The more I watch Microsoft’s new ad for Windows, the more I like it.

The ad, which debuted on Thursday night, successfully counters the idea promoted by Apple that PCs are bumbling buffoons personified by prematurely middle-aged businessmen.

Instead, the ad convincingly portrays the PC as part of global culture, unpretentious and down-to-earth.

The ad starts with a John Hodgman-alike Microsoft engineer, who proudly declares: “I’m a PC, and I am not alone.” It then swings through Europe, Africa, America and back again, showing people of all nations declaring simply one after the other: “I’m a PC.”

It ends with author Deepak Chopra, who says: “We are all a PC, inseparably one.”

Watch it carefully. The people and locations of the ad clearly reflect Bill Gates’ concerns about the world: disease, poverty, education and opportunity. Bill Gates makes a appearance (a welcome one. I admire him giving away his money), and there’s quite a few people from developing countries in this ad: something I’ve never seen in Apple’s marketing.

They’re real people, with accents and bad teeth (like me). I find it a refreshing antidote to the fake youthfulness of Apple’s iPod silhouettes and the insufferable, elitist hipster who personifies the Mac on TV.

I like Microsoft’s new ad because it portrays the PC through the very ordinary people that use these machines every day — and some extraordinary ones. It’s the opposite of Apple’s phony lifestyle advertising. It’s refreshingly egalitarian. It’s like “The Wire” versus “Law and Order.” Plus, there’s no sign of Jerry Seinfeld.

UPDATE: Two more new ads after the jump.

If you enjoy running a Windows game alongside your usual Mac applications, you aren’t alone. New numbers indicate U.S. sales of virtualization software is up 50 percent this year.

The sales increase would be even greater than the 41 percent jump in Mac hardware sales Apple recently reported.

Between $15 million and $20 million of Mac virtualization software has been sold so far in 2008, according to NPD Group analyst Michael Redmond.

Redmond, talking to Computerworld, credited Apple’s move to Intel processors for “encouraging more users to experiment with virtualization.”

Differing from Apple’s Boot Camp, which lets Mac users reboot into a Windows environment, virtualization software permits Intel Apple’s to run Windows applications within OSX. The most frequent uses of Mac virtualization is to play a Windows game that has yet to be released for the Apple platform or for developers to test software designed for Windows users.

Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion are the two leading virtualization software packages for the Mac. Parallels, introduced in 2006, has sold a million copies while Fusion (now Fusion 2) sold a quarter million copies since coming on the Mac VM scene in 2007.

(Photo: Jimmy Joe)

Plumb Amazing’s Record app for iPhone turns the device into a nifty little field recorder for capturing interviews, lectures, songs, bird calls, meetings, car sounds (to play for Clik and Clak on Car Talk), reminders, ideas, your child’s first words, street musicians, podcasts, science notes, observations, the list is limited only by your imagination.

Sounds in Plum Record can be tagged with photos, and text, multiple tags can be added at different locations in a sound file like bookmarks, allowing you to jump to different sections of the sound file instantly.

Plumb Amazing also offers a free server for uploading files, or you can transfer them directly to your Mac or other disk server.

Available now in the AppStore for a measly $5, many AppStore reviews of this software are glowing, though several complain about bugginess that prevents transferring files to Macs running Tiger.

Griffin Technologies unveiled two iPhone accessories worth investigating at Apple Expo Paris on Wednesday: AirCurve is an acoustic amplifier that requires no power to amplify the iPhone’s built-in speaker, and Clarifi has a lens for taking close-up photographs built in to its protective polycarbonate iPhone case.

AirCurve borrows design elements from Bose “wave technology” to turn your iPhone into a no-power-drain alarm clock on your nightstand, or a mini sound system that never needs batteries or adapters, according to Griffin. An internal coiled waveguide collects sound from the iPhone’s built-in speaker, amplifies it, and projects it into the room. Designed with a pass-through slot that allows you to charge and sync your iPhone with a dock cable (available separately), AirCurve’s see-through translucent body lets you appreciate the acoustic curves inside that do all the work. Look for the AirCurve selling soon for $20 at major American electronics retailers.

Clarifi is similar to dozens of other protective polycarbonate iPhone cases on the market but is distinguished by the built-in lens that trurns the iPhone’s 2 megapixel camera into something more than just a snapshot device with focus set to ∞. Without Clarifi, iPhone requires about 18 inches to focus properly. Slide Clarifi’s lens into place and, according to the product specs, you can move in to 4 inches for crisp, detailed macrophotography. The case has cutaways for access to the power switch, headphone jack, volume controls, and dock connector. Clarifi will sell for $35 at major electronic retailers beginning in October and is compatible with iPhone 3G only.

By day, Damian Ward operates Macs for a printing company in darkest Buckinghamshire, a county just to the north west of London. He’s been doing this for 15 years or so.

By night, Damian hunts for batches of unwanted, unloved old Macs. He hunts down 512k machines, Classics, SEs and SE30s, and early iMacs. He takes them in — from colleagues, friends, Freecycle, eBay, junk sales, anywhere — and tinkers with them. He has quite an impressive collection.

“You bring them home and you think they’ll be beyond repair, and that you’ll only be able to use them for parts,” he says.

“Then you discover they’re working fine, and then you can’t get rid of them can you? You have to keep them.” That’s right. You have to.

Microsoft’s $300 million Vista ad campaign has ditched comedian Jerry Seinfeld in favor of a John Hodgman-alike Microsoft engineer who says: “Hello, I’m a PC, and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”

Microsoft on Thursday is set to air several new ads, according to the New York Times, including one starring a lookalike of the bumbling but lovable PC character in Apple’s Get a Mac ads, played by Daily Show correspondent and author John Hodgman.

The Times says the ad is an “audacious embrace” of Apple’s Windows-baiting, and typical of MS’s new agency, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, which has a history of turning negative perceptions into advertising counterstrikes.

Apple has been “using a lot of their money to de-position our brand and tell people what we stand for,” Microsoft brand marketer David Webster told the Times. “They’ve made a caricature out of the PC.”

Other ads in the series will include musician Pharrell Williams, actress Eva Longoria and author Deepak Chopra, the Times says.

Guess which one is Steve? Clue: The only one thinner than Sir Mick.

Steve Jobs is hobnobbing with Sir Mick Jagger in Brussels, according to the EC press service.

Jobs met with Sir Mick at an online commerce roundtable to discuss “opportunities and barriers” to online retailing in Europe, the EC says. Other bigwigs included EC competition commissioner Neelie Kroes and the heads of LVMH, Alcatel, eBAy, Fiat and EMI, and others.

The business leaders met on Wednesday.

Jobs may be in Europe to attend Apple Expo in Paris, which just opened, although Apple doesn’t have a booth at the show.

The annual Apple Expo trade show is the biggest Apple-oriented show in Europe. Until 2003, Jobs has delivered a keynote speech there. But as Apple has expanded its chain of stores around the world, it has been pulling out of more and more conferences: Macworld in New York, NAB in Las Vegas and Apple Expo in France.

“Apple is participating in fewer trade shows every year, because often there are better ways for us to reach our customers,” an Apple spokesman told Macworld.

More details and pictures after the jump.

Apple increased its share of notebook computers sold in North America during the second quarter to 10.6 percent, moving it into fourth spot and posting the largest jump among top computer makers, researchers said Wednesday.

The numbers compare to the 6.6 percent market share registered during the same three-month period in 2007, according to DisplaySearch. The four-point jump is the largest of the top five PC makers. Dell led the market with 21.9 percent of North American notebook sales.

After the jump, read how the Apple ‘halo’ effect is boosting business interest in Mac notebooks.

Macenstein has a beauty of a post, explaining precisely how to remove Apple’s own apps from sight on your iPhone.

If you’ve ever wondered how many screenfuls of apps the iPhone will let you store, the answer is nine – or a total of 148 apps. But it turns out that there’s a secret, hidden, 10th screen.

So if Calculator, Clock or Contacts drive you crazy and you want to be rid of them, all you have to do is get yourself nine screen loads of apps, and be sure that the 8th and 9th screens are full to the brim. Then get the icons wiggling and start shuffling from screen eight to screen nine. Boom!, as Steve would say.

The apps aren’t actually deleted, just removed from sight. And even then, they will re-appear after you restart the phone or sync it.

Full details are at Macenstein. And if you read it and think: “Why would I spend so much time doing that?”, then you and I both have great minds.

Behold! The i-men. Gareth White of New Future Graphic made them using Photo Booth, some props and a pile of imagination.

Every high school and junior high student in the Ballinger school district near San Angelo has been given a brand new MacBook. Lucky them.

Let’s assume that most of these youngsters have not owned a Mac before. What advice should we give them? What tips would make their computing life a happy one?

Here’s my list, which in some respects is similar to Alex Payne’s, linked above:

• don’t let your Mac automatically log you in. Pick a good system password and make sure you have to enter it to gain access
• back your stuff up. If your computer is going to die, the chances are good that it’ll die the day before you have to hand in that important assignment
• don’t overload your Applications folder with stuff you don’t need
• use a text editor to write. Only use a word processor for final formatting, if it’s necessary; even then, TextEdit or Bean are just fine for most of the basics
• learn about properly quitting apps (not just closing their windows); about using disk images and installing software from them; about grabbing screenshots with Command+Shift+3 and Command+Shift+4; about Expose and Spaces and Quick Look

Just a few tips off the top of my head. If you were in that school hall while those MacBooks were handed out, what advice would you have been giving the kids?

Image via Gearlog

Emulating Apple’s propensity for using media “events” to unveil new technology, T-Mobile sent an “invitation” to technology press Tuesday, encouraging attendance at a New York City event on September 23rd that will mark the debut of Google’s Android smartphone and the software it’s powered by.

The event sets up the first public challenge to Apple’s domination of the touch-screen smartphone market, with the thoroughly-leaked and publicly previewed phone, once known as the HTC Dream but now called the G1. Reportedly tricked-out with features including a slide-out display that exposes a full keyboard, as well as a BlackBerry-like trackball, the phone has been rumored to be the launch device for T-Mobile’s nationwide 3G network and may also boast GPS navigation, a tilt sensor and Wi-Fi connectivity.

We hope that Wi-Fi rumor proves true if the G1 hopes to go toe-to-toe with iPhone.

Via AppleInsider

The LinkedIn profile of a senior manager on Apple’s chip architecture team appears to confirm Apple is developing its own ARM processors for the next generation of iPhone, according to a report in the New York Times.

While current iPhones feature a Samsung chipset according to many analysts, Apple was rumored to have acquired chipmaker PA Semiconductor in April for $300 million to engineer custom low-power chips to meet the specific needs of iPhone and iPod design. Wei-han Lien, a member of the PA Semi team who came to Apple in the deal, lists his current project as “Manage ARM CPU architecture team for iPhone” on his profile at the popular social networking site, an indication Apple will soon quit outsourcing iPhone processors.

By developing its own ARM configuration, Apple could create a processor with support for software accelerators or a graphics engine, according to former AMD chief technical officer Fred Weber. In addition, disposing of an outside chip supplier would allow Apple to maintain tighter controls on who knows what about its future products.

As one might expect, Apple declined to comment on matters related to PA Semi, which it operates as a subsidiary.

Via c|net

Image via Flickr by sasurau

The market for Apple’s iPhone may turn out to be less than half the size once expected in Japan, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. With worldwide sales of the 3G model approaching 6 million units since its July 11 launch, and at least one analyst predicting total 2008 sales to reach 7 – 8 million units, Japanese consumers may snap up fewer than half a million out of a previously predicted 1 million, writes Journal reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane.

“The iPhone is a difficult phone to use for the Japanese market because there are so many features it doesn’t have,” says Eimei Yokota, an analyst with MM Research. More than 10 domestic handset manufacturers compete for a slice of Japan’s cellphone market, one of the world’s largest with annual sales of 50 million phones. Nokia Corp., the industry leader in global shipments, has less than 1% share in Japan. Instead, Sharp Corp. leads the Japanese market, with about 25% of shipments. Models currently sold by Japanese cellphone makers typically contain a high-end color display, digital TV-viewing capability, satellite navigation service, music player and digital camera. Many models also include chips that let owners use their phones as debit cards or train passes.

While Softbank, Apple’s cellular phone partner in Japan with 19.5 million wireless subscribers, says the iPhone continues to be popular, Yokota, the MM Research analyst, says one small but must-have feature often cited as a deficiency in the iPhone is the lack of “emoji,” clip art that can be inserted in sentences to jazz up emails.

Takuro Hiraoka, an analyst for GfK Marketing Services Japan Ltd., says the problem could be a lack of education. “Japanese users don’t know what to do with an iPhone,” he said. “Sales could grow if Apple provides specific examples of how it can be used.”

Apple computer sales in the U.S. rose 38 percent during the second quarter, more than triple that of top PC maker Hewlett-Packard, researchers said Tuesday.

Gartner said U.S. Apple PC shipments rose 38.1 percent during the second quarter, compared to the same period in 2007. The Cupertino, Calif. company shipped nearly 1.4 million PCs in the U.S., up from 1 million units during the second quarter of 2007, Gartner said.

Read more about Apple’s jump in marketshare after this jump.

The US back to school promotion’s done, but its equivalent has now fired up in the UK. Brits can now grab Apple laptops or iMacs, an iPod nano or iPod touch, and then get a rebate of up to £95 (which doesn’t actually cover the cost of even the cheapest iPod on offer, but still).

The most interesting part about this is the offer’s closing date: the spooktastic October 31. It’s pretty rare for Apple to start shipping new Macs when this kind of promotion is still running (although it does sometimes happen), so does this mean we now won’t be seeing new Mac laptops and iMacs until November? Or are British students just getting ‘encouraged’ to clear Apple’s UK inventory, readying the company for its autumn/fall assult?

Update: other European Apple Stores are also running similar offers—this isn’t just specific to the UK.

The summer holidays are barely over and the children only back at school for a week, but already the Christmas tat has started appearing in the shops and the media is casting its collective eyes over the events of the last few months to put together some “thing of the year” contests.

And first on the radar is the UK’s Stuff Magazine, best known for the scantily clad ladies who adorn its front cover (usually clutching some gadget or other in their manicured paws).

In the Reader’s gadget of the year category, the iPhone 3G is up against Nintendo’s Wii Fit, the Asus Eee, game consoles the PS3 and XBox 360 60GB, and the B&W Zeppelin speaker system.

That’s not all though. The MacBook Air crops up in the Design of the year category, against the Zeppelin (again) and a bunch of other things that, in my opinion, don’t even come close.

But wait, there’s more. Apple is also nominated in Retailer of the year.

So does the iPhone deserve Gadget of the Year status? I’d say it does, yes. I’ve not seen anything else — except perhaps Mario Kart on the Wii — make people smile so much. Everyone who picks up an iPhone, whether they’re playing with a friend’s or toying with one of the demo models in a shop, smiles. You watch, it’s true. They pick the thing up for the first time, they start tapping on it, and they smile.

Apple released the OS X 10.5.5 update in the US on Monday afternoon to immediate acclaim as an all-out assault on bugs. Despite initial skepticism, even TUAW, which was first to the tape, acknowledged the release notes are “quite detailed.”

Gizmodo provided a laundry list of items addresed in the update, with MacWorld shortly touting 30 bugs fixed in the new software. Not six hours later, ComputerWorld upped the ante to 70 bugs fixed.

Security experts are finally satisfied the “Dan Kaminski exploit,” referring to the researcher who disclosed a critical flaw in DNS that made it much easier than originally thought to “poison” the cache of DNS servers, or insert bogus information into the Internet’s routing infrastructure, has been fixed.

Apple also updated Mac OS X’s implementation of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the open-source DNS software maintained by the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), to keep it current with an early-August version that ISC released to solve performance issues that had shipped in the original fix for Kaminsky’s vulnerability.

The update also fixes a number of non-security flaws, according to the release notes. iCal and Mail both received more than half a dozen fixes, Time Machine got slapped around a bit, and MobileMe even came in for some love.

See the complete list of adjustments after the jump.

VMWare Fusion, one of the two leading virtualization solutions for Mac, has just been updated to 2.0. The $80 app is a free upgrade for all users of the previous version, and it adds several features that make it better to run Windows on a Mac, oxymoronic though that might sound.

You can read more about the upgrade here, or download it here. After all, it and Parallels are the only ways to run Chrome on a Mac, so…

Over the last year and a half, a few dozen…dozen would-be “iPhone-killers” have emerged to take on Apple’s little widescreen iPod/phone/Internet browsing device that could. And illustrious these phones have been, ranging from the underwhelming Samsung Instinct to the equally underwhelming LG Dare and even the moderately adequate HTC Touch Pro.

And now, as dynamic Verizon pitchman Mike Lanman proves in this eternal launch video, RIM is throwing its Canadian hat (it’s flannel, with ear-laps) into the ring with the puzzling BlackBerry Storm. You will be shocked to learn that this amazing phone will “Take the market by <cue thunderbolt> STORM!”

Except that it probably won’t make any impact on the iPhone market. And that’s because Apple created a platform and RIM is building a product. Click through to read why.

Microsoft has maintained a publicly announced schedule for releasing Windows 7 in early 2010, but its internal calendar has June 3, 2009 as the planned release date, according to a report by InternetNews.com.

Stung, perhaps by the relentless ribbing its Vista operating system has taken at the hands of Apple advertising, along with countless jibes from pundits on the Internet, Microsoft plans to release a beta version of the new system at its Professional Developers Conference next month.

Inside sources confirm that internal builds of the redesigned platform have already been made available to partners for hardware and software certification. Windows 7 is not a whole new OS but an evolution of Vista, and will reuse the old kernel and device driver model. That means it would use the kernel in its newer state, when Microsoft updated it with Vista’s first service pack. It also means existing device drivers for Vista will work on Windows 7.

Good luck with that, guys.

Electronics retail giant Best Buy Monday announced it would acquire Napster for $121 million. The Minneapolis-based company told Cult of Mac the move wouldn’t harm its growing relationship with iTunes owner Apple.

“Our relationship with Apple is strong and will continue to be so,” said Susan Busch, Best Buy Corporate PR Director.

The acquisition of the digital music service would become “a platform for accelerating our growth in the emerging industry of digital entertainment, beyond music subscriptions,” Best Buy Executive Vice President Dave Morrish, said in a statement.

As part of the acquisition, Best Buy gains Napster’s 700,000 subscribers, its online platform and mobile technology. Napster CEO Chris Gorog and senior management would stay on. The retailer will keep Napster’s headquarters in Los Angeles, where it employs 140 workers.

Best Buy could use Napster to attract consumers still unsure of digital music.

“They might be able to find a business in bringing in late-adopters or stragglers into the online music market by virtue of their breadth of products and service,” Mike McGuire’s Gartner’s media analyst, told Cult of Mac.

McGuire said that while iTunes and Napster may have been rivals when they first arrived on the digital music scene, Napster has never been a threat to Apple. This may be why Best Buy emphasized it will still sell the Apple iPhone.

In May, Napster took a swipe at iTunes, announcing it would sell 6 million DRM-free songs, calling it “the largest major label MP3 catalog in the industry, but also the largest library of independent music available anywhere.” McGuire, however, saw the MP3 effort as “something a bit more than an afterthought, but not much more.”

Photo courtesy: Tronick

In July, Apple noted that an upcoming ‘product transition’ would affect future profit margins, prompting speculation. For once, such speculation has started to fade, but now rumors regarding the new MacBook are beginning to surface: an aluminium case, LED backlit display, multi-touch. Does that sound like anything to you?

Is Apple going to ditch the ‘Pro’ from MacBook Pro and streamline its laptop range, leaving just a ‘standard’ MacBook (with different screen sizes and minor tinkering possibilities under the hood), and the Air for people who happily set fire to 50-dollar bills? (Clearly, they would once have lit their cigars with said bills, but you’re not allowed to smoke anywhere in the free world these days.)

Obviously, this is idle speculation, but such streamlining would make sense. Run SuperDrives across the new MacBook range, and position the low-end model at an aggressive price-point, but with roughly the grunt of today’s mid-range MacBook (albeit with some extra toys), and then beef up the mid- and top-ends with larger screens and a graphics card, but slice their price-tags, too.

According to resellers we’ve spoken to, laptops are the Apple hardware that continues to outperform the market and expectations, and so if Apple really does want to make a play for market-share, this could be the way to do it.

Update: As Gruber just pointed out, Apple was likely referring to the new iPods introduced last week and the guidance was for the quarter about to end. But what the hell—I still have an inkling that the laptop line-up is going to change rather dramatically over the coming months. So there.

The percentage of iPhone 3G speed tests with extremely slow outcomes has been cut in half since Friday’s release of 2.1 software, according to Test My iPhone administrator Donovan Lewis.

Prior to Friday’s software update, 3G download speeds registering in the very-pokey 100 – 300kbps range accounted for 10 – 11% of all 3G speed tests done using the iPhone performance utility. Since then, results in the 100 -300kbps range account for just 5.37% of all 3G download tests. The site has registered over 250,000 3G tests since its inception. It also provides EDGE and Wifi testing and includes upload and download assessment, as well as testing for non-iPhone connectivity.

“We’re seeing an overall more consistent kbps score and the number of 3G tests where the user scored a real low 100kbps – 300kbps is down,” Lewis told Cult of Mac, adding, “I think that’s a real big improvement overall.”

Others have reported generally satisfactory reactions to the improvement with app handling and system crashes since loading their phones with the new software. How is 2.1 affecting your iPhone experience? Let us know in comments.

There’s a bunch of iPhone/iTouch apps that offer some sort of sketching functionality. It was only a matter of time before people started sharing some of their sketches online, and my favorite gallery so far is the Flickr iPhone Sketches pool, which contains some real gems (like Luis Mendo’s untitled sketch, above, and Waiting by Pepita P.) There’s loads more:

iPhone art pool

If, like me, you like the idea of drawing during dull moments but are rarely organized enough to carry around a sketchpad and a pencil, iPhone artwork is probably the next best option.

Got some iPhone artworks you’d like to share? By all means post links in the comments. A URL on a line of its own gets auto-linked. Let’s see whatcha got.

Picture used with permission from Luis Mendo