Of all the eccentric Mac-lover accessories out there, these clocks might be some of the most phoned-in I’ve ever seen: they’re basically just old Apple keyboards clawed out of an electronics dump with their keys shaken loose and stuffed with cheap horological guts.
Even so, I’m sort of tempted by the iMac Bondi Blue Clock: it seems like just yesterday when I was bringing one back home for the first time. Oh, how time passes for an Apple fan.
What do the crafters at Geekware do with all of the keys they’ve got left over after they make a clock? No surprise there, really: they try to convince you they’re jewelry. Again, I’m guilty here of thinking these Apple key cufflinks are absolutely ridiculous and yet kind of wanting to own a pair.
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.
We’ve all been gleefully following the seventeen month legal battle between Apple and Mac clone maker Psystar, but it looks likes the credits are finally about to roll. Yesterday, United States District Judge William Alsup granted a permanent injunction to Apple that will prevent Psystar from ever again selling hardware with Apple’s operating system already installed.
If you’re set to automatically grab new updates, you’re likely to notice Apple’s Software Update burbling insistently in your dock for your attention, after Apple released a couple of updates of both their Airport software and the MacBook / MacBook Pro’s EFI.
The Airport Client Update 2009-002 is a routine update, fixing a few routine issues. The update solves the inability to turn the AirPort on or off in some cases after upgrading from Leopard, as well as an occasional loss of network connectivity when using Wake on Demand and the inability to create computer-to-computer networks or share Internet connections on some MacBook, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini computers.
The MacBook and MacBook Pro EFI Update is more interesting, in that with the installation of SuperDrive Firmware Update 3.0, the optical drive of these machines should no longer sound like Cookie Monster trying to chew his way through a sheet of plate glass when waking from sleep or start-up.
As usual, you can either load up Software Update to automatically suck them down and install them (restart required), or you can grab the latest updates from Apple’s support page.
It’s a small update, but it’s an important one: Apple has just quietly upgraded iTunes to allow buyers the ability to preview whole albums at a time.
iTunes has always allowed buyers to preview tracks before they buy: thirty second snippets that allow users to confirm that the 99 cents they are about to pluck down for “You Shook Me All Night Long” is, in fact, the AC/DC version, and not the migraine-inducing caterwaul of Miss Celine Dion dueting with Anastasia.
If you wanted to buy an entire album, though, you had to click the preview button in iTunes for every single song. No longer: now, a handy “Preview All” button is available on each album page in the iTunes Store.
Some nice functionality, to be sure, but long, long overdue. Amazon’s MP3 store has allowed users to preview full albums for over two years, and it’s hardly difficult functionality to ape. But better late than never.
It should be no surprise to anyone that the newest iMacs catapulted to the top of the sales charts when Apple released them in October. But just in case you have any bets going on the matter comes sweet analyst confirmation: Apple computers topped the list of the most popular machines sold at retail in October, according to the NPD Group. Gentlemen, collect your outstanding beers and pony rides.
(A meaty smack of the palm on the expanse of forehead above the pineal gland, and then the hand trails downward to shield the eyes, as if from a bright light, leaving only the grim rictus of a man self-repulsed still exposed. “Oh, jeez, thanks, Apple!” the blogger says. “Now I look like an idiot!”)
In addition to offering the new processor configuration, Apple has also expanded the hard drive space, now offering up to 8TB of storage in the Mac Pro, spread evenly between four hard drive bays. And while the quad-core 3.33GHz Mac Pro will add another $1,200.00 to the price of your machine, the 8TB of hard drive space is now standard.
While they were at it, Apple’s Xserves also got a bit of a beef-up, with the hard drive options again being expanded to 6TB across three hard drive bays. They’ve also updated their build-to-order RAM options on the Xserve, offering 4GB RAM modules which double the capacity of the quad-core Xserve to 24GB and the octuple-core Xserve to 48GB. Apple also states that the X-Serves will support up to 96GB of RAM under Snow Leopard, so 8GB RAM modules should work in these machines.
Despite the rumor of a dual Intel Core i9 Mac Pro configuration making a lot of sense (my guess is we’ll still see it at some point), Apple needed to patch the Mac Pro quick if they didn’t want the highest-end Core i7 iMacs cannibalizing sales, due to the latter machine’s superior price-to-performance ratio. A slight bump to the CPU frequency is a swift and easy patch to make while Apple looks into a more drastic refresh… although it also resets the countdown timer to the next Mac Pro refresh. My guess is we’ll see the Core i9 Mac Pros sometime early next year.
As a smartphone, the iPhone is hard to beat, but as a tool capable of inflicting extraordinary acts of physical violence, the handset is less impressive… even when compared to Apple’s other products.
A MacBook Air, of course, can be stealthily drawn across a carotid artery, but the iPhone’s rounded, lozenge-like design makes it a poor weapon for either stabbing or slashing. Neither can it be dropped like an anvil upon an unsuspecting brain pan, like the iMac, or used as a blunt, aluminum club, like the MacBook Pro. In battle, an iPhone — at best — can be hurled at an opponent as a distraction while you sprint, comically hooting, in the other direction. It’s a bizarre misstep in Jonathan Ives’ oeuvre of gladiatorial product designs.
Still, where Apple may have failed to deliver, enter the makers to transform the iPhone into the weapon of mass destruction it should be. Christopher Rojas took the TouchOSC application and used his iPhone to remote control a fantastic, solar-powered Arduino Tank, built out of parts from Sparkfun.
In theory, officially introducing China up to the charms of the iPhone should have been a coup for Apple, potentially generating the sale of millions of handsets in the largest market on Earth. But the reality looks far bleaker: according to data from the official Chinese online iPhone store, Taobao.com, only five iPhones were sold in the first two weeks of its online availability.
Taobao.com is not the only place selling iPhones: Apple’s carrier partner in China, China Unicom, is also selling iPhones, but has not released official numbers. That said, Taobao.com’s numbers should be viewed grimly: it’s the largest and most frequented electronics site in China… the Chinese equivalent of Amazon.com.
I imagine that in a lot of totally fundamental ways, pitching a university to let you teach a new course must be a lot like pitching a tech article to a mainstream magazine. It all starts with throwing random words at a sheet of brainstorming paper, then cynically deciding that while “iPhone: the future of music composition” is clearly ridiculous, it would look good as a headline [in the course catalog], so let’s see where it gets us anyway. Quickly inducing hyperventilation in order to simulate breathless excitement, you pick up the phone, call your editor [department head] and shout: “The iPhone is the future of music! No one else has done it before, so we’ll be at the forefront, reporting [teaching] about a fantastic new era meshing technology and art!”
Yes, go forth, my son. Fortune favors the bold! Do your job right and if you’re a tech journalist, you’ll make about $800. But if you’re a university professor, like Georg Essl of the University of Michigan? You may just have taken your first step towards tenure!
First Verizon snubbed AT&T’s 3G coverage in a snarky “There’s A Map for That” advertisement. Then they called the iPhone a Misfit Toy thanks to AT&T’s spotty 3G network. AT&T got hysterical about it, going to court to get the “false and misleading” ads removed from the air. Verizon’s breezy response: “The Truth Hurts.”
Now it looks like the little purse fight between the nation’s two largest cell providers is at an end: both Verizon and AT&T filed for an official dismissal of the case in an Atlanta federal court yesterday. Verizon also asked for their counter-suit against AT&T to be dismissed.
For the last year or so, I’ve had an old indigo blue iMac G3, throbbing its orange oculus silently on my computer desk. I inherited it from the previous inhabitant of my apartment, and while I was at first enthusiastic about it, I’ve never quite been able to decide what I want to do with it.
While my budgerigar, Humbert J. Humbird, likes it well enough, converting it into a bird cage doesn’t really seem like a good idea: a gloomy demesne indeed for a parakeet already morbidly inclined. Another idea I had was to install Writeroom and put it in the front hallway of my palatial blogger’s luxury apartment, as a sort of guest book, but the only nook suitable is already the napping post of my senescent man servant, Beasley.
The other day, though, inspiration struck: I would Hackintosh it. I’d just rip out that iMac’s guts — the bulbous CRT, the 450MHz Power PC architecture, the 10GB hard drive and the 350MB RAM — and install a homemade mini-PC, hacked to run Snow Leopard. A perfect New Year’s project, and an excellent way to make that gorgeous, old and obsolete piece of plastic junk into a modern Mac.
I haven’t started yet — I expect the real challenges to be the installation of an LCD screen and getting the slot-loading DVD drive to play nice — but I was curious if anyone had tried to Hackintosh an old iMac G3. Sure enough, someone had, as demonstrated this gorgeous picture guide of some maker who gutted his own, tray-loading Tangerine iMac G3 and installed a Hackintosh.
Unfortunately, there’s no text instructions, but the process seems simple enough. I plan to start sometime in January, and I’ll update here about it as I do. Any of our Cultists done something similar and want to warn me away from potential pitfalls? Pipe up in the comments.
It’s hard to think of a more forward thinking bunch of visionaries than the true pioneers of the fastly changing frontiers of technology: hard core pornographers.
Time after time — Betamax, VHS, Laser Discs, DVD, Blu-Ray and the Internet — pornographers are the first to embrace new technology, hoping to add yet another sales channel to their already rich smut peddling arrays. Compare pornographers to industries like the RIAA or MPAA, who are hopeless to embrace new technology that might threaten their old, stagnating business models, and it’s really hard not to think pornographers are one of the few media entities out there who really get tech.
Needless to say, porn would like a piece of the App Store, but Apple’s prudish policies aren’t having any of that. But pornographers are nothing if not ingenious, and a group of them have now launched the Sex App Shop, which the press release heralds as “the world’s first legal alternative to [the App Store],” featuring a wide range of adult content from major labels like Playboy, Vivid, VCA, Wicked Pictures and New Sensation. Apps costs $0.99, and yearly memberships with unlimited downloads is available for $99.
Through a glass viewed darkly, if not even muculently: the iPhone camera stinks.
To be fair, that’s not entirely Apple’s fault. While there are certainly better camera sensors out there than the one Apple chose to install as the retina in their little iBall, there’s a clear correlation between sensor size and image quality when it comes to digital cameras, and you can only make a cell phone’s sensor so big.
Nothing to be done about the sensor then. But like a fly hovering over hamburger, gadget tinkerer Bhautik Joshi had a seemingly stupid question buzzing around in his brain meats: can you improve the quality of the images the iPhone takes by attaching an old Canon SLR lens?
At least it’s now quantifiable: AT&T provides the worst cellphone service in the country, according to a recent customer satisfaction poll.
Consumer Reports hit the streets and asked 50,000 readers across 26 cities to rank cell phone service according to voice service, messaging, internet access and customer support. Verizon came out on top, achieving the top two ranks in customer satisfaction in every category. Then came T-Mobile and Sprint.
AT&T? Dead last. Their highest average rating in any service category was total ambivalence, with most categories rated as poor or terrible.
We posted yesterday that Apple and Psystar had reached a partial settlement in their age-old legal conflict over Psystar’s manufacturing and marketing of PCs with OS X pre-installed. The only thing up in the air was exactly how much those Hackintoshing upstarts from Florida would end up having to pay.
Now the number’s out, and it’s not pretty: Psystar has agreed to pay Apple $2.67 million dollars in damages.
Like an iPhone for Titans: a hypothetical lozenge in ebony, aluminum and glass!
We never quite see the end of Tablet Mac rumors on the Internet, and it’s easy to get swept up in the madness of crowds over the skintiest of them. Let’s not let too much foam collect in the saucer of our collected under lips over the latest headline to hit the feeds, though: “Apple takes control of TabletMac trademark” looks pretty exciting at first blush, but it’s probably just business as usual for a large company protecting its trademark.
The development comes by way of Axiotron, that neat company that will take your MacBook and $699, rip out its display, replace it with a pen-based screen, break its spine at the coccyx and flip it around one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees to give you a Tablet Mac. In fact, they went as far as to register a trademark for TabletMac with the Trademark Office.
Sometime in the last year, though, Axiotron transferred the TabletMac trademark to Apple. It’s easy to take that trademark transfer as significant (bolded), a sign that Apple is soon to send a hoary Jobs down from Mount Silicon with a divine, multitouch tablet of its own.
In reality, though, if Apple is working on a Tablet Mac, it’s unlikely to be called any such thing. I suspect the real source of this is just standard protection of Apple’s “Mac” trademark, and the whole thing was settled as easily as an email rattled off to Axiotron: “Hey, you guys are doing cool work. Transfer the TabletMac trademark to us before we have to rearrange your face.”
As a blogger, it’s hard to know quite from just what angle I should tackle modder Will Urbina’s utterly wonderful but certainly unholy amalgamation of a Xbox and a Hackintosh.
Should I describe it as a hideous, pupal cocoon that has been secreted by Microsoft to encase the imago of the Macintosh struggling to free its wings within? Or is OS X just the magic employed a soul-devouring hag, who — once bedded — lets the charm drop and reveals herself as the uggo she is?
Either way, Urbina’s creation is probably a psychoanalytically diagnosable incubus in the mind of Steve.
Called the OS Xbox Pro, Urbina’s project takes a translucent Microsoft Xbox chassis and crams it with Hackintoshable guts, including a pair of 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550s, an NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT GPU, 8GB of RAM, a 16GB solid state drive, and four additional hard drives. One drive boots Windows 7, the other OS X Snow Leopard (retail bought, Urbina assures), with two other hard drives for video editing. The end cost was $1500 for component from New Egg, which is just a little bit less than the cost of a 27 inch iMac.
The impetus to Urbina’s profane cross-breed case mod? Although he prefers Windows, Urbina needed a work machine to use Final Cut Pro.
The end result is sure to have Cupertino weaving a circle around it thrice and shutting its eyes in holy dread, but personally, I just can’t think of a better use for an old Xbox than to make it into a Mac.
Last month, we reported the rumor that in the titanium ensconced bunkers of their development labs, Apple was busy testing a new, sextuple core Mac Pro, to be introduced in the first quarter of 2010.
Proven true or not, the rumor certainly wasn’t a bad guess. The release of Apple’s new iMacs, which come in Intel Core i7 configurations, has made the beefiest of Apple’s desktops look like a poor deal for the price, capably beating the benchmarks of Apple’s existing, Xeon-toting Mac Pro for a comparable price. Apple needs to refresh their Mac Pros soon if they want to avoid their iMac line cannibalizing Mac Pro sales.
It’s not so surprising, then, to see this rumor dusted off. According to Polish website PCLab, the next Mac Pro will sport dual Intel Xeon Core i9 CPUs, offering 12 physical and 24 logical cores. Their test results of the CPU show it to run about 50% faster than the Mac Pro’s existing quad-core Xeon processor. The Core i9 features 32nm engraving, so it sips power more daintily than the previous chip, which is also in line with Apple’s increased interest in rubbing the animal blood out of their furs and providing more environmentally-conscious machines.
Of course, it takes a lot more than a Polish website to make a rumor a fact, but it’s hard to imagine what other course Apple would take with the Mac Pro line besides the Intel Core i9. And while it means absolutely nothing, Intel quickly asked PCMag to remove the information from their website. Verification by cover-up or warrantless supposition? You decide!
They don’t do it often, but when they do, Apple doesn’t like to mess around when it comes to suing other electronics companies for infringing upon their patents and intellectual properties. No, Apple lawsuits tend to end like a round of Mortal Kombat, at least figuratively. Close your eyes and you can mentally transpose Steve Jobs for Sub-Zero; as the judgment comes down, he holds aloft the fluid-spurting spinal column of a defeated opponent while screaming and staring into the sun. The internet then provides the commentary: FATALITY.
Bad news indeed, then, for Media Solutions Holdings, who must already be feeling the twinge of legal lumbar pain. Last week, Apple filed a patent infringement lawsuit against them, claiming that the company is using a host of different websites (such as laptopsforless.com, laptopacadapter.com and ereplacements.com) to sell knock-off MacBook and MacBook Pro MagSafe power adapters.
Even if Leander can’t quite figure out how to use it, the multi-touch capable Magic Mouse is quite a stride forward for Mac owners… especially given Apple’s execrable history of making decent mice. Still, no new piece of gear is without its technological problems. No surprise, then, that the Apple support forums have become the petri dish in which isolated Magic Mouse troubleshooting complaints have been allowed to multiply into a wider culture sample of product failure.
It’s been said countless times: one indicator of Apple’s superiority over Microsoft and Dell (and other major computer and electronics manufacturers that are — for the most part — associated with Windows) is the fact that Apple inspires creativity in the general populace on a scale that dwarfs the influence of any other computer-oriented company you’d care to name.
Some evidence of this can be found in the following gallery of 10 simply awesome wallpapers themed around nothing more complicated than the Apple logo. Perhaps you know others in this specific genre that belong in this class — we invite you to let us know about it in comments below.
And if you can find anything comparable out there built around a logo from Microsoft, Windows, Dell, HP, etc., do let us know about that, too.
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry owned the first Mac Plus, and it’s about to be auctioned off next month.
Roddenberry’s Mac Plus will join one of Michael Jackson’s gloves in an auction on October 8-9 by Profiles in History, an auctioneer of Hollywood memorabilia.
The Mac Plus — serial number F4200NUM0001 — was given to Roddenberry in January 1986. The auction house expects it to fetch $800 to $1,200.
All the icons for folders and apps in Snow Leopard are now drawn in glorious 512 x 512 pixels. It’s a step toward making the operating system resolution independent, and perhaps also to make Snow Leopard a touchscreen friendly OS.
But it’s also obviously done just for the art of it. These icons are real beauties. They are full of great details and little surprises. One icon contains the words to a song, visible only if you blow it up to its full size.
George Sawyer, who describes himself as “raised in a wood shop,” fashioned the Podbark case from flexible veneer adhered to wood-look paper with a protective screen sandwiched between. They wrap around the iPod with a finger joint, adding an authentic touch.
Sawyer started making them a few years ago, when the fifth gen iPod came out. Podbark currently fits those and the iPod classic 80gig, a comfort to those of us who have older models hanging around. They cost $15-$18, available in your choice of maple (pictured) or walnut.
iPhone (iBark?) and newer iPod models are in the works.
