FaceTime’s been a huge success on the iPhone and iPod Touch. You knew it was coming to the Mac, and guess what? Now it has.
Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller demonstrated the new functionality, calling between an iPhone 4 and a Mac. When Steve rotates his iPhone, it rotates on Phil’s computer as well. It even does fullscreen.
Wonder how long you’ll have to wait? Barely any time at all: Apple will be releasing FaceTime for Mac in beta form today.
[image via Gizmodo]
The final piece of the iLife ’11 puzzle? GarageBand ’11, which according to Steve, features some great new features to help fix timing in your music, some more guitar amps and effects, piano and guitar lessons built-in and an in-program “How Did I Play?” feature.
The next program in the iLife ’11 suite that Apple will be talking about today is iMovie ’11.
What’s new? According to Steve, iMovie ’11 has all new audio editing for mere mortals who don’t want to invest in Final Cut Pro, as well as one step effects, a people finder, news and sports themes and the ability to create movie trailers.
Steve Jobs has just taken things back from Tim Cook, and now he’s announcing the first new product of the Back to Mac event. As predicted, it’s iLife ’11.
“I’d like to talk about iLife. It’s widely regarded as the best suite of digital lifestyle apps in the world. You can’t do this on any other computer. We improve it every year or two, coming out with new version.”
First up, he details the changes to iPhoto, which is gaining vastly expanded fullscreen support, as well as gobs of Facebook enhancements, easier emailing functionality and some new slideshows. There’s more though… and it only gets more impressive as the presentation goes on.
Just as they did for September’s iPod Event, Apple will be live streaming Steve Jobs’ ‘Back To Mac’ announcements later today, starting at 10:00AM PDT. You can find the official link here.
Like last time, the live stream is only open to people using Mac products. Here are the compatible devices:
• OSX 10.6 Mac running Safari
• iPhone running a minimum of iOS 3.0
• iPod touch running a minimum of iOS 3.0
• iPad
Don’t worry if you’re stuck on an office PC: we’ll be live blogging the event, as usual.
This marks the second time in recent years that Apple has live streamed their own event, supposedly to test their new data centers, although Apple did experiment with live streaming earlier in the decade… only for the whole site to keel over under the strain of just 50,000 viewers.
In just a few hours, Apple will announce a new version of OS X, and will almost certainly unveil new MacBook Airs and new versions of iLife/iWork. But we’re wondering if they won’t reveal one more thing: a social media network with the goal of creating millions of home-based Apple Genii at its core.
In just two and a half hours, we can all expect Steve Jobs to strut on stage and orgiastically unburden himself of the many new secret products and developments kept a lid upon in Cupertino for the past few months… but thanks to some too-eager web monkey’s blunder over on the official Apple support forums, we have semi-official confirmation of several new products that we now know to expect later today.
Apparently, the official Apple forums have already been setup with new sections dedicated to iMovie ’11, iPhoto ’11 and GarageBand ’11… all of which are applications to be found in the rumored iLife ’11 software suite that is expected to be announced today.
There’s more juicy gossip than that though: the Polish geeks who found the new product sections also found one for the new MacBook Air, as well as a “Reserved 2010” section, which could be just about anything. Does Steve have a surprise announcement up his sleeve, or will that Reserved 2010 sub-forum turn into an official section for Mac OS X 10.7 or even the CDMA iPhone?
It’s war! Again. Or still. Whatever. Apple CEO Steve Jobs launched an “epic rant” during an earnings call this week blasting Google’s “fragmented,” er, “open” approach to apps and extolling the virtues of Apple’s “closed,” I mean “integrated” iOS platform.
“We think Android is very fragmented and getting more fragmented by the day… We believe integrated will trump fragmented every time.”
In retaliation, Google mobile strategy chief Andy Rubin apparently posted the following dorky reply on Twitter:
the definition of open: ‘mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make’.
That’s a set of Linux commands for copying Android.
Does Rubin have a point? No, seriously. What’s his point?
Since Google hasn’t mounted a coherent defense against fragmen… I mean the open approach to mobile platforms, does anyone here want to try?
Go here to read the whole post on IT World.
Deep down in their guts, iOS and OS X are basically the same beast, distinguished largely by their user interface shells… so could tomorrow’s reveal of OS X 10.7, “Lion,” make OS X’s UI more like iOS than ever before? An unconfirmed report says yes.
According to the report, the upcoming update to Lion will be heavily based on iOS in many of its trappings. It’ll still be Aqua, but “the iOS influence is [more] visible in the new OS user interface.”
Steve Jobs made an unusual visit to Apple’s quarterly conference call today, sounding ebullient about Apple’s record sales figures for the fourth quarter of 2010, and boasted of Apple’s dominance over RIM, bashed Google and praised both the homogeny of iOS and the careful thinking that went into the design of the iPad compared to the “avalanche of tablets. Here’re the highlights, and some juicy quotes:
Apple announced a record $20.4 billion in revenue during the fiscal 2010 fourth quarter, and a profit of $4.31 billion, in a press release ahead of their quarterly financial conference call.
Sales of Macs increased a sizable 27 percent from the same quarter last year; 14.1 million ipPhones were sold, a whopping 91 percent increase from last year’s Q4.
“We are blown away to report over $20 billion in revenue and over $4 billion in after-tax earnings—both all-time records for Apple,” Steve Jobs said in Apple’s press release.
iPad sales topped out at just over four million, and iPod sales declined by 11 percent.
On Wednesday, Steve Jobs will likely introduce a redesigned 13.3-inch MacBook Air with a bigger battery and more ports — yet thinner and lighter — than the current model, CultofMac.com has independently confirmed.
Apple will probably also add a second, smaller 11.6-inch “Netbook” version, according to our well-placed source.
Our information independently corroborates recent reports by AppleInsider, and Engadget, which ran a picture of a purported prototype over the weekend.
The new model is also apparently much snappier than its underpowered predecessor. “It boots so fast, it’s unbelievable,” our source says. “It’s amazing how fast it boots up.”
Maybe it’s my (only somewhat) jaded inner journalist, but bubbly marketing language almost never rouses me. So naturally, I dismissed the phrases “rediscover your music” and “stunning mobile music fidelity,” printed on the box of Etymotic’s microphone-equipped hf2 earphones, as standard advertising blather.
After a few hours of listening to music through the hf2s I went back and read the box again, this time with wider eyes — because damned if for once some outfit’s marketing department hadn’t made a claim that was actually spot-on accurate. In fact, the thought crossing my mind as I gleefully ripped through my music collection, trying to see how many tracks would give me goosebumps, was that maybe those marketing peeps had even been too subtle about the hf2’s performance — that maybe the box should have just been plastered in wild neon stickers bearing candid phrases like “THESE ARE *&@#$ AWESOME!!” (and that’s why I wouldn’t last long in marketing).
George Hotz a.k.a GeoHot has released the Mac version of limera1n, his 1-click jailbreak solution. However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.
It is pretty easy to use and worked perfectly with my iPhone 4. Besides the tool, there’s a limera1n application that gets automatically installed on the iPhone after jailbreak, which gives you option to install Cydia.
Here’s see how it works.
Ingredients:
In 1983, Steve Jobs wooed Pepsi executive John Sculley to Apple with one of the most famous lines in business: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
Jobs and Sculley ran Apple together as co-CEOs, blending cutting edge technology (the first Mac) with cutting edge advertising (the famous 1984 ad) and world-class design. But it soon soured, and Sculley is best known today for forcing Jobs’ resignation after a boardroom battle for control of the company.
Now, for the first time, Sculley talks publicly about Steve Jobs and the secrets of his success. It’s the first interview Sculley has given on the subject of Steve Jobs since he was forced out of the company in 1993.
“There are many product development and marketing lessons I learned working with Steve in the early days,” says Sculley. “It’s impressive how he still sticks to his same first principles years later.”
He adds, “I don’t see any change in Steve’s first principles — except he’s gotten better and better at it.”
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…”).
As Apple prepares to show off the next big upgrade of OS X, here’s news that its Mac hardware has cracked 10% PC market share for the first time since the early 1990s.
According to market research firm Gartner, Apple had 10.4% of U.S. PC shipments in Q3, making it the fourth largest computer maker in the U.S.
Gartner didn’t even count iPads, which are a runaway hit. But they had an effect on other PC makers’ numbers. Gartner said Q3 was weak, especially in the U.S., thanks in big part to the iPad.
“Media tablet hype around devices such as the iPad has also affected consumer notebook growth by delaying some PC purchases, especially in the U.S. consumer market. Media tablets don’t replace primary PCs, but they affect PC purchases in many ways,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, in a statement. “At this stage, hype around media tablets has led consumers and the channels to take a ‘wait and see’ approach to buying a new device.”
Gartner’s full release below:
Steve Jobs rebuffed student journalist Chelsea Kate Isaacs dogged pursuit of a comment on campus Macs with “Please leave us alone.”
But the 22-year old has now discovered that not all tech companies are so hard to cover.
Issacs sent in a 140-character statement about why she should be picked in a Microsoft contest to cover the launch of Windows Phone 7 — and won. (All speculation about what that Tweet-sized application said are welcome in the comments).
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicted this week that Apple will eventually lose its early tablet lead to Google. Munster is very bullish on tablets and pessimistic about the prospects for netbooks and laptops. “The tablet is undeniably going to be the winning category in mobile computing over the next decade,” he said.
But ultimately Apple won’t be able to maintain the lead in tablets, according to Munster.
My own prediction is that Munster is correct about Android — if he is talking about the global market. But in the United States, I predict that Apple will maintain its tablet lead indefinitely. Here’s why.
(Read the rest on IT World)
This new TV commercial for Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 inspired me to write a script for this weekend’s Saturday Night Live. No, really!
WEEKEND UPDATE SEGMENT
Seth Meyers, Amy Poehler
SETH
Microsoft this week unveiled its long awaited Windows Phone 7 to compete with the Apple iPhone and Google Android phones. The company also released a TV commercial depicting a world of people so engrossed in their cell phones that they fail in their jobs, neglect their kids and ignore the sexual advances of their spouses. To which people in the commercial respond: “Really!?!”
Which brings us to a segment we like to call, “REALLY!?! with Seth & Amy.”
<Applause>
It was a month ago to the day that I ditched physical books, comics, and magazines for my iPad. A round-the-world trip for work precipitated the change. For 29 days, I would be outside the U.S., with stops in Australia, Singapore, India, and the UK. Not to mention that the India stop included three cities and four additional flights. It was not the time for a big stack of physical media, nor for a full laptop. It was time to travel light and to travel digital.
In the process, I’ve learned a lot. Some of it more boring, self-discovery kind of stuff, which I’ll save for my personal blog, if at all, but a lot of it about tablets, computers, and where entertainment itself might go.
1. The current iPad is good enough for most uses.
In spite of my promise to wait for the iPad 2, the thought of a total of 65 hours on planes quickly converted me to the quite-capable version 1.0. I really put it through its paces: web-browsing, Twitter, RSS reader, Facebook, blogging, video, gaming, and book-reading. Despite its early generation, it’s wholly adequate for most of these tasks. It is weakest, as many people have noted, for typing. If you can get it perfectly flat, as on a tray table in an airplane, it’s possible to hit a near touch-typing speed, but any other grip means going slow and making mistakes. Though some have complained about its anemic 256 MB of RAM, I found it plenty speedy for every task I threw at it. The absence of video cameras for video chat was a minor nuisance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXkoIBDXwd8
Taking their iPhone Where No iDevice Has Gone Before, a father and son in Newburgh, NY recently took a weekend science project to new heights. Luke and Max Geissbuhler attached an HD Video Camera, iPhone and some styrofoam packing to a weather balloon, then launched their homemade satellite on a journey that lasted 72 minutes and climbed over 100,000 feet into the atmosphere!
Foxconn, the largest tech manufacturer in the world, is under fire yet again for alleged worker abuse… this time as part of a survey commissioned by the iPod maker itself.
As reported to China’s state-run Global Times, several universities working on Foxconn’s behalf in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have surveyed 1,736 workers. The results when compiled into the final report are shocking, to say the least.
Here’s a tip for the next time you’re stuck in traffic: Turn your car windshield into a heads-up display for watching movies on an iPad.
iPhone users are twice as likely to be influenced by the Tea Party than voters who carry an Android or Blackberry phone, according to a new online poll by Zogby/463.
In addition, iPhone users are twice as likely to believe that Sarah Palin “speaks for them,” and 60 percent predict a Republican takeover of Congress this year.
