MacHEADS – The Movie, the recently-released documentary on the interesting, outspoken community of people who believe Mac is the Holy Grail of personal computing, went up on Amazon VOD Monday, where you can “rent” the film for a week for $2.99 or buy it outright for $9.99.

MacHEADS debuted at Macworld Expo 2009 with over 1000 people attending the premiere. In an interview for BBC director Kobi Shely added, “The movie explores everything from the early days to the current days. Central to the success of the Mac has been the community that has supported Apple through the good times and the bad. That included the years when the company was written off as having lost its way and the ink on one of its many obituaries was all but dry.”

The film also features footage and commentary from multiple Mac evangelists, including Apple Chief Evangelist and savior Guy Kawasaki; the first official employee of Apple inc., Daniel Kottke; publisher of the first Apple newsletter Adam Engst; Chicago Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihantko; and a special guest appearance by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

MacHEADS is due to be available on the iTunes store next week.

Proof once again that it’s the *software* that makes the iPhone camera, QuadCamera is my latest favorite thing from the App Store.

It turns your iPhone into something like a Lomo Action Sampler, only one with much, much more flexibility than the its traditional film-loading counterpart.

Delays in shipping Apple’s new iMacs are due mostly to “business reasons,” Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu told clients Monday.

Chief among the reasons are decisions on which chip to use in the iMacs and the timing of Apple’s release of its upcoming Snow Leopard operating system.

“Apple is in the midst of figuring out whether to power the new iMac line with Intel quad-core processors or more high-powered dual-core processors with larger caches,” Wu wrote in his report.

The BlackBerry Storm, RIM’s first touch-screen handset, has gotten off to a rough start in its bid to compete with Apple’s iPhone, according to a report Monday.

The phone, plagued by technical problems, sold 500,000 units a month after RIM unveiled the device Nov. 21, according to the Wall Street Journal. By contrast, Apple sold 2.4 million iPhone 3Gs in its first quarter.

Jim Balsillie, RIM’s co-chief executive, said swatting bugs after a product hits the shelves is now the “new reality” as cell phone makers attempt to duplicate Apple’s success with the iPhone.

James Savage from the RetroMacCast got in touch to share his story of original Mac ownership.

James owns up to having a collection of 170 Macs. I’ll let him explain more…

When a computer gives up the ghost, there are a lot of things you can do to keep it around the house.

Here are a few ways we’ve found, if you’ve found a new way to give new life to your dead Mac, let us know.

Macquarium: when your mac is swimming with the fishes.

There are a ton of these — flickr counts nearly 700 — but this slick black version was made by Dave D’aranjo who rescued a Mac from a Singapore sidewalk and turned it into an aquarium. He spent a couple of months fashioning the fish bowl, following the how-to in low end Mac, then adding his own touches and getting a custom logo to give it a screen-saver look.

This is a page from The Magazine, an ezine-in-an-app that’s now available on the App Store for a dollar.

By itself, it’s not much to write home about in my opinion. The presentation is amateurish and the content not terribly interesting. And there simply isn’t very much of it. Not my kind of magazine at all, frankly.

But what’s more interesting is the concept of a mag-as-an-app.

Image © 2009 Nik Fletcher

This post is really more about Macworld, the trade show and conference, than it is about the device that spawned it. But for 24 of Mac’s 25 years, the two have gone hand-in-hand.

While indications seem clear the Mac and Apple are both healthy and vital at 25, with years of relevance and innovation ahead despite whatever rough patches the economy may present in the near term, the fate of what has been for many years the Apple community’s most anticipated event is very much up in the air.

Of course the entire world is aware by now Apple decided to make 2009 its final appearance at the huge trade show held the first week or so of January at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The smart money immediately proclaimed Apple’s move to quit Macworld spelled doom for the event.

Rumors swirled during this year’s show that Apple itself might be moving next year to the larger, far more ambitious International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held in Las Vegas right around the same time as Macworld.

Just this week, iLounge announced plans to fund a high-profile unified pavilion area for iPod and iPhone products at CES in 2010.

Blogger John Gruber penned Friday a misty paean to the City and the Expo, one of the smarter, more comprehensive assessments of the overall picture I’ve yet seen.

Gruber and I agree on a couple of points worth noting: as he wrote,

1) “There is nothing else like Macworld Expo, and if it fades away, there will be nothing to take its place.” With Apple gone, Macworld will be different and if it is to survive, it will have to be different in a way that keeps it vital and active for the diverse mix of large and small exhibitors that make up a healthy event; and

2) The great majority of exhibitors who make up Macworld, 90 percent of whose products are not available at the Apple Store, want the conference and expo to survive, but almost to a one they confirmed to me, as I walked the floor at this year’s conference (and to Gruber as well), – they will wait and see who else is going to stay on board.

This week a quiet campaign began, led by the community of Mac-o-philes who most definitely want to see Macworld survive and prosper. IDG, the event promoter, has agreed to give anyone who pre-registers now for next year’s event, January 4 – 8, 2010, a free Expo pass. Not buy one get one free, just register now and go for free.

IDG has also placed a big SUGGESTION BOX graphic on the front page of the website, a mailto: link the IDG PR representative I spoke with assures me the promoter will pay close attention to for feedback from attendees and exhibitors alike.

It may well be true that Apple no longer has a need for Macworld, that its growing chain of Retail Stores and increasing market awareness make it a bad business decision to spend millions of dollars to be the anchor tenant at the sprawling event.

For the hundreds of other businesses who’ve come to rely on Macworld as an opportunity to get their products in front of and tell their stories to thousands of people over four days in San Francisco, the stakes are very different.

Story and photos by Natalie Guillén

SANTA FE, New Mexico — As Arch Sproul unpacked half a dozen Macintosh Classic IIs, all six of his employees hovered around in excitement.

It was fall of 1992, and most of the employees had never used a computer before.

Today, four of those original computers are still in use, working overtime seven days a week at the Virginia Trading Post arts and crafts store, nestled next to dozens of other shops downtown. They are used mainly as cash registers, scanning bar codes, and keeping tabs on inventory.

The machines are rare examples of aging Macs that are still in daily use. They are a testament to the utility and longevity of the Mac, which celebrates its 25th anniversary on Sunday.

Times they have changed: a quarter of a century ago, reporter Michael J. Miller was on the West Coast bureau of Popular Computing. (Now he blogs for PC mag.)

A few choice extracts about his trip down to Cupertino to see the first Mac:

“I met with Steve Jobs, who was then Apple Chairman and heading up the Mac project, along with key designers including Burrell Smith, the original hardware designer and software designers Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson.”

“Most of the time I was meeting with other members on the team, but I remember Jobs coming in —  he was very charismatic: intense, proud of the work and a bit prickly about any criticism. He and his folks were quick to put down the IBM PC and its clones for not pushing the envelope and settling for “mediocrity.”

“Jobs and the team were rightly proud of the new machine, which was very different from the IBM PC that then dominated the industry. Maybe it was the famous “Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field,” but even then I was entranced by the new machine and the possibilities it offered – particularly the graphical user interface.”

Miller’s trip down memory lane — complete with anecdotes about the Mac II, Apple’s first laser printer and the role of industrial design at Apple — is well worth a read.