In the latest in a long string of murders over iPods, a 16-year-old in Salt Lake City is now being charged as an adult after the alleged stabbing of a classmate over an Apple device.
Jonatan Bustos is in jail charged with criminal homicide-murder after a tussle with classmate 15-year-old Taylor Pankow over a stolen iPod.
How many years could Bustos get?
Killing for Apple’s must-have device has earned perps a wide range of sentences — from under 10 years to life in prison.
Steve Jobs launched an insta-meme today by suggesting in his keynote that Apple’s new multi-touch iPod nano could be worn as a wristwatch.
The meme becomes a fad next week when the nano arrives in stores and people start actually wearing them on wrists. It’s going to happen, especially when third-party companies begin offering special-purpose wristwatch straps for it. I know it’s going to happen because I’m going to do it.
Talk is cheap, but a Huffington Post poll at post time was running over 67% in favor of wearing the iPod nano as a wristwatch.
But serving as Apple’s first-ever foray into the wristwatch racket isn’t what’s ground-breaking about the device.
Looking robust, Steve Jobs has just taken the stage at the Yuerba Buena Center — exactly on time — to announce this year’s new iPod models.
What to expect? A new iPod Touch boasting a Retina Display and A4 CPU, most likely. A new touchscreen Shuffle. The possibility of a new, rebranded AppleTV called the iTV. And maybe — just maybe — iTunes in the cloud.
What do you think the next hour will reveal?
[Image via GDGT]
What with the contentious relationship between Intel and Apple, you’d think Apple CEO Steve Jobs wouldn’t be pleased about the chip giant acquiring Infineon’s wireless business, the firm that supplies baseband chips for the iPhone. However, Intel’s CEO says Jobs was overjoyed at the news.
“Steve was very happy,” Intel CEO Paul Otellini said in a Fox Business TV interview. There were a number of companies competing for [Infineon’s wireless unit]. I think they [Apple] are very happy Intel won the bid.” Tuesday we reported Intel acquired Infineon for $1.4 billion.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2F4O0QIzC4&feature=player_embedded
Embedded in a long and informative (but badly Google-translated) link to a breakdown of Apple’s A4 CPU, we noticed this intriguing video of all four iPhones — the iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 — pitted head-to-head in a performance test.
There’s nothing really shocking about the results here: Apple has improved the performance of the iPhone with every single release. As each test app is launched — including Plants vs. Zombies, Google Earth, Seadragon and Safari — it always fully loads quickest on the most recent iPhone, with every preceding iPhone lagging incrementally behind. Reboot is the same.
That said, we found something rather soothing about watching this video in this last day before the calm of new Apple product announcements. Perhaps it’s the cheery, burbling music. Either way, it’s an interesting look not only at how far the iPhone has come over the last three years, but in actuality, what a great smartphone it was in the first place.
We start out the week with a deal on a skeleton – for your iPhone case. With a product sounding something like Old Blue Eyes, the Nubi Do To Do list manager has reduced its price. Finally, if you are looking for the perfect stationary to send that email missive, Mail Stationary 3 for the Mac might lend a hand.
Along the way, we’ll take a look at a variety of other gadgets. As always, details on these and many more items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
Come September 1st, everyone expects Apple to announce at least some sort of streaming iTunes functionality… but what if that’s all a red herring? According to All Things D, that might just be the case: they are saying that the next version of iTunes won’t stream media from the cloud, but will instead by heavily integrated with social networking features.
The idea is this: future versions of iTunes would basically be little social networks, in which you’d be able to share recommendations of apps, movies or songs with other people. There’d be no actual media sharing ability at first, but this is clearly an evolutionary move, laying the groundwork for a more feature rich streaming iTunes to come.
It’s a very interesting rumor. Apple executives have said that the streaming iTunes capability we should expect in the near future is more modest than the pie-in-the-sky dreams of internet opiners. Combined with the rumored streaming television ability of the new iTV, this would seem to be a more realistic rollout of a future cloud-based iTunes for Apple to take.
The official Netflix streaming app for iPhone and iPod touch hit the App Store this morning. The free download allows anyone with a monthly Netflix subscription of $8.99 or more to watch unlimited streaming movies and TV on the iOS device of their choice.
I’ve been playing with it since I woke up today, and I’m quite impressed — video looks phenomenal on my 3GS, and performance over both WiFI and 3G have been great (which, as a San Franciscan who resides in a neighborhood AT&T ignores, is very impressive).
Netflix iPhone App Video from Netflix on Vimeo.
My two minor quibbles with the app are both interface-related: NetFlix opted to represent titles to watch with large icons, which makes it a labor to scroll through. Worse, it doesn’t provide a thumb on the right side to provide any sense of where you are in the middle of a long list. Search works very well, however.
But these are minor complaints. Frankly, this puts HuluPlus to shame. Better selection, better performance, and no ads. Download the crap out of this. Get it here.
Like prison cakes, iOS updates tend to have secret files baked into the firmware, each capable of sawing through the bars of Apple’s own internal clampdown to free details on upcoming products. The latest beta of iOS 4.1 is no exception, offering a tantalizing first glimpse of three upcoming iOS devices.
The first two tipped products aren’t particularly surprising: a reference to an iPod 4,1 is clearly pointing towards next month’s updated iPod Touch, which is likely to boast an A4 CPU, FaceTime support and a Retina Display.
Similarly, once you know that iProd 1,1 was the internal Apple coding reference to the first-gen iPad, iProd 2,1 is easy to peg as a second-gen iPad. What’s curious here, though, is the fact that Apple’s officially programming support for a second generation iPad at all into iOS 4.1. If Apple sticks to a yearly product update for the iPad, we’re eight months away from an update to the tablet; does the reference to iProd 2,1 in an iOS update scheduled for next month indicate a surprising hardware refresh for the iPad line later this year, possibly fixing the begrudged lack of FaceTime support?
The final reference, though, is the most intriguing: an unknown device described as “unknownHardware” tagged with a unique Apple product ID of 20547. Smart money is this being an iOS-driven update to the AppleTV, although we’ve all been surprised by Apple before. Only September’s annual iPod event will give us partial answers.
Research in Motion reportedly is shopping for a mobile ad platform to help the BlackBerry maker better compete with Apple’s iAds and Google’s AdMob. The only hitch: the company that tops RIM’s list of candidates — Millennial Media — just isn’t that interested in being acquired.
Millennial Media CEO Paul Palmieri told the Wall Street Journal the company wants to launch an initial public offering and remain independent. If snatched-up by RIM, Palmieri’s company would lose all the opportunity to serve ads to the lucrative iPhone, iPad and other iOS devices protected by Apple’s iOS developer agreement. The agreement, initially aimed at Google, denies ad network access, unless approved by Cupertino. Since Apple has its own ad network – iAd – its unlikely Millennial would get another bite of the Apple.
