A host of Apple patent filings have led to frenzied speculation — e.g. here — that Steve Jobs’s next bombshell will be a tablet computer that really works. I’ll believe it when I see it — not the tablet, but software that makes it do useful work. The computing tablet that’s more helpful than a Moleskine notebook has yet to be invented. But I’d buy one tomorrow if it existed.
Category Archives: Apple
Intel inside, but where next?
This morning’s Observer column about the implications of Apple’s new processor. Excerpt:
More troubling for Apple is the prospect that its operating system and applications software can now run natively on (much cheaper) PC hardware. The company is set against this, but already programmers have hacked it and it is difficult to see how Apple could stop the practice. If it catches on, Apple might see sales of its computers decline as those who admire Apple software but dislike its hardware prices get the best of both worlds.
If Apple is ambivalent about the future, you should see Intel’s smouldering fury as the implications of the launch dawned on it. Not only did Jobs decline to go along with the ‘Intel inside’ mantra embossed on most Windows machines, he authorised a television ad that left the company’s executives speechless.
‘The Intel chip’, it burbles. ‘For years, it’s been trapped inside PCs, inside dull little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks, when it could have been doing so much more. Starting today, the Intel chip will be set free and get to live life inside a Mac. Imagine the possibilities.’
How do you spell ‘chutzpah’ again?
Sometimes one wonders…
… about the sanity of one’s fellow beings. The owner of this expensive computing set-up published the photograph on Flickr — and yet displays his postal address on his website. Clearly, the ability to do joined-up thinking is not evenly distributed across the globe.
Apple responds to iTunes privacy concerns
According to BBC Online, Apple has made changes to its iTunes music software in response to complaints that it abused user privacy. Sony could learn some lessons from this.
Michael Dell to eat his hat
Well, well. Nice story in the New York Times…
In 1997, shortly after [Steve] Jobs returned to Apple, the company he helped start in 1976, Dell’s founder and chairman, Michael S. Dell, was asked at a technology conference what might be done to fix Apple, then deeply troubled financially.
“What would I do?” Mr. Dell said to an audience of several thousand information technology managers. “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
On Friday, apparently savoring the moment, Mr. Jobs sent a brief e-mail message to Apple employees, which read: “Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.”
More: According to Slashdot, the actual numbers were: $72,132,428,843 compared to Dell’s $71,970,702,760
Letter to Apple Support
From Jason Kottke.
Hello,
I purchased a new Powerbook three weeks ago. It was working fine until a few hours ago when you announced the new Intel-powered MacBook Pro at MacWorld and I started to cry. “Four to fives times faster,” I sobbed, “a built-in iSight, and a brighter, wider screen.”
My display, while not as bright or large as the new MacBook Pro display, illuminated my wet cheeks and red, swollen eyes as my tears rained down on the backlit keyboard. An acrid smell rose up from inside the smooth metal machine as my salty tears joined with the electronics, joyfully releasing the electrons from their assigned silicon pathways to freely arc into forbidden areas of the computer and elsewhere, including, somewhat painfully, my hands.
Is this covered under my warranty and if so, can you send me a new MacBook Pro as a replacement, please? Thank you for your time,
-jason
Hmmm… Quentin’s PowerBook had a dreadful accident some time back and his insurance company paid up a few days ago. But instead of rushing out and buying a new machine he decided to wait for Steve Jobs’s MacWorld keynote, and is now looking very smug at the prospect of a major coup in the Gadget Wars! Bah.
No ‘Intel Inside’ outside!
Surprise, surprise! Apple’s new desktop and laptop computers have Intel CPUs, but according to Silicon.com
they don’t show the chipmaker’s presence on the outside.
Most brand-name PCs that use Intel processors take part in the “Intel Inside” programme, which gives the computer makers marketing dollars for displaying the chipmaker’s logo on their products and in their advertising.
But Apple decided not to sign on to the programme with the line-up of Intel-based Macs that CEO Steve Jobs introduced at the Macworld Expo on Tuesday.
Er, why not? The answer, according to Good Morning, Silicon Valley, is because the ‘Intel Inside’ logo “evokes a gag reflex” in many longterm Apple customers!
Almost word perfect
Ah, for the want of a ‘u’! Seen in a car park today.
Free the IE code!
Microsoft has announced that it will no longer ‘support’ the Mac version of Internet Explorer. Yawn. But Bill Thompson sees this as an opportunity. If Microsoft no longer wants Mac IE, he argues, why not release the source code and let keen programmers support — and maybe enhance — it. Now there’s a real optimist for you.
Small mercies, no. 2
A US judge has banned so-called ‘intelligent design’ from being taught in science lessons in a Pennsylvania school district. Report from this week’s EducationGuardian:
A courtroom battle seen as a test case for the teaching of science in America ended in a decisive victory for evolution yesterday when a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that it was unconstitutional to teach “intelligent design” in biology class.
In a 139-page decision that was scathing about the area school district and dismissive of the science of “intelligent design”, US district judge John Jones III ruled that the school district of Dover, Pennsylvania, had violated the constitution by ordering teachers to read a statement which challenged Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Yesterday’s verdict concludes a trial that was seen as the most important legal review of science and religion since the 1920s. It arrives at a time when the teaching of evolution is under attack in school districts from Georgia to Kansas and when the school district in Dover was seen as the cutting edge of a new effort by the religious right to inject its views into America’s state school system.
Needless to say, the ID nutters are not deterred. This one will run and run, but the careful nature of the judgment suggests to me that they are on a hiding to nothing. The US may currently be run by religious maniacs, but the Constititution firmly separates religion and state and I can’t see even a Bush-packed Supreme Court changing that.