hardware - page 50

John Venzon, the former-curator of Newton Museum who recently sold his collection of every Newton made on eBay, writes:

“I can now let you know that the winner of the Newton Museum was none other than Walter Smith, one of the creators of the Newton. He was responsible for, among other things, the unified data model which ties the Newton software together, the compiler, interpreter, and runtime library for NewtonScript, the language used to write Newton applications and the Newton object store, where all the persistent data in a Newton resides.

I have transfered the www.newtonmuseum.com domain to him as well, so the Newton Museum lives on, and in GREAT hands.”

Wow. What a knockout quarter Apple had — posting income of $5.75 billion, it’s best ever. Most of the cash came from 14 million iPod sales — three times what it sold this time last year. But the company also saw 20 percent growth in Mac sales, shifting 1.25 million Macs. What surprises me is these were lame duck machines — soon to be made obsolete by new Intel boxes.

Wall Street’s a little bit worried though about the current quarter, which Apple said will be lower than projections due to “a pause” in Mac sales as the product lineup switches to Intel, according to the Wall Street Journal.

There was also “a pause” in sales the previous quarter, Reuters reports. If that’s true, what will sales of Intel Macs be like when the lineup is filled out this year? A quick skim of the earnings call reports doesn’t mention any guidance about supplies — but my gut is it’ll go gangbusters, but supplies will be constrained and Apple won’t be able to keep up. I think Apple’s going to have an unbelievable year, and this is just the beginning.

John Venzon, curator of the Newton Museum is shutting down the website and selling his collection of every Newton ever made.

Venzon has run the website since 2001. Venzon said his collection includes “one of every Newton ever made plus every developer scrap of paper, software and manual.” The collection is for sale through eBay.

“I’m closing up shop for the very prozaic reason that my wife and I are remodeling our house, and the collection is housed in a room we are tearing out to make space for a family room,” Venzon said. “The sale is also helping to pay for it. My hosting is up in June, so I’ll be passing it on to the person who buys the collection, if they want it.”

Venzon added: “I still use my original Newton I bought in 1993, though. I’m keeping that!”

Update: I emailed Venzon to ask how much he thought the collection was worth. Venzon, a feature film editor, replied:

Ah, Newton, is there nothing you can’t do?

Apple’s mega Cinema Display is to about get some competition: Dell is prepping its own 30-inch flat panel, according to a post on the NeoWin forums.

I’ve no idea how reliable the post is, but it says the monster monitor will ship four days before Christmas, have WQXGA resolution (2560 x 1600), two DVI-D links and one HDCP port.

The big question though is price — will it be a lot less than the $2,500 Apple charges?

Think Secret says at Macworld in January Apple will unveil an online media distribution system for streaming tons of content to the living room, including feature-length movies.

One of the analysts interviewed wondered whether the Mac mini, which Think Secret says will be revamped, could be based on Intel’s new Viiv platform, a set of branded chip technologies for home entertainment devices.

Among other things, Viiv (which rhymes with “five”) provides a secure platform for sharing copy-protected media among devices in the home, as well as out of it — like loading TV shows on handhelds and laptops, for example.

Intel has been busy signing up dozens of partners in consumer electronics, as well as Hollywood and the music biz, according to the WSJ (registration required). Tivo is a partner, as is British Sky Broadcasting and Movielink, a joint movie-download service from five major movie studios.

Viiv works with Microsoft’s Media Center and the upcoming Windows Vista, but could Apple also be involved, basing the new Mac mini on Viiv?

Either way, publications like the Enquirer and Hardware Analysis, think Viiv is bad news for consumers.

The technology will allow content to be locked down, limiting what consumers can do with movies or music they buy in digital format, even if it’s within their “fair use” rights.

In addition, “unauthorized” hardware like homebrew Linux boxes will be locked out of the legitimate digital content market. As I suggested before — this is the real reason Apple is switching to Intel — so that it can sell copy-protected digital entertainment securely online.

It may not be all doom and gloom. Intel says Viiv will play unprotected content.

According to the WSJ: “With Viiv, Intel tried to make sure that consumers can still use unprotected content — such as CDs they rip — as they can now, Mr. Corbett said.”

But note the telling phrase: “Intel tried to make sure that consumers can still use unprotected content.”

Coverbuddy is a program that lets you navigate your iTunes library via album artwork rather than lists of songs or artists. It’s nice, but pretty useless.

But now a new version of the software allows iTunes to be accessed via any web browser, including the browser on the Sony PSP, which turns the little game machine into a remote for iTunes.

If you don’t get an iPod this Christmas because they’re all sold out, download and print out this gorgeous paperPod.

This Japanese site also has a charming classic Mac.

LaCie’s newest hard drive is a 500GB brick — literally.

The $400 hard drive is shaped like a Lego brick, and is stackable to boot.

Available in late December, the USB 2.0 drive will be available in a range of capacities, starting at 160GB for $120.

Crafted by the world-famous designer Ora-Ito, the new Brick expresses a ludic playfulness in a user-friendly high-performance hard drive. Stack & Play multiple LaCie Bricks together to brighten your desktop and your mood.

It looks like Microsoft’s done an Apple with the XBox 360. Of all things, the standout feature in early reviews is not the graphics, but the user interface.

That’s surprising, given Microsoft’s reputation for astonishingly crappy interfaces.

In a discussion of the UI, BusinessWeek concluded: “Microsoft certainly seems to have done just about everything right.”

Wired News said: “What’s impressed me most thus far about the 360 is how it streamlines and refines the user interface.”

And Columnist John Dvorak said: “The Xbox 360 explores new menu structures with a unique and pleasant GUI… I have not seen a hardware/software system this well thought out for a decade or more.”

According to a press release, the UI was developed by a UK consultancy, Akqa, and was perfected using good-old usability testing:

To arrive at the new Xbox 360 player interface, Microsoft and AKQA formed a multidisciplinary team of user experience, interaction design, user insight and behavior specialists, who built several functioning prototypes, working hand-in-hand with the Xbox 360 industrial design team. In-depth testing of the prototypes followed, with immersive workshops, usability sessions and interviews with customers taking place worldwide. The prototypes were then refined and re-tested.

BetaNews has a bunch of screenshots, and it does look surprisingly clean and uncluttered.

On Kroll’s Blog:

While I was at the Apple Store last night with my girlfriend getting my nano, some guy brought his old Mac in because he thought it was time to “upgrade”. He had been doing his banking on that machine since he got it, using quicken or something. This mac classic came out in 1990, had 1meg of RAM, and a 8mhz processor!

The machine appears to be a Mac SE, which came out in 1987 — making it almost two decades old. That’s a long time to be using the same computer.

When I was in New York a few years ago, I spent an afternoon at Tekserve, a big Mac repair shop in Chelsea.

While there, a couple of people bought in classic Macs for repair, and there were several on the shelves waiting to be picked up. I was surprised there were so many. Tekserve’s owner said they belonged to the many writers in the neighborhood, who considered them perfectly functional for scribbling on.

Philip Torrone has some friends who own a $20,000 laser-engraving machine. So he gave them his PowerBook and a 19-Century etching of a nocturnal creature (from a book by O’Reilly, who Torrone works for).

The result is this amazingly-detailed etching.

Watch this fun video of a transparent PowerBook screen.

At first the PowerBook looks like it’s displaying a regular “transparent desktop,” made by snapping a pic of the scene behind the computer and displaying it onscreen, giving the impression the LCD is transparent.

But then the PowerBook is picked up and the background stays stationary in space — just as though it would if the screen were truly transparent. It’s a really convincing illusion.

The clip was made by Jose Izquierdo of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and he explains how he did it after the link:

Love Labs, a UK sex-toy manufacturer, has devloped an iPod vibrator that buzzes in time to the music.

The 2-inch, $30 iBuzz plugs into the iPod’s headphone jack and vibrates in sync with the rhythms of the iPod.

The only online retailer that seems to be selling it — Lovehoney — describes it thus:

A super-fun sex toy that plugs into your iPod! The music-activated vibrating bullet stimulates you in time with your favourite music. And you can listen to your songs while you’re enjoying the vibrations…

Use the his-and-hers attachments to add extra excitement. Turn him into a vibrator with the stretchy ring and use the soft sleeve for sensitive stimulation.

Out of Japan, a set of stackable add-ons for the Mac mini that transforms it into a towering music system.

Made by a company called Greenhouse, the components are a 15 Watt subwoofer (bottom); a speaker and USB hub (the one with the knob); and a hard-drive case for storing gigabytes and gigabytes of digital music. On top is the mini itself.

Unfortunatley, there’s no other information about cost or shipping — or how it sounds. Sure looks good though.

(Via courtesy of Akihabara News)

Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab was offfered Mac OS X for free for his $100 laptop project, the WSJ reports.

Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc.’s chief executive, offered to provide free copies of the company’s operating system, OS X, for the machine, according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative’s founders. “We declined because it’s not open source,” says Dr. Papert, noting the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

Under present plans, the first production version of the laptop will be powered by an AMD microprocessor and use an open-source Linux-based operating system supplied by Red Hat.

Steve Jobs will unveil the first Intel-based Macs at Macworld in January — and it’ll be the flat-screen iMac and the 15-inch PowerBook, according to a somewhat-believable report at AppleInsider.

Most observers had expected low-end products like the Mac Mini to switch first, but AppleInsider says:

Although Apple has only committed to introducing the first Intel-based Macintosh systems by mid-2006, extremely reliable sources and a several-month-long investigation have revealed that January’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco is being primed as the launch-pad for at least one of the Mac maker’s next-generation Intel systems.

Surprisingly, the most reliable information indicates that the iMac and PowerBook — two of the company’s most recently revised Mac offerings — are targeted to be the first two Mac models to receive Intel processors in January. The iMac and PowerBook are also believed to be Apple’s best-selling Mac models, which explains why the company will be upgrading them with Intel processors first and refreshing their associated product lines for the second time in as little as four months.

A several-month-long investigation! Well, it must be true. We’ll see. Macworld rumors sure are flying early this year. But, people are saying AppleInsider is the new ThinkSecret.

The developer of the the iLoad CD-to-iPod loader is hoping it will be a hit so he can pay off his court-ordered restitution.

Reports the Colorado Springs Gazette:

A Monument businessman convicted of theft and securities fraud won’t be allowed to travel to China to market a product he invented, a judge ruled Friday.

Sanford Schupper, 56, has been convicted of defrauding Citibank Visa of as much as $200,000 and sentenced to six years in prison. In another case, Schupper was convicted of swindling a family out of $872,000 and sentenced to eight years in prison.

Friday, Schupper’s lawyer asked senior state District Court Judge Donald Campbell to grant Schupper permission to go to China to market his latest invention, an accessory for Apple iPods.

Schupper says the product could make him millions and allow him to pay court-ordered restitution to victims of his crimes. He hasn’t revealed specifics about the product because of fears someone might steal the idea.

Meanwhile, Schupper is sparring with Gizmodo.

The Nimzy Vibro Blaster is an unfortunately named “vibrator” that turns any flat object into a speaker.

Developed by Digital Infotech of Singapore, the Nimzy Vibro Blaster transforms audio from an iPod or other gizmo into mechanical vibrations. Placed on a flat surface — wood, stone, glass or plastic — the company claims its “advanced electro acoustic technology” sounds “loud and clear!”

A wonderfully cheery e-mail from the company’s new US marketing operation in Plantation, Florida, proclaimed:

Believe it or not, no more bulky speakers, any flat object can become one…

Owners of IPODs or any other MP3 players can use Vibro Blaster to share their favorite music anytime, anywhere; Business executives can travel with this compact toy to do presentations with audio from laptop. Hence they become more convincing to the audience; bored in hotel room, travelers can enjoy their own music while conducting multiple tasks, most importantly, hear the phone ring!

Once again, Digital Infotech Inc brings more fun to life and work with innovative technology.

Here’s a link to the only product page I could find. Warning: the page makes a horrible racket.

The next version of Motorola’s stylish RAZR phone, the RAZR V3i, will come equipped with Apple’s iTunes software.

The V3i is the second Moto phone to carry iTunes. Like its predecessor, the ROKR (dubbed the CROCKR because of its limitations), it will likely be limited to 100 songs maximum.

The RAZR is “the first choice for a select group of fashion elite and Hollywood ‘it’ girls,” according to the Moto press release. That may be, but the Register isn’t impressed:

If Apple and Motorola are serious about phones as a digital music player, they need to shape up fast. Thanks to a single-chip design, Nokia is able to push today’s high-end Symbian smartphones down into the midrange next year, and features like WiFi are standard across next year’s N series and E series models. More importantly, Nokia is determined to allow users to share their songs and playlists over a personal area network connection using WiFi or Bluetooth – something that Apple is extremely reluctant to do. As the cheeky graphic nicely illustrates.

PS: Be sure to check the Register’s graphic.

The French site MacBidouille has detailed step-by-step instructions for souping-up a 12-inch iBook and turning it into a something comparable to the 12-inch PowerBook — at a considerable saving.

It requires disassembing the iBook, swapping out the optical drive and hard drive, and adding Bluetooth and a ton of RAM. It takes a couple of hours, and “this transformation is not a piece of cake,” but:

All parts including the iBook have been purchased for 1,598 euros VAT included. To compare, the same iBook 80GB 5400rpm without the SuperDrive costs : 1,677.99 euros VAT included and the PB 12″ Superdrive 1.2 GB with 80 GB 5400rpm : 2,168 euros VAT included.

BoingBoing has a pic of a pack of chocolate cigarettes picked up in Mexico with a really nice iMac design.

The graphic is really good — as are the others BoingBoing points to. Graphic design is alive and well in Mexico.

Apple I nerds may be interested in a Homebrew Computer Club retrospective at the Vintage Computer Festival this weekend in Mountain View, California. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak will be there, as will several other Homebrewers.

“The VCF in conjunction with the DigiBarn Computer Museum is proud to
present a 30th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Homebrew Computer Club, the legendary Silicon Valley institution that helped to launch the era of the personal computer. Bruce Damer of the DigiBarn Computer Museum will moderate this panel of former Homebrew members, including Steve Wozniak, Lee Felsenstein, Allen Baum, Len Shustek, Bob Lash and Michael Holley.

Join the panel as they recount their experiences and gab with the group as we feast on some yummy cake, courtesy of the DigiBarn.”

(The comical Homebrew diorama is taken from an Information Age exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History).

The Festival is at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Doors open 9:30am until 6:00pm; full exhibit is $12 per person per day; $7 per person per day for exhibit and marketplace only. Kids under 17 are free.

Engadget got its “sweaty paws” on the next version of Motorola’s iTunes phone — the SLVR L7 — and it looks like it’ll pipe music through wireless Bluetooth stereo headphones.

“… it has Bluetooth, a VGA digital camera, and a TransFlash memory card slot for storing up to 100 iTunes tracks, but there is one real surprise: the phone doesn’t have a headphone jack. Seems a bit odd for a phone with iTunes, but we’re hearing that Motorola will offer Bluetooth stereo headphones.”

Apple’s PowerBooks and iBooks are generally well-made, value-for-money machines, but they suffer from a critical design flaw — the tip of the AC power adapter is prone to breaking off inside the power port.

It’s a costly and time-consuming repair, and it’s almost impossible for owners to fix themselves. I know, because it’s happened to me three times in the last three years.

The last time was just last week, and the story of how I fixed it is a saga you can read after the jump. Long story short: I finally dug it out in a frenzy of rage and frustration that almost ruined a $2,500 computer.

Apple’s at it again. New pro lineup:

Power Mac: Dual-core PowerPC chips across line. Two models: Dual and Quad, which features two dual-core processors, up to 2.5GHz per core. Four PCI Express slots, and “wicked-fast workstation graphics” that can power up to eight Cinema Displasy! Eight! Starts at $2,000; top-of-the-line starts at $3,200.

PowerBooks: Higher res displays (1440-by-960 on the 15″), longer battery life and SuperDrives as standard. $1,400-$2,500.

Aperture: Pro touch-up and archive photo tool. Supports RAW. $500. Not really a Photoshop killer; more like iPhoto on steroids. Get this — it requires Dual 2GHz G5 or faster, 2GB of RAM, 5GB of HD space for ap and tutorials (not counting giant RAW files), and ATI Radeon X800 XT card or better! No worries about it getting pirated: who has the hardware to run such a beast?

I actually don’t like product announcements like this. It makes my 18-month-old PowerBook and G5 look feeble and decrepit. Damn Apple!