Cult of Mac

It’s a minor triumph of Apple’s that all AT&T plans for the iPhone include unlimited data services. After all, Blackberries and Treos alike have spendy access plans that dramatically increase their cost of use.

But as Justine Ezarik (a designer based in Pittsburgh known as iJustine who is also a “lifecaster” on Justin.tv) learned recently, AT&T still has a very old-world view of billing for data services. The company broke out as a line item every data transfer her iPhone made, including 30,000 texts, most of which come up as a huge series of $0.00 transactions. The total heft to the package? 300 pages. And it shipped in a box, which can’t have been cheap, even leaving aside the environmental impact of a few hundred thousand folks getting extra-big bills printed on paper.

In response, Justine has put up a marvelous iPhone ad parody that you can view above via YouTube. The message is clear: Get eBilling, and someone talk to AT&T about the way they manage billing for data!

Via Apple 2.0

Nintendo owns the portable gaming market. They have since they created it with Game & Watch in the mid-’80s and then revolutionized it with Game Boy in 1989. Many challengers have risen and fallen over the 18 years since.

But as I predicted the day the iPhone was released, a reckoning is due between Apple and Nintendo in the coming years. As GigaOM reported today, Nintendo has filed a patent for a tilt-sensitive handheld console (a perfect companion to the motion-based Wii). Meanwhile, the New York Times claims Apple is stealthily adding game functions to the iPhone. There’s nothing stealthy about it. You create a portable device capable of gorgeous graphics, pristine audio and driven by a multitouch interface, you’re already there in the first place.

Let’s go back to the prediction from Jan. 9, shall we?

And multi-touch in iPhone is significantly more flexible — it’s made to interpret complex gestures with more than one point of input. There are a number of DS games that could easily be adapted, and it’s just made to host a new rhythm or music game that would require drumming two spots at once. It’s not a threat to the DS, because its price-point is so much higher. It is a threat to crappy games for cell phones, which often cost $6 and suck.

More interestingly, this could begin to threaten Nintendo down the road. The iPhone and its interface are extremely high-end today. By the end of the year, Apple could replace its traditional high-end iPod with one driven by the new iPhone interface and screen and offer it for the same price those iPods sell for today — and even boost the hard drive size, too. Suddenly, you have the world’s premiere media player and rising games star in a $250 package. That beats the PSP any day and hounds the DS tomorrow.

Sounds good. Anything else?

That’s my prediction of the day: As the iPhone seizes the high-end of Apple’s consumer electronics products, the iPod becomes the ultimate PSP-killer, with an interface the DS can’t quite match without the need for a stylus. Tell me you wouldn’t buy that. I dare you.

I’m sorry. Sometimes the smug just gets everywhere.

Following the brief Apple Event last week where Steve Jobs rolled out new iMacs, iLife and iWork, the entire executive committee took a rare press conference. Though the attendant press peppered Steve and co. with good questions, one stood out for its ineptitude. Bob Keefe of Cox Newspapers, asked Apple why Macs don’t carry the “Intel Inside” stickers. No, really.

Steve, of course, replied that Apple likes its own stickers better, which is the best possible answer, given the circumstances. MacWorld has the full audio of the question and the half-laughed response to Keefe. It’s definitely worth it just for the reception of Steve’s answer.

And now we’ve seen where Keefe was going with his line of questioning. He wrote a trend story, published yesterday, that tried to link Apple’s disinterest in Intel Inside to an overall decline in the program. Which, to be frank, is really reaching. Especially since one of his pieces of evidence is that AMD chips are popular now and that Dell and HP have ad campaigns that aren’t solely focused on the use of Intel chips. Not to mention that Dell and HP are both moving in a strategic design direction that emphasizes their brands, not those of their suppliers.

Still, it does say something about how far outside the realm of typical business reporters Apple’s strategies are that people still might not understand the whole notion of a nice, clean design after all this time. And really, the question is barely different from asking, “Why isn’t the battery on the iPhone user-replaceable?” or “Why can’t I get third-party MagSafe power adapters?” Quite simply, Apple thinks it’s better this way. More attractive, maybe easier, and certainly more controlled. Apple loves it’s partners. But let’s face it — this is all about Apple and always has been.

No outside stickers need apply.

Via MacUser

Sorry for the inactivity over the last week, everyone. A lot of traveling for work, coupled with a massive layover in Kentucky, has kept me from blogging. I’ve got  a lot in the works, including an overview (and gentle mockery) of the first-ever issue of MacWorld from February 1984, featuring a profile of Mac fan Bill Gates (yes, I’m serious).

For now, though, enjoy some of the top stories from the week’s absence:

The new iMac — totally disassembled. [Kodawarisan]
First Review of iWork Numbers [MacWorld]
Woz Funds HotSwap.com [Reuters]
Apple Files New Patent For Multitouch on Laptops [Gizmodo]
What’s Behind Apple’s iWork? [BusinessWeek]
Guy Creates Fake iPhone From Scratch (But Leaves Out YouTube Icon) [Gizmodo]
iPhone Video-Conferencing With Mirrors [MacDaddyWorld]

And we’re off to the races. Despite Apple’s interest in restricting iPhone development to themselves and trusted third-parties like Google, clever programmers have delivered native software for the device — including an addictive-looking game called “Lights Off,” released today by Delicious Monster.

It’s a standard puzzle-game — tap the buttons to turn out all the lights in the 5×5 grid — but the presentation is very slick, and the iPhone interface alone makes it more compelling than it would be on OS X for Mac.

As with all unsupported iPhone software, it takes some warranty-voiding mojo to make “Lights Off” install, but the app’s creators, Lucas Newman and Adam Betts, helpfully include full instructions:

Installing third-party applications on your iPhone is not for the faint of heart. For more in depth instructions on iPhone modifications, look at the iPhone Dev Wiki.

1. Download iActivator and use it to “perform jailbreak” on your iPhone to allow access to the entire filesystem, which is necessary to upload applications.

2. Use iPHUC to upload Lights Off.app to the Applications folder on your iPhone.

3. Install SSH (or the alternate version) on your iPhone, and run the command: chmod +x “/Applications/Lights Off.app/LightsOff”

Not for the faint of heart, as you can see. But still: Blinking lights! Blinking lights and the satisfaction of walking on forbidden ground!

Via Daring Fireball.

Some months ago, the Internet was abuzz with the news that Apple had killed the Mac mini. Except that Apple hadn’t — the littlest Mac was still on sale, even if it’s tech was starting to look a bit long in the tooth. The site that started the rumor, AppleInsider, posted a comment stating full confidence that the Mac mini was going to kick any second.

Except it hasn’t — Apple quietly updated the product to current Core2 Duo processors. You can even get a Mac mini with a 2Ghz chip, which seems pretty far from a DOA product. Despite abundant evidence that the Mac mini has been a consistent seller for Apple, and that the line won’t get killed any more than today’s new iMacs “killed” the product line they replaced, AppleInsider still claims that the Mac mini will die real soon now.

While AppleInsider remains confident that Apple ultimately intends to phase out the diminutive Mac, the Cupertino-based firm quietly updated existing models with faster processors on Tuesday.

Well, of course Apple will ultimately phase out the Mac mini. But it won’t be a sudden pulling of the plug on a laggard product line. It will be the gentle retirement of a successful run of years. They’re flailing for hype. Nothing to see here.

Everyone who joking referred to the keynote Steve Jobs gave in January as the critical moment of the iPhoneWorld conference just got a lot more ammunition, as a large number of Mac-related expected announcements that never surfaced back then just dropped together: Sexy aluminum, thin, iMacs; a new version of iLife; a new version of iWork; and some new features for .Mac. A random August product launch is the new MacWorld.

Many of the rumor-mongers were right on the money about the iMacs. They’re thin as could be, they use the exact keyboard that leaked to the web the other week, and their fronts recall almost exactly the back face of the iPhone. It’s a clever design move, extending the iMac as big brother of the iPod metaphor to a new iMac as big brother to the iPhone. That said, it’s hard to describe these as being a radical leap forward. They’re virtually the same design as the last generation, only thinner, hotter, faster. The desktop market is ripe for disruption.

The additions to iLife are similarly unexciting. As excited as I am that iPhoto now has event-organized cataloging, and the Magic GarageBand feature that can turn music played on a guitar into a trumpet or otherwise. But the new Web Gallery features on .Mac aren’t that different from what came before — they’re just much more appealing and creative than what came before. Definitely not a big enough shift.

iWork has finally been fleshed out into a real office suite, offering Numbers, a spreadsheet program that has been rumored at least since Columbus landed in the Caribbean. It looks very appealing, and I think I’m finally going to invest in it. I love Keynote, and Pages looks improved (hey, Apple realized that people want to write, not just lay out text!).

Edited to correct my obvious typo. The more I think about this, the more it makes sense. This would be the perfect platform to introduce a radical mouse replacement for — like a huge trackpad with multitouch. The design language screams multitouch. Curiouser and curiouser.

Original Post: Interesting bit of speculation over at Gizmodo today about the new iMacs we’re all expecting hear about tomorrow. It’s all summed up in the picture they mocked up above. Basically, if the last generation of iMacs was made to look like the big brother of the iPod, why shouldn’t generation tie into Apple’s new top-of-the-line portable lifestyle device the iPhone?

Back when Apple introduced the first Intel iMacs in January 2006, I was quite surprised that the company maintained the identical form factors from the the final PowerPC iMacs, which were only three months old at the time. Thinking about it more, however, it made perfect sense. Apple was deliberately designing to emphasize the reliability of the new technologies. Now that the Intel Macs are runaway hits, it’s time to emphasize the benefits of connecting an iPhone to an iMac. A perfect design strategy.

I wouldn’t buy one, but it’s a lot more credible than the Apple Cinema Display knock-offs people are passing off as iMac shots in this rumor cycle.

This viral video is too meta to be believed. It stars Randi Jayne, the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and David Prager, COO of online TV channel Revision3, which hosts the Diggnation show, and the video’s about an Apple product. It’s like a Silicon Valley intermarriage.

It’s still pretty funny, though. Especially if you’re into parodies of “Freak Like Me.

Via Apple 2.0

The “leaked” pics of a new iMac making the rounds are clearly a Photoshop fake made from images of Apple’s Cinema Displays taken from Apple’s website. See below.
The color also screams fake.

A new iMac is rumored to be introduced by Steve Jobs at a special event at Apple HQ on Tuesday — and everyone is hoping for a redesign. But Apple’s consumer machines do not come with metallic finishes. That’s reserved for the “pro” level machines. If the iMac has a new case, it will be made of plastic and will come in black, white or maybe other fruity colors.

The Fake:

From Apple’s website:

.

Pic: Forbes.

Fake Steve has been outed by (of all publications) the New York Times, and turns out he’s Dan Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes. Here’s the story: A Mystery Solved: ‘Fake Steve’ Is an Editor

“Mr. Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year, when a small group of chief executives turned bloggers attracted some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly. “I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if a C.E.O. kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it.”

Ironically, Lyons was the author of a Forbes hit piece on blogs last year, called Attack of the Blogs. It begins: “Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.”

Of course, libel, lies and invective is what makes Fake Steve fun, but a lot of it was aimed at his fellow journalists. It was pretty clear Fake Steve was a journalist or editor — given all the pops he made at fellow Silicon Valley scribblers. He called Gawker publisher Nick Denton a “macrocephalic sodomite” (Denton is gay and has a large head).

Now that he’s been outed, it’s going to be pretty uncomfortable for him running into his targets.

UPDATE: Fake Steve has just posted his won entry about the Times story. He’s glad he was busted by the Times and not Valleywag, which has been on the hunt for months. Fake Steve writes:

“One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag. I really, really enjoyed seeing those guys keep guessing wrong. For six months Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth put their big brains together and couldn’t come up with the answer. Guy from the Times did it in a week. So much for the trope about smarty-pants bloggers disrupting old media. Brilliant. My only regret is that we didn’t get a chance to see Bigglesworth take a few more swings and misses.”

Caution: What you don’t know about this post could cause your children to develop psychic powers and revive the dead — with stolen iPods! Also: Alarmism in television news magazines: Are you safe? More importantly, is your cat?

Everyone must watch or read the transcript of Dateline NBC‘s howlingly funny special “\to catch_an i-Jacker” (I swear I didn’t make up any of the odd formatting in the above title, which, um…reminds me of a certain Daily Show segment…). Apparently, the investigative crew was shocked — SHOCKED! — to learn that iPods occasionally get stolen. And worse, sometimes other things get stolen, too!

In Los Angeles, robberies of iPods and other gadgets shot up 34 percent last year.

To make sure iPods don’t kill your children, please click through, and don’t stop until the part where the reporters use a sexual predator tactic in order to catch a thief. No, seriously. You have to see this.

According to The Register, a Microsoft employee who made this hilarious Zune parody ad (featuring his boss, Monkey Boy Steve Ballmer) was fired for his trouble.

Via Fake Steve

With all the hubbub surrounding the release of the iPhone (can you believe it’s been more than a month already?), Apple’s introduction of miniature Apple Stores inside of Best Buys kind of flew under the radar. Which is kind of odd, because the Best Buy mini-stores represent Apple’s resurgence more than almost anything else that’s happened in Steve Jobs’s tenure.

After all, in the 1990s, Best Buy did such a terrible job selling Macs that Apple pulled is products out of the entire chain, focusing on CompUSA and Internet sales. Now, almost 10 years later, Apple returns on its own terms.

I checked out the Apple mini-store in the Best Buy in Santa Rosa, California on Saturday night, where I took a couple of photos. It’s an interesting set-up, all-in-all. Very consumer-focused, which makes sense, but I was surprised that Apple isn’t selling any Mac Pros at Best Buy at all. It’s MacBooks (and Pros), iMacs, and nothing else. The entire display centers on computers — not on iPods, let alone iPhones, which aren’t stocked at Best Buy at all. A very interesting positioning all around — given that it’s the iPod and its accessories that brought Apple back into most retail stores.

Macs star, and it’s about time. Click through the jump for another image from the store.

Several hundred thousand people across the country are now happy iPhone users. They’re also all AT&T users, whether they wanted to be or not. Until Apple shipped their wonder-phone, I was never that interested in phones focused on e-mail and web browsing — then it all changed. However, as a T-Mobile user, my options are limited. Much as I would like to say I’m glad that my service agreement will force me to wait until at least the second-generation iPhone, I’m not. I want a great phone. And so I headed to the T-Mobile store yesterday, in search of hope. And I found none. To read the gory details, hit the jump.

Visual comparison of rumored new iMac keyboard to existing iMac keyboard. [Gizmodo]

Hackers release proof-of-concept “Hello World” application for iPhone [TUAW]

USB Hard Drives Now Work with AppleTV — But Not Well [AppleTV Hacks]

iPhone Making Calls on Australian Carrier [MacNN]

Minor GUI improvements in latest Leopard Builds [ThinkSecret]

Shut Down Dell and Give the Money Back to Shareholders [ZDNet]

Hot technologies often inspire imitators and detractors. The set of touchscreen iPhone-alikes coming from China are pretty clear evidence of the former, and anyone telling themselves they like their Treos just fine represent the latter.

But nothing’s weirder than the ancillary universes that show up to support the latest buzzworthy devices. And nothing for the iPhone is weirder than iRovr, a social network for iPhones only. It doesn’t seem to be much more than Friendster or Facebook optimized for the device, but it just expands the exclusive advantages extended to iPhone owners.

As you can see, however, there is a way to cheat your way in. Just use Safari 3. Which raises an interesting question: Is it lamer to join iRovr as an iPhone owner — or to cheat your way in as a non-iPhone-owning Safari user because you want the reflected glory?

My money’s on the second one.

Picture by Ed Dame

The iPhone’s non-user-replaceable battery has been a source of endless controversy since Apple first debuted the device. Some claimed that Apple wouldn’t even be able to sell any iPhones once people realized they couldn’t pop in a spare battery on the road (this idea totally ignoring, of course, the fact that many people, myself included, have never ever swapped cell batteries on the fly…). Others are under the impression that the iPhone’s battery will altogether stop working after either 300 or 400 charges — even though it’s pretty clear that figure states that iPhone battery capacity is more likely to fall to 80 percent after that time. Which is a bit different from 0 percent.

Now, of course, all of this confusion has yielded a class-action suit. Perhaps if everyone would just talk to Philip Elmer-Dewitt at Apple 2.0, this would all get cleared up. He’s put together a very detailed account of the entire battery saga. Check it out, and try not to lose your mind. That way lies madness.

Very few promising technologies have taken as long to catch on as the ebook. Everyone seems to be under the impression that electronics will one day replace printed books. But almost no one wants to actually read their books that way.

The sole users of ebooks tend to be people with PDAs — and now iPhones. A new site, TextOniPhone has sprung up to meet people’s needs to read works of literature on their revolutionary Internet Communicators. The site purports to have more than 20,000 books and novels optimized for reading on the iPhone. All the texts are public domain, and, as seems to be the norm these days, the site only works on iPhone (or a user-agent-spoofed browser). IPhone Dispatch has a nice review.
Gerry Manacsa, a senior designer at WOWIO, checked out a bunch of PDFs on an iPhone to test the platform’s viability as an ebook reader. His results were fairly good, particularly for comics, which is where I see the iPhone excelling, personally. This will be an interesting thread to watch.

Via Digg.

Despite the best efforts of folks like me, bonafide iPhones didn’t show up in the wild until a few week prior to release. As it turns out, that’s because Apple was smart enough to hide iPhones inside of other devices. This according to Richard Burns, AT&T’s President of Wireless Networks, in an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal.

So secretive was the project that he didn’t even show the phone to his wife. And when AT&T’s team of testers hit the streets to try the phone in ballparks, subways and skyscrapers, Burns said they used a contraption to cloak the device so nobody would know what the testers were holding.

Burns declined to offer a description of the cloaking device, calling it “something that looked like something else.”

That’s how you know Apple is brilliant: They made it look like “something that looked like something else.” How visionary. Or not.

My best guess is that Apple made the iPhones look like Zunes. Any other guesses?

Via Digg.
Image from Hideapod.

Columnist John Dvorak at an Apple Store. Pic by Steve Rhodes.

Columnist John Dvorak, who is perhaps the most hated pundit by Mac users because of his constant (and quote deliberate) Mac bashing, is now a Mac user himself — and he likes it.

In his latest PC Magazine Column, Dvorak confesses that he has been using an iMac at work for a couple of months, and it’s “not half bad.” After heaping on more weak praise, he says he has no plans to buy a Mac for personal use at home, but he increasingly finds himslef recommending the Mac to friends and neighbors who ask him what to buy! He writes:

“I can see why the Mac is gaining market share, because the rationale for using one is simple. Do you want to deal with the agony of antivirus, firewall, antispyware, and other touchy software subsystems, many of which do not work well? Or do you want to boot Microsoft Word and write a document and be done with it?

As someone who does recommend gear to people, I have to think to myself, “Should I recommend something that will come back to haunt me, or recommend a Mac with its higher price but lower hassle factor?” The answer is simple. I hate the idea of having to do customer service for people who cannot keep their systems clean, and that’s most people.”

Chart: MarketWatch.

Apple’s Q3 was the company’s best ever. It raked in $5.41 billion in sales, posting a $818 million in profit. Gross margins — the amount of revenue that is profit — is up to a whopping 36 percent. This surely is the highest in the industry. By contrast, Dell reported Q2 2007 margins of just 4.3 percent, earning $605 million profit on revenues of $14.1 billion.
Apple also reported 10 million iPods sold — up 21 percent on the year before; and 1.76 million Macs, up 33 percent year-on-year.

Apple’s stock is rebounding on the news: it’s up 6 percent after taking a hammering yesterday on AT&T’s iPhone numbers.

Picture by Ed Dame.

Apple sold 270,000 iPhones on the opening weekend, according to Apple’s Q3 results.

See the data PDF here.

AT&T’s quarterly results said only 146,000 were activated in the first two days — so it looks like 124,000 people either waited a few days to activate their phones, or had trouble activating them, as was widely reported.

We now have definitive proof that a business world built on the quarterly earnings report is destined for self-destruction: Apple’s stock fell almost $9 because its partner AT&T “only” managed to activate 146,000 iPhones in its first day and a half on sale. Not that the activation figure directly reflects the number of iPhones sold.

Yes, I’m serious, and I’m totally bewildered. Analysts and investors are pretending that the second quarter, which closed June 30, would be the one that reflects the impact of the iPhone. Which is nice, except that the iPhone went on sale at 6 p.m. on June 29, and AT&T had serious network issues that prevented people from activating their phones until well into the next week. Which means that anyone who couldn’t or chose not to activate their iPhone until after midnight on June 30 got left out of this report.

Which is obviously a clear sign that it’s time to sell all of your shares in AAPL. Obviously. You know how, in movies, we’ve gotten to the point where people talk about the highest opening 5.5-day gross ever by a film released on a Tuesday in a month with a full moon that falls on a Saturday? This is the opposite. This is the smallest 1.5-day activation ever for an incredibly successful product. They chopped off Sunday, for heaven’s sake!

But this is the world that exists. It’s all about the quarterlies. And maybe that means that Apple did AT&T a disservice by not launching a week sooner. It shouldn’t have any impact on the long-term health of either firm. But it’s idiotic. Especially since AT&T experienced — wait for it — 61 percent total revenue growth!

Grrrr. Anyway, don’t read too much into these numbers. Apple will release its sales numbers soon, which are a clearer indication of how well the iPhone did in its first day and a half. Not that a day and a half of sales matters. It’s stupid. Can we talk about this in October?

Image via TechDigest

Watch the video up top. It’s a pretty terrifying video of a totally compromised iPhone through a new exploit of Safari, both on iPhone and likely PCs and Macs. A fix is already in the works, but I have to say I’m not that bothered. Why? Because it, like every other really dangerous exploit of a Mac or Apple product I’ve seen is heavily reliant on social engineering. For your iPhone to freak out and possibly shoot your cats with an iLaserbeam, you first need to go to a website specifically designed to make your iPhone freak out and kill your kittens. And I’m sorry, there’s no amount of protection that can protect people who are dupes for fraud. You can only go so far. This hole needs to close, no doubt, but if people vulnerable to harm on the web don’t know to only go to links they can trust, they probably shouldn’t be using the web at large.

Now, when people can make this happen over WiFi without the use of an exploit-focused website, then I’ll panic. And probably go back to landlines.

Via NY Times.