Photo by ranajune.

Steve Jobs is still parking in handicapped spaces at Apple, according to a new snap posted to Flickr.

Snapper Rana Sobhany spotted Jobs’ Mercedes SL55 AMG parked in a handicapped spot at the Apple campus over the weekend.

“Mercedes? Check. No license plate? Check. Handicap spot? Yep, this is Steve Jobs’ car!!!” she writes.

Jobs, of course, has a long history of parking in handicapped parking spaces at Apple. The reports go back years, and have recently been documented on Flickr.

Since 2006, Jobs’ car has been snapped in handicapped parking spaces at Apple at least five times. See the pictures after the jump.

Via ValleyWag.

It’s been evident to anyone paying attention (even those of us who have been jonesing for new MacBook Pros since early June) that Apple would hold off on any product launches throughout the summer to put maximum focus on the iPhone 3G. Apple just wasn’t going to do anything to distract from that, nor were they going to launch major product in the doldrums of late August.

So it was obvious Apple would wait until after Labor Day to take care of much-needed updates to the iPod and MacBook Pro product lines.  According to rumormongers, it might be just a week after Labor Day that such welcome udpates arrive — eight days to be exact, with an as-yet-unannounced Sept. 9 launch event. Kevin Rose is leading this charge, claiming new, non-stubby widescreen iPod nanos, but I think most people care more about cheaper iPod touches and MacBook Pros with Montevina than anything else.

I think an actual Town Hall event would be a bad move. These are going to be evolutionary updates, and they don’t deserve the fanfare of the iPhone 3G or AppStore launch. My prognostication is that Apple will unveil new product on just about every Tuesday in September. First new iPods, then new MacBook Pros, then new MacBooks, than new Mac minis and AppleTVs. Just keep it coming and pour it on…

Apple is on track to sell just shy of 3 million Macs and close to 11 million iPods in the September quarter, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. If Apple manages to hit the high end of Munster’s estimate of betweeen 2.7 million and 2.9 million Macs sold from July through September, it will be the first time Apple will have sold 10 million Macs in any fiscal year in its history.

Munster based his estimates on July sales data from NPD Group, which also suggested the possibility of sales of 4.1 million iPhones and a gross margin of 32 percent. Munster estimates Apple’s earnings per share at $1.19 on revenue of $8.5 billion. Wall Street consensus estimates put the numbers at $1.11 on $8.08 billion, while Apple’s previous guidance calls for $1.00 on $7.8 billion.

Munster affirmed his Buy rating on Apple, Inc. (AAPL) shares, with a price target of $250. The stock closed today at $172.55 in New York trading.

When I was researching material for a long article about third party development programs for the iPhone back in March, one of the most common complaints I heard from users and skeptics alike was leveled at the lack of cut and paste functionality on Apple’s groundbreaking mobile device. In July, Apple spokesman Greg Jowsiak basically said cut and paste was a low priority as far as the company was concerned.

No surprise then, that third party workarounds for the missing tool began to emerge, with one fashioned by student developer Zac White among the more promising. Unfortunately, Apple has placed new roadblocks in the path toward letting you cut and paste text on your iPhone, according to White.

No word yet from Apple on whether cut and paste has been re-prioritized in-house.

Via AppleInsider

Image by Vissago via Flickr

Using testing equipment similar to that used by the FCC and mobile phone manufacturers to make sure phones are able to properly send and receive signals without interfering with other devices, engineers in Sweden pronounced the iPhone 3G’s capabilities “completely normal,” according to a report at Engadget.

Much speculation and not a little complaint registered in the wake of Apple’s 2.0.2 firmware upgrade last week, calling the iPhone’s 3G capabilities into question. One woman in Alabama filed suit in federal court seeking a class action to hold Apple liable for selling a “defective” product. But engineers at Bluetest in Gothenburg, Sweden, tested the iPhone 3G against a Nokia N73 and a Sony Ericsson P1 and found the difference between these two popular 3G phones and the iPhone 3G was negligible.

Your mileage may vary.

Track your progress toward cleaner living, or at least breathing. Every body needs somebody.

The picture above is burning up Digg right now. It supposedly shows the redesign of the MacBook Pro, which is expected to be refreshed any day now.

The new machine looks gorgeous. With smooth, rounded contours, it resemble the MacBook Air, and there appears to be the magnetic hinge borrowed from entry-level MacBook, which would be a big improvement on the Pro’s current latch/hook design.

Alas, it isn’t a leak — it’s a mockup from the MacRumors forums created by user mciarlo.

Cyan games has announced that it has a three-person team working to port Myst to iPhone, a no-brainer decision that should finally provide something like a killer app game for the device. Way back in the early 1990s, Myst was briefly Mac exclusive, and it typified everything great about that era’s multimedia focus. It was HyperCard-based, it used CD-ROM, and the graphics were gorgeous. And now it’s making a comeback. Can’t wait.

Cyan via Wired

“Apple is about the idea that people with passion can change the world.”

Exactly.

Digg via Romaine Moisescot

iHologram – iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.

The above video, “iHologram,” by animator David O’Reilly, is a fake. The awesome idea of using the accelerometers in the iPhone to manipulate a real-time animation is a great idea, and might even be possible in the right hands. But the video was made by pre-rendering the clip and then moving the iPod touch in time to show the right orientation.

O’Reilly explains:

The iHologram app was not real. It was an illustration of an idea I had which I believe could work with the technology (combining anamorphosis and motion sensing). Unfortunately I’m just an ideas person, and I can show how things should look, but I’m no hardcore programmer.

I’d be happy to collaborate with a developer or studio who want’s to make it happen, I’m bursting with ideas for the interactive world, but right now all my attention is on filmmaking.

My aim with this was to tackle the problem of 3d viewing in an original way using current technology, not fool anyone”¦ so for those who doubted but still supported it, respect. I hope it inspires some talented programmers out there.

Get cracking, iPhone developers!

Quick Look. Two words that brilliantly sum up one of the most important and yet least celebrated additions to the Mac experience. When stripped down to basics, Quick Look is merely a document preview. But what a preview! Using it, you can preview the majority of documents on your Mac by selecting them and hitting space, without opening the documents’ parent applications. Quick Look showcases the best of Apple and the Mac, highlighting how it’s sometimes the most obvious things that can be used as the basis for innovation and making the computing experience better.

Craig Grannell:
People use a whole lot of files, and Quick Look has the potential to save Mac users a lot of time every single day, by providing a full and simple preview to a selected file that doesn’t take ages to render, doesn’t require parent apps to open, and is often actually preferable to using apps at all. (I certainly rarely use Office now, preferring to read Word and Excel documents in Quick Look.) It shows how much Quick Look has become ingrained in me that I spent a good ten seconds dumbly hammering space on my iBook yesterday before realizing that, no, it doesn’t actually have Leopard installed.

For me, Quick Look shows what the best thing is about the Mac experience: it’s not about bells and whistles, and it’s not about flashy, showy gimmicks–it’s about doing something in the simplest, most efficient and intuitive fashion, in order to improve the experience for the user. And even though each use of Quick Look may save only a few seconds, it’s often the little things in the Mac user experience that leave the biggest impressions.

Leigh McMullen:
It’s hard to image that a simple OS feature could be considered one of the top Mac moments of the past 25 years. Nevertheless, Quicklook is truely a game changing feature, all the more so for its incredible subtlety. The implementation is so Apple. Take a feature (document preview) and make its implementation so seemless that it disappears. It’s like two-finger scrolling on Macbook Pro trackpads, you don’t even notice you’re doing it.

If you work with a lot of documents and doubt this feature’s importance, take the Tiger challenge: try using 10.4 for a day. You’ll be banging on that space-bar with so much  frustration your colleagues will think you’re playing Quake.

Sources familiar with inventory management practices at large retailers such as Target in the US and Argos in the UK say all signs point to a refresh of Apple’s iPod line on the near horizon.

Handheld PDA scanners used by employees at Target show all current iPod models have changed inventory status from “Active” to “Discontinued,” and Argos outlets in the UK have recently taken receipt of new point-of-sale displays promoting “price cuts,” according to a report atAppleInsider.

Who’s ready for a $199 iPod Touch?

Steve Wozniak spoke to Intel developers in San Francisco yesterday, telling them maintaining a vision without compromise, is “the right way of going through life.”

In a wide-ranging on-stage interview at the annual Intel Developer Forum, Wozniak also said being poor helps inspire creativity. As a computer designer, “I would do any trick I could think of to try to save money,” he said. “Not having any money helps.”

In the end, the man who began work on the first Apple computer as an engineer working at Hewlett-Packard (and offered his invention to that company five times before accepting rejection and taking it on himself with Steve Jobs), waxed philosophical about technology’s impact on our lives.

“Technology is always supposed to improve our lives,” he said. “I don’t know. Are we happier than we were 100 years ago? Are we happier than we were 1,000 years ago? Do we smile more?”

• Daring Fireball reports that OpenClip will fail once iPhone OS 2.1 ships: https://tinyurl.com/69lntu #

Image by Nathan via Flickr

Members of a SoHo neighborhood group lodged a lengthy formal complaint against the Apple Store at Prince & Green in Manhattan yesterday, calling the retail outlet “the worst neighbor in SoHo.”

An Alabama iPhone 3G owner filed suit in Federal court yesterday, seeking class action status in a complaint against Apple’s ‘twice as fast at half the price’ marketing blitz.

The petition claims “[Apple] expressly warranted that the Defective iPhone 3G would be ‘twice as fast’ and would otherwise perform adequately on the 3G standard or protocol.” The plaintiff claims she and a class of “thousands, perhaps tens of thousands” of consumers were duped by the company’s marketing into buying a product that does not perform as it was advertised  and asked the court to force Apple to repair or replace the iPhone 3G, and award  an unspecified amount of money in damages.

Apple has yet to issue a statement or response to the suit.

Via ComputerWorld

Image via Wall Street Journal

UPDATE: The original reference to Chiat\Day as creators of the campaign referred to in this post was incorrect. We regret the error and any confusion it may have caused.

Microsoft is launching a $300 million advertising campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld to try and slow the juggernaut that has seen Apple take increasingly big bites out of the Windows maker’s dominant share of the personal computer market.

Seinfeld, a known Apple/Mac fan, will reportedly take $10 million to look the other way and come up with one-liners to help transform Microsoft’s stodgy and serious image in the public mind.

The campaign, created by Chiat/Day, the agency responsible for Apple’s legendary 1984 commercial,  MDC Partners’ Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Miami, will also feature comedians Chris Rock and Will Ferrell (who starred in a Mac “switch” ad years ago). Apparently up in Redmond they don’t think Apple’s recent success is funny at all.

Via WSJ

Hulger’s P*Phone handset comes in Black, Red, Pink & White, with iPhone adapter.

We held a caption contest last week in which we asked readers to play photo editor and come up with an appropriate caption for the image below, with the winner to receive a Hulger P*Phone handset, with iPhone adapter, in the color of their choice.

The response was so great, we picked four winners! Read their excellent captions after the jump and click through to Hulger’s 20% discount URL that lets every Cult of Mac reader win this one.

iPhone speed tests conducted through TestMyiPhone initially appeared to confirm our report earlier today suspecting the upgrade to 2.0.2 firmware may have had a negative effect on 3G connectivity, according to a site administrator. Closer looks at the data in response to a Cult of Mac request leave the question of causation unresolved, however.

“[We] did make a new file to get the average upload/download for both 3G and EDGE,” reports the admin, adding, “this is much more accurate and based off just the last 24hrs.” And there does appear to be a decrease in comparison with historical data comprising the over 175,000 3G and EDGE tests done on the site.

But closer inspection of 3G and EDGE test trends over the past week show no correlation related to the 2.0.2 release on Monday.

In response, then, to the question that has the internet buzzing over 2.0.2’s effect on 3G connectivity, whether it fixes bugs that have been widely reported, if only by anecdote, or whether it has actually made things worse for some users, we can fall back on the old quote attributed to Mark Twain. The one about there being three kinds of lies in this life: lies, dammned lies, and statistics.

The iPhone 2.0.2 upgrade seems to have caused a significant drop in download speeds, according to statistics gathered by the Test My iPhone website.

The site, which allows iPhone users to test their iPhone’s download and upload speeds, shows that speeds for iPhones tested in the past 24 hours are significantly slower than the average speed in tests done prior to Monday’s release of the 2.0.2 firmware upgrade.

Prior to the upgrade, the average iPhone download speed is 2227.93 kbps (averaged from nearly 600,000 total speed tests made at the site).

But in tests made over the past 24 hours, the average is just 1429.31 kbps.

That’s a decrease of nearly 36 percent.

With widespread reports of 3G connection issues, the drop in download speeds seems to indicate that instead of fixing connectivity problems, the 2.0.2 update has actually made things worse. However, there could be several reasons for the speed decrease — from meteorological conditions to a spike in traffic on AT&T’s network.

The speed decrease may simply be  a bug in the site’s reporting tool. The average global download speed and the average upload speeds are the same: Both are 2227.93, which looks fishy.

We have contacted the site for further information, but have yet to hear back from them.

Apple released the 2.0.2 firmware for the iPhone a couple of days ago with cryptic release notes indicating “bug fixes.”

By yesterday afternoon, however, it seemed the company may be playing whack-a-mole with some issues, including widely reported 3G reception problems, and that disaffected users may be waiting until September for another shot at stable functionality across the iPhone product line.

Steve Jobs has written at least one iPhone customer, admitting that up to 2% of the iPhones out there could be suffering from “a known iPhone bug” that crashes 3rd party apps and will be fixed in the promised September 2.1 firmware release.

One thing is certain, with millions of iPhones now in the stream of commerce and credible expectations of Apple selling another several million in the next four months, if things are really broken the problem will soon move beyond a couple hundred complaints on Apple’s support forum.

Next time you’re running out for some organic produce or fresh-grilled unagi, if you’re in Texas, you might want to swing by H-E-B, where you can pick up a MacBook while you’re at it.

Who said Apple’s distribution model is restrictive?

Via AppleGazette

China has apparently shut off access to iTunes after discovering some Olympic athletes downloaded and have been playing Songs for Tibet, an album produced by The Art of Peace Foundation to raise funds to support “peace-related projects that are dear to the Dalai Lama”, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader whom China regards as subversive.

The group made the album available as a free download just prior to the start of the Olympics in Beijing on August 8 and encouraged Olympic athletes to download and play it on their iPods as a subtle protest during the games.

Via SMH, Australia

First generation iPod nano customers who have experienced their battery overheating should contact AppleCare for a replacement, the company said today, after scattered reports of some devices with battery problems that cause them to give off smoke or sparks.

Apple’s statement put the number of affected units at less than 0.001 percent of the devices, which were first released in September 2005. The problem units have been traced back to a single battery supplier. There have been no reports of serious injuries or property damage, and no reports of incidents for any other iPod nano model.

Via CNet

Apple has doubled its share of the mobile web browser market since launching iPhone 3G six weeks ago, according to Pacific Crest technology analyst Andy Hargreaves. Still quite a small pebble in a large pond, at 0.31% of the total mobile browser market, iPhone’s “accelerating web usage highlights…key long-term advantages” for Apple and the company’s investors, Hargreaves says. Coupled with the recent announcement that iPhones will be carried at Best Buy outlets beginning in September, he predicts Apple will easily sell more than the 3.5 million iPhones Wall Street expects in its third quarter.

Despite some continuing worry about the health of the general economy, Hargreaves and other analysts see the iPhone as very bullish for the price of Apple, Inc. shares. Consensus targets are in the $200 – $225 per share range; the stock closed today at $173.53.

Via CNBC

Apple Magsafe power adapters have apparently failed at high enough rates the company is now offering to replace them free of charge, whether your MacBook (13-inch Late 2006), MacBook (13-inch), MacBook Pro (15-inch Glossy) or  MacBook Pro (17-inch) is out-of-warranty or not.

Any Apple-Authorized Service Provider can make the switch for you, or you can take the adapter to the Genius bar at any Apple retail store.

Reservations recommended.