Are you the kind of nostalgic soul who looks back at the Underwood, Remington, and Smith-Corona typewriters of yesteryear and sigh plaintively? Yet are you simultaneously a modern tech nerd, who couldn’t go without the conveniences afforded by an iPad or iMac? Well, then, the Qwerkywriter — an 84-key keyboard that looks just like a vintage typewriter — might be just the thing for you.
Each week we pull the best Apple-related gadgets from the Cult of Mac and collect them here for your perusing pleasure.
It’s the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Macintosh, and we wondered at Cult of Mac what can we do to celebrate? Then we thought, let’s dissect an original Macintosh and see what made it tick! There’s nothing like destruction in the persuit of knowledge.
In full retro spirit, we asked our friends at iFixit if they would help perform a special anniversary teardown of the 128k Mac. How does our silicon hero compare to modern Macs in terms of components, assembly and ease of repair? Of course being true geeks themselves, they jumped at the chance.
There was only one problem: where to find an original 128k Mac.
If you love to game, and you’ve never played a roguelike, shame on you. You can hardly call yourself a gamer at all.
You guys carry some odd things aro und in your gadget bags. Like, rubiks cubes, otoscopes, or electronic dog tags? Hey, whatever works for you, that’s fine. Who are we to judge. Even though the Cult of Mac Show Us What’s In Your Gadget Bag sweepstakes is over, we couldn’t get over how fascinating a lot of the gadget bags were. Each told a unique story about that individual, which was really interesting to see. So to celebrate you guys, we compiled this gallery of the 10 most interesting gadget bags we saw last week.
A decade ago Apple introduced the iPod, and with it a new method for controlling music playback: a scroll wheel with buttons around the perimeter. The interface was novel for a portable music player, which usually used more traditional buttons in a linear or grid layout.
The scroll wheel was the brainchild of Phil Schiller, Apple’s Director of Marketing. He realized that users would have to navigate large lists of songs, and that a wheel offered an intuitive, dynamic solution.
A patent recently granted to Apple has got online observers predicting a future touch-screen MacBook laptop.
It’ll never happen. Before I tell you why, let’s take a look at the evidence.
Here’s a full transcript of my interview with John Sculley on the subject of Steve Jobs.
It’s long but worth reading because there are some awesome insights into how Jobs does things.
It’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers. It’s rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public.
UPDATE: Here’s an audio version of the entire interview made by reader Rick Mansfield using OS X’s text-to-speech system. It’s a bit robotic (Rick used the “Alex” voice, which he says is “more than tolerable to listen to”) but you might enjoy it while commuting or at the gym. The audio is 52 minutes long and it’s a 45MB download. It’s in .m4a format, which will play on any iPod/iPhone, etc. Download it here (Option-Click the link; or right-click and choose “Save Linked File…”).
User Interface Watch: Apple’s march towards hands free, thought controlled computing continued this past week with the widely misunderstood iPhone 4 “Death Grip” episode. Perceived and quickly lambasted as a design flaw, Apple is stategically taking high levels of flak as they quietly persue their true longterm goal.
[Tags: ANALYSIS, HUMOR, SATIRE]
Steve Jobs has always been a minimalist, be it product design, the breadth of his wardrobe, or succinct email replies. This minimalism also applies to the ways in which we interact with our computers.
Early computers required both hands and all fingers to operate, utlilizing bulky keyboards. This mimicked the way humans had conveyed information since the invention of the typewriter, but was clearly just a technology to be milked for all it was worth, then cast aside.
We start off with two MacBooks for under $1,000: a 2.26GHz MacBook Core 2 Duo for $799 and a 2.26GHz Unibody MacBook Pro, starting at $929. Also on tap is a price cut on the 16GB iPhone 3Gs from Walmart.
Along the way, we also check out Apple’s back-to-school sale, new software for the iPhone and iPad and other Mac-related items. Details on these and many more bargains are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
