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.

Canadian-born, Hong-Kong based actor and singer Edison Chen is in court against a computer technician after explicit nude photos of him and several starlets were posted on the Internet.

Chen says some 1,300 sex pics, including about a dozen celebrities, were illegally copied from a custom pink PowerBook that he brought in for repairs in 2006.

He’s testifying in a criminal case against Sze Ho-chun, a computer technician charged with obtaining access to Chen’s computer for dishonest gain.

Chen believed he had erased the files by putting them into the trash before the machine was handed over for repairs.

“I did not know about encrypted data or securing the trash. In my opinion, when you deleted a file and put it in the trash bin, it was deleted,” he said, adding that he later found out that files deleted from the trash could be recovered in some cases.  Chen went on voluntary hiatus career after the scandal broke in early 2008, media reports that it halted careers of several of the women involved.

No matter if you have nude starlets or bad poetry or bank info on your Mac, this is about as nightmare as it gets.

To clean out an old MacBook to give to a friend recently, I tried out permanent eraser and (until the Internet proves me wrong) it seemed to do the trick…

Aside from remembering to take out the trash after binning it, what’s your preferred method of erasing data?

Via Globe & Mail, Guardian, AFP

Could iPhone users benefit from the increasing price wars over wireless data plans? Giant mobile carrier AT&T is speaking out as a number of analyst suggest iPhone service price drops are inevitable.

AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega told tech site Engadget the No. 1 wireless carrier is in frequent contact with Apple on how to improve the iPhone’s performance.

“We communicate with Apple and say, you know, if we tweak this it would work better,” he said. “They’ve been very good about working with us,” de la Vega said, describing Apple’s response.

There are plenty of cutesy headphone alternatives — but if you’re looking to replace your Apple earbuds with something likely to start up a conversation or get a few stares, these giant green fly-shaped versions may be the answer.

The look a little less gross on than in the package, but for $12.95 they might not be a bad emergency spare.  Available at Patina.

Via gizmodiva

Yet another analyst has suggested Apple should sell a netbook, a market Cupertino has expressed luke-warm interest in, at best. Undaunted, however, an analyst Monday put forth what might be called the Goldilocks theory of netbooks.

A $599 netbook would pass Apple’s ‘junk’ test while also retaining the high margins to which investors have become accustom, argued Broadpoint AmTech analyst Brian Marshall.

Marshall thinks Apple could unveil a netbook – outfitted with a 10.1-inch screen, a 16GB hard drive and ARM chip. The $599 price tag would provide a hefty 50 percent margin over PC netbooks and be close enough to the $999 entry-level MacBook that it would be a “material difference,” Marshall told Computerworld.

Came across this art work by Nick Rodrigues while trying to find help for my dying iPod.

His “diePod,” made back in 2007, is an an iPod gravestone that contains all note worthy songs and photos of your life debuted at Art Basil Switzerland.
Of it, Rodrigues says, “A child born today will most likely carry some type of media device with them for there entire life. If these devices live on with us we will carry a record of our entire life with us to the grave-that’s better then the tomb of king tut.”

Amen. My fourth gen 20 GB iPod is ready to shuffle off this mortal coil, and I just can’t let it go. Yeah, I know it’s old but it was great for audio books and came in handy now and then as an external hard drive.

The folder icon keeps cropping up, no amount of partitioning + erase + restore seems to fix it for longer than a week, when the battery runs out. It’ll soon be ready for my drawer/graveyard, since there’s no recycling program yet locally.

Ever kept your dead pods around, perhaps for use as doorstops or paperweights?

Image courtesy Massachusetts Cultural Council, copyright Nick Rodrigues

Steve Jobs, who historically would spend hours a day logged into a chat client, has been using his computer less since taking his six-month leave of absence, according to a report by former PBS journalist Mark Stephens.

“Steve Jobs has stopped using his computer. He’s off curing himself of something he won’t name and in some manner we can’t know but I CAN tell you right now it doesn’t involve using his computer,” Stephens wrote under his pen name, Robert X Cringley.

Stephens argues in his post that because Jobs has not yet resigned from his position as CEO at Apple, his health is material to Apple and to Apple shareholders, is material to the company, and should be disclosed.

Because Jobs’ previous habit was to be available online to his coterie of personal contacts, a trend he apparently continued even after he announced he’d be taking a six month leave of absence near the beginning of this year, the apparent fact that he is no longer logging on daily is, according to Stephens, “important.”

“His condition remains squarely on the table, hot and steaming and ready to be served-up,” Stephens writes. “Who cares?

Anyone cares who actually expects Steve Jobs to return to Apple.”

Via MacNN

If you can think it, it’s said, eventually technology will allow you to do it.

Something I’ve thought about several hundred, if not thousands of times, is capturing the audio from a particularly tasty video I’ve been pointed to or have happened to come across (mostly) on YouTube.

Turns out, you can do that.

There’s a super easy way of doing it completely online at VidToMp3, but if you’d like a handy, light app for handling the task on your Mac, savvy Japanese developers at iExtractMp3 (translated from the original Japanese) have developed a universal binary, now in its 4th iteration, to do just that.

I tested both the online method and the iExractMp3 app today and added a couple of Snooks Eaglin tunes to my iTunes collection in a matter of minutes.

If you want to use iExtractMp3, you’ll need to know how to first download .flv files to your hard drive, which is easy enough to do. Everything else about using iExtractMp3 or VidToMp3 is self-explanatory.

The genie is now so far out of the bottle, one almost wants to feel sorry for the powers that be in the music industry.

Almost.

Via MakeUseOf

More than one quarter of iPhone users today have two fine options available for implementing cut and paste on their mobile device, with more on the way.

Of course Apple thinks of these users as criminals, but, really, how long can the company deny the rest of its smartphone ecosystem the number three functionality its users believe is still missing?

Via MakeUseOf

Apple lost its bid to trademark the word “pod” in Australia, due to an objection from a guitar company that also makes a product called “POD.”

Guitar accessories company Line 6 makes a line of  multi-effects processors, like the pocket version aimed at giving your guitar sound a boost sans amp pictured above, called POD.  Line 6 blocked Apple’s trademark claim, arguing it has a pre-existing trademark in the same category related to musical devices.

Although Line 6 has sold far fewer PODs than Apple’s range of iPod devices, the Australian Trade Marks Office hearing officer Iain Thompson declared that the POD device was still an established product.

“While the evidence does not show particularly strong sales [for Line 6’s POD], the marketplace is not particularly large and the participants in the musical industry are generally well informed about the products available to them to enable them to perform.”

Apple’s lawyers maintained the POD was “digital signal processing hardware,” and therefore did not qualify for the  “portable electronic devices” class of trademark. Thompson rejected the claim, arguing the iPod’s sound equalizer features used digital signal manipulation.

Apple was ordered to pay Line 6’s legal costs.

Via Smart Company

Image courtesy Line 6

I’m only on my second MacBook upper case (pictured above), and it’s currently held together with a piece of duct tape.

But that’s nothing. Over at MacInTouch, reader Derek C is on his eighth, and Apple are sending him a whole new MacBook.

The related Flickr group, My MacBook was cracked by itself is still going strong, too. I suspect many Cult readers have seen this problem.

The appeal of a unibody replacement grows ever stronger.

A new adjustable bed called the Prodigy claims it can end nocturnal snore wars, thanks to iPhone, iPod touch capabilities.

Prodigy debuted recently at the Las Vegas Furniture Market, though in the only image I was able to find (from the product sheet .pdf) it looks like geriatric central, makers Leggett & Platt say outright  it “is not your grandparent’s adjustable bed.”

Some of the new features aimed at stopping bedroom tiffs:

*One-touch, anti-snore technology allows annoyed awake user to change the position of a snoring partner by seven degrees to open nasal passages, which can alleviate mild to moderate snoring. After thirty minutes, the bed gently returns snoring perpetrator  to the original sleep position.

*A  gentle-wake alarm system that softly massages the sleeper awake. Because Prodigy can work on dual twin mattresses, each sleeper can be awakened individually, perfect for couples who can’t agree on a common wake time or a unified snooze-button strategy.

All this controlled from your iPhone or iPod touch. No word on pricing; makers are taking pre-orders up to May 2009.

Of course, it would mean having to give up on the liberating swift kick or annoyed shove, but perhaps one could get used to it.

Via sleepinformation

Apple has begun offering China refurbished iPods and iMacs, but at prices higher than U.S. retail prices, according to reports Monday.

In one example, a 2.8 GHz iMac discounted by 12 percent to $2,059 is still priced higher than the U.S. pre-sales tax $1,799.

While only 0.25 percent of the huge China market, the Asian giant helped Apple increase third-quarter sales by 49 percent, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The iPhone 3G launched today in United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Some 25,000 people signed up in the first few hours, not bad considering you can’t send or recieve text messages in Arabic and the web browser does not yet render Arabic text properly.  (Mobile providers have promised that these services will be available within the next three months.)

The 8GB iPhone costs around $600, 16GB around $700, with a monthly fee of about $25. Mobile provider Etisalat also throws in a hundred texts a month, to thumb perhaps in French or English while you’re waiting for Arabic.

Via Arabian Business

Image courtesy ifone4arab

It appears lawyers for Apple and clone-maker Psystar will head back to the courtroom after failed mediation talks, according to reports Monday.

The court-ordered talks, held secretly February 18 between the two companies, “did not settle” the copyright-infringement case, according to the World of Apple Website, quoting an unnamed “contact.”

A federal court earlier this month agreed to allow Psystar to submit a modified counterclaim against Apple’s initial charges. The Mac clone maker now maintains Apple has misused its copyright protections of the OS X software to stifle hardware rivals.

If  you’re the type who might forget your keys but not your iPhone, Swiss car design maker Rinspeed is rolling out a concept car for you.