Update: Ben Rudolph, Parallels’ spokesman, says the ad’s removal is nothing major:

Nah, just testing out some marketing concepts, getting feedback, etc.  Nothing that sordid. :)

Original post: Remember when the Internet was 89 percent “Get a Mac” parodies? You know, back before bad iPhone parodies were in vogue? Well, that era briefly resumed today as Parallels, makers of virtualization app Parallels Desktop, posted their own “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials. As you might expect, the traditional rivals work together well for the first time ever in the four Parallels parodies.

Then, as suddenly as it arrived, the post vanished. Not only is the official blog linking the files gone, but the videos are clear off of YouTube. You can read the original link at a Google cache, and it’s clear that this was a deliberate PR campaign to start:

Everyone’s seen Apple’s great “I’m a PC. I’m a Mac.” commercials, and you knew it was only a matter of time before we did our own.

We took a different approach than the “official” ads…rather than talking about why PCs and Macs are different and arguing which is better, we decided to show how you can experience the best of both worlds with Parallels Desktop for Mac.

Take a look. They’ll (hopefully) make you laugh:

I’ve written to Parallels to see if Apple is involved with a C&D here. I would be surprised to learn that this isn’t protected as parody – I don’t believe the rules are different if the creator has a commercial interest. Still, a mystery.

Via DownloadSquad.

At Apple’s town hall meeting today, an employees asked Steve Jobs why the iPhone is being released at 6PM on Friday?

Jobs said Apple didn’t want people to have to take off from work, so they scheduled the launch after hours.

More on the all-staff meeting at Ars Technica.

Picture from Pomcast

Steve Jobs is so stoked about the iPhone launch on Friday, he’s giving a rare company-wide pep talk at Apple HQ on Thursday. As far as I know, he’s not held one of these since the early days of returning to the company in 1997.

From: Steve Jobs
Date: June 27, 2007 1:47:55 PM PDT
To: XXXXXX
Subject: Town Hall Meeting Tomorrow

Team,

We’re launching the most revolutionary and exciting product in Apple’s history this Friday. And given Apple’s legacy of breakthrough products, that’s saying a lot.

I’d like to get together and share my thoughts about this amazing moment for our company. So please join me for a company-wide communications meeting tomorrow, Thursday, at 11:00AM in Town Hall.

This meeting will also be broadcast to other Apple campus locations. Please check XXXXXX for details.

See you there,

Steve

Via the iPhoneBlog

Image from Kottke

The iPod’s scroll wheel is doomed. Multitouch is such a compelling user experience, it must supplant the scroll wheel. Writes Newsweek’s Steven Levy in one of the first reviews of the iPhone:

Also, the new way of navigating–swiping down your song list or fast-browsing by skimming your finger on a vertically arranged alphabet on the right of the screen–is a superior interface.

I can’t see Apple selling another large-capacity iPod with the old scroll wheel interface. Everyone is going to want multitouch, and maybe soon Apple will have the economies of scale to put it on a sub-$400 device. I doubt the nano will go multitouch, but it’s the beginning of the end for the wheel.

It seems there’s more people looking for iPhone waiters on Craigslist than waiters available to wait.
In New York especially, waiters are in high demand. One particularly desperate guy wants his waiter to start camping out on Wed night — 60 hours before the iPhone goes on sale. (“I need an iPhone. Like, really need an iPhone.”)

But here’s the really galling part. He wants waiters with experience! “Interested applicants should have experience waiting in line,” the ad says.

The full desperate text:

Updated: Get Paid To Wait In Line… For An iPhone (Midtown)
“Ok, so here’s the deal. I need an iPhone. Like, really need an iPhone. It’s so bad, I’ve taken to carrying around my paper cut-out just to get used to the size. ANYWAY, I’m looking for 1 or 2 industrious folks to setup camp outside the 5th Avenue Apple Store 6:00am, Wednesday the 27th until 6:00pm on Friday the 29th. That’s 60 hours of chilling and doing nothing… and getting paid. Or maybe getting your very own iPhone if we can buy more than 1! Interested applicants should have experience waiting in line. You are responsible for any supplies, food, etc. that you may need during your stay. If you want to be considered for this rather bizarre, very odd, and slightly fun assignment, please get in touch right away…”

Meanwhile, in L.A, waiters must be reliable and focused; in San Francisco, creeps and criminals need not apply; and in NYC, security in apparently not an issue.

More ads after the jump…

I just finished reading John Heileman’s rather critical profile of Steve Jobs, and I have to say I didn’t think it was too bad. It’s definitely written for an audience that has barely even heard of Steve Jobs, so the rehashing of young Steve’s mean temper and early folly seem a bit over-done to the average Apple observer.

Still, I think a lot of the skepticism in the article is fair, even if I do think Heileman misunderstands what drives Steve to continually enter new businesses. Steve loves to make things that he wants to use — it just so happens that Steve’s tastes are often quite compatible with our tastes. And I guarantee that years ago, he started complaining that there wasn’t a single cell phone he could stand to use. Now we have the iPhone. This isn’t really about legacy — Steve has done everything he ever wanted to and more. Now it’s just the continual drive to make cool stuff that he wants.

But a lot of other people have a problem with the piece, particularly Fake Steve, who publishes the funniest critique I have ever read:

Sorry, John Heilemann, but when you set us up with a big cover calling me iGod and making me look like shit, and when you get half the magazine for your story, we expect you to deliver something new, something interesting, something jarring, something smart. In short, something we didn’t know before. We’d also expect you to maybe find out something bad, or to at least have the balls to say you think the iPhone is going to flop, instead of saying “maybe it will, maybe it won’t.” For that matter you might do your readers the courtesy of admitting that you hate me for arousing such feelings of man-lust in your tiny heart, and that your obsession with El Jobso is a way of masking (and, paradoxically, indulging) the hard-on you have for me. You might also just admit that New York magazine is just trying to cash in on the hype around the iPhone and looking for any excuse to put my face on your cover so you can sell more copies; but you think you can look cool if you dress it up as some kind of cynical, pseudo-psychological deep-think business piece.

Instead, John, you just come off looking like some guy who wishes he still worked at the New Yorker.

Right. As if. Friend, you’re getting an Azzie award.

Ow. I mean, OW.

Technorati Tags: fake steve, Steve Jobs

Lots of iPods have bitten the big one over the last six years. But never before have I seen so many totally trashed “breakthrough digital devices” in one place as at the great Pile of Photos of Broken iPods. Head over. Grab some hankies. Mourn. Reboot.

Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: ipod, puppy

No matter what one thinks of Safari for Windows (which has already been patched three days after launch and still can’t render A LOT of sites), it’s nice to see Apple attacking Microsoft’s browser hegemony on its own turf.

Right?

Unfortunately, not really. As John Lilly, COO of Mozilla, points out, when Steve showed off a pie chart depicting his vision of Apple’s Windows browser marketshare, he didn’t depict MS losing any share at all. Instead, the image just eats up all the alternatives, including the still-rising Firefox. And while I have my problems with Firefox (it strikes me as a program only a software engineer could love), I only want to see Apple bite into Internet Explorer’s customers, not the folks who have already sought out an alternative.

The computer world is not the American political scene, and there is room for way more than two players. And so it should be. The more browsers we have, the fewer “browser-specific” features develop and the more readily standards get adopted across platforms. We all stand to benefit from a diverse, competitive markets. A shame that Apple reveals they have no interest in the same.
John’s Blog » Blog Archive » A Picture’s Worth 100M Users???

Technorati Tags: firefox, safari

So what is Steve Jobs didn’t introduce any new hardware in his keynote and the iPhone third-party application support is somewhat bogus? Core Animation, the new Desktop and new Finder or incredibly gorgeous, so watch Steve preach it on Apple’s official stream.

Technorati Tags: keynote, steve jobs, wwdc

With all the excitement and, to be frank, disappointment that came with yesterday’s WWDC Stevenote, I haven’t seen anyone pick out the obvious with Apple’s innovative new GUI element Stacks, which allows users to cluster files that would otherwise clutter the desktop into a discreet pile of files that blow out into a scannable list with a simple click. It takes the super-janky right-click a folder in the dock movement we’re all used to now and replaces it with a sleek Dock launcher we can all get behind.
It’s really cool. It’s also a very old concept, one that Apple has had patented for 15 years. And this doesn’t look to be a great implementation of it. Way back in 1992, Apple called the Stacks content “Piles,” first demonstrating the new interface at the CHI conference. Gitta Solomon of Apple’s Advanced Technology Human Computer Interaction Group created the fascinating interview, which The Register mooted was finally destined for Mac OS X way back in 2003. Only four years too early — and 11 years too late. Click through to learn more about Piles.

Technorati Tags: piles, stacks