I have a bet for my pinky finger with a certain man from the south that Apple will never release the white iPhone 4.
What’s the point? After long delays caused by light leaking onto the camera sensor, the white iPhone 4 has been delayed nearly nine months… and the next-gen iPhone is, at best, due out a mere three months after the white iPhone 4 is set to debut. At that point, anyone who wants one is going to just wait for a white iPhone 5.
I’d always assumed Apple was just hoping that delaying it until spring of 2011 would just get everyone to forget about the white iPhone 4, but their latest official signage at Apple Stores around the country reminds people that the albino iPhone 4 is still coming.
Crap. Maybe I’m about to lose that pinky bet after all.
Remember all the chatter about a year ago that iPhone pricing separated Apple and Verizon? Well, it seems the carrier has moved closer to Apple’s thinking, spurring by a desire to block T-Mobile USA or Sprint from obtaining the popular handset, according to an analyst Monday.
Kaufman Bros.’ Shaw Wu told clients he is “picking up that iPhone economics to Apple are likely to be favorable, similar to that offered by AT&T.” Apparently, Verizon “may be willing to pay for exclusivity to itself and AT&T,” Wu writes.
It is Cyber Monday, the online version of retailers’ Black Friday. To mark the event, Apple and others are marking down their products. First up is the mothership, which announced 30 percent off on select items purchased at the Apple Store. Next is ZAGG, which began a 50 percent off sale sitewide. Finally, the iPhone App Store has marked-down several applications for the iPhone and the iPod touch, including “Perfect Photo,” photo-editing software.
Along the way, we’ll also look at some hardware bargains ($885 for a MacBook Air, $200 for an iBook G4, $199 for a 32GB iPhone 4), as well as deals for your iPad and Mac. As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
We get in the Black Friday mood with a number of price cuts and freebies for the iPhone and iPad. First up is the Apple Store’s Black Friday event, with offers such as a 16GB Wi-Fi iPad for $458 – $41 off the usual price. We also have the Sketchbook Pro app for the iPad for just $0.99 – a $7 drop from Thursday. Finally is a new batch of iPhone app price cuts, including “Iron Man 2” for just $0.99 – a $4 reduction.
Along the way, we have price cuts on MacBook Airs and iMacs, as well as iPhone 4s. Plus there are cases, snap-on batteries and much more. As usual, details can be found on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
Following Thanksgiving as it does, Black Friday — and it’s smaller and more stupidly named sister “holiday.” Cyber Monday — is generally an America-only affair, but not if you shop directly from Apple, who are now teasing their November 26th “one-day Apple shopping event” both domestically and internationally.
The new MacBook Air is Apple’s least self-repairable notebook yet, thoroughly bolted down by proprietary Torx screws, but if you thought that was just an anomaly, think again: Apple’s so averse to you cracking open your iPhone that they are actually retrofitting proprietary screws into iPhone 4’s brought in for in-warranty servicing.
According to reports last month, Apple is working on a reprogrammable SIM module for future iPhones that would allow Cupertino to sell iPhones directly to customers without it being locked to a specific carrier.
Hey, guess who doesn’t like that idea? Hint: the carriers.
Verizon’s Twitter account might have tipped the forthcoming arrival of the iPhone to America’s biggest CDMA network, but Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg is still playing coy about the possibility of a Verizon iPhone.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Seidenberg says that a Verizon iPhone will only arrive “when Apple thinks it’s time.”
It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.
Computer scientist Alan Kay is one of the most foremost experts in computers in schools, and yet he believes technology in education has largely failed.
Kay is a pioneering computer scientist, a former Apple fellow, and famous for formulating the Dynabook concept that predicted laptops and tablets 40 years before they became commonplace. Kay was a researcher at Xerox PARC in the seventies on technologies that Apple later commercialized in the Lisa and Mac. Among many honors, Kay has won the prestigious Turing Award for work on object-oriented programming. During the mid-1980s he was an Apple Fellow at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group.
Computers have been in schools for the last 30 years, but with few exceptions, they haven’t been used to their full potential.
Kay says the education system has squandered 30 years of technology in classrooms. He likens the modern factory educatory system to a monkey with a microscope. The monkey looks at its reflection in the microscope’s barrel but doesn’t look through the eyepiece — it utterly misses the point.
Computers have become tools of distraction, Kay said, instead of education. He singles out Guitar Hero as the best example of this — players get the fantasy of virtuoso guitar playing without learning a single note.
“When I look at computers in schools, this is what I see. It’s all Guitar Hero,” he said during a keynote speech at CES earlier this year.
We asked Kay to expand on these ideas in this exclusive Q&A. Kay talks about the importance of using technology to create educated voters capable of participating in a democracy, and Apple’s general disinterest in education.
Steve Jobs has been on the record for months that he thinks Blu-Ray is a format that is in the process of being murdered by streaming video, so Microsoft’s latest ad taking a jab at the Mac for its lack of Blu-Ray support feels a little limp… but to give credit where its due, the pseudo stop motion animation (which is really CGI) that they are using to make that point is pretty cute.
