Breaking fake news site Scoopertino is reporting that Apple has decided to take a retro approach with their new product offering, a re-release of the venerable Apple II microcomputer. An Apple press release (apparently) notes:
The Apple II gave birth to the computer industry. Now it’s pregnant again — this time with unlimited possibilities.
Do you yearn for the time when your music required a hulking great box to play it? When that music came not in convenient playlists but separated out onto various discs and mechanical cartridges (aka “tapes”)? Do you wish to relive those wonderful days of the Midi System, the Mini System and even, back in the depths of the 1970s, the Music Center?
Then you’re in luck. By applying the latest in touch-screen technology and cutting edge software design, you can now have all the inconvenience of old-school recorded music rendered with the convenience of multi-touch. Behold: The BeatBlaster.
FOR SALE>£100,000 ($161,000): 6mm ƒ2.8 Fisheye-Nikkor
That’s what you’ll see at the top of Grays of Westminster’s used Nikon manual-focus lens listings. The London dealer has gotten its hands on this incredible chunk of glass, a 5.2-kilo (11.5-pound) mountain of a lens that makes the camera behind it look like a vestigial tail.
PicPlayPost is supposedly a way to make video diptychs of your precious moments, and then share them via the usual social networks. But if you grew up in (or otherwise managed to live through) the 1980s, you’ll know exactly what this app is for: remaking the cheesy title sequences of 1980s TV shows like Dallas.
Remember the MagnaDoodle? If you fall on my side of the Great Age Divide, then your answer will be an excited “yes!” The re-usable screen of the Magna Doodle was just about the closest thing that us 70s-born youngsters had to the touch-screen iPhone which you ungrateful kids enjoy today.
If you’re on the wrong side of the Great Age Divide, your answer will be all like “WTF old man you suck LOL.” To which I would respond with the following punishment: You will be forced to use this Magna Doodle for a week. Without the iPhone inside.
Scanner Pro is my new favorite scanning app for the iPad. It doesn’t do OCR, it doesn’t grab phone numbers from business cards. It just scans, stores, shares and searches your paper documents, and it does it with a beautifully simple interface.
The app is actually an update to the old iPhone version, but this new version (4.0) is completely redesigned and is now a universal app. And just in time, too, as the new iPad’s 5MP autofocus camera makes it a pretty great scanner.
Do you have an old film SLR lying around that you promise yourself you will one day load up with film and take out shooting? Well, forget about that — it’s just taking up space and picking up dust. You should instead do what Etsy-er Roberto Altieri does, and turn it into a dock for the camera you actually use every day: Your iPhone.
I thought it was impossible to do anything dorkier than wearing a Bluetooth headset all day long, because you’re, like, so important that you’ll be getting a call any minute now. Well, it turns out that I was wrong. Check out the Tomko Transceiver for iPhone, a plug-in handset that makes your iPhone work like a CB radio.
First things first: Pentax calls this “the smallest, lightest interchangeable lens camera in the world,” and they’re dead right. This camera is small. You thought your micro four-thirds camera was small, but it’s huge compared to the Pentax Q. It’s hard to appreciate just how small it is, until you put it next to something else that’s really small. Like an iPhone.
As you can see, the Q sits neatly atop the iPhone’s screen, not even touching the edges of its case. It’s tiny.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Samsung seems to be obsessed with adding easy-to-break, easy-to-lose accessories to its “phones” and tablets. The two Notes come with tiny, disappearing styluses, and this monstrosity — the five-inch Wi-Fi-only Galaxy S — has an antenna. Yes, heft this slab in your palm and you’ll be whisked back to the early 1990s, when phones were the size of bricks, and you pulled the antenna out to make and receive calls.
The fantastic Letters of Note blog has posted an amazing letter that a 30-year old Bill Gates sent to John Sculley and Jean Louis Gassée back in June of 1985.
In the letter, Gates argues that Apple should license their hardware and operating system out to other companies, making Macintosh a “standard.” If that pitch sounds familiar, it should: after being ignored by Apple for six months, Microsoft took the idea and ran with it, bringing Windows to the world.
If you’re serious about your iPhoneography (and you should be, with such a great camera always in your pocket), then you might want to take a look at the ridiculously over-achieving iPhone Rangefinder case, from our fine friends at Photojojo. The two-piece polycarbonate case slips over the phone and adds a shutter button, a viewfinder and even interchangeable lenses. It’s pretty neat.
Remember that super cool iOS theme we showed you a couple of weeks ago, which made an iPhone’s user interface look like it was right out of the 80s? It was just a dream ten days ago, but it’s now real and it’s available to download from Cydia.
Here’s another lovely short video from Matthew Pearce, the man behind the Matt’s Macintosh YouTube channel.
MacPaint doesn’t just explain what MacPaint was, but is more about why it was an important part of the software lineup back in those days. Things we take for granted today (like copying a graphic and pasting it into another document) were new and exciting back then.
As Matt points out, MacPaint in 1984 laid foundations for features you still see today in modern graphics applications.
(And one other thing: Matthew’s original Macintosh 128K looks pristine, and the screen as clean and bright as the day it was made. He even has an as-new copy of the original printed manual. Where does he find this stuff?)
Enjoy!
Way back in the mists of 1991, in the dark days when Kevin Costner somehow beat Martin Scorsese for the Best Director Oscar (Dances with Wolves vs. Goodfellas. Seriously?), WinZip was first launched. The frustrating, hard-to-use piece of shareware is still going today, and has just elbowed its way into the iOS App Store. That’s right: WinZip is now available for the iPhone and iPad.
If you grew up during the 1980s, many of its style tropes will have been burned indelibly into your brain. Shoulder pads, snow-washed jeans, pleated pants, and tacky, tacky poster art, exemplified by selective-colored black and white photos. If you can imagine a monochrome image of a rose, with the petals colored lipstick red, then congratulations: your mind just traveled back to 1985. Now, with Paint FX, your iPad can do the same.
Instagram 2.1, which launched at the end of last week, has fixed up the frankly horrible interface of v2.0, and added in some significant new features. Other things — like the proliferation of scantily-clad ladies and (normally-clad) pets in the “popular” section — remain just the same.
There’s something magical about the days of the original Macintosh and the first iPod. We were on the cusp of a new age in personal computing, and Apple was solidifying itself as a staple brand in the consumer technology market.
Some retro iPhone cases from a company called Schreer Delights replicate the original Macintosh, iMac and iPod with charming detail.
Back in 1981, Bill Gates co-wrote a PC game called Donkey, commonly known (as some apps were back in those days) by its filename, DONKEY.BAS. If you’re old enough to remember those days and old enough to yearn for them, you might enjoy playing Donkey all over again on your iPhone.
For fans of vintage Macintosh computers and truly rare finds, a very unusual item has just surfaced in the wild: a 128k Macintosh prototype that used a 5.25” “Twiggy” floppy disk mechanism, the same kind Apple used with the first generation Lisa workstation.
For those who yearn for the glory days of the Classic Mac OS and Beige Boxes, Andrea Grell offers up an authentic and interactive working demo of System 7 running on a Performa 6116CD. From the startup chime to eWorld, this blast from the past is worthy viewing for all old Mac fans.
Sitting in front of the tree on Christmas morning with a DVD of a roaring fireplace looping on your television? Tacky!
Sitting in front of the tree on Christmas morning with an 8-bit interactive fireplace roaring on your Mac? Awesome!
New at PhotoJojo is this crazy Holga iPhone lens case that gives you nine special effects for your photos.
In 1985, after a power struggle developed between Steve Jobs and John Sculley, Apple Computer’s charismatic co-founder was forced out of the company his vision had created. For the next twelve years, the company foundered, lost marketshare hand over fist and almost went bankrupt before Jobs returned to the company in 1997 to put things right.
We all know that story. Still, it’s amazing how just one item from the dark years can hilariously put the disconnect between pre- and post-Jobs Apple in sharp relief. Could anything better exemplify the now-amusing differences in vision between Apple under Jobs and Apple under Sculley than this 1987 relic, The Apple Catalogue?
We’ve got an affinity for great Apple tattoos here at Cult of Mac, but let’s face facts: most of them are pretty bad. But the Apple-themed tattoo we’ve fallen in love with today is a lot better than another hipster giving him or herself a “Think Different” tramp stamp.
Reader Karissa B. wrote us to show off her new Apple tattoo. We already liked it a lot: not only is the retro-style Apple logo nursing a mean mouthful of fangs, but the Pac Man like motif of Cupertino trying to gobble up its Clyde in a fleeing Microsoft logo was funny and whimsical. But it’s the story about what the tattoo means and why Karissa got it that really makes this tattoo shine.