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

Apple has filed a patent application detailing a method of “pairing a sensor and an authorised garment”, such as “running shoes, shirts or slacks” in hopes of deterring what the company has determined is a disturbing trend toward people “[taking] it upon themselves to remove the sensor from the special pocket of the [iPod-linked] Nike+ shoe and place it at inappropriate locations (shoelaces, for example) or place it on non-Nike+ model shoes.”

Apple sells the Nike+ iPod Sport Kit as a tool for storing data about your workout on your iPod, allowing you to track and analyze your progress toward fitness perfection. As one commenter on Slashdot said about the $30 sensor, “you can also share your workout stats with others, help build community, etc – sort of the antithesis of the “isolated runner with headphones on” kind of thing. Very Web 2.0.”

Under the patent Apple has applied for, companies like Nike could authorise their garments by burying an RFID chip inside it, requiring that chip to activate the sensor. No longer would you be able to use the sensor you paid for with any shoe of your choosing.

Via Slashdot

Another survey seems to confirm Apple products are immune from the general economic malaise hurting consumer spending. Consumers planned to buy more Mac laptops and desktops for the back-to-school period as well as over the next 90 days, according to a a survey by ChangeWave released Monday.  This compares to the No. 1 PC maker, which consumers said they would buy fewer.

Also, the August survey found the release of Apple’s iPhone 3G is having a “halo” affect on other products. ChangeWave found 17 percent of consumers said the new iPhone made them more apt to buy a Mac.

Eight percent of the 4,416 mostly-U.S. consumers said during the critical back-to-school season they would buy an Apple product online compared to four percent who said they would buy less from Apple’s Web site, for a four percent overall gain for the Cupertino, Calif. company. 

Consumers said, in general,  they planned to spend less on electronics over the next three months. ChangeWave found 34 percent of consumers said they would spend less on electronics, compared to 15 percent  that indicated they would spend more on electronics. The findings are 13 percent lower than a year ago.

Confidence in Apple products differs from overall PC buying plans.  Desire to buy an Apple laptop rose two points (34 percent) with plans for an Apple desktop rising by three points to 30 percent. This contrasts with a decline in plans to buy a PC.

When it came to the top two PC sellers – HP and Dell – the retail reticence was pronounced. Plans to buy a Dell laptop within the next 90 days fell 4 points while future desktops rose by 3 points. U.S. consumers said they would buy fewer HP laptops and desktops, compared to July.

It should be noted that much of HP sales are coming from outside the United States. On Friday, Gartner analyst Alfonso Velso told Cult of Mac that Apple was particularly susceptible to any economic downturn that affected consumer spending. However, only recently had the research firm detected rumblings of any blowback from the economy. Gartner placed Apple as the sixth-largest PC maker. MetaFacts had earlier said Apple ranked fourth in laptop sales.   

Wanna build an iPhone robot? Of course you do. And the people at BattleBricks have got everything you need.

You need two iPhones for this trick, thanks to the robot’s ingenious control system. The robot is controlled via a simple Google Web Toolkit app. The iPhone in your hand is used to issue commands; the iPhone attached to the robot displays coloured squares in different shades of grey, and an on-board light sensor watches what it’s showing; one shade says “turn right”, another “turn left” and so on.

Full instructions can be downloaded from the BattleBricks page. There’s exciting video to watch too.

And if you should happen to build your own robot, do let Cult of Mac know, so we can share your creation with the rest of the Cultists.

A film that looks at the evolution and culture surrounding the Macintosh has been selected to the shortlist of the 2008 Naperville Independent Film Festival which takes place next week.

This is the first time the film, a documentary called, ‘Welcome to Machintosh’, has been screened in the US since new interview footage with original Apple co-founder Ron Wayne was added to the movie. Click here to watch the trailer on YouTube.

That exclusive interview was added just before the movie’s European premiere at the Globians Documentary Film Festival in August. The documentary mixes history, criticism and Apple idolatory into an exploration of the early years of Apple as seen through the eyes of Apple employees, engineers, resellers and supporters.

• Devon Kelly and friends literally make a song and dance about Mac OS X’s spinning rainbow of doom: https://bit.ly/1LZ8oZ #
• Apple rejects Podcaster from the App Store for, er, no discernible sensible reason – https://bit.ly/3a66nC (Hat tip: Daring Fireball.) #

While there has been much speculation about webkit powered Chrome and the possible implications for Apple’s Safari browser, we think the shot Google fired last week was across a different bow altogether.

Follow us after the jump where we discuss how Chrome has it’s sights set on Windows and why Apple couldn’t care less if there’s ever a Safari  v4.0.