Picture: The president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushenko, yakking on his iPhone. The iPhone is hot in the Slavic country. From iPhone Code.

Used iPhones are worth more than $1,000 in Ukraine, according to the Craigslist buyer who just purchased my slightly scratched iPhone for (get this) $350.

The buyer, named Claude, is heading to Ukraine next week on business and everyone he meets will ask him for an iPhone, he says. He’s sold dozens of iPhones, new and used: It doesn’t really matter.

In fact, I sold him two iPhones: a virgin 16-Gbyte model still sealed in its box, and my slightly worn day-to-day iPhone, an original 8-Gbyte model.

I got $850 for both phones — $500 for the new one (it retails for $500 + $40 tax) and $350 for the used iPhone (it sells new for $400 + $34 tax. I paid $600 minus a $100 rebate).

I felt pretty good until Claude told me he’ll be getting at least $1,000 for the used iPhone in Ukraine, and more for the new one. WTF! — thanks for telling me!

Still, it’s not all gravy. Claude says he has to keep the iPhones on his person when passing through customs, or they disappear from his luggage. Likewise the chargers, cords and everything else. Plus, he has to bribe every official he meets.

Claude wasn’t aware there’s a new iPhone model expected next month (which is why I’m selling). Not that it mattered. He says he’ll take all and any iPhones I can send his way.

Anyone want to get rid of their old iPhone?

The lines are 30-people deep for an iPhone in NYC, Gizmodo reports. And that’s for the current generation iPhone — not version 2.0 excepted in a month.

It seems there’s lots of people desperate to get their hands on unopened iPhones — even a couple of weeks before older models are outdated.

A couple of months ago I bought a 16-Gbyte iPhone at the Apple Store, thinking I’d upgrade from my original 8-Gbyte iPhone. But then rumors of the iPhone 2.0 started catching fire, so I didn’t open it. With the release of a 3G iPhone looking likely in early June, I thought it better to wait.

Trouble is, I waited too long to return the unopened iPhone to the Apple Store, which has a two-week return policy. So earlier this week, I put it on Craigslist for $550 ($50 over retail) and crossed my fingers.

Boy, was I surprised. I’ve had several offers, many of them for the inflated price. Most of these buyers asked me if I had more than one phone.

The first offer came in just a few seconds after I posted the ad. The buyer, who I’m meeting this afternoon, wrote: “I will need as many as you have. no receipt needed if you know what I mean.”

The iPhone must be headed overseas. Apple has a policy limiting sales to five iPhones per customer — checked against their credit card.

I’ll be asking the buyer some questions this afternoon about his interest in buying multiple, unopened iPhones.

Link to “iPhone wanted” ads on SF Craigslist.

Macworld has some interesting, contrarian advice about buying a Mac these days.

A couple of years ago, pro users would never consider a low-end iMac or MacBook portable for work: it just wouldn’t be powerful enough.

But because Apple is using powerful dual-core Intel chips across its entire line, the difference between machines is blurring.

After running a battery of tests, MacWorld concludes that for most people, a new iMac or MacBook Pro is good enough — pro, power users included. The savings add up to $1,000 or more.

… for most mainstay applications, the high-end iMac and MacBook Pro models are plenty fast (the 3.06GHz build-to-order iMac even beat the Mac Pro in some of our tests). Even Adobe Photoshop, a heavy-duty program that conventional wisdom has long argued should be run only on a high-end system, works acceptably well on just about any Mac (unless you’re editing gigantic files).

A new limited-edition, Europe-only R2-D2 DVD Projector now has an integrated iPod dock for projecting the Star Wars saga onto your living room wall. Earlier versions of the Artoo didn’t have an iPod dock. The projector is limited to 4,000 units, and costs € 2799 — about $4,300.The dock is compatible with the 1G and 2G iPod nano,* and 5G iPod with video.*(Facts corrected, thanks to reader Mario Panighetti)Link.

Open and Save dialogs are as unsexy as things come on the Mac, but every Mac user has to deal with them daily. Despite Mac OS X being in its fifth major incarnation, these dialogs are still limited, but with Default Folder X, everything changes, and even a little sleekness is thrown into the mix.Once Default Folder X is installed, a black HUD-style overlay surrounds Open and Save dialog boxes, its toolbar providing access to user-definable favorites, recent folders, and a slew of handy options (such as rename, reveal and move) that puts Apple’s own dialogs to shame. Usefully, favorites can have hot-keys assigned via Default Folder’s preferences pane, which also provides the means to create a default Open/Save folder for each installed application.

Other included niceties are the menu/Dock item, providing a system-wide means of rapidly navigating mounted volumes and defined favorites, and a superior preview within Open dialogs, which automatically stretches to fill available vertical space. Spotlight comments and file properties are also possible to manipulate from Open and Save dialogs when Default Folder X is installed.

Although at the pricier end of the shareware spectrum—especially for a one-shot utility—Default Folder X is nonetheless an essential purchase. The seconds it saves every time you open or save a file soon add up, and after a few months’ use, you’ll find Macs lacking the application feel naked by comparison.

Default Folder X continues to excel in its fourth major revision, making it much easier for Mac users to open and save files.

Further information

Manufacturer: St. Clair Software
Price: $34.95 (upgrades from $14.95)
URL: www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/

Isamu Sanada, the Japanese photographer who makes Mac mockups, has created a new design for a tablet Mac that blends the iPhone with the MacBook Air subnotebook. He calls it the Mac Air.

According to a rough translation of his site, the Mac Air also doubles as a desktop.

It hooks to a wireless keyboard and uses a wireless Time Capsule-like docking station as a hard drive. The dock includes a SuperDrive for playing and burning Cds/DVDs.

It boots into the iPhone operating system when a tablet, and OS X when used as a desktop.

It’s a great idea, but will Apple  ever make such a device? Maybe. Sanada has once or twice correctly predicted Apple’s products in the past. As previously reported:

Isamu Sanada is a photographer by trade, but an Apple designer by calling.

Sanada is an amateur designer of fantasy Macintoshes. His Applele website is a popular showcase for dozens of speculative designs for future Apple machines.

In fact, Sanada is so adept at mimicking Apple’s look, he created a design for a new laptop that predicted Apple’s distinctive Titanium PowerBook G4 months before it came out.

Link to Sanada’s Mac Air mockup.

Sanada hasn’t made a new design for many months. No word why he’s returned to making fantasy Macs. His email simply said:

“I made a new image. Please enjoy it.”

VMWare, the virtualization powerhouse that brought its Fusion software to Mac in late 2006, is now just about ready to roll its second major version of the program for OS X. Late this afternoon, VMWare sent over info and download links for a public beta of Fusion 2.0, and, I have to say, it’s looking hawt. More comprehensive DirectX 9 support for seamless PC gaming, insane levels of multimonitor support (ten screens!) and easy importing of Parallels, Virtual PC and even Boot Camp partitions.

Better yet, VMWare has announced that Fusion 2.0 will be free to all existing Mac customers once the final version ships. Of the three big updates, the monitor support is the big one. Parallels doesn’t support multiple displays for Windows, and the Fusion implementation looks nicer than multiple displays for most native PCs. Parallels can do Mac in one screen, Windows in another, but not Windows on two displays for the same virtual machine. Granted, this is a fairly niche feature, but its really well put together, as you can see in the video I’ve thrown up at the top.

The beta is wide open, so if you want in on the action and can live with a few beta quirks, hit the link.

Pete’s post below got me thinking. Apple’s star is rising, and they absolutely are eroding the market-share of Windows. Every quarter this thing of ours becomes more and more mainstream, and it’s not impossible to imagine a time when the Mac will at least have a significant degree of parity with Windows. This raises a bigger question: would we ever want Apple to eclipse Microsoft?

The first thing they teach you in strategic planning is to perform the following assessment:

“What are the benefits of a course of action, versus, what are the negatives of following the same. What are the possible unintended consequences”.

Now certainly we are all excited about Apple’s continued rise, but there may also be come cause for concern. In the rest of this article we’re going to play the “Unintended Consequences Game”.

While it’s taken as writ that we cultists tend to be creative types, a recent study from the Fuqua school of business at Duke University seems to indicate that simply seeing an Apple logo makes you more creative.

The researchers conducted a number of experiments, one of which was showing the logos for fractions of a second to create a subliminal impression, and in all cases those who’d seen the Apple logo scored higher on standardized creativity tests than those who’d seen the IBM logo or no logos at all.

Keith Sawyer in his Creativity and Innovation blog has got a great write up on the paper if you don’t feel like sorting through all the academic stuff in the published paper (I managed to get through 5 whole pages before turning to Keith’s excellent article).

Very interesting cover story in BusinessWeek about soaring demand for Macs inside of companies. In some ways, this is an inevitable outgrowth of the success of the iPod. Sales of the iPod goose home sales of Macs, and once you’ve got a Mac, you never want to work in Windows again. Writer Peter Burrows says it well:

But now the call is coming from mainstream users, people who may have started off with an iPod, then bought a Mac at home and no longer want a “Windows-by-day, Mac-by-night” existence.

This may be a sign of hope for all of us Mac users-in-exile. I work in an all-ThinkPad office, and dream of getting to live an all-Mac life. But since we’re consultants, we use the same machines that our clients do. What does that mean? Buy more Macs, corporate world! Then we can ditch Windows for good!

Okay I know it’s an oxymoron, but work with me here.

link to the full video

Mac|Life reports that a OQO user has managed to get Leopard up and running on his hand-held, complete with a pretty impressive video on YouTube. Ordinarily, I could give to shakes for some beige box running OS X, but the OQO device is actually cool enough that I’d actually buy one if we can get OS X on it stable.

Whats notable from the video is that OS X Boots Sloooooooow, and runs Slooooooow on the device. But I’m pretty sure there are some clever folks out there who work out a way to speed it up. And besides, OQO was founded by ex-Apple folks, so the design is pretty slick, too.

So the utter blasphemy of a Hackintosh aside, this really reinfoces the fact that consumers want something more than an iPhone, but less than a full-on Mac.

What do you think? If someone offered this thing commercially (Hopefully Apple) would you buy one?

Take this with a grain of salt, but Fortune’s Scott Moritz has filed a report claiming that AT&T will subsidize the price of the hotly awaited 3G iPhone down to start at $199 with a two-year agreement, which would be a clear sign that the company is serious about starting to move some massive numbers of the device when it drops in June.

There are definitely parts of the story that I don’t buy — I don’t think Apple is going to go 8 and 16 gig on the new iPhone, let alone “8-gigabit-memory and 16-gigabit-memory,” and the pricing strategy only makes sense if the iPhone is non-exclusive to AT&T. If Apple’s selling the 3G iPhone unlocked at Apple Stores for $200 more, this makes sense. If not, this is just bizarre.

Thoughts? I really hope we see a 32-gigabyte model of the 3G iPhone – that makes it not just a nano replacement for me, but an actual iPod replacement.

FORTUNE: Techland AT&T to cut the price of Apple’s new iPhone

Thanks, Matt!

Tags: iphone, rumor, at&t, speculation

Apple’s alliance with American Idol has caused me some discomfort this year, so I always do my best to mock the entire enterprise. As eagle-eyed reader Scott noticed, the recent iTunes and Idol charity event Idol Gives Back tends to, ahem, “borrow” the design language of a York Peppermint Patty. I’m sure this was Fox’s designers rather than Apple, but still…

My ambivalence toward the MacBook Air is pretty well-known. While I think its basic idea is compelling, Apple’s execution just leaves too much to be desired with just one USB port, terrible iPod hard drive, and no mobile broadband radio. This parody from Lenovo that’s been circulating to its suppliers in China sort of sums up the flaw in Steve’s vision for a truly wireless laptop. I mean, how can you release a machine with one USB port when the iPod and iPhone both need to be synced over USB and not WiFi?

Bonus points for the warbly parody of the MacBook Air song.

YouTube – test Via Fake Steve

Tags: macbookair, lenovo, thinkpad, humor, parody

That’s a MacBook Pro, apparently running Steve Ballmer’s keynote presentation at a media conference in Louvain, Belgium last week. Flickr user Paint.It.Black got the shot, and Choubistar got a picture with both Ballmer and the MacBook Pro together. Allegedly, MacBook Pros were used to drive all presentations for the conference, and there are multiple shots of it. No Photoshop. Glorious.

What laptop does Steve Ballmer use for his presentations? Right… on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Via Gizmodo

The MacUpdate promo has unlocked both Parallels and BannerZest (as well as Sound Studio), reversing my prior concerns, and making the bundle one heck of a good deal. Parallels alone (which I have used the heck out of), is worth the $64.99 price of entry, getting BannerZest tossed in is just icing. As per my previous review, Art-Text and DVDRemaster pro also seem to be pretty handy utilities, adding value to the bundle. But the unlocking of parallels is what really tips it over the edge for me.

Only three days left, folks.

My old colleague Rob Beschizza, who recently abandoned Wired.com for BoingBoing Gadgets, has a brilliant parody of my new book, Inside Steve’s Brain. The treacherous bastard writes:

“It’s hard to believe that one man revolutionized the operating system business in the 2000s, converting Windows’ extraordinary market dominance into the reviled seven-year ditch that is Vista, and squandering billions on confused advances into ill-understood peripheral markets like video gaming and music hardware

…. Wired.com’s Leander Kahney cuts through the salt-ringed tide marks that surround him to unearth secrets to his unbelievable results. It reveals the real Steve.”

LINK.

Pitting two great software bundles head-to-head in CultofMac cage match? What the heck, we have to do something to amuse ourselves until WWDC

Mac users this week are presented with two choices for bundles of shareware. The MacHiest bundle that includes 12 titles, bundled together for $49, and the MacUpdate promo that includes 10 titles for $64.99 (albeit 3 of them are locked until they reach specific sales numbers).

We get under the covers of these bundles to see which are worth your hard-earned duckets.

UPDATE: Microsoft says this was their attempt to make the worst internal video ever. MMM…yeah. Interesting spin…

I’ve been wrapping up an all-intensive project at work lately, but I have to break my silence for this: “Rocking Our Sales” by Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band. I don’t really know where to begin. I guess I will just say this. I have no idea if Apple makes lame Bruce Springsteen parody music videos to inspire its channel sales teams, but if it does, I have to assume that it uses better lyrics than “Talk up our Microsoft Application Virtualization…See what’s on employee’s laptops with AIS and MDOP!”

EPIC FAIL, MS! And if anyone is actually inspired to sell more Vista based on this, really think about switching your job. I mean, damn.

Via Daring Fireball

Filed under: Still Speculating, just not wildly.

My inept Photoshop skills aside, Leander’s post below and the prevalence of the OSX86 project and similar efforts really speak to a single problem within the Macintosh lineup: The Tweener. That is, the Mac that is in between the Mac Mini and the MacPro. Apparently there are a WHOLE lot of folks who are desperate for this machine. Why it doesn’t exist is a mystery. Not only is there apparently a huge market for this kind of machine, there is an even larger market for “Certified Mac” after-market parts.

It’s a wonder that being the “Salesy” part of a duo that built their first computer in a garage, Steve doesn’t seem to get that enthusiasts want a computer they can “tinker” with.

As always I am gratuitously soliciting your comments as to what you’d like to see in this machine. My specs follow after the break

Apple has pushed past Toshiba to become the fourth largest PC maker in the U.S., according to new numbers from research firm Gartner.

Apple earned 6.6 percent of the PC market in Q1 2008, and saw 32.5 percent year-on-year growth in unit shipments, Gartner said. Overall, the PC market grew 3 percent year-on-year, Gartner said.

Apple trails Dell (31.4 percent market share), Hewlett-Packard (25 percent) and Acer (9.1 percent). While Dell grew 15 percent year-on-year during the quarter, Acer slipped 18.3 percent, Gartner said.

Acer is only 2.5 percentage points ahead of Apple, and Apple is positioned to regain the number-three slot, which it hasn’t held since the mid-nineties.

Worldwide, Apple failed to make the top 5 (HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba).

A Santa Cruz woman is using Leopard’s Back to My Mac remote control software to track a thief who stole her laptop.

The woman, named Joey, had her MacBook and iPhone stolen from her truck. The thief didn’t wipe the MacBook, and Joey was able to log on remotely every time the crook connected to the internet using Back To My Mac. Built-into OS X, Back To My Mac allows administrators to take full control of machines over the Net.

Joey was able to remove sensitive data; copy and delete files; and then spy on the thief using the MacBook’s built-in iSight camera.

The crook spends a lot of time in cafes using free WiFi to search file sharing networks for software, music and movies.

As the crook surfed the Net, Joey was able to compile a full profile for police, including his Gmail account, home IP address, mother’s maiden name, and even snap clear pictures showing the detail of his tattoos.

Santa Cruz police are reportedly issuing a warrant to arrest the thief.

Joey was documenting the entire process on a LiveJournal account, which has been taken offline, likely to prevent the crook from getting wind of his impending arrest.

Via Roughly Drafted.

The first movie starring stoner legend Ellen Feiss, the break-out star of Apple’s “Switch ads,” will air online on Monday, April 21. But don’t get too excited: it looks like a turkey.

Bed & Breakfast, an indie movie shot in France, will air at 9:30PM ET / 6:30 PM PT on TheDigitalLifestyle.tv, a 24-hour Apple-related Web TV channel.

Feiss stars as the girlfriend of an American guy lured to a castle owned by a former college roommate, or something. The movie was shot in 2006 and seems to have promptly disappeared. There’s no indication whether it’s a comedy, a drama or a slasher flick.

It looks like a film school project; it “twists the apparent perception of things to reveal the reality that lurks behind,” according to this archived web site for the film.

Feiss shot to fame in 2002 after slurring her words in an Apple Switch ad detailing how her dad’s PC ate her homework. The ad became an online sensation, and was parodied widely. Feiss was invited on late night TV and was offered roles in moveis and TV shows, but shunned Hollywood — until now.

Here’s a still of Feiss from the movie:

Trying to find out if would-be Mac clone maker Psystart in legit or not, Gizmodo readers went to the two addresses identified by the Guardian’s Charles Arthur (see below). As Arthur predicted, one address is a single-story home, and the other address is a warehouse, but it’s home to a completely different company.

The Gizmodo reader, Michael, snapped some pictures and talked to the warehouse manager, who has never heard of Psystar.

In addition, another Giz reader, Robert, pulled records from Florida’s corporate filing office and found that Psystar’s two principles, Rodolfo and Roberto Pedraza, are officers or agents of “a whole crapload of companies,” according to Giz. Only one of these companies is active: Floridatek.

“These guys are obviously clowns,” says Robert.