hardware - page 47

The tinkerers at iFixit have taken apart the MacBook Air to discover:

• The battery isn’t hard to remove, but it isn’t something you’d do mid-flight when the battery dies.
• Most of the internal volume is taken up by the battery.
• The logicboard is surprisingly small: it looks like something out of an alarm clock, not a reasonably-powered laptop.
• The touchpad uses the same hardware as the iPhone and iPod Touch, which may allow Apple to add new multi-touch gestures via software.
• The hard drive is the slim 80-Gbyte model, not the chubby 160-Gbyte drive found in the iPod Classic. Unfortunately, 80-Gbyte is the maximum capacity of drives this size (5mm deep).
• It’s held together by 88 tiny screws.

The MacBook Air is starting to reach customers, and early reviews of the Apple’s thinnest laptop is starting to trickle down the wire. None trickles with as much force as Jason Snell’s astoundingly thorough dissection of everything about the Air, from software to hardware, from connectivity to battery life and more. I highly recommend the review (which is positive, but laden with caveats). I think it might be the most even-handed review of the Air so far. I mean, who knew that its headphone jack was as wonky as the iPhone’s?

And, as a rebuttal to the rebuttal. the folks over at apcommunity have created the MacBook Paper. It really is the thinnest laptop ever!

YouTube – MacBook Paper – Print your own!

Tags: macbookair, paper, thinnovation

Picture: Malabooboo

The tech press is missing the boat with the MacBook Air.

All the grumbling about the price, the absence of an optical drive, the irreplaceable battery, shows that the technical minded misunderstand the machine.

Of course it’s not practical, it’s a fashion computer.

But it seems the target audience — fashionistas — are taking note. A quick Google shows that fashion blogs are raving about the Air.

Coquette, a blog about ‘digital fashion and style by natalie zee drieu, raves about the Air’s potential as an accessory: “This little thing is ready to tote around in your Balenciaga or Gucci bag,” it says. “I’m so getting one!!!!!”

Judging from the comments on those blogs, lots of their readers are bonkers for it too.

Compared to a $1,800 Prada handbag, the MacBook Air is a steal.

Expect long lines at the NYC Soho and Meatpacking stores.

Via Carl Howe at Blackfriars: The MacBook Air is an ideal product — in the right market

If you’re a Mac power user who would prefer a MacBook Pro over a MacBook Air for every reason save only the light device’s cool multi-touch trackpad, hold onto your seats. According to AppleInsider, the MacBook Pro line will soon sport the same trackpad, as the product category gets updated to Intel’s Penryn processor line in the next few weeks, in line with the rest of the computer industry.

This is an exciting development. The only thing about the Air that really intrigues me is the multi-touch capability, so I’ll be able to go Pro without regret if this rumor holds up. Penryn’s a processor with serious legs on it.

Though we’ve all ranted and raved about the MacBook Air since Tuesday’s launch at MacWorld, i think we’re not getting any closer to a final decision. Many people see this incredibly thin machine as an ideal travel laptop, while I think Apple got so caught up in its focus on thinness that sacrificed far too many other features. Some argue that this is a typical Apple move to kill off unnecessary features ahead of the rest of the industry, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. There’s a lot on my mind, but I’ll use some reader comments to get into it.

Brendan West: But if they had a super-thin bezel, the edges of the computer could not reach that mythical 0.16″³, you see. The thinning of the shell means the still-pretty-bulky-for-its-size-LCD screen has to stop at a certain thickness.

With the MacBook, the bezel was so thick (I think) because of the emerging magnetic latch tech. With the MBA, it’s because (I think) they just couldn’t do it, cap’n.

That’s all true, but why does going down to 0.16″ matter? Any laptop is going to take up as much space as its thickest component. Apple couldn’t have gotten 0.25″ and gotten a better-looking bezel and bigger screen in the process?

Anon: “It’s still bigger than a 12″³ Powerbook.” And not just a little bigger. It’s two inches wider. I just measured, it won’t fit in the laptop bag that totes around my four year old Powerbook. I agree with all the Air’s compromises (speed, ports, I can even live with the integrated battery.) But the huge footprint is probably a dealbreaker. It means the Air’s thickness and weight is more about looks then portability. I’ve had one Powerbook after another for the last 15 years, but I’m worried: I don’t see my next machine in Apple’s lineup.

You and me both.

Bone: Hey, Pete”¦

When you get that masters in product design / mechanical and electrical engineering maybe you can explain to Apple’s designers/engineers how to fit an 8mm thick 1.8 HD where a 5MM thick version probably barely fits and keep the thing just as thin. Same goes with the bezel.

So long as they can tell me why shaving off that 3mm is more important than providing an $1800 laptop that would have as much storage as a $349 portable media player, I’m ready to have that conversation. Three millimeters is 0.11 inches. Oh noes! The MacBook Air might be 0.76″ in more places than its hinge! Call the cops!

Ian: I also looked at my kids needs. We have wi-fi at home and they mostly use their Mac now for iPod and Thumb drive. The last time my kids listened to a CD or watched a movie on the Macbook was an age ago. They don’t know what a Firewire cable is and so will not miss it. So I think this is a great product for students as well. It is targeted at a different market”¦

An interesting perspective. I can’t say I disagree.

Greg Baines: It is no doubt a beautiful machine. But I was just looking at the Hong Kong apple site, and I worked out for around the same price as the air I could buy an iMac, Apple TV, and an iPod touch.

If I really needed a portable and walked intot he Hong Kong store with the money for an air, I could by an iBook, an iPod touch, an iPod classic, and an Apple TV for the price of an air.

I’d love to buy one, but it just costs too much. What a shame. With all these really decent low cost machiens coming out (but poorly designed), why couldn’t apple also bring something simple and beautifuly designed that people actually need? What about the education market?

Maybe we should all boycott the Macbook Air- it is no doubt the most beautiful computer ever made, but why do we get pushed overpriced products all the time?

That’s a bit extreme, but I agree in part. What about the education market?

Finally, I wanted to take quotes from two celebrity commentators on the MacBook Air: Wil Shipley, founder of Delicious Monster, and Steve Jobs himself. They’re both fans.

Shipley: I don’t buy a laptop because I want to replace its drive in a year. I buy it because it seems great and meets my needs today. If my needs magically morph over the coming year, I guess I’ll sell it on eBay. Or pay Apple to throw in a different drive, or something. Honestly, I think we need to admit that just because machines get faster every year, doesn’t mean that the majority of people need faster machines.

In two weeks I’ll be writing Delicious Library 2 on a MacBook Air, every day. Because it’s simple and beautiful, and I crave those things.

Well, obviously, Wil, but my 12″ Powerbook G4 is nearly five years old, and I don’t think Apple is interested in putting it back on the market as an executive laptop. Besides, people do constantly need more data storage as video editing, photo editing, podcasting and other kinds of creativity got democratized — mostly thanks to Apple’s iLife suite. I have a really hard time believing that your Air isn’t going to spend most of its time at home hooked up with either a server or NAS, Wil. Right now, 80 gigs isn’t enough for anyone really interested in maintaining a big iTunes library and adding TV and movies into the mix, as well. It just isn’t. There’s no getting around this issue. And ordinary people don’t have external hard drives, home servers or other such solutions.

Jobs: “I’m going to be the first one in line to buy one of these,” he said. “I’ve been lusting after this.”

Yep. Just as I suspected. Steve made a machine for himself, as ever. It’s just a shame that this time his view of the world was so vastly different from the realities most of us have to deal with. He lives in Palo Alto, where WiFi is ubiquitous, so forget about a 3G modem on the Air. He has a million external data storage options and more powerful computers at his disposal, so keep the hard drive tiny. He won’t buy the one with a regular hard drive, so throw in a slow, unreliable iPod hard drive instead of a real one. The rich people like Steve will all buy the one with the SSD in it, so who cares about the low end?

At the end of the day, this is my take on the MacBook Air: Gorgeous design solving a questionable goal of ultimate thinness. The model with the SSD is a dream secondary computer for the rich and famous. The other one is going to be unsatisfying to a lot of people. Most importantly, it’s just not small enough. Who decided that thin was the only way to go about making a full-featured laptop that doesn’t weigh much? And the 12″ Powerbook still hasn’t been topped as a design triumph at Apple. Period.

So I’ve been tossing the MacBook Air’s (de)merits around in my head since about 10:30 this morning, and I’ve reached some conclusions. Some good, some bad. It’s not the machine I’m looking for (I still want a small form-factor MacBook Pro), but it’s got some pluses to go with the minuses we’ve already called out. Your comments would be appreciated.
Pros:

• Dude, it’s like totally thin.
• Multi-touch track pad.
• Seriously thin.
• No, it fits in a manila envelope.
• MANILA.
• ENVELOPE!
• And it weighs three pounds.
• It’s faster than the first Core Solo Intel Mac mini that Apple released.
• The hidden port hatch is pretty darn cool.
• Overall design is absolutely gorgeous. Very few people change their laptop batteries on the fly, so I appreciate a nice, cohesive frame that hides the internals.

Cons:

• Super-minimal I/O. What, 4-pin FireWire was too bulky for you? Someone tell Sony that FireWire doesn’t work in an ultra-compact laptop!
• MacBook-sized footprint. This thing is only thinner, not smaller. It’s not taking up less of your lap, and it’s still bigger than a 12″ Powerbook.
• Giant bezel around the screen. If you’re stressing how small this thing is, shouldn’t you build in design elements that stress how much you’ve packed into such a tiny package? A 1″ border on a 13.3″ screen is available on the MacBook. How exactly does this stress professional needs and storage considerations?
• I can buy an iPod classic with a 160 gig hard drive for $349, plug it into a MacBook Air and TRIPLE its storage capacity. The fact that I can’t put the same hard drive into a MacBook Air is ridiculous. There’s no excuse for an 80 gig ceiling, no matter how thin the box is.
• No mobile broadband built-in. Kind of makes the whole “Air” thing moot if I need to find a hotspot to crank this up.
• Multi-touch on a trackpad is nowhere near as nice as multi-touch on an iPhone or iPod touch.
• Apple made a sacrifice of functionality in pursuit of a goal that might or might not be the most important virtue. Sure, thinness is a nice-to-have. But isn’t weight and overall size more important for the sub-compact market?
• MacBook Air? More like Err.

It looks like there’s a mini backlash brewing against the beautiful but pricey MacBook Air — online at least.

Over at MacRumors, a “first impressions” gallery of the new sub-notebook is drawing far more negative reader comments than positive ones.

Yes, Mac fans like the Air’s thin profile, but there’s a lot of bitching about its limitations — the price, soldered ram, non-replaceable battery, and paying extra for an ethernet port or DVD drive.

“It’s an expensive, disposable toy,” says one MacRumors reader.

Matching Wired’s leaked inside information to a T, Steve Jobs closed this year’s MacWorld keynote by unveiling the MacBook Air, the company’s first true subcompact since the PowerBook 2400. Weighing just 3 pounds and tapering from .76 inches down to an astonishing .16 inches, this is a dreambook. Absurdly light. Full 13.3 inch screen. Astonishing multi-touch trackpad with gestures borrowed form the iPhone. Available with SSD options. Starts at $1799.

Unfortunately, it’s not for everyone. I won’t be buying one, much as I would like to. Its processor is fairly slow, 1.6 Ghz or 1.8 Ghz. It is a Core 2 Duo, but not up to the kind of performance leap I want. The ram is soldered at 2 gigs. The hard drive is 80gigs or a 64 gig SSD. No other options. I want at least the storage of the biggest iPod classic, whose hard drive should fit in this thing. Its trim size is no different from the existing MacBook, which means a large bezel that just reminds how much more room could be used for a larger screen. This is perfectly set up as an executive’s stylish laptop for the web, watching rental movies from iTunes, and e-mail. Beyond that, it would mainly frustrate for what it won’t do. I guess I’ll be getting a MacBook Pro once the Penryn models (please have multi-touch, please have multi-touch) are announced. I guess we’ll continue without a true compact MacBook Pro.

Anyone up for it? It kind of seems like a MacBook that Steve Jobs would use — I don’t know how many others will.

Apple – MacBook Air

Tags: macbook, apple, macbook air, steve jobs, keynote

Edit: New AppleTV is $229, a price cut. Additionally, all of the new features are available on the old version as a free software upgrade. Available in two weeks. Nice.

Conceding that its foray into movie download sales on iTunes has failed to meet expectations, Apple has announced the launch of iTunes Movie Rentals, featuring the films of all major movie studios. By the end of February, more than 1000 films will be available. Older titles are $2.99, new ones $3.99. You’ll get a 30 day window to watch, but just 24 hours to finish once you start (so forget about watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy all at once).

There is some really cool stuff here, however. Movies will start playing within 30 seconds of starting to download. You can transfer the file to an iPod or iPhone while watching it on a computer. It runs on Mac, PC, iPods, iPhones, existing AppleTV and an all-new high definition AppleTV. The new AppleTV can sync files from its hard drive back to your computer. That said, it’s a true stand-alone solution. No computer required.

Intriguing. Still not sure the AppleTV will ever take off. Still no price announcement. Will update when it gets posted to Wired.

Liveblogging the 2008 Macworld Steve Jobs Keynote | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

Tags: appletvitunes apple keyntoe macworld

Gadget Lab got a hot tip from an “Apple insider” this afternoon about the much-rumored “MacBook Air,” purported to be an ultra-light laptop that relies primarily on wireless technology instead of cables. Though the renderings in this post are merely clever photoshops (pretty clearly based on the new Apple Bluetooth keyboard), our friends at Wired say it sounds real:

An Apple insider told Wired today that the company’s new ultraportable, expected to be seen in public for the first time tomorrow, has an extremely thin profile and is shaped like a teardrop when closed thicker at the top behind the screen, tapering at the bottom behind the keyboard.

“It’s unbelievably thin,” said the source.

The device is made of aluminum and glass, and uses the same design language as recent Apple consumer products: black on silver.

The tapering is an interesting strategy. All of the tapering laptops I can think of are incredible fat at the hinge before getting somewhat thin at the edges. If it got no thicker than existing MacBook Pros and got thinner still? That would be hot. I don’t buy the inductive powering rumor, though. Though seemingly elegant, it would require a charging station, which seems pretty anti-Apple. Still, only 12 hours to go! Anyone else got a crazy rumor for the mill?

Our pals over at Wired Gadget Lab point us toward these humongous banners that Apple has positioned throughout Moscone Center for this year’s Macworld, reading “There’s something in the air.” (They’ll be live-blogging Tuesday — check it out!)

As you might expect, this has led to rampant speculation around the Internets, including the idea that Apple’s new ultra-light and -thin MacBook would adopt the surname “Air,” an idea popularized by the occasionally reliable and occasionally crazy 9to5Mac and MacRumors.

Everyone agrees, however, that this probably has something to do with wireless networking, either the arrival of WiMax on the Mac platform, or (more likely) the availability of HSDPA (3G) networks for new iPhones, true mobile broadband at last. I think the latter is much more likely, if only because the most enthusiastic proponent of WiMax is Motorola, and Steve Jobs absolutely hates Motorola.

After going back and forth, I’m making a very conservative forecast for this year’s Macworld. We’ll see Penryn-based MacBook Pros for sure, maybe Penryn MacBooks (could wait until February), Penryn iMacs, an announcement of new iPhones with more data and 3G (for delivery in the spring), and a thin-and-light MacBook Pro. But nothing with SSD, no multitouch for Mac, and no tabletMac. I think Apple has so many incremental upgrades to perform this time out that there won’t be much room for a huge, earth-shattering kaboom like last time around. I’m certainly hoping to be proven wrong, though.

Last month, after a couple of eggnogs at the office, I drenched my keyboard in a cup of coffee. Kind readers suggested running it through the dishwasher. Of course, putting keyboards in dishwashers is the kind of thing you read on the internet all the time, but never believe it actually works.

So, skeptical that it would work, I tried it myself.I’m happy to report that running a filthy, coffee-stained keyboard through the dishwasher works great. The keyboard is spotless, and it works perfectly.

Feel me: dishwashers make keyboards better than new.

Full procedure after the jump.

Apple

Taking some of the fun out of next week’s MacWorld Keynote, Apple announced new Mac Pros and xServes, each offering up to eight cores of Xeon goodness. The Mac Pros come STANDARD with eight cores (ranging from 2.8 up to 3.2Ghz) and support for dual 30-inch Cinema HD Displays, which is just ludicrous by about any standard. Of course, if you’re really a glutton for punishment, you can still install up to four graphics cards, each with support for two 30″ displays, meaning EIGHT giant screens. They’re taking the whole “Pro” thing seriously these days, which is really nice to see.

And now, we can just hope that new MacBooks, MacBook Pros, iMacs, iPhones and other new kinds of hardware are on the docket for next Tuesday.

Tags: macpro, xserve, apple, hardware, announcement

Once Apple began to work with Intel, it got a lot easier to begin predicting the future development of Mac hardware. When IBM and Motorola provided the horsepower (or lack thereof, as the case may be) for the Mac platform, it was anybody’s guess when Apple might ship new machines — or what would cause the shipping delay this time. Intel, however, is an open book. They show off their processor roadmap up to a year in advance.

RIght now, everyone is waiting for Apple to unveil new portable Macs using the Penryn chip, the world’s first consumer 45nm CPU. They should drop at MacWorld. But Intel’s way out in front. According to BusinessWeek’s Reena Jana, the future will be ultra-efficient chips powering greener laptops with longer battery life. She writes about her exclusive preview on the Next blog.

Yet Intel seems to really be walking the walk on these two matters. Chip-wise, the company will be rolling out a platform code-named “Menlow,” in Q2 or Q3 of 2008. It’s the first-generation of low-power platforms, which promises to run on 10 times less CPU power and is 5 times smaller than previous chips.

Sounds like the ideal way to make a tiny MacBook with extremely efficient battery life that won’t burn your knees. I’m just waiting for the first Mac portable that can operate for 9 hours without a charge.

I just spilled coffee all over my computer keyboard. While horrified at the damage, I was fascinated to see how the coffee pooled in the middle of the keys.

I’ve never seen the like before.

It’s an Apple keyboard. The keys have a glossy finish and are slightly depressed in the center. Of course, most of the coffee drained off the keys and collected in the keyboard’s base, which is made of transparent plastic. I wish i’d got a picture of that. It looked like one of those paperweights filled with oil and water, but in this case, it was a muddy brown liquid. But the coffee drained out when I turned it over.

I shall run the keyboard through the dishwasher to see if that myth works.

In the rush to create high-markup accessories for the iPhone, one company is hawking the Pogo Stylus: a pointing device for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch — two products expressly designed to be used without a stylus.

Is there really a market for this? I imagine the pudgy fingered might take a look, as might people who have become accustomed to poking around their smartphone with a little pen. But the whole point of Apple’s multitouch is doing away with pointing devices. But the market for iPod accessories is worth more than $1 billion annually, so companies are taking a throw-it-out-and-fingers-crossed approach.

Available now from the company’s website for $25.

I was talking with a friend awhile ago about the current state of hardware piracy in China. Basically, if it’s available in the US, there’s a nearly identical knock-off on the streets of Beijing and, by correlation, in the back alleys of San Francisco and New York. I found an absurdly faithful iPod shuffle copy a few months ago, and now “ECNokia” (very original name) is offering an iPod nano fatty rip that they’re advertising as identical in industrial design, but throwing in a bigger screen, a digital camera, SD cards, video recording and an FM tuner.

Granted, we don’t know that this picture is in any way accurate, but the interesting thing is that it could be. After all, Chinese companies do all of the manufacturing for iPods at this point. If you were Foxconn or whomever, it would be pretty darn easy to just leave the molds for your Apple project on the line as you make a few knock-offs. This is the bizarre situation of our present era of outsourcing: Companies can copy a market-leading project without reverse-engineering it, because many of the copiers are the actual engineers.

Via Gizmodo

Several handset-makers, including LG, HTC, Palm, and Nokia, have launched new “iPhone-killers” in the last couple of weeks, hoping to prove that the phone guys understand something that Apple doesn’t. And according to David Pogue, one such effort, the T-Mobile Shadow does a great job of making that point. Until you start using Windows Mobile 6, which is a blight on phone-dom. The review is a riot:

When you’re assigning a contact to one of the five “My Faves” slots, a T-Mobile calling plan that gives you unlimited calls to your five favorite numbers, three confirmation screens is two too many.

If it takes four presses on the More button just to see everything in the Start menu and you provide no direct way to get to the first page from the last you need to redesign.

And that’s the big difference, for me. Until someone comes out with an interface half as intuitive as the iPhone’s, I can’t be swayed. I guess we’ll see what Google’s got when it rolls out the Android SDK today, but it looks like Apple’s lead is insurmountable.

Technorati Tags: iphone, shadow

My brother brought something very interesting to my attention recently. Although Dell offers a 15.4″ Inspiron starting at $499, to make it even roughly comparable in performance to a MacBook, you need to make it cost more than the Apple. No, seriously:

Once you start “customizing” the machine to be anything capable of running a modern OS, a category in which we are forced to include Vista, the total more than doubles. The default shipping OS for the $499 machine is Vista. The laptop, as configured initially, has 512MB of RAM, or a quarter of the recommended amount for Vista. The processor is a single-core running at 2GHz, and the drive capacity is a scanty 60GB, of which between a fifth and a sixth will be consumed by the OS, and somewhat more by preinstalled third-party software.

So, starting from the base price of $499, I added:

Dual core 2GHz CPU: $150
Windows XP Pro: $129 (Yep, you have to pay the price of Leopard to upgrade from XP Home to XP Pro)
1 GB RAM installed: $50
80 GB drive: $25
85 W/Hr battery: $50
802.11n wifi card: $100
McAfee AV software: $99
MS Office: $149
3-year warranty: $240

Dell grand total: $1501

And what of the Mac? Well, aside from costing slightly less, it’s also much less of a hassle to custom build.

At the Apple Store site, I configured a low-end MacBook for purchase.
Stock configuration: 2GHz Core2Duo, 1GB RAM, 80GB disk, 802.11n,
Leopard installed. To this I added:

3-year AppleCare: $249
MS Office: $150 (Or only $79, if you go the iWork route)

Apple grand total: $1498

Checkmate, Dell. I would really like to commend Apple for how easy it is to use their online store compared to Dell’s. The Apple experience is a single page, loaded only with relevant tools to install. Meanwhile, the Dell site is loaded with multiple versions of the same piece of software, or bizarre configuration options most people could not possibly give a crap about. I mean, really. Can you explain off the top of your head why an 85 Wh battery is better than a 60? Or what a 9-cell versus 6-cell battey is? More importantly, do you think anyone you know would? I mean, come on. Just give people what they need. This is absurd and ugly. Shopping at Dell’s site is like buying a used car from a guy named Moe off of Craig’s List (trust me, I have). There continue to be hidden costs you couldn’t have imagined, and it just keeps getting worse.

At this point, is there any reason to stick with Dell? There’s Parallels if you really need it, and MS Office, Quicken, QuickBooks, and most of the other staples have already migrated. Heck, Apple Mail even has built in Exchange support — which Windows doesn’t, unless you buy Office Pro with Outlook. How do you like them Apples, Redmond?

Thanks Andrew!

PC World: In Pictures: The Most Notable Notebooks of 2007

The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware. The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows.

Via Daring Fireball

The MacBook is just about the only Mac to not received a major upgrade in the last four months. According to MacRumors, that could change tomorrow, as they predict Apple will launch new MacBooks featuring an improved graphics chipset from Intel. Speaking as someone in the market for a new machine, a hotter MacBook would certainly spur me to action, and tomorrow is about as late as Apple can go and still generate significant sales in the holiday season. This rumor is also quite credible, as a driver for the graphics chipset in question is present in Leopard, which would ship natively on any new Mac:

Apple’s Leopard update, however, has revealed drivers for the newer Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics chip. This is the successor to the Intel GMA 950 which currently resides in the existing MacBooks. This would suggest that the next MacBook will see an upgrade to the Santa Rosa chipset.

While we’re at it, Apple, do you think it would be possible to soften the edge of the MacBook wrist-rest? That think really chafes…

Mac Rumors: New Apple MacBook on Tuesday? GMA X3100?

Tags: macbook, rumors, Apple

Thanks to Apple’s just-announced iPhone software developers kit, VOIP will likely be coming to the iPhone, according to Alex Schaefer lead programmer of Apollo, a web-based iPhone instant messaging application.

“VoIP is next, and I’m preparing to start a new project working exclusively on that,” he tells Wired News’ software blog.

Schaefer is just one of many Mac developers itching to develop for the iPhone. There’s more reaction from developers in this other Wired News story: Developers on iPhone SDK: OMG! ABFT!

There seems to be a memory leak with some iPhones that quickly gobbles up the device’s storage space.
A <a href=”https://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5025646&#5025646″>discussion thread</a> on Apple’s support forums details the iPhone’s “Other” memory category growing to several gigabyte in some cases. (The “Other” category is shown in the iTunes screenshot above)

The source of the memory blob is mysterious, but one sufferer suggests that Google Maps may be causing the problem. The Google widget may be caching every map that’s loaded.

The only way to clear the growing memory blog is to wipe the device and start from scratch. One reader reports that upgrading to 1.1.1 did not free a memory blog that had grown to 1.6GB, but wiping and restoring the phone dropped it to a reasonable 14MB.

Thanks Adrian!

Hacker genius Erling Ellingsen has made his own $2 multitouch input pad from a plastic bag full of blue dye and an iSight camera. He’s also hacked the iPhone’s accelerometer that allows you to control the phone by tipping, rotating or shaking it.

Ellingson’s jury-rigged multitouch input pad lets him control his computer with his fingers, just like the iPhone or Jeff Han’s futuristic multitouch table. Using a bag of die and an iSight camera beneath it, Ellingson can navigate the Web, move chess pieces and play a virtual keyboard. How it works exactly is not clear, but check out the impressive video:

Ellingsen has also hacked the iPhone’s accelerometer, allowing him to control various homemade iPhone applications by tilting, rotating or shaking the iPhone. Ellingsen has created three demo apps controlled by tipping and shaking: a virtual Steve Jobs bobble-head that bobs its head when the phone is shaken; a maze that is navigated by tipping and turning the phone; and a virtual box of balls that roll and bounce as he rotates the phone. Again, see the impressive video:

Ellingsen has released the source code for the iPhone hack, and he’s asking for people to submit their ideas and vote on suggestions for what to do with it.

So far, he’s thinking about an iPod+Nike-like pedometer, a Labyrinth game, SmackBook navigation for Safari and a virtual pet that’s shakeable, among other ideas.

(Via Waxy)