari browser used by Apple’s iPhone.

With Microsoft having long preached the gospel of praising developers for the innovations brought to its core product, the company would no doubt gain the undying gratitude of the developer community should it adopt Webkit and free developers from the extra work currently required to make their code render predictably in Internet Explorer.

Via AppleInsider

I just love this picture. It sums up perfectly the progress that’s been made in computing over the last couple of decades. That which was once beige and plasticky is now sleek and silvery. (I know some people still swear by those old clacky keyboards, though: John Gruber once called the Extended Keyboard II “the single best hardware product Apple has ever manufactured.”)

You get the same feel from this one. I remember being utterly amazed by the G4 iMac’s design. I borrowed one from Apple to write a review, and marveled at the computer’s shiny hinged neck and (for the time) large, bright display. Now compare it to a modern iMac. It looks like a toy. (Those of you still using a G4 iMac and enjoying it, get in touch to tell me how and why. Send pics.)

(Photos used under Creative Commons licence. Thanks to: Blakespot and Editor B