A widening gulf appears to be growing separating iPod touch and iPhone owners’ willingness to run the latest Apple operating system software. Only 55 percent of iPod touch users have upgraded to OS 3.0 or higher, in stark contrast to around 95 percent of iPhone owners, a survey indicates.
At the heart of the disparity appears Apple’s decision to charge iPod touch users for upgrading, while OS 3.x is free for iPhone owners. Also, many features in OS 3.0 and higher are targeted toward the iPhone, rather than the non-cellular iPod touch.
According to Judge WIlliam Alsup’s ruling against the notorious Mac clone makers, Psystar has until December 31st to comply with a permanent injunction against the company from selling computers that have been modified to run Apple’s OS X operating system. But will Psystar come back from the dead?
There’s conflicting reports coming out from both Apple and Psystar’s camps concerning the fate of the Florida computer retailer. Psystar attorner Eugene Action was recently quoted by the Dow Jones Newswire as saying that “[Psystar] will not be in business” and that the company would be “shutting down immediately” by laying off their eight employees.
That seems pretty clear cut, but now K.A.D. Camara, who also represented Psystar in their legal battle against Apple, is saying the opposite: “Regrettably, Mr. Action was misquoted in an early story that seems to have been picked up elsewhere,” he said. “Psystar does not intend to shut down permanently.”
It’s hard to imagine how the tiny little company, already $2.7MM in the hole after having to pay Apple damages, will manage to survive: they aren’t known for anything besides their Open Mac computers, and they only ever successfully sold a handful of them. My guess this is just a blanket denial to keep options open, and the reality is more likely that they will have to close. Sayonara, Psystar.
Mark your calendars. It looks like we have a date for next year’s World Wide Developer’s Conference.
Thanks to an update to the Moscone Center’s summer schedule, it now looks like this year’s WWDC will be held from Monday, June 28th, 2010 to Friday, July 2nd, 2010. There’s no official confirmation just yet, but the Moscone Center has blocked off those dates for a “Corporate Event.”
That can really only be one thing. It overlaps nicely with the third anniversary of the iPhone’s release… and, not so coincidentally, the presumed lapse of AT&T’s exclusivity deal. Even if Apple doesn’t reveal a new iPhone model at WWDC this year (and they will, if only to bump screen resolution to be competitive with the likes of HTC Droid and the Nexus One Android smartphones), I imagine we will all be happy to hear the announcement of new carrier choices. God knows we need the option.
We close out this week before Christmas with more hardware deals. A 24-inch iMac with 3.06GHz Core Two Duo processor for $1,399 and a 15-inch 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, for $1,989 from ExperCom. The Apple Store is offering MacBook Airs, starting at $1,099 for a 1.60GHz 13-inch model. If you’re still looking for a deal on an iPod touch (and who isn’t?), the Apple Store also is selling an 8GB version for $149.
There are a couple deals on iPod and iPhone cases, including 80 percent off on iPod touch cases. If you haven’t upgraded to 10.6 yet, there is a bargain on a Mac Box Set with 10.6, iLife and iWork for $129.
As always, for links and details to all of these bargains and many others, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
I’ve never been such a big fan of using voice search on my phone. Take Google’s own voice search app for the iPhone. As far as translating my own search terms, it does pretty well, but it has an issue with ambient noise. For example, I may need Google’s help to spell the longest town name in Scotland, but I’m pretty sure the correct spelling isn’t “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogery BEEP HONK SCREECH CRASH chwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.”
Still, voice search enthusiasts who own iPhones now have another program to loudly and emphatically yell at. Following up on last week’s Dragon Diction app, Nuance has released Dragon Search
It works very similarly to the Google Mobile app: you simply tap a button, clearly say your search term, and then beam your search query up to Nuance’s servers, which promptly spits back the applicable results. Where Dragon Search differs from Google’s efforts is it can easily extend its search beyond just Google results: it will also search iTunes, Twitter, Wikipedia, Youtube, Yahoo and Bing.
If you’re interested, the app is free for now, although you should move soon on that free download: the free introductory offer ends soon.
Apple has always benefitted from the iPod’s “halo,” which also spurred purchases of other devices, including the iPhone and the Cupertino, Calif. company’s line of Mac computers. Can Internet bookseller Amazon do the same for ebooks? “The Kindle has definitely established itself as the iPod of the book world,” a Citigroup analyst told investors Thursday.
The Kindle, an e-book reader drawing the most attention beside Apple’s rumored tablet, could earn Amazon $1.6 billion in 2010, according to analyst Mark Mahoney. The analyst said the Kindle is having “greater than expected traction” and expects the company to sell 2 million Kindles in 2009 – up from 1.5 million previously forecast.
If you’re thinking of a flash drive for a nice stocking stuffer, you might want to pre-load it with some cool Apple-oriented ebooks. Take Control, which publishes many technology titles, is having a 50 percent off sale on its ebooks through Dec. 31, 2009.
Some of the titles include: iPhone ’09 Visual Quick Start Guide ($15), Macworld iPhone & iPod touch Superguide, Third Ed. ($12.95), and Macworld Total Snow Leopard Superguide ($12.95). All ebooks are DRM-free.
Here’s the link, which includes the coupon code for the 50 percent discount.
As we reach midweek, we offer a variety of deals for the Mac lover. To while away the time, the Apple Store is selling a number of Mac Pro Workstations with Xeon processors, starting with a $2,149 deal on a 2.66 GHz version. For the mobile Mac fans, Apple has 8GB iPod nanos for $99. You can take that nano to a coffee shop where you can listen to a variety of MP3 songs from your free iTunes Starbucks sampler.
Along the way we also have a new batch of App Store freebies, as well as iPhone cases and other gadgets. As always, for details on these and other bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
Microsoft has a rather ignoble history when it comes to trying to counter Apple’s hyper-effective and popular “Get a Mac” campaign. Their first efforts were just embarrassing: a series of advertisements featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates awkwardly mumbling non sequiturs at one another. That desperate bid for hipness failed, and so Microsoft launched their Laptop Hunter ads, which were comparatively straightforward: a camera crew followed “real” computer shoppers as they looked for new machines, and documented their ultimate choice of Windows laptops. Simple, pleasant and marginally effective… even if they did repeat all of the old, stupid fallacies about Apple computers costing significantly more than similarly specced Windows machines.
Pretty soon, though, controversy hit. Lauren deLong, an adorable red ead featured in the “Laptop Hunter” ads, turned out to be an actress with a filmography of ten movies to her credit. Since Microsoft’s ads purported to be following “real computer shoppers,” that made the ads’ truthfulness somewhat dubious.
So here’s the question: were the Laptop Hunters ads what the proclaimed themselves to be, or completely fictional? The “behind-the-scenes” footage of the Laptop Hunter ads shoot, as embedded above and first posted back in September, baldly asserts that participants were not told they were in a commercial until after they had picked their machines.
I’m not buying it. Not only are the individuals in the ads just a little too pointed in their dismissal of Apple products — I think a more common response to why a PC users would reject a Mac would be “I’ve always used Windows machines!” and not “It really seems like you’re paying for the aesthetics” — but surely, a professional actress like Ms. deLong would be savvy enough recognize the financial opportunity that had just presented itself if a film crew that had followed her around all day told her she’d be in a national campaign for Microsoft. The next thing she would have said is, “I have to call my agent,” not “How’s my hair?”
So Apple has allowed into the Store a third-party video recording application for plain old 2G and 3G iPhones; but honestly, don’t get your hopes up too high.
iVideoCamera by Laan Labs suffers some serious limitations: it only records three frames a second, it can only record for a minute at most, and resolution is just 160×213. It’s little more than a series of stills stitched together into something vaguely resembling moving pictures.
