kottke.org

...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.

267 kottke.org posts about Apple

 

Apple as religious experience

At The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal has an interesting post about Apple as a religion and uses that lens to look at the so-called Antennagate** brouhaha. For example, Apple was built on four key myths:

1. a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment;
2. a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world;
3. a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
4. and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company...

On Twitter, Tim Carmody adds that Apple's problems are increasingly theological in nature -- "Free will, problem of evil, Satanic rebellion" -- which is a really interesting way to look at the whole thing. (John Gruber the Baptist?)

** The Antennagate being, of course, the hotel where Apple Inc. is headquartered.

2004 iPhone prediction

Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters, published in 2004, contained the following footnote:

If the Mac was so great, why did it lose? Cost, again Microsoft concentrated on the software business and unleashed a swarm of cheap component suppliers on Apple hardware. It did not help either that suits took over during a critical period. (And it hasn't lost yet. If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.)

Then again, a few footnotes later Graham writes:

I would not even use Javascript, if I were you; Viaweb didn't. Most of the Javascript I see on the Web isn't necessary, and much of it breaks. And when you start to be able to browse actual web pages on your cell phone or PDA (or toaster), who knows if they'll even support it.

Maybe he meant Flash? (via oddhead)

How to hold an Apple press conference

Apple is holding a press conference today, which will presumably address the antenna problems that few actual customers seem to be having on the still-selling-like-hotcakes iPhone 4. I have a number of sources at Apple and based on my conversations with them, here's my prediction on how today's event will play out:

Steve Jobs will come out on stage and will sit in front of a large olde tyme cash register. He will immediately begin taking questions from the assembled journalists and bloggers. As the first-question scrum begins, Jobs will start madly ringing up purchases on the very loud register while pointing to his ears, shaking his head, and shouting "gosh, I'm sorry I can't hear you guys over the sound of the register". This will continue for several minutes and then the press conference will be over.

Someone on Apple's board suggested a more conventional press event but Jobs quickly wrote an email back saying that they were not going to "hold it that way".

By Jason Kottke    Jul 16, 2010    Apple   iPhone   Steve Jobs

Weak sauce from Apple

What the hell do all those shortcut symbols in OS X application menus (⌘, ⌥, ⇧) mean anyway?

I have to think (and experiment) every single time I want to decipher one of these keyboard "shortcuts". Why is it that only the command key (⌘) actually has the symbol printed on the key itself? And what's up with the symbol for the option key (⌥)?

Put 'em on the keyboard, Apple.

By Jason Kottke    Jun 23, 2010    Apple   OS X

Can the human eye see individual pixels on iPhone 4?

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy takes on Steve Jobs' claim that iPhone 4's pixels are too small for the human eye to see individually. I have confidence in Plait's conclusions:

I know a thing or two about resolution as well, having spent a few years calibrating a camera on board Hubble.

He may as well have pulled Marshall McLuhan out from behind a movie poster.

By Jason Kottke    Jun 10, 2010    Apple   iPhone   Phil Plait   physics   science   Steve Jobs

David Foster Wallace on iPhone 4's FaceTime

The recently announced iPhone 4 includes a feature called FaceTime; it's wifi videophone functionality. In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote that within the reality of the book, videophones enjoyed enormous initial popularity but then after a few months, most people gave it up. Why the switch back to voice?

The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, and (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.

First, the stress:

Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation [...] let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet -- and this was the retrospectively marvelous part -- even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided.

[...] Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener's expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those caller who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking extra rude, absentminded, or childishly self-absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.

And then vanity:

And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn't. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair-checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door.

Those are only excerpts...you can read more on pp. 144-151 of Infinite Jest. Eventually, in the world of the book, people began wearing "form-fitting polybutylene masks" when talking on the videophone before even that became too much.

Steve Jobs' keynote at WWDC

At 1pm ET, Steve Jobs is scheduled to take the stage at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference and announce some new stuff. Rumored so far: iPhone 4.0, some kind of magic trackpad, Safari 5, and a new version of AppleTV.

Follow the keynote here in image+text format: Engadget, gdgt, Ars Technica, and the NY Times' Bits blog.

By Jason Kottke    Jun 7, 2010    Apple   Steve Jobs   WWDC

Apple doesn't want a monopoly

Last week, Mike Davidson put up a post about Apple discussing the idea that having a ruthless company making great products is a good problem to have (compared to a ruthless company making so-so products). It got picked up by DF, but I flagged it in my RSS because of a section close to the bottom. I haven't seen this theory about Apple discussed before.

What's the best way to avoid becoming a monopoly? Make sure you never get close to 100% market share. What's the best way to temper your market share? Keep prices a bit higher than you could. Keep supply a bit lower than you could. Keep investing in high margin differentiation and not low margin ubiquity...They are fighting hard right now to make sure they are one of the two or three that will continue to be relevant in 5-10 years, but their goal is clearly not to be at 100% or even 90%...It's scary to people because they remember the harm other companies have done when they reached monopoly status, but with Google, Microsoft, Nokia, RIMM, and now HP all keeping the market healthy with different alternatives, there is no excuse for not voting with your feet if you're unhappy. Apple's not going to take over the world because -- if for no other reason -- the laws of the United States won't let them.

By Aaron Cohen    May 24, 2010    Apple

The other iPhone network

As our devices converge, the infrastructure necessary to support them grows and grows. The iPhone costs $200, fits in a pocket, and relies on "a vast array of infrastructures, data ecologies, and device networks" to function...from the mines where the indium for the touchscreen is mined to the cell towers that allow you to locate that coffee shop in Brooklyn.

Until we see that the iPhone is as thoroughly entangled into a network of landscapes as any more obviously geological infrastructure (the highway, both imposing carefully limited slopes across every topography it encounters and grinding/crushing/re-laying igneous material onto those slopes) or industrial product (the car, fueled by condensed and liquefied geology), we will consistently misunderstand it.

See also I, Pencil and this neat Harry Beckian map of the iPhone's connections and capabilities. (via lone gunman)

By Jason Kottke    May 14, 2010    Apple   iPhone   maps

iPad 3G first impressions

It's like an iPad, but with 3G networking.

By Jason Kottke    Apr 30, 2010    Apple   iPad

Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash

A letter from Steve Jobs about why they don't allow Flash on iPhones, iPods, and iPads. (Notice he specifically uses the harsher "allow" instead of the much softer "support".)

Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript -- all open standards. Apple's mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

Jobs sort of circles around the main issue which is, from my own perspective as heavy web user and web developer: though Flash may have been necessary in the past to provide functionality in the browser that wasn't possible using JS, HTML, and CSS, that is no longer the case. Those open web technologies have matured (or will in the near future) and can do most or even all of what is possible with Flash. For 95% of all cases, Flash is, or will soon be, obsolete because there is a better way to do it that's more accessible, more open, and more "web-like".

MSFT vs AAPL

After posting the Apple stock purchase vs. Apple product purchase thing this afternoon, I thought, hey, Microsoft's stock went up a bunch after Windows 95 came out so I'll figure out how much the software's purchase price would be worth in Microsoft stock today. The answer was not very exciting as you can see from this graph courtesy of Google Finance:

MSFT vs AAPL

Since the Windows 95 launch, Microsoft's stock has only (only!) quadrupled in value while Apple's stock has increased by more than 24 times. 24 times! That kind of growth is remarkable for a company that had already been public for 15 years and, everyone assumed, had already been through their boom time. Of course, what goes up can easily come down...

I stuck Google in there for good measure. It doesn't show as much growth as you'd think because GOOG's IPO-day closing price made it a very large company from the start...the chart hides Google's pre-IPO growth in value. But still, look at how much Apple's stock price has grown in comparison to Google's since the latter's IPO. (For fun, add Yahoo into the mix and dial the graph back to 1996.)

By Jason Kottke    Apr 26, 2010    Apple   Google   Microsoft

Buying Apple stock instead of products

In 2001, a PowerBook G4 would have set you back $3500. Suppose instead that you had purchased $3500 in Apple stock instead of the computer...that stock would now be worth about $110,000. Even an original iPod's worth in AAPL ($399) would be worth almost $12,000 today.

By Jason Kottke    Apr 26, 2010    Apple

The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books

Writing for the New Yorker, Ken Auletta surveys the ebook landscape: it's Apple, Amazon, Google, and the book publishers engaged in a poker game for the hearts, minds, and wallets of book buyers. Kindle editions of books are selling well:

There are now an estimated three million Kindles in use, and Amazon lists more than four hundred and fifty thousand e-books. If the same book is available in paper and paperless form, Amazon says, forty per cent of its customers order the electronic version. Russ Grandinetti, the Amazon vice-president, says the Kindle has boosted book sales over all. "On average," he says, Kindle users "buy 3.1 times as many books as they did twelve months ago."

Many compare ebook-selling to what iTunes was able to do with music albums. But Auletta notes:

The analogy of the music business goes only so far. What iTunes did was to replace the CD as the basic unit of commerce; rather than being forced to buy an entire album to get the song you really wanted, you could buy just the single track. But no one, with the possible exception of students, will want to buy a single chapter of most books.

I've touched on this before, but while people may not want to buy single chapters of books, they do want to read things that aren't book length. I think we'll see more literature in the novella/short-story/long magazine article range as publishers and authors attempt to fill that gap.

But mostly, I couldn't stop thinking of something that Clay Shirky recently said:

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

When an industry changes dramatically, the future belongs to the nimble.

By Jason Kottke    Apr 19, 2010    Amazon   Apple   books   Google   iPad   Ken Auletta   Kindle

Lorem iPad

Lorem iPad dolor sit amet, consectetur Apple adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua Shenzhen. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud no multi-tasking ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip iPad ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor iPad in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse CEO Steve Jobs dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Windows 7 ha ha ha. Excepteur sint occaecat battery life non proident, iPad in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Morbi erat justo, magical in semper posuere Jony Ive, molestie eget ipsum. Praesent eget erat no camera. Apple a erat sit amet ante pretium just a big iPod touch bibendum a at magna. Suspendisse Flash, sem sed tempor gravida, dolor mi auctor HTML5, vel feugiat justo metus nec diam. Maecenas quis iPad volutpat augue.

By Jason Kottke    Apr 2, 2010    Apple   iPad   journalism

iPad first reviews

You know, by people who have actually used the thing for more than 5 minutes at a press event. Walt Mossberg from WSJ:

It's qualitatively different, a whole new type of computer that, through a simple interface, can run more-sophisticated, PC-like software than a phone does, and whose large screen allows much more functionality when compared with a phone's. But, because the iPad is a new type of computer, you have to feel it, to use it, to fully understand it and decide if it is for you, or whether, say, a netbook might do better.

David Pogue at the NY Times:

The simple act of making the multitouch screen bigger changes the whole experience. Maps become real maps, like the paper ones. You see your e-mail inbox and the open message simultaneously. Driving simulators fill more of your field of view, closer to a windshield than a keyhole.

Also from Pogue, an interesting tidbit on how you buy access for the iPad through AT&T:

But how's this for a rare deal from a cell company: there's no contract. By tapping a button in Settings, you can order up a month of unlimited cellular Internet service for $30. Or pay $15 for 250 megabytes of Internet data; when it runs out, you can either buy another 250 megs, or just upgrade to the unlimited plan for the month. Either way, you can cancel and rejoin as often as you want -- just March, July and November, for example -- without penalty. The other carriers are probably cursing AT&T's name for setting this precedent.

Andy Ihnatko for the Chicago Sun-Times:

The most compelling sign that Apple got this right is the fact that despite the novelty of the iPad, the excitement slips away after about ten seconds and you're completely focused on the task at hand ... whether it's reading a book, writing a report, or working on clearing your Inbox. Second most compelling: in situation after situation, I find that the iPad is the best computer in my household and office menagerie. It's not a replacement for my notebook, mind you. It feels more as if the iPad is filling a gap that's existed for quite some time.

Ed Baig from USA Today:

The first iPad is a winner. It stacks up as a formidable electronic-reader rival for Amazon's Kindle. It gives portable game machines from Nintendo and Sony a run for their money.

BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin:

Maybe the most exciting thing about iPad is the apps that aren't here yet. The book-film-game hybrid someone will bust out in a year, redefining the experience of each, and suggesting some new nouns and verbs in the process. Or an augmented reality lens from NASA that lets you hold the thing up to the sky and pinpoint where the ISS is, next to what constellation, read the names and see the faces of the crew members, check how those fuel cells are holding up.

I like it a lot. But it's the things I never knew it made possible -- to be revealed or not in the coming months -- that will determine whether I love it.

Stephen Fry for Time:

The iPad does perform tasks -- it runs apps and has the calendar, e-mail, Web browsing, office productivity, audio, video and gaming capabilities you would expect of any such device -- yet when I eventually got my hands on one, I discovered that one doesn't relate to it as a "tool"; the experience is closer to one's relationship with a person or an animal.

By Jason Kottke    Apr 1, 2010    Apple   iPad

The economics of the mushy middle

Companies who target the middle of the market (Sony, Dell, General Motors) are losing customers to companies like Apple & Hermes at the high end and Ikea & H&M at the low end. From James Surowiecki:

The products made by midrange companies are neither exceptional enough to justify premium prices nor cheap enough to win over value-conscious consumers. Furthermore, the squeeze is getting tighter every day. Thanks to economies of scale, products that start out mediocre often get better without getting much more expensive -- the newest Flip, for instance, shoots in high-def and has four times as much memory as the original -- so consumers can trade down without a significant drop in quality. Conversely, economies of scale also allow makers of high-end products to reduce prices without skimping on quality. A top-of-the-line iPod now features video and four times as much storage as it did six years ago, but costs a hundred and fifty dollars less. At the same time, the global market has become so huge that you can occupy a high-end niche and still sell a lot of units. Apple has just 2.2 per cent of the world cell-phone market, but that means it sold twenty-five million iPhones last year.

rating: 4.5 stars

The September Issue

I straight-up loved this movie. It's a fascinating look at the creative process of a team with strong leadership operating at a very high level. The trailer is pretty misleading in this respect...the main story in the film has little to do with fashion and should be instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever worked with a bunch of people on a project. Others have made the comparison of Anna Wintour with Steve Jobs and it seems apt. At several points in the film, my thoughts drifted to Jobs and Apple; Wintour seems like the same sort of creative leader as Jobs.

Apple's 10 biggest problems

Notes from John Gruber's talk at MacWorld.

The pessimistic dig on Apple, says Gruber, is that it's a supremely well-organized company organized around one irreplaceable guy. The optimistic view is that Jobs has structured it to run like his other company, Pixar, which manages to turn out hit after hit, year after year, without a charismatic celebrity leader.

By Jason Kottke    Feb 16, 2010    Apple   John Gruber   lists

App Store: quality control without the quality

David Heinemeier Hansson has some thoughts on "quality control without the quality part" nature of Apple's App Store.

In fact, lots of software has lower quality because of the App Store process. Developers can't easily get bug fixes out and they certainly don't release new versions as often as they otherwise would. This harks back to the era where software was really cumbersome to release on CDs, so you did it much less frequently.

Multi-touch interactions on the iPad

For all you UI nerds out there, a four-minute video collection of some of the multi-touch gestures and actions on the iPad from Wednesday's event.

Here are the annotations. (via @h_fj)

By Jason Kottke    Jan 29, 2010    Apple   design   iPad   video

Some stuff about the iPad

Instapaper's iPhone app is going to be great on this thing.

If you don't like the prices in Apple's iBook Store, just use Amazon's Kindle app on the iPad.

No 3G? No contracts? (Might be saving this for last/later.)

I'm looking on the photos of this thing and there doesn't seem to be a camera, video or otherwise.

The iPad appears to be a device that you use sitting down. Can you type on it while holding it standing up?

Ok, there's 3G. $15/mo for 250 MB of data. $30/mo for "unlimited".

iPad is unlocked. International SIM cards "will just work".

Price: $500. Boom. That's for the low-end model with no 3G.

Ooh, keyboard dock. If they could outfit that with a hinge and some sort of latching device, I wonder what that kind of thing would look like? (Will the keyboard work with the iPhone -- er, iPad nano -- as well?)

Will there be an iBook Reader/Store app for the iPhone?

Oh, from earlier: Jobs repositioned Apple as a "mobile devices company".

Right at the end, Jobs showed a street sign marking the intersection of "Technology" and "Liberal Arts". I guess that means that kottke.org is now in direct competition with Apple, Inc. YOU'RE GOING DOWN, STEVE!

Kurt Anderson:

Watching AAPL's share price live: the moment Jobs announced the iPad's base price ($499), Apple's market cap increased by $5 billion.

The iPad page is up on Apple's web site. Nothing on the store yet.

The iPad makes the Kindle look like it's from the 1980s.

Amazon's stock price is up...it dipped a bit when the iPad's price was announced but recovered shortly after. I have heard more than a few people say that the Kindle is "dead". But one minus in the iPad column is that readability in the outdoors is not going to be so good...the iPhone in the sunshine might as well be a stone for how useful it is.

If you watch the video on Apple's site, there are now (at least) three different keyboard interactions people need to know to use Apple products. There's 10-fingered touch typing on analog keyboards, thumb typing on the iPhone keyboard, and (about 2:30 into the video) the really odd 4-fingered no-thumbs way of typing on the iPad.

Thinking ahead to the iPad 2, they'll add a video camera, right? What else?

Whoa, the zooming on the Google Maps apps (@ 3:45 in the video) looks incredible. The page flipping animation in the iBooks app though? Super cheesy. It's like in the early days of cars where they built them to look like horse-drawn carriages. Can't we just scroll?

The orientation on the keyboard dock is wrong...it should be horizontal, not vertical.

Gruber gleefully reports that there's no Flash on the iPad. Which is a genuine bummer because this thing is perfect for playing all the (free!) addictive Flash games that I so love.

iPad is not a good name. Too close to iPod for one thing. But mainly just blah.

If the iPhone is any indication, this thing is going to be great for kids. Ollie likes playing games and looking at videos on the iPhone but the larger screen size of the iPad allows for more collaborative play...one kid + one adult or two kids using it together. The iPhone is for solitary use; the iPad can be collaborative (or at least collective). Later: Sippey calls the iPad the family computer:

It looks like a great machine to travel from the living room to the kitchen to the kids room to the bedroom. We'll search the web on it, read the news on it, the kids will do email on it, play Brushes and Bejeweled on it, and it'll be the perfect complement to the Sunday afternoon TV football ritual. We'll use it to control the music in the house, and do some quick bet-settling during dinner. I'm sure we'll eventually enjoy some multiplayer "board" games on it, or read a book on it, or watch a TV show on it. And the kids will argue with each other over who gets it next. (Dad will.)

By Jason Kottke    Jan 27, 2010    Apple   iPad

Apple "Moses Tablet" unveiling

As usual, several media outlets will bring you breathless coverage of Apple's shiny new thing, in this case, some sort of tablet-y device/service. The event starts at 1pm ET; you can follow along on Ars Technica,
Engadget, gdgt, NY Times' Bits blog, or Gizmodo (which is often irritating).

More Apple tablet photos

I don't know if these two photos depict the rumored Apple tablet or not, but I *do know* I want 5000 words from Errol Morris that attempt to answer these two seemingly related questions in an attempt to determine their authenticity:

1. Which photo was taken first?
2. Why was the tablet moved between photos?

Apple Tablet photo

Just a reminder that a docked Apple Tablet was spotted in the wild almost two years ago:

iPhone Mega

Quick App Store idea

Allow two classes of apps in the App Store: those approved by Apple and those not approved by Apple. The unapproved apps would only be accessed through direct searches (they would not appear in top 10 lists or be featured on the front page), would carry cigarette-grade warnings that it might kill your phone and cause cancer, and maybe Apple would take a slightly larger cut to incentivize developers to get apps approved. Non-approved apps could still be pulled from the store by Apple at any point for blatant violations of Apple's guidelines. That way, if developers want to skirt around all the headaches of Apple's approval process and if users want to gamble on an app to run on their own hardware that Apple won't or can't approve in a timely fashion, they can.

Not that Apple would ever do such a thing.

By Jason Kottke    Nov 24, 2009    Apple   iPhone

1984 review of original Mac

Larry Magid reviewed the original Macintosh in the LA Times in 1984. Here's his original review.

Like the Lisa, it uses a hand-held "mouse" -- a small pointing device which enables the user to select programs, and move data from one part of the screen to another. Also like the Lisa, Macintosh uses a black and white display screen whose resolution is so high that it can quickly draw detailed pictures while at the same time display crisp and readable text.

By Jason Kottke    Oct 23, 2009    Apple   Larry Magid   Mac

Your company? There's an app for that.

Few technology and device-making companies probably realize it, but they are in direct competition with Apple (or soon will be). How did this happen? Well, the iPhone1 does a lot of useful things pretty well, well enough that it is replacing several specialized devices that do one or two things really well. Space in backpacks, pockets, and purses is a finite resource, as is money (obviously). As a result, many are opting to carry only the iPhone with them when they might have toted several devices around. Here is a short list of devices with capabilities duplicated to some degree by the iPhone:

Mobile phone - All the stuff any mobile phone does: phone calls, texting, voicemail.

PDA - The iPhone meets all of the basic PDA needs: address book, calendar, to-dos, notes, and easy data syncing.

iPod - The iPhone is a full-featured music-playing device. And with 32 GB of storage, the 3GS can handle a huge chunk of even the largest music collection.

Point and shoot camera - While not as full-featured as something like a PowerShot, the camera on the iPhone 3GS has a 3-megapxiel lens with both auto and manual focus, shoots in low-light, does macro, and can shoot video. Plus, it's easy to instantly publish your photos online using the iPhone's networking capabilities and automatically tag your photos with your location.

Personal computer - With the increased speed of the iPhone 3GS, the 3G and wifi networking, a real web browser, and the wide array of available apps at the App Store, many people find themselves leaving the laptops at home and using the iPhone as their main computer when they are out and about.

Nintendo DS or PSP - There are thousands of games available at the App Store and if the folks in my office and on the NYC subway are any indication, people are using their iPhones as serious on-the-go gaming machines.

GPS - With geolocation by GPS, wifi, or cell tower, the Google Maps app, and the built-in compass, the iPhone is a powerful wayfinding device. Apps can provide turn by turn directions, current traffic conditions, satellite and photographic street views, transit information, and you can search for addresses and businesses.

Flip video camera - The iPhone 3GS doesn't shoot in HD (yet), but the video capabilities on the phone are quite good, especially the on-phone editing and easy sharing.

Compass - Serious hikers and campers wouldn't want to rely on a battery-powered device as their only compass, but the built-in compass on the iPhone 3GS is perfect for casual wayfinding.

Watch - I use the clock on my iPhone more often than any other function. By far.

Portable DVD player - Widescreen video looks great on the iPhone, you can d/l videos and TV shows from the iTunes Store, and with apps like Handbrake, it's easy to rip DVDs for viewing on the iPhone.

Kindle - Amazon's Kindle app for the iPhone is surprisingly usable. And unlike Amazon's hardware, the iPhone can run many ebook readers that handle several different formats.

With all the apps available at the App Store, the list goes on: pedometer, tape recorder, heart monitor, calculator, remote control, USB key, and on and on. Electronic devices aren't even the whole story. I used to carry a folding map of Manhattan (and the subway) with me wherever I went but not anymore. With Safari, Instapaper, and Amazon's Kindle app, books and magazines aren't necessary to provide on-the-go reading material.

Once someone has an iPhone, it is going to be tough to persuade them that they also need to spend money on and carry around a dedicated GPS device, point-and-shoot camera, or tape recorder unless they have an unusual need. But the real problem for other device manufacturers is that all of these iPhone features -- particularly the always-on internet connectivity; the email, HTTP, and SMS capabilities; and the GPS/location features -- can work in concert with each other to actually make better versions of the devices listed above. Like a GPS that automatically takes photos of where you are and posts them to a Flickr gallery or a video camera that'll email videos to your mom or a portable gaming machine with access to thousands of free games over your mobile's phone network. We tend to forget that the iPhone is still from the future in a way that most of the other devices on the list above aren't. It will take time for device makers to make up that difference.

If these manufacturers don't know they are in competition with the iPhone, Apple sure does. At their Rock & Roll event last week, MacWorld quotes Phil Schiller as saying:

iPod touch is also a great game machine. No multi-touch interface on other devices, games are expensive, there's no app store, and there's no iPod built in. Plus it's easier to buy stuff because of the App Store on the device. Chart of game and entertainment titles available on PSP, Nintendo DS, and iPhone OS. PSP: 607. Nintendo DS: 3680. iPhone: 21,178.

The same applies to the iPhone. At the same event, Steve Jobs commented that with the new iPod nano, you essentially get a $149 Flip video camera thrown in for free:

We're going to start off with an 8GB unit, and we're going to lower the price from $149 to free. This is the new Apple, isn't it? (laughter) How are we going to do that. We're going to build a video camera into the new iPod nano. On the back of each unit is a video camera and a microphone, and there's a speaker inside as well. Built into every iPod nano is now an awesome video camera. And yet we've still retained its incredibly small size.

In discussing the Kindle with David Pogue, Jobs even knocks the idea of specialized devices:

"I'm sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing," he said. "But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren't willing to pay for a dedicated device."

In terms of this competition, the iPhone at this point in its lifetime2 is analogous to the internet in the late 1990s. The internet was pretty obviously in competition with a few obvious industries at that point -- like meatspace book stores -- but caught (and is still catching) others off guard: cable TV, movie companies, music companies, FedEx/USPS/UPS, movie theaters, desktop software makers, book publishers, magazine publishers, shoe/apparel stores, newspaper publishers, video game console makers, libraries, grocery stores, real estate agents, etc. etc....basically any organization offering entertainment or information. The internet is still the ultimate "there's an app for that" engine; it duplicated some of the capabilities of and drew attention away from so many products and services that these businesses offered. Some of these companies are dying -- slowly or otherwise -- while others were able to adapt and adopt quickly enough to survive and even thrive. It'll be interesting to see which of the iPhone's competitors will be able to do the same.

[1] In this essay, I'm using "the iPhone" as a convenient shorthand for "any of a number of devices and smartphones that offer similar functionality to the iPhone, including but not limited to the Palm Pre, Android phones, Blackberry Storm, and iPod Touch". Similar arguments apply, to varying degrees, to these devices and their manufacturers but are especially relevant to the iPhone and Apple; hence, the shorthand. If you don't read this footnote, adequately absorb its message, and send me email to the effect of "the iPhone sux because Apple and AT&T are monopolistic robber barons", I reserve the right to punch you in the face while yelling I WASN'T JUST TALKING ABOUT THE IPHONE YOU JACKASS.

[2] You've got to wonder when Apple is going to change the name of the iPhone. The phone part of the device increasingly seems like an afterthought, not the main attraction. The main benefit of the device is that it does everything. How do you choose a name for the device that has everything? Hell if I know. But as far as the timing goes, I'd guess that the name change will happen with next year's introduction of the new model. The current progression of names -- iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS -- has nowhere else to go (iPhone 3GS Plus isn't Apple's style).

Update: The console makers are worried about mobile phone gaming platforms.

Among the questions voiced by video game executives: How can Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft keep consumers hooked on game-only consoles, like the Wii or even the PlayStation Portable, when Apple offers games on popular, everyday devices that double as cellphones and music players?

And how can game developers and the makers of big consoles persuade consumers to buy the latest shoot'em-ups for $30 or more, when Apple's App store is full of games, created by developers around the world and approved by Apple, that cost as little as 99 cents -- or even are free?

By Jason Kottke    Sep 16, 2009    Apple   business   iPhone   Kindle

The Apple upgrade problem

I recently upgraded to a new MacBook Pro from a two-year-old version of the same model (more or less). It's sturdier, faster, has a more functional trackpad, and has a much larger hard drive than the previous model, making it well worth the ~$2700 purchase price because I use my computer for more hours in a year than I sleep. Three weeks ago, my first-generation iPhone broke and rather than pay for a straight-up replacement, I upgraded to a new iPhone 3G (and promised AT&T my spare kidney in the process). Again, totally worth it...the speed and video camera alone were worth the upgrade. On Monday, I upgraded the OS on my MBP to OS X 10.5 Service Pack 1 Snow Leopard. Not sure whether it was worth it at this point or not, but it was only $29 and promised much.

The upgrade process in each case was painless. To set up the MBP, I just connected it to my Time Machine drive and was up and running about an hour later with all my apps and preferences intact. The iPhone took even less time than that and everything from my old phone was magically there. Snow Leopard took 45 minutes and, aside from a couple of Mail.app and Safari plug-ins I use, everything was just as before.1 Past upgrades of Apple computers and iPods have gone similarly well.

Which is where the potential difficulty for Apple comes in. From a superficial perspective, my old MBP and new MBP felt exactly the same...same OS, same desktop wallpaper, same Dock, all my same files in their same folders, etc. Same deal with the iPhone except moreso...the iPhone is almost entirely software and that was nearly identical. And re: Snow Leopard, I haven't noticed any changes at all aside from the aforementioned absent plug-ins.

So, just having paid thousands of dollars for new hardware and software, I have what feels like my same old stuff.

Deep down, when I stop to think about it, I know (or have otherwise convinced myself) that these purchases were worth it and that Apple's ease of upgrade works almost exactly how it should. But my gut tells me that I've been ripped off. The "newness" cognitive jolt humans get is almost entirely absent. I don't know if Apple is aware of this (I'd guess yes) and don't know if it even matters to them (because, like I said, this is the way that it should work...and look at those sales figures), but it's got to be having some small effect. People want to feel, emotionally speaking, that their money is well-spent and impeccable branding, funny commericals, and the sense of belonging to a hip lifestyle that Apple tries to engender in its customers can only go so far. [Apple Tablet, this is your cue.]

[1] Merlin Mann's upgrade did not go well. Not only did Merlin not get the "newness" cognitive jolt, his new stuff worked worse than his old stuff. Although, Merlin, upgrading five (five!) computers while "writing a book on deadline" probably wasn't the best idea.

By Jason Kottke    Sep 2, 2009    Apple   iPhone   MacBook Pro   Merlin Mann   OS X

Matte screen back on the MacBook Pro

Apple is finally offering the 15" MacBook Pro with an anti-glare screen. I bought a new MBP about a week before Marco but don't want to pay $250 for the exchange even though the glossy screen bugs the shit out of me and ranks right up there with Apple's worst design decisions ever (e.g. the Mighty Mouse and the puck mouse). Irritating.

By Jason Kottke    Aug 11, 2009    Apple   macbookpro

A phone that makes you breakfast

Rick Webb on all the recent bitching about the iPhone, Apple, and the App Store.

They made a mobile browser light years better than any previous browser & you promptly took it for granted & bitched about it lacking Flash.

And on cut and paste:

You whined for 2 years about cut and paste. They invented a brand new user interface means to implement it. You never even used it.

There's a bunch more. (thx, david)

By Jason Kottke    Aug 11, 2009    Apple   iPhone   Rick Webb

Pre-order new version of OS X: only $29

The next version of OS X (code named Snow Leopard) is available for pre-order at Amazon...for only $29 for Leopard (10.5) users. The family pack for five users is only $49. If you're upgrading from an older version of OS X, the Mac Box Set for $169 is your best bet. (via daringfireball)

By Jason Kottke    Aug 3, 2009    Apple   OS X

Who's up for a little Microsoft vs. Apple?

From John Gruber, an Apple booster, an essay on Microsoft's Long, Slow Decline. And, is if in reply, an essay called Apple: Secrecy Does Not Scale from Anil Dash, Microsoft enthusiast. A perhaps unsubtle reply to both essays might be "I can't hear you over the continual sounds of the cash register"...MS and Apple continue to be enormously profitable doing business the way they do.

Unhappy Mac

Unhappy Mac

By Jason Kottke    Jul 29, 2009    annakarenina   Apple   books   Mac

Apple tablet out in Sept?

The Financial Times says that the rumored Apple tablet is due out sometime in "September or October".

Book publishers have been in talks with Apple and are optimistic about being included in the computer, which could provide an alternative to Amazon's Kindle, Sony's Reader and a forthcoming device from Plastic Logic, recently allied with Barnes & Noble.

And if it runs apps from the App Store ("yes" seems to be the general consensus), you'll be able to read books in the Apple tablet format *and* in Amazon's Kindle format (with the Kindle app), which can't be happy news for Amazon, hardware-wise.

By Jason Kottke    Jul 27, 2009    Amazon   Apple   Apple tablet   books   Kindle

Find My iPhone works

Shortly after activating the Find My iPhone feature on his iPhone, Kevin loses it and then uses the feature to successfully retrieve it.

Then an amazingly lucky thing happened. I refreshed the iPhone location and the circle moved, to the corner of the block, and shrunk in size to maybe 100 feet across. I waited a minute and refreshed again. The small circle had shifted southward down Washtenaw.

"THAT WAY!"

Us three skinny white guys walked at a rapid pace in the direction of the circle. We moved past the birthday party, curious if one of the participants might be culpable, but the circle again shifted farther south. I was ready to break for our car if the phone started moving away faster than we could catch it, but it hovered at the very end of the street, at the corner of Washtenaw and Milwaukee.

I wonder if Apple imagined this sort of amateur (and potentially dangerous) police work would happen when they implemented Find My iPhone.

By Jason Kottke    Jun 22, 2009    Apple   iPhone

Steve Jobs' liver transplant

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple's Steve Jobs had a liver transplant operation done about two months ago. John Gruber has extensive coverage of Livergate; he thinks it was an Apple leak:

This must be a deliberate, timed leak from Apple. The timing is simply perfect from Apple's perspective -- midnight on the Friday of what appears to be the most successful new product launch in company history.

Whatever the case, get well soon, Steve.

By Jason Kottke    Jun 20, 2009    Apple   Steve Jobs

Live from WWDC

Apple's WWDC shindig is going on in SF right now...they're announcing new goodies in the keynote. Follow along here and here.

By Jason Kottke    Jun 8, 2009    Apple   WWDC

Apple I prints

20x200 has a print by Mark Richards of an exploded Apple I machine.

In the photographs, a visual parallel between the wires delivering energy to a mechanical memory and the neural pathways of human anatomy becomes apparent. The pieces of machines are re-framed as something more than cold technology; I hope I can provide emotion, unexpected beauty and history.

(via df)

iPhone 3.0

Land sakes, with all the hustle and bustle around here lately, I plumb forgot that Apple had an event today to announce the newest version of the operating system for their interactiveTelePhone. Engadget has the details. The iPhone 3.0 highlights so far:

Embeddable Google Maps within applications.
Same apps of two phones can talk to each other (gaming!).
Turn-by-turn directions available.
Push notifications finally coming. (They retooled after hearing all sorts of feedback from App Store developers.)
Streaming audio and video.
CUT AND PASTE.
MMS support.
Better searching, like in email and calendars.

By Jason Kottke    Mar 17, 2009    Apple   iPhone   telephony

Safari 4 beta

It's supposed to be really fast. Check it out here.

Update: The new location for the tabs is pretty disorienting so far. (So far = 10 minutes of use.) I keep glancing up in the middle to see the title of the page I'm on and it's not there...and then I have to hunt for whichever tab I'm on. The separation of the tabs from the page content is also causing me problems. The page area is What I'm Looking At Now and the tabs are What I'm Going To Look At Soon...why separate them with a bunch of stuff (aside from the URL) that is unrelated to either of those things...i.e. What I Almost Never Need To Look At?

By Jason Kottke    Feb 24, 2009    Apple   browsers   Safari

The best Mac ever

I love stuff like this: what is the best Mac ever? Now, I'm no McIntosh expurt like Herr Gruber, but the best Mac ever has to be one of their notebooks...an iBook or Powerbook or MacBook Pro.

By Jason Kottke    Jan 22, 2009    Apple   best of

Steve Jobs: still fine and ornery

A short letter from Steve Jobs reveals that he's receiving treatment for a health problem and will continue as Apple's CEO in full capacity for the foreseeable future. I love the last line:

So now I've said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.

By Jason Kottke    Jan 5, 2009    Apple   Steve Jobs

At 10:10, a watch smiles

Ten minutes past ten o'clock, which forms a smiley face on a clock and "frames the brand" nicely, is the go-to time for watches in advertising. Timex sets their watches to precisely 10:09:36 while Rolex waits almost a minute until 10:10:31.

The Hamilton Watch Company was among the first to clock in at 10:10; that time is favored in ads dating at least as far back as 1926. Rolex began consistently setting watches in ads at 10:10 in the early 1940s. Timex appears to have begun the transition in 1953, when its Ben Hogan model showed 8:20 while the Marlin model was set to 10:10.

Apple usually uses 9:42 am for the iPhone, which is approximately when it was introduced at MacWorld 2007. Until recently, the icon for Apple's iCal displayed July 17 when not in use; iCal debuted at MacWorld 2002 on that date.

By Jason Kottke    Dec 4, 2008    Apple   iPhone   time

iTunes U, tons of free educational materials

iTunes U is a section of the iTunes store that houses educational audio and video files for free use by anyone.

iTunes U is a part of the iTunes Store featuring free lectures, language lessons, audiobooks, and more, that you can enjoy on your iPod, iPhone, Mac or PC. Explore over 75,000 educational audio and video files from top universities, museums and public media organizations from around the world. With iTunes U, there's no end to what or where you can learn.

Check it out in the iTunes Store. iTunes U includes the formidable series of podcasts from the University of Oxford. (via vsl)

By Jason Kottke    Nov 17, 2008    Apple   audio   education   iTunes   iTunes Store   itunesu

Old MacBook Pros, $700 off

Amazon is selling old MacBook Pros for $700 less than they were going for just two days ago. If you've ever wanted Apple hardware at a good value, now's your chance. (via daringfireball)

New Apple MacBooks

Apple announced new MacBooks and MacBooks Pro today and as Apple's new releases always seem to do, the new models make the old ones look like a pile of puke. (My year-old MacBook Pro suddenly looks like an antique.) To show off their new lineup and manufacturing process, they've produced a little video. Jonathan Ive is one earnest dude.

The new Microsoft ads

After a couple of teasers starring Jerry Seinfeld, Microsoft is airing some new ads that take Apple's "I'm a PC" out into the real world. So instead of John Hodgman's dorky PC character (who is parodied in one of the new ads), they've got all sorts of people -- basketball players, actresses, scientists, fashion designers, etc. -- proudly declaring "I'm a PC". As Michael Sippey mentions, the ads do communicate a "message of joy and abundance and widespread use of Personal Computing", but they're not "great".

I briefly worked for a design firm in the late 90s that did a lot of advertising work. One of the hard and fast rules in the office -- which was taken from a book written by a successful ad man whose name I cannot recall -- was that if a company was #1 in a certain space, their advertising should never ever mention the competition, not even in an oblique fashion. And even if a company was #2, they should do the same and act as if they were #1.

That's the problem with Microsoft's ads. They're still #1 and the bigger company, but by referencing Apple's successful ad campaign, they're acting like Apple is #1. (John Gruber made this same point the other day.) The ads fail because they serve to remind people that Apple comes up with good ideas that Microsoft then takes and shapes into something that so-called "normal people" can use or understand. Except that this isn't 1993. With the iPod, iPhone, iMac, OS X, the Apple Stores, and the iTunes Store, Apple has their finger firmly on the pulse of what normal people want and Microsoft's recent attempts (the Zune, Vista) to keep up by emulating Apple have failed. If MS had created the "I'm a PC" message on their own, the ads would be great, but these copy-and-paste ads lack soul and are merely "eh".

What's interesting is that with the I'm a Mac/I'm a PC ads, Apple mentions Microsoft explicitly, over and over, proving the old adage that rules are made to be broken. What works in Apple's favor is that they are the #2 company and were clever about how they attacked #1. Microsoft's hamfisted ads are almost saying to Apple, "nuh-uh, my mom thinks I'm cool" while the image of Hodgman's frumpy PC is hard to shake and makes Windows seem lame without being overly insulting about it.

Old iPhones still valuable

Before the iPhone 3G came out in July, I did a quick price survey on the 1st generation iPhones being sold on eBay.

A quick search reveals that used & unlocked 8Gb iPhones are going for ~$400 and 16Gb for upwards of $500, with never-opened phones going for even more.

After the 3G came out, the prices on the old iPhone remained about the same.

I just checked eBay again and those prices are down only slightly. Never-opened unlocked iPhones are still fetching $400-500 and somewhat less for previously used phones.

BusinessWeek recently confirmed that those old phones are still selling well, demonstrating a lot of demand for iPhones that can be easily unlocked for use on networks besides AT&T in the US and elsewhere in the world.

On e-commerce site eBay, where NextWorth peddles many of its wares, a 16-GB version of the first-generation iPhone goes for about $600, and an 8-GB model in good condition commands $500. When it was new, the 16-GB phone sold for $499; the 8-GB model went for $399. Today, AT&T's most expensive iPhone 3G model sells for $300 with a two-year service contract.

By Jason Kottke    Sep 3, 2008    Apple   eBay   iPhone

iPhone SSH clients

There are four SSH clients for the iPhone; here's a review comparing them all. (via waxy)

By Jason Kottke    Aug 19, 2008    Apple   iPhone   ssh

Michael Phelps' iPod

Before each race during the Olympics, Michael Phelps is seen sporting those ubiquitous white iPod earbuds. But what's he listening to? A lot of rap and hip hop.

The $1000 iPhone app

Yesterday developer Armin Heinrich posted an iPhone app to the App Store called I Am Rich. The program displays a red gem, has no function but to display your wealth to others through ownership, and costs $1000. It has since been removed from the App Store, although no one knows whether Apple or Heinrich pulled it.

I Am Rich isn't the most clever piece of art, but it's not bad either. For some, the iPhone is already an obvious display of wealth and I Am Rich is commenting on that. Plus, buying more than you need as an indication of wealth is practically an American core value for a growing segment of the population. Is paying $5000 for a wristwatch or $50,000 for a car when much cheaper alternatives exist really all that different than paying $1000 for an iPhone app?

When news of the app got out onto the web, the outcry came swiftly. VentureBeat implored Apple to pull it from the App Store, as did several other humorless blogs. Blog commenters were even more harsh in their assessments. What I can't understand is: why should Apple pull I Am Rich from the App Store? They have to approve each app but presumably that's to guard against apps which crash iPhones, misrepresent their function, go against Apple's terms of service, or introduce malicious code to the iPhone.

Excluding I Am Rich would be excluding for taste...because some feel that it costs too much for what it does. (And this isn't the only example. There have been many cries of too many poor quality (but otherwise functional) apps in the store and that Apple should address the problem.) App Store shoppers should get to make the choice of whether or not to buy an iPhone app, not Apple, particularly since the App Store is the only way to legitimately purchase consumer iPhone apps. Imagine if Apple chose which music they stocked in the iTunes store based on the company's taste. No Kanye because Jay-Z is better. No Dylan because it's too whiney. Of course they don't do that; they stock a crapload of different music and let the buyer decide. We should deride Apple for that type of behavior, not cheer them on.

By Jason Kottke    Aug 6, 2008    Apple   business   iPhone   iPhone apps   money

Rave for Apple's keyboard

I've been meaning to post about the remarkable new Apple keyboard. It took me a day to get used to it, but now I love it. Typing on it is effortless, silent, and fast...I had no idea a change in keyboard could result in such a perceptible speed increase. Tim Bray calls the keyboard "great":

The current line-up of Apple keyboards isn't good, it is (the sizing flaw aside) great. The feel is both sensitive and rock-solid and I think I'm typing faster than any time in the last twenty years or so.

Rafe likes it too and Robert bought extras in case Apple discontinues them.

By Jason Kottke    Jul 25, 2008    Apple

Old iPhone price check on eBay

Before the iPhone 3G came out last month, I wrote about how valuable the old iPhone still was.

A quick search reveals that used & unlocked 8Gb iPhones are going for ~$400 and 16Gb for upwards of $500, with never-opened phones going for even more.

I just checked eBay again and those prices are down only slightly. Never-opened unlocked iPhones are still fetching $400-500 and somewhat less for previously used phones. If you've purchased an iPhone 3G in the past few days, you still have an excellent shot at getting most of your money back from your first phone (provided you can get it unlocked, which isn't difficult).

I also checked the prices for unlocked iPhone 3Gs...prices are upwards of $1400 for the 16GB model. The unlocked claim is somewhat dubious. AFAIK, there hasn't been a crack released yet although it's been reported that the 3Gs are being sold unlocked in Italy and Hong Kong.

Update: The 3G has been cracked.

By Jason Kottke    Jul 18, 2008    Apple   eBay   iPhone   telephony

iPhone line-cutter

Lance Arthur deals with an iPhone line-cutter.

"Are you standing in line?"

"Yeah."

"Were you standing in line behind me outside for three and a half hours."

"Yeah, I was." Grin.

He stares at me. I instantly hate him. A lot. I hate everything about his self-congratulatory smart-assed grin and his cheating little heart and his idea of how life should work for him, where he can outsmart us all and get what he wants and get away with it. "No, you weren't."

Fairness matters, even when you've got something to lose.

By Jason Kottke    Jul 15, 2008    Apple   iPhone   lancearthur

Steve Jobs: one more thing

A list of all the times that Steve Jobs has said, "just one more thing" at keynotes and product launches...aka this is the stuff that Apple thought would do well. Among the hits: original iMac, OS X, the iPod, and the iPhone. Only one real miss: the G4 Cube.

Also: did Jobs take that phrase from Columbo?

Update: The video version of "one more thing". (thx, eric)

By Jason Kottke    Jul 11, 2008    Apple   Steve Jobs

Cool iPhone apps

So, what are the cool must-have iPhone Apps? The iTunes Store lists the most popular ones but that's often not a good indicator. Obvious choices thus far: Twitterific (read and post to Twitter), Remote (control iTunes or Apple TV with your iPhone), and AppEngines' individual ebooks (like Pride and Prejudice). Let me know what your favorites are in the comments and I'll compile a list. Bonus points if you actually explain what the app does and why it's worth the effort.

By Jason Kottke    Jul 10, 2008    46 comments    Apple   iPhone   iPhone apps

iPhone 2.0 update now available

MacRumors has the scoop.

Once again, digging through Apple's XML files has revealed the url to the iPhone 2.0 Firmware that is presently available on Apple's servers.

Here's the direct download link. Be sure to read all the disclaimers at MacRumors...this is not an official Apple release and should be treated with caution. (Basically, don't try this at home, kids.) And once again, here's the link to the App Store so that you can install all the shiny new iPhone apps.

iPhone Apps Store open

iTunes 7.7 became available last night and with it, the capability to buy applications to put on your iPhone. Well, you can't actually put them on your phone yet, but you can buy/download them. Here's a link to all iPhone Apps and here's a link to just the free ones. I can't seem to get the link for the main store's page, but the easiest way to get there is to click on "Applications" in your iTunes Library and click "Get More Applications".

The new iPhone software will likely be out later today so that you can actually install and use these apps.

Update: Here's the link for the iPhone Apps Store. (thx, carl)

Valuable old iPhones

Last week: maybe that old iPhone isn't completely worthless after all.

But a cheaper and easier way to get an iPhone that works on T-Mobile, etc. is to buy an old iPhone from an upgrader for $100, maybe even $150?

This week: you might actually break even or turn a small profit from selling your old iPhone on eBay or craigslist. A quick search reveals that used & unlocked 8Gb iPhones are going for ~$400 and 16Gb for upwards of $500, with never-opened phones going for even more. Here are some recent old iPhone auctions:

- A lot of five never-opened unlocked 16Gb iPhones went for $2,755 ($551 per phone)
- A used unlocked 8Gb iPhone went for $405
- A used unlocked 16Gb iPhone went for $585.

Before the announcement of the iPhone 3G, new 8Gb iPhones retailed for $399, 16Gb for $499. When the iPhone 3G comes out on July 11, the supply of old iPhones in the marketplace will greatly increase (which means that the price will drop) but the auctions above suggest that those old phones might not be shiny paperweights after all. (thx, praveen & carl)

By Jason Kottke    Jun 23, 2008    Apple   iPhone   telephony

How much is that old iPhone worth?

Just after Apple announced the iPhone 3G, Khoi Vinh whipped up a quick graph of the declining value of his iPhone over the past year. He generously estimates that when the iPhone 3G is released in early July, his old iPhone will be worth $100, half of the price for a new iPhone 3G. At the time, I speculated that you'd be hard pressed to find a buyer at $75.

However, the resale market for old iPhones might not be so dismal. AT&T has confirmed to MacWorld that in-store activation of the iPhone 3G will be mandatory:

AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel confirmed for Macworld that activation must be done at the time of purchase, in-store.

For those who want to use their phone on another network, an untethered 8 GB iPhone 3G would cost them at least $374 ($199 + $175 AT&T account cancellation fee). But a cheaper and easier way to get an iPhone that works on T-Mobile, etc. is to buy an old iPhone from an upgrader for $100, maybe even $150?

By Jason Kottke    Jun 20, 2008    Apple   ATT   iPhone   telephony

iPhone 3G hangover

After yesterday's iPhone 3G revelry, the inevitable hangover. AT&T is done playing nice with iPhone customers. First off, the data plan for 3G is $10 more than the old plan. Second, in-store activation is required, "which takes 10-12 minutes"...with the old version of the iPhone, you could activate through iTunes and it took 2 minutes. (That means no online ordering of phones either.) Third, Apple and AT&T may be working on a purchase penalty for those who don't activate their phones within 30 days...so no more buying a phone to use on another network. Four: no prepaid plans. Yay?

By Jason Kottke    Jun 10, 2008    Apple   ATT   business   iPhone   telephony

Realtime Google stock prices

Google is providing real-time stock prices now...no page refresh necessary. So you can, for instance, watch Apple's stock price drop after Jobs' keynote. Now I know how daytraders feel...I can't take my eyes off of the screen.

By Jason Kottke    Jun 9, 2008    Apple   finance   Google

2008 WWDC Jobs keynote

What new brushed metal magic treats will Steve Jobs unveil this year at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference? Hover car? Neverlost keys? Orgasm pills? Electric pony? All that and more at 1pm ET....live blogging of Jobs' keynote at MacRumors, Mac Observer, Engadget, and Ars Technica (which includes a spectacularly nerdy photo of Gizmodo's Brian Lam and his liveblogging contraption). Let the games begin.

Update: Holy shit! Michael Sippey is on stage right now.

Update: Here's some live streaming audio of the keynote. This feels like cheating. (thx, andy)

Update: New iPhone announced with 3G, GPS, flush headphone jack (!!), thinner, cheaper, and better battery life. Price: $199 for 8 gig iPhone. $299 for 16 gig. Available in white.

Update: This is an interesting tech tidbit about how Apple fit all of those protocols into the phone:

iPhone 3G delivers UMTS, HSDPA, GSM, Wi-Fi, EDGE, GPS, and Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR in one compact device - using only two antennas. Clever iPhone engineering integrates those antennas into a few unexpected places: the metal ring around the camera, the audio jack, the metal screen bezel, and the iPhone circuitry itself. And intelligent iPhone power management technology gives you up to 5 hours of talk time over 3G networks.

By Jason Kottke    Jun 9, 2008    Apple   Steve Jobs   WWDC

Mobile phone companies are evil, irritating, and stupid defacto monopolies

[I'm sure this is nothing new and has been amply documented elsewhere but I'm in rant mode, not research mode, so here we go.] We're going to London soon so my wife calls up AT&T to make sure our iPhones will work in the UK. We already knew all about the ridiculous prices they charge for international data roaming (viewing a 3-minute video on YouTube would cost about $40!), so turning that feature off for the duration is not going to be a problem. After unlocking the phones for international access, the woman informed Meg of two other tidbits of mobile phone company idiocy:

1. If my iPhone is on in the UK and the phone rings but I don't answer, the call goes to voicemail. As it should. But somehow, I get charged for that call at $1.29/minute *and* perhaps an additional call from my phone to the US, also billed at $1.29/minute. Individual voicemails are limited to 2 minutes, but if I get 10 2-minute voicemails over the course of a couple days, I'm charged $25 for not answering my phone. And then I have to listen to all the voicemails...that's another $25. Insane and inane.

2. But it gets even more unbelievable! Then the woman tells Meg that when the iPhone is hooked up to a computer via USB, you shouldn't download the photos from the phone to the computer because you'll incur international data roaming charges and further that the only way to deal with this is to wait to sync your photos when you get back to the US. W! T! F! How is that even possible? This sounds like complete bullshit to me. The iPhone somehow calls AT&T to ask permission to d/l photos? Verifies the EXIF data? Informs the US government what you've been taking pictures of...some kind of distributed self-surveillance system? Is this really the case or was this woman just really confused about what she was reading off of her script?

By Jason Kottke    May 14, 2008    Apple   ATT   iPhone   telephony   travel

iPhone celebs

From Coolspotters, a new site that tracks celebrity use of brands and fashion, here's a list of celebs that use an iPhone, including Heidi Klum, Karl Rove, Paris Hilton, and, er, Steve Jobs. (via mike davidson)

By Jason Kottke    May 13, 2008    Apple   celebrity   iPhone

The under-construction facade of the new Apple

The under-construction facade of the new Apple Store in Boston looks like Fenway Park's Green Monster. I bet they did this just to piss off Gruber.

The iPhone Mega

EXCLUSIVE!! From a mole deep inside the company comes word and vision of a new iPhone from Apple, the iPhone Mega:

iPhone Mega

In a rare comment regarding a leaked product, Steve Jobs noted that "the easy portability of the iPhone was an issue for some people; we saw a market opportunity there".

By Jason Kottke    Apr 21, 2008    Apple   iPhone

Slowing down the playback of a 1999 Apple

Slowing down the playback of a 1999 Apple commercial = drunk Jeff Goldblum. "Internet? I'd say Internet." Great stuff, indeed. (via cynical-c)

By Jason Kottke    Apr 2, 2008    advertising   Apple   jeffgoldblum   remix   TV

Is the Mighty Mouse Apple's worst product

Is the Mighty Mouse Apple's worst product ever? Google says yes. (I dislike mine as well.)

A video stream of yesterday's iPhone SDK

A video stream of yesterday's iPhone SDK presentation.

Update: Jason at SVN speculates on the implications of yesterday's announcements.

By Deron Bauman    Mar 7, 2008    Apple   iPhone   sdk   video

Good notes from today's Apple event at

Good notes from today's Apple event at which they announced the developer's kit for the iPhone. VC John Doerr also announced the iFund, a $100 million fund that will give money to companies wanting to develop applications for the iPhone. (via df)

By Jason Kottke    Mar 6, 2008    Apple   ifund   iPhone   telephony   vc

Steve Jobs, encouraging the conspiracy theory in all of us

When Steve Jobs disregards a market segment -- think mp3 players or cell phones -- that sometimes means Apple is about to jump in and take over. When asked about Amazon's Kindle a few months ago, Jobs said:

"It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."

Of course, that set off speculation that Apple was about to do just that, integrate a book reader into a series of portable internet devices.

It's speculation like this that feeds the conspiracy theory in all of us. Being an Apple fan is like that -- except once every few product cycles the conspiracy actually plays out.

Build your own Apple Store. Oobject tracked

Build your own Apple Store. Oobject tracked down the materials, furniture, fixtures, and finishes used in the Apple Stores, giving anyone enough information to turn their living room into one.

By Jason Kottke    Jan 24, 2008    Apple   architecture   design   oobject

Why Is Apple On The Starbucks Model?

Does it make sense for Apple to build a fourth store in Manhattan, hot on the heels of their new Meatpacking District outpost? Retail saturation schemes work for Dunkin' Donuts. But in what way would the incredible overhead and costly building prices of the Apple temples serve the company? Surely there's a good business reason for it—even though one doesn't come to mind.

By Choire Sicha    Jan 18, 2008    30 comments    Apple   stores

The JobsNote is going on right now&

The JobsNote is going on right now—ooh, shiny new Apple things. So far they've announced a movie rental program for your iPhone but there is still no cut and paste?

By Choire Sicha    Jan 15, 2008    Apple   complaints   iPhone

Now that Sony's on board, all four

Now that Sony's on board, all four of the major music labels are selling DRM-free music on Amazon's MP3 store. Amazon's giving Apple a real run for its money here.

By Jason Kottke    Jan 11, 2008    Amazon   Apple   MP3   music   Sony

Wired has a longish article about how

Wired has a longish article about how the iPhone came about. I wish this story had more direct quotes and explicit references...it's hard to read it and not take the whole thing with a huge grain of salt.

By Jason Kottke    Jan 10, 2008    Apple   iPhone

The $27,000 Apple computer

Apple announced newer faster Mac Pros today. They start at $2799 but you can configure them up to several thousand dollars (including software and accessories).

$27000 Apple

The really expensive bits are the 32 GB of RAM ($9100), the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 video card ($2850), the four 15,000 RPM hard drives ($800 each), the two 30" Cinema Displays ($1700 each), a Fibre Channel Card ($1000), and an unlimited-client copy of Mac OS X Server ($999).

That's a lot of money but you've got to remember that in addition to satisfying your computing needs well into the next decade, this baby will heat your entire house and provide a metal cooktop surface hot enough to prepare meals on. Mmm, 15,000 RPM omelettes! (thx, jake)

Update: Wow, configuring the new Xserve is even more expensive; adding all the possible options runs the price to over $83,000, which includes a $12,000 RAID array and $50,000 Mac OS X Server software support. $50K for support? Does Jobs come fix it himself?

By Jason Kottke    Jan 8, 2008    Apple   Mac   macpro   xserve

What if you traded Apple stock around

What if you traded Apple stock around Steve Jobs' January Macworld keynotes...would you make any money? Short answer is yes but buying Apple stock 10 years ago and holding would have been the better move. Also interesting is the market's reaction to OS X and Jobs' installment as CEO...Apple lost 7.3% of its market cap the day after the announcement.

Flickr: Camera Finder: Apple: iPhone

At long last, Apple is listed as one of the available brands of camera in the flickr Camera Finder.

This means that you can search for shots taken not only with iPhone, but with the three models of Apple's original camera line, the QuickTake (codenamed Venus, Mars, and Neptune). Currently, there are no viewable uploaded photos taken with the QuickTake 100 or 150, but there are some from the QuickTake 200.

It's also nice to see that Merlin's tree.cx pic made it to the top of the iPhone-taken 'interesting' list. (via highindustrial)

Update: A potential reason for the iPhone's relatively paltry numbers is that when you email photos from the phone, it strips the exif data out which means those photos aren't counted. I imagine many more people email photos to Flickr from the iPhone than upload them from their computers.

By Adam Lisagor    Dec 4, 2007    Apple   Flickr   iPhone   Merlin Mann   quicktake

On the complexity of personal computers

If you believe that software made for a mass market audience that costs $129 (or even $259), does just about anything you want the instant you specify, and runs on mass-produced hardware that fits comfortably in a small backpack will always perform flawlessly, you're deluded. If you believe any advertising or marketing to the contrary, you're twice deluded, once by yourself and once by someone else. You want 100% reliability for cheap? Buy a calculator. But don't expect anything more than arithmetic.

By Jason Kottke    Nov 19, 2007    Apple   Microsoft

An Apple Lisa commercial featuring Kevin Costner.

An Apple Lisa commercial featuring Kevin Costner. While you digest the awesomeness of that, it's interesting to note how consistent Apple has been under Steve Jobs in their message and approach...the emphasis on non-traditional business uses of computers in the Lisa ad and the whole iLife philosophy go together quite well. (via the house next door)

Has anyone else noticed that Mail.app

Has anyone else noticed that Mail.app and IMAP aren't perfect playmates in Leopard? The unread counts in my folders don't update until I click on them (and my inbox unread count never updates), which is suboptimal and time consuming in the extreme.

By Jason Kottke    Nov 7, 2007    Apple   email   imap   Leopard   Mail.app   OS X

1984 all over again?

Google recently announced that a bunch of companies (aka the Open Handset Alliance) were getting together to make cell phones that run on an open platform called Android. That was a couple of days ago so maybe someone else has already made the imperfect comparison between this and Mac vs. PC circa 1984, but if not:

1984 2007

Or perhaps Steven Frank has it right:

A 34-company committee couldn't create a successful ham sandwich, much less a mobile application suite.

By Jason Kottke    Nov 7, 2007    android   Apple   Google   iPhone   Mac   mobile phones   stevenfrank   telephony

For my future reference, How-to: Proper GMail

For my future reference, How-to: Proper GMail IMAP for iPhone and Apple Mail.

By Jason Kottke    Oct 25, 2007    Apple   email   Gmail   how to   imap   Mail.app

Apple = the new evil empire?

Apple's market capitalization now exceeds that of Intel and IBM. The faithful are in a celebratory mood. But I predict that we'll soon see an uptick in stories and blog posts asking some variation of the following question: "Now that Apple is 1) a huge company, 2) no longer a scrappy underdog, and 3) basically dominates an industry like, dare I say it, Microsoft, will those free-thinking Mac fanatics who desperately wanted the company to survive its lean years now turn on them because giant multinational corporations who use DRM and are in bed with the music and cellphone industries are evil?" This will likely be abbreviated: "Is Apple the new Microsoft?"

Answers will range from yes, no, maybe, it depends, you're asking the wrong question, I love Apple so SHUT UP, and, from Anil, Microsoft was never that bad and Apple has always been rotten and thank God those fanatics finally woke up about it and I was right all along. And....go!

By Jason Kottke    Oct 24, 2007    Apple

In the ongoing battle between the iTunes

In the ongoing battle between the iTunes Music Store and Amazon's MP3 store, Amazon is giving a 20% referral fee to their associates for each song sold through the end of the year. Wow. That's $1.80 on a $8.99 album...I wonder if Amazon's selling these for below cost (like they did with Harry Potter.) (via nelson)

By Jason Kottke    Oct 17, 2007    Amazon   Apple   business   iTunes   iTunes Store   music

Two bits (bites? har har) of Apple

Two bits (bites? har har) of Apple news:

1. Steve Jobs has announced that an SDK will be available for the iPhone and iPod touch in February. No more hacking your phone to put applications on it.

2. You can now preorder OS X 10.5 (Leopard) at Amazon for $109...that's $20 off the retail price. The offer comes with a pre-order price guarantee; if the price drops before it ships, you get it for the lower price.

By Jason Kottke    Oct 17, 2007    Apple   iPhone   iPod   Leopard   OS X   telephony

I'm loving the new 1.1.1 update to the

I'm loving the new 1.1.1 update to the iPhone. Best new features for me: the double-tap of the Home button to go to your address book favorites (first suggested by Steven Johnson shortly after the phone's introduction) and more alert ringtone choices for when a new text message comes in. I still wish I could set that alert volume independently from the main ringtone volume, but this is a good start...I'll be able to hear my texts coming in again.

Weegee Photo Boothing Marilyn

Speaking of Weegee, I stumbled across some photos he made based on his well-known portrait of Marilyn Monroe.

Weegee images of Marilyn Monroe

He created the funhouse photos by manipulating negatives and distorting the light falling on the photographic paper from the enlarger. They remind me of images captured by OS X's Photo Booth with the distortion filters on.

Photo Booth photos

(Photo credits, L to R: Blueberry Pony, Spullara, Winstonavich, Thelastminute, Mysistersabarista)

Amazon has launched their mp3 music store.

Amazon has launched their mp3 music store. Files are in mp3 format, no DRM, high bitrate (high quality), and songs are mostly 89-99 cents. A compelling alternative to Apple's iTMS.

By Jason Kottke    Sep 25, 2007    Amazon   Apple   DRM   iTunes Store   MP3   music

Wes Anderson is promoting The Darjeeling Limited

Wes Anderson is promoting The Darjeeling Limited by releasing a 13-minute teaser film called Hotel Chevalier on the web before Darjeeling opens in theaters. Three words: Natalie Portman nude. Portman, Anderson, and Jason Schwartzman will be at the Apple Store in NYC to premiere the short. If you go, expect a freakin' mob scene of twee hipster horndogs.

Update: New Wes Anderson Film Features Deadpan Delivery, Meticulous Art Direction, Characters With Father Issues. Completely unexpected.

Being sent to Mordor:

Being sent to Mordor:

Hardware techies at Apple are regularly sent from California for intense two-week shifts to the city-sized FoxConn factory in Shenzhen, China where iPods are made and tested. Internally at Apple this is known as "being sent to Mordor."

By Jason Kottke    Sep 14, 2007    Apple   language

Video of a Charlie Rose interview with

Video of a Charlie Rose interview with Pixar's John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. This was about a year after Toy Story had been released and a few months before Apple bought Jobs' NeXT.

Describe what you did before you saw this message

Safari Error

Page address: http://ambrosiasw.com/utilities/itoner/

Description: Woke up to the alarm at 6:30 am. Got my son out of his crib, handed him to my wife. OJ + medication + forgot to take my multivitamin. Checked my email, Twitter, etc. Did a couple posts. Showered but didn't shave. Took care of my son while my wife went to the gym. He played on the floor a bit, we laughed and giggled together a lot. Good times. Then he got hungry so I fed him while watching Honey I Shrunk the Kids on cable. When my wife got home around 10am, I put him down for a nap, packed up my bag, and left for work. N train to Canal then a 5 minute walk to the office. Worked on some PHP for a couple of hours, making less progress than I would have liked. Caught a baby mouse in a drinking glass at the office. Went to get lunch with the gang. First and second choices no good, but ended up at an Italian bakery/deli on Mott. Turkey and provolone on a roll with mayo and lettuce, Pepsi, and potato chips (sour cream and onion). Gave leftover sandwich to the baby mouse, AKA "Feedy". Sat back down at my desk. Selected "iToner" from bookmarks list and waited. Error number NSURLErrorDomain:-1005.

By Jason Kottke    Sep 12, 2007    Apple   Safari

Profile of designer Josh Davis on Apple's

Profile of designer Josh Davis on Apple's web site. "The most complex print I've done had 120,000 layers in Illustrator. The printer called and said, 'How did you do this? How long did it take?' And I said, 'Oh, five minutes.'"

By Jason Kottke    Sep 10, 2007    Apple   design   joshdavis

Microsoft's Art of Office site showcases artistic

Microsoft's Art of Office site showcases artistic creations made with the Office suite of programs...upload your own to participate.

Apple may have announced their ringtone strategy

Apple may have announced their ringtone strategy for the iPhone (30-second ringtones cost $1.98 to make and you must purchase songs through the iTunes Music Store), but Ambrosia Software's iToner utility lets you make ringtones from any mp3 or acc audio file with a simple drag/drop, all for $15 (free 30-day trial). iToner seems like the clear winner here.

Update: The just-released new version of iTunes (7.4) makes iToner ringtones invisible to the iPhone. Ambrosia is working on an iToner update. (thx, jim)

By Jason Kottke    Sep 6, 2007    Apple   iPhone   itoner   music   telephony

My friend David Galbraith just launched a

My friend David Galbraith just launched a gadget site called Oobject. The gadgets are organized into hierarchically ordered collections and you can vote on the position of a particular gadget within the collection. Two of my favorite collections are the iPod knock-offs and revolting gold gadgets (it's interesting that gold makes technology look vulgar and therefore cheap).

Oh, and David's Smashing Telly is still cranking along nicely. I wish I had time to watch all the shows featured recently.

By Jason Kottke    Sep 5, 2007    Apple   David Galbraith   iPod   oobject

Apple is holding a special event today

Apple is holding a special event today at 10am PT to announce a new product. Or something. No one knows exactly what but it seems to have something to do with music. Popular guesses include a 3G iPhone, a different iPod nano, a touchscreen iPod, and the availability of the Beatles entire musical catalog on iTunes. MacWorld, Engadget, MacObserver, and ArsTechnica (among others) will have live coverage.

Update: Jobs announced 99-cent ringtones, new colors for iPod shuffle, new form factor for iPod nano (fat vs. thin), renamed the iPod to iPod classic, introduced new iPod touch (basically the iPhone without the phone), new mobile iTunes Music Store that will work on iPod touch and the iPhone, odd partnership with Starbucks...click to buy currently playing songs in the store and free wifi for iTMS purchases (how about free wifi, period?), and the 8GB iPhone now costs $399. !!!!! I guess Apple's plan on that was 1) gouge all the early adopters, and then 2) reduce the price to sell iPhones like crazy.

By Jason Kottke    Sep 5, 2007    Apple   iPhone   iPod   music

Nice video of how a copy and

Nice video of how a copy and paste feature might work on the iPhone. There was a lengthy discussion about how to implement this on kottke.org last month.

By Jason Kottke    Aug 8, 2007    Adam Lisagor   Apple   design   iPhone   video

iPhone, Wiimote, or newborn baby: which has the best built-in accelerometer?

In the Kottke/Hourihan household, much of the past 4 weeks has been spent determining which has the most sensitive built-in accelerometer: an iPhone, a Nintendo Wiimote, or our newborn son.

iPhone Wii Ollie

The iPhone was eliminated fairly quickly...the portrait-to-landscape flip is easy to circumvent if you do it slow enough or at an odd angle. The Wiimote might be the winner; it registers small, slow movements with ease, as when executing a drop shot in tennis or tapping in a putt in golf.

Newborns, however, are born with something called the Moro reflex. When infants feel themselves fall backwards, they startle and throw their arms out to the sides, as illustrated in this video. Even fast asleep they will do this, often waking up in the process. So while the Wiimote's accelerometer may be more sensitive, the psychological pressure exerted on the parent while lowering a sleeping baby slowly and smoothly enough so as not to wake them with the Moro reflex and thereby squandering 40 minutes of walking-the-baby-to-sleep time is beyond intense and so much greater than any stress one might feel serving for the match in tennis or getting that final strike in bowling.

In the battle of Steve Jobs (CEO

In the battle of Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) vs. Steve Jobs (former CEO of Pixar and current Disney Board member), Steve Jobs (Apple) was the clear winner. Apple sold an estimated 500,000 iPhones this weekend -- grossing somewhere between $250 million and $300 million -- while Pixar's Ratatouille grossed $47.2 million.

Update: Some more interesting iPhone statistics, including Apple's stock price increase since the iPhone was announced ($32 billion increase in market cap) and that iPhone was mentioned in 1.25% of all blogs posts over the weekend. (thx, thor)

Update: Apple's stock price went down this morning in heavy trading. I guess Wall Street wasn't so over the moon for the iPhone?

By Jason Kottke    Jul 2, 2007    Apple   business   Disney   iPhone   movies   Pixar   Ratatouille   Steve Jobs

New iPhone features

John Gruber remarked on the lack of a clipboard on the iPhone and I found myself missing that feature this afternoon. Steven Johnson suggested a double-click of the Home button as a shortcut to the phone favorites screen to shorten initiation times for frequent calls. Both of these observations beg the question: how are new capabilities going to get added to the iPhone? A bunch of you are either interaction/interface designers or otherwise clever folks...how would you add a feature like a clipboard to the iPhone?

Here's where interaction on the iPhone stands right now. Pressing, holding, flipping physical buttons (home, power, silent, volume). Tapping buttons on the screen to active them. Tapping the screen to zoom in/out. Tap the screen with two fingers to zoom with Google Maps. Pinch and expand on screen to zoom in/out. Swipe screen to scroll up/down and side to side. Swipe screen to flip album covers in iPod mode. Touch and hold screen to bring up magnifying loupe and drag to move cursor. Flip unit to reorient screen from portrait to landscape and vice versa. Swipe message to delete. Swipe screen to unlock. There are probably more that I'm forgetting.

How do you add to that while keeping the interface intuitive, uncluttered (both the physical device and onscreen), and usable? Add a button to the device? Add buttons onscreen...a menu button perhaps? Double and triple pressing of physical buttons? New touchscreen gestures? Physical gestures like shaking the entire phone to left or right? Voice activated features? A combination of some/all of those?

By Jason Kottke    Jul 1, 2007    80 comments    Apple   design   iPhone   multitouch   telephony

Cupertino, we have a problem

My iPhone bubble abruptly popped this evening when I tried my Shure E3c earphones (the best pair of earphones I've ever owned and far superior to the Apple earbuds) with the iPhone and they didn't work. The ones that came with the iPhone work fine. On their site, Apple says:

iPhone has a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack, so it is compatible with most portable stereo headphones. Some stereo headphones may require an adapter (sold separately) to ensure proper fit.

The earbuds from a v3 iPod didn't work either. The E3c plug is 3.5 mm and the earphones are about 2 years old. Is anyone else having problems with their earphones? I don't understand why this is even an issue. Very irritating.

Update: Others are having similar problems with headphones not fitting. Looks like it's the plastic sheath around the plug that's the problem. (thx, sean)

Update: I cut away a bit of the E3c's sheath with my trusty Exacto knife and it now fits in the jack. I'd love to know the reason for recessing that plug so much...besides pure aethetics of course; it just seems like too much of a trade-off.

According to Apple's iPhone stock checker, every

According to Apple's iPhone stock checker, every single Apple Store in the country currently has iPhones available.

Update: That page only updates once a day at 9pm for the next day's stock. So when it says there are iPhones in stock at 3pm, that's not necessarily the case. (thx, jeremy) At around 11:30 am ET today, Jake Dobkin reported "plenty of stock, no wait to purchase".

By Jason Kottke    Jun 30, 2007    Apple   applestore   iPhone

John Gruber's initial assessment of the iPhone,

John Gruber's initial assessment of the iPhone, a lot more thorough than mine.

Quick iPhone review

- I'm kind of amazed that this thing lives up to the expectations I had for it. It's an amazing device.

- To read RSS, just put a feed address into Safari and Apple redirects it through their iPhone feed reader. But it's very much of an a la carte thing, one feed at a time. What's needed is a proper newsreader with its own icon on home screen. Workarounds for now: Google Reader looks nice or you could make a collective feed that combines all the feeds you want to read on your iPhone and use that with the iPhone feed reader (Meg's idea).

- I skipped the index finger and am right into the two thumb typing. With the software correction, it's surprisingly easy. Or maybe I just have small lady thumbs.

- After fiddling with it for an hour, I know how to work the iPhone better than the Nokia I had for the past 2 years, even though the Nokia has far fewer capabilities.

- I could use the Google Maps app forever.

- When I go back to using my Macbook Pro, I want to fling stuff around the screen like on the iPhone. It's an addictive way to interface with information.

- Finding Nemo looked really nice on the widescreen display.

- You can pinch and expand with two thumbs instead of your thumb and index finger.

- The camera is not what you would call great, but it's as good as my old phone's, which is about all I want out of it. The lack of video is a bit of a bummer.

- I Twittered from on line at the AT&T store that the line was moving slowly because they were doing in-store credit checks and contract sign-ups, contrary to what everyone had been told by Apple beforehand. That was not the case. They were just being super careful with everything...each phone and the bag that it went into had a bar code on it and they were scanning everything and running phones from the back of the store one at a time. The staff was helpful and courteous and it was a very smooth transaction, all things considered. I was on line for 2 hours before the store opened and then another 2 hours waiting to get into the store.

- The alert options (ringtones, vibrate options, messaging alerts, etc.) aren't as fine-grained as I would like, but they'll do for now.

- I have not tried the internet stuff on anything but my home WiFi network, so I don't know about the EDGE network speed. Will try it out and about later.

- The Google Maps display shows the subway stops but not the full system map. Workaround: stick a JPG of the subway map in your iPhoto library and sync it up to the iPhone. Voila, zoomable, dragable NYC subway map.

- Wasn't it only a year or two ago that everyone was oohing and aahing over Jeff Han's touchscreen demos? And now there's a mass-produced device that does similar stuff that fits it your pocket. We're living in the future, folks...the iPhone is the hovercar we've all been waiting for.

Update:

- The iPhone is the first iPod with a speaker. Which means that in addition to using it as a speakerphone, you can listen to music, podcasts, YouTube videos, and movies without earphones. Which might seem a bit "eh", but won't once you have 15 people gathered around watching and listening to that funny bit from last night's Colbert Report. You know, the Social.

- I'm getting my mail right off my server with IMAP, so when it gets to the phone, it hasn't gone through Mail.app's junk filters...which basically means that mail on the iPhone is useless for me. In the near future, I'm going to set things up to route through GMail prior to the phone to near-eliminate the spam.

- Tried the EDGE network while I was out and about. Seemed pretty speedy to me, not noticeably slower than my WiFi at home...which may say more about Time Warner's cable modem speeds than EDGE.

- BTW, all of these first impressions are just that. You can't judge a device or an interface without using it day to day for awhile. I'm curious to see how I and others are still liking the phone in two weeks.

- Everytime I connect the iPhone to my computer, Aperture launches. Do not want.

By Jason Kottke    Jun 30, 2007    Apple   ATT   Google Maps   iPhone   jeffhan   mobile phones   multitouch   NYC   RSS   Safari   telephony

Video about how the keyboard software for

Video about how the keyboard software for the iPhone works. As suspected, learning the keyboard requires some techniques not needed for using a regular keyboard but once you get used to them, the two-thumbed typing shown in the final scene seems pretty quick.

By Jason Kottke    Jun 27, 2007    Apple   design   iPhone   telephony

David Pogue writes that the iPhone lives

David Pogue writes that the iPhone lives up to most of its hype. Summary: typing is so-so, browser good, network slow, email is great, and a modified Russian reversal joke: "On the iPhone, you don't check your voice mail; it checks you". (thx, david)

Update: Walt Mossberg has a much more in-depth review...he liked it less than Pogue, I think. Regarding the Microsoft Exchange incompatibility speculation: "It can also handle corporate email using Microsoft's Exchange system, if your IT department cooperates by enabling a setting on the server."

Update: Steven Levy weighs in with a review in Newsweek. I wonder how many review phones got sent out? I'm guessing less than 20.

I've been keeping up with the latest

I've been keeping up with the latest iPhone news but I haven't been telling you about it...partially because my poor pal Merlin is about to pop an artery due to all the hype. Anyway, it's Friday and he's got all weekend to clean that up, so here we go. The big thing is a 20-minute guided tour of the device, wherein we learn that there's a neat swiping delete gesture, you can view Word docs, it's thumb-typeable, the earbuds wires house the world's smallest remote control, Google Maps have driving directions *and* traffic conditions, and there's an "airplane mode" that turns off all the wifi, cell, and Bluetooth signals for plane trips. It looks like the iPhone will be available online...here's the page at the Apple Store. What else? It plays YouTube videos. iPhone setup will be handled through iTunes: "To set up your iPhone, you'll need an account with Apple's iTunes Store."

By Jason Kottke    Jun 22, 2007    Apple   Google   Google Maps   iPhone   maps   Merlin Mann   telephony

Long profile of Steve Jobs on the

Long profile of Steve Jobs on the eve of his fourth act written by John Heilemann, who is one of my favorite technology/culture writers. I'm dying to find out what past Jobs-championed Apple product the iPhone will most resemble: the Lisa or the iPod?

By Jason Kottke    Jun 18, 2007    Apple   business   iPhone   iPod   johnheilemann   lisa   Steve Jobs

In the Year 2030, the Young Hotshot at

In the Year 2030, the Young Hotshot at My Office Tries to Walk Me Through "Centaur," Apple's New Mind-Orb-Based Operating System. "Well, go ahead and materialize the topaz orb first. That should launch your facefield preferences."

By Jason Kottke    Jun 18, 2007    Apple   funny   parody

Even though it's not out until October,

Even though it's not out until October, you can pre-order the new version of OS X (10.5, aka Leopard) at Amazon right now.

By Jason Kottke    Jun 14, 2007    Amazon   Apple   Leopard   OS X

Stuff from Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote this

Stuff from Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote this morning: new version of Safari for Mac *and* Windows (downloadable beta), developing for iPhone can be done with HTML & JavaScript...just like Dashboard widgets, new Finder and Desktop, and Apple's web site is completely redesigned.

Update: From the reaction I'm hearing so far, it's difficult to tell what was more disappointing to people: Jobs' keynote or The Sopronos finale. Also, a Keynote bingo was possible (diagonally, bottom left to top right)...no report yet as to whether anyone yelled out during the show.

Update: TUAW is reporting that someone in the crowd yelled "bingo" 35 minutes into the keynote, but if you look at the card, a bingo was only possible when the iPhone widgets were announced towards the end. Disqualified for early non-bingo! (thx, alex)

By Jason Kottke    Jun 11, 2007    Apple   iPhone   Leopard   Safari   Steve Jobs   telephony   web development   WWDC   www

Today we once again get to hear

Today we once again get to hear the gospel straight from the source; Steve Jobs will be keynoting Apple's WWDC at 1pm ET. MacRumors, Mac Observer, and Engadget will have live coverage. My predictions: better .Mac, iPhone something, and Jobs will announce that Paulie's gonna whack Tony Soprano but not before Tony squeals to the Feds. Oh, and a pony.

By Jason Kottke    Jun 11, 2007    Apple   iPhone   Steve Jobs   The Sopranos   TV   WWDC

The 2007 MacTech 25 "honors the most influential people

The 2007 MacTech 25 "honors the most influential people in the Macintosh community". Includes a single woman.

By Jason Kottke    Jun 7, 2007    Apple   best of   gender   lists   Mac

Apple has released three new iPhone ads

Apple has released three new iPhone ads in advance of the device's release date on June 29. The third ad is the money spot. The only remaining question: how likely am I to get one within a week or two of release without standing in line for hours on end? (via df, who notes that "No other cell phone is advertised by showing off the user interface.")

Nice summary of the Steve Jobs/Bill

Nice summary of the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates conversation at the D: All Things Digital conference. "Asked to give advice for others considering starting their own businesses, Gates explained that in the early days, he and his colleagues never considered the value of the company they were developing. 'It's all about the people and the passion, and it's amazing the business worked out the way it did.'" Here's a briefer summary with context and a transcript and video of the entire interview is available on the conference site.

Winners of the 2007 National Design Awards, including

Winners of the 2007 National Design Awards, including Apple's Jonathan Ive and Chip Kidd.

Why has Apple's focus on industrial design

Why has Apple's focus on industrial design been so successful? "The most fundamental thing about Apple that's interesting to me is that they're just as smart about what they don't do. Great products can be made more beautiful by omitting things." (via justin)

By Jason Kottke    May 9, 2007    Apple   design

Coda

Panic has released Coda, a new web development app for OS X. Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser describes it thusly:

We build websites by hand, with code, and we've long since dreamed of streamlining the experience, bringing together all of the tools that we needed into a single, elegant window. While you can certainly pair up your favorite text editor with Transmit today, and then maybe have Safari open for previews, and maybe use Terminal for running queries directly or a CSS editor for editing your style sheets, we dreamed of a place where all of that can happen in one place.

Ever since I switched to a Mac, I've been seeking a suitable replacement/upgrade for Homesite. I limped along unsatisfied with BBEdit and am finally getting into the groove with TextMate, but the inter-app switching -- especially between the editor, FTP client, and the terminal -- was really getting me down. John Gruber has a nice preview/review of Coda:

Each of Coda's components offers decidedly fewer features than the leading standalone apps dedicated to those tasks. (With the possible exception of the terminal - I mean, come on, it's a terminal.) This isn't a dirty secret, or the unfortunate downside of Coda only being a 1.0. Surely Coda will sprout many new features in the future, but it's never going to pursue any of these individual apps in terms of feature parity.

The appeal of Coda cannot be expressed solely by any comparison of features. The point is not what it does, but it how it feels to use it. The essential aspects of Coda aren't features in its components, but rather the connections between components.

Panic's implicit argument with Coda is that there are limits to the experience of using a collection of separate apps; that they can offer a better experience - at least in certain regards - by writing a meta app comprising separate components than they could even by writing their own entire suite of standalone web apps. Ignore, for the moment, the time and resource limitations of a small company such as Panic, and imagine a Panic text editor app, a Panic CSS editor app, a Panic web browser, a Panic file transfer/file browser app - add them all together and you'd wind up with more features, but you'd miss the entire point.

Panic co-founders Steven Frank and Cabel Sasser both weigh in on the launch. Has anyone given Coda a shot yet? How do you find it? I'm hoping to find some time later today to check it out and will attempt to report back.

By Jason Kottke    Apr 24, 2007    45 comments    Apple   bbedit   cabelsasser   coda   homesite   John Gruber   OS X   panic   stevenfrank   textmate   web development   www

Citing the resource-hungry iPhone as the culprit,

Citing the resource-hungry iPhone as the culprit, Apple announced that they've pushed back the launch date for the new version of OS X (codename: Leopard) from June to October. "iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price -- we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team."

By Jason Kottke    Apr 12, 2007    Apple   iPhone   Leopard   OS X

Apple and EMI jointly announced earlier this

Apple and EMI jointly announced earlier this week that the iTMS would offer EMI's music without DRM and at a bitrate of 256 kps instead of 128 kps. Twice the bitrate = twice as good, yeah? Not so fast...you might not even notice the difference.

By Jason Kottke    Apr 6, 2007    Apple   iTunes   iTunes Store   MP3   music

Apple will begin to sell DRM-free songs

Apple will begin to sell DRM-free songs from EMI via the iTunes Music Store in May. The songs are higher quality but will cost slightly more ($1.29 vs $0.99 for the DRM version). It'll be interesting to see how many people choose to buy the non-DRM stuff at the higher price. My feeling is that typical consumers won't care that much...lower price will win out over slightly higher quality and some nebulous future flexibility. I bet EMI is even half-hoping for failure on this thing: "see, customers *want* DRM..."

By Jason Kottke    Apr 2, 2007    Apple   DRM   iTunes Store   MP3   music

Artist Christian Marclay says that Apple contacted

Artist Christian Marclay says that Apple contacted him about using his short film Telephones for their iPhone commercial. He refused and they went ahead and made the commercial using the same idea with different footage. Says Marclay, "the way they dealt with the whole thing is pretty sleazy". TouchExplode gets credit for spotting the reference. (via df)

Apple Store prototypes

Not sure why I'm surprised, but when Apple came up with the idea for their Apple Stores, they appoached the design of the stores like they would any other product: they built a prototype first:

"One of the best pieces of advice Mickey ever gave us was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn't work," says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product. Apple Store Version 0.0 took shape in a warehouse near the Apple campus. "Ron and I had a store all designed," says Jobs, when they were stopped by an insight: The computer was evolving from a simple productivity tool to a "hub" for video, photography, music, information, and so forth. The sale, then, was less about the machine than what you could do with it. But looking at their store, they winced. The hardware was laid out by product category - in other words, by how the company was organized internally, not by how a customer might actually want to buy things. "We were like, 'Oh, God, we're screwed!'" says Jobs.

But they weren't screwed; they were in a mockup. "So we redesigned it," he says. "And it cost us, I don't know, six, nine months. But it was the right decision by a million miles." When the first store finally opened, in Tysons Corner, Va., only a quarter of it was about product. The rest was arranged around interests: along the right wall, photos, videos, kids; on the left, problems. A third area - the Genius Bar in the back - was Johnson's brainstorm.

Lots of other great stuff in the article as well. Sounds like the Apple Store is an underrated piece of Apple technology.

By Jason Kottke    Mar 8, 2007    Apple   business   design

Steven Johnson, new Apple rumors blogger, reads

Steven Johnson, new Apple rumors blogger, reads the tea leaves and surmises that Apple will soon release multitouch displays to go with Leopard and a new version of iLife.

By Jason Kottke    Mar 1, 2007    Apple   ilife   OS X   Steven Johnson

A commercial for the iPhone aired during

A commercial for the iPhone aired during the Oscars last night. Rick Silva noticed that it was a lot like artist Christian Marclay's 1995 piece Telephones (the relevant clip starts at 3:40) and, to a lesser extent, Matthias Mueller's film, Home Stories. Nice detective work!

Update: Here's a list of all the actors in the iPhone commercial (except one).

Update: The missing "French Woman" is Audrey Tautou from Amelie. (thx to several folks who wrote in)

Steve Jobs' thoughts on music and DRM.

Steve Jobs' thoughts on music and DRM. Sounds like he'd rather that music sold via the iTMS didn't have DRM built in.

By Jason Kottke    Feb 12, 2007    Apple   DRM   iTunes   iTunes Store   music   Steve Jobs

Daylight saving change and computer systems

Not too many people are paying attention, but the Energy Policy Act of 2005 lengthened daylight saving time by four weeks in the US. Instead of beginning the first Sunday of April and running through the last Sunday in October, daylight saving time will now stretch from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November. The Washington Post has an article today about the change and what impact it might have on automated systems:

The change takes effect this year -- on March 11 -- and it has angered airlines, delighted candy makers and sent thousands of technicians scrambling to make sure countless automated systems switch their clocks at the right moment. Unless changed by one method or another, many systems will remain programmed to read the calendar and start daylight saving time on its old date in April, not its new one in March.

The article mentions that older Microsoft products like Windows XP SP1 and Windows NT4 might require manual updates and Daring Fireball has had a few updates about how the switch effects Mac users, including this piece at TidBITS. But what about everything else? Is the version of Movable Type I'm using going to make the adjustment? What about Wordpress? Perl? Ruby? PHP? Java? Linux? I'm sure the current versions of all these programs and languages address the issue, but are there fixes and patches for those running old versions of Perl on their server?

If you've got any information about programs, applications, and languages affected by the change and how to address the problem, leave a comment on this thread. I'll update the post as information comes in.

By Jason Kottke    Feb 1, 2007    26 comments    Apple   Microsoft   time

Music industry: CD prices are being driven

Music industry: CD prices are being driven down by $9.99 albums on iTunes Music Store. "Physical retailers are pressuring the labels downward on price (of course, Wal-Mart is the biggest culprit) because they don't want to be undercut by iTunes 9.99 on all single albums. We're rapidly moving to a 9.99 world on the big sellers (the ones stocked in Target and Wal-Mart and Best Buy)."

By Jason Kottke    Jan 31, 2007    Apple   cds   iTunes   iTunes Store   music

Mac geek proposes to girlfriend via F12

Mac geek proposes to girlfriend via F12 key and a Dashboard widget. See also Apple Store marriage proposal.

By Jason Kottke    Jan 31, 2007    Apple   dashboard   marriage   OS X

OhMiBod is the ultimate iPod accessory: a

OhMiBod is the ultimate iPod accessory: a vibrator that hooks up to the iPod and buzzes in time with the music. "I will never listen to music the same way again." Don't miss the playlists compiled specifically for OhMiBod use. NSFW. (thx, tania)

By Jason Kottke    Jan 31, 2007    Apple   iPod   music   NSFW   sex

David Pennock on the steep rise of

David Pennock on the steep rise of Apple's stock after announcing the iPhone: "Jobs's speech could not possibly have revealed over $8 billion in previously undisclosed information".

Update: On the other hand, analysts think that Steve Jobs' mere presence at the company is worth $20 billion.

Lengthy interview with Steve Jobs from 1995. "I'm

Lengthy interview with Steve Jobs from 1995. "I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance."

Here's how MacRumors did their livecast of

Here's how MacRumors did their livecast of Steve Jobs' MacWorld keynote. At one point, the site had 213,000 simultaneous visitors.

David Pogue's iPhone FAQ, part 2. Part 1 is here.

David Pogue's iPhone FAQ, part 2. Part 1 is here.

Booksquare surmises that turned sideways, the iPhone

Booksquare surmises that turned sideways, the iPhone -- with its bright 160 ppi screen -- will be pretty decent for reading books and such. (via o'reilly)

Video from CBS News of an iPhone demonstration. (via blurbomat)

Video from CBS News of an iPhone demonstration. (via blurbomat)

Regarding some of the points in my

Regarding some of the points in my iPhone round-up from yesterday, David Pogue has some answers to those questions and a whole lot more in his iPhone FAQ. "Is it ambidextrous? -No." What does that even mean? As a lefty, am I out of luck? (via df)

By Jason Kottke    Jan 12, 2007    Apple   iPhone   iPod   mobile phones   telephony

iPhone round-up

By now you've all heard about the iPhone and read 60 billion things about it, so I'll get straight to it. I've been tracking some of the best points from around the web and jotted down some thoughts of my own.

Caveat: Evaluating an interface, software or hardware, is difficult to do unless you have used it. An interface for something like a mobile phone is something you use on the time-scale of weeks and months, not minutes or hours. There are certain issues you can flag as potential problems, challenges, or triumphs after viewing demos, descriptions of functions, and the like, but until you're holding the thing in your hand and living with it day-to-day, you really can't say "this is going to work this way" or "I don't like the way that functions" with anything approaching absolute confidence. With that said:

  • In his keynote announcing it, Steve Jobs said the killer app for the iPhone was voice. The thing is, many people you talk to who are are under 35 use their phones more and more for text and less and less for voice. Same thing for Treo and Blackberry aficionados. Does the text entry via the touchscreen work as well as text entry via a mini keyboard? The tactility of raised buttons provides a lot of feedback to the typer's fingers that a touchscreen does not. (Jason Fried said: "When you touch the [iPhone] it doesn't touch you back.") Can you type on it with your thumbs? What about if your thumbs are large? I know people who can text without looking at the keypad and/or Blackberry keyboard, that's out the window with the touchscreen. Can you dial with one hand?

    The touchscreen text entry is the biggest issue with the iPhone. If it works well, the iPhone has a good shot at success, and if not, it's going to be very frustrating for those that rely on their mobile for text...and every potential customer of the iPhone is going to hear about that shortcoming and shy away.

  • The price is pretty high. So was the price for the first iPod. And the Macintosh. Apple will approach this in a similar way to the iPod...start with a premium product at the high end and work their way down to shuffle-land. It isn't difficult to imagine an iPhone nano that just does voice, SMS, music, and a camera. (Or an iPhone shuffle...you press the call button and it randomly calls someone from the ten contacts the shuffle synched from your computer that morning.)
  • I guess we know why iPod development has seemed a little sluggish lately. When the Zune came out two months ago, it was thought that maybe Apple was falling behind, coasting on the fumes of an aging product line, and not innovating in the portable music player space anymore. I think the iPhone puts this discussion on the back burner for now. And the Zune? The supposed iPod-killer's bullet ricocheted off of the iPhone's smooth buttonless interface and is heading back in the wrong direction. Rest in peace, my gentle brown friend.
  • How long before the other iPods start working like the iPhone? I imagine a widescreen video iPod with touchscreen but without a phone, wifi, camera, etc. will be introduced at some point after the iPhone comes out in June. Without the need for the clickwheel, the shape of the video and nano iPods becomes much more flexible. If they can cram all the memory and electronics into a smaller space, the nano could be half its current height with a touchscreen.
  • What's really kind of sad about the intensely exuberant reaction to the iPhone is that the situation with current mobile phones are so bad in the first place. It's not like we didn't see any of this coming or couldn't imagine the utility of the iPhone's features. Visual voicemail is a good idea, but the reason Nokia or Motorola didn't introduce it years ago is that the carriers (Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc.) don't want to support it despite its obvious utility and ease of implementation. (T-Mobile sends my Nokia phone a text message every time I get a voicemail...what could be simpler than sending the number along with it and shunting those messages to a special voicemail app on the phone to see a list of them? Listening to them out of sequence would be a bit harder, but doable. Blackberry announced they were doing this back in 2005.) Integrated Google Maps, email, and search makes obvious sense too. As for the touchscreen, we've all seen Jeff Han's work on multi-touch interaction, Minority Report, and Wacom's Cintiq, not to mention the mousepads on the MacBooks and the iPod's clickwheel. The Japanese are pretty unimpressed with the whole thing.

    What *is* fantastic about the iPhone is the way that they've put it all together; features are great, but it's all about the implementation. Apple stripped out all the stuff you don't need and made everything you do need really simple and easy. (That's the way it appears anyway...see above caveat.)

  • Regarding the above, a relevant passage from a Time magazine article on how the iPhone came about:

    One reason there's limited innovation in cell phones generally is that the cell carriers have stiff guidelines that the manufacturers have to follow. They demand that all their handsets work the same way. "A lot of times, to be honest, there's some hubris, where they think they know better," Jobs says. "They dictate what's on the phone. That just wouldn't work for us, because we want to innovate. Unless we could do that, it wasn't worth doing." Jobs demanded special treatment from his phone service partner, Cingular, and he got it. He even forced Cingular to re-engineer its infrastructure to handle the iPhone's unique voicemail scheme. "They broke all their typical process rules to make it happen," says Tony Fadell, who heads Apple's iPod division. "They were infected by this product, and they were like, we've gotta do this!"

  • From the video, it looks like it take four clicks (after unlocking the phone) to make a phone call. For everyday use, that seems excessive. I hope there's going to be some sort of speed dial mechanism...with my current phone, pressing "2" and then "send" calls my wife (which I can basically do without looking, BTW).
  • I don't know what the state of the art is in voice recognition these days, but I'm a little surprised that's not an input option here. To call someone, you say their name (my current phone does this). To text someone, you speak the message and they get the text on their end. Speaking "Google Maps, sushi near 10003" would have the expected result.
  • Or maybe drawing graffiti on the screen with your fingers and other gestural input methods? You could have different swipes and taps as a speed dial mechanism...swipe the screen from top left to bottom right and then tap in the lower right hand corner to call mom, that sort of thing. Or Morse code maybe? ;)
  • The OS X included with the phone obviously isn't the version that's running on my Powerbook right now. John Gruber proves that footnotes are often more interesting than the referring text and offers this little tidbit:

    That is to say the core operating system at the core of Mac OS X, the computer OS used in Macs, and "OS X", the embedded OS on the iPhone. More on this soon in a separate fireball, but do not be confused: Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to "Mac OS X" as "OS X" are now over.

    Several people have speculated that the iPhone's version of OS X is actually a preview of what we'll be getting with Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X.
  • Lance warns us of the dreaded version 1.0 hardware from Apple.
  • My favorite thing about the iPhone is the Google Maps integration. I would use that at least 4-5 times a week.
  • Will phone numbers and addresses detected on web pages in Safari be clickable? Click to dial a phone number, click to look up an address with Google Maps, that sort of thing. Update: There's a video online somewhere (anyone?) of a demo that shows a URL in an email and/or text message that's clickable. (thx, Deron)
  • The resolution of the screen on the iPhone is 160 ppi. People who have seen it close up report that the screen is extremely crisp and clear. Apple displays have been higher than 72 ppi for quite awhile, now but not as high as 160. How soon can we expect 160 ppi on the MacBooks?
  • Double the width of the iPhone and you've got the iTablet. 640x480, a bigger virtual keyboard to type on, etc. Just a thought.
  • My friend Chris suggested that it should ship with a dock that hooks directly to a monitor. Attach a keyboard and mouse to the monitor and voila!, you've got the world's smallest portable computer.
  • iPhone trademark dispute between Apple and Cisco: booorrrrr-ring.
  • This is one of the biggest questions in the hardcore technology community: will Apple allow 3rd party development of widgets and apps for the iPhone? Right now it seems like they might not, but there's a lot of speculation in the absence of information going on. It sure would be nice if they did, but Apple doesn't have a good track record here. I bet the Dodgeball and Upcoming folks are looking at the integrated Google Maps and wishing they could integrate their apps in the same way. (And Flickr too!)
  • Games! A no-brainer. Probably lots you can do with the motion sensors and proximity detectors, not to mention the touchscreen. Although the touchscreen does make it difficult to see and control the onscreen action at the same time. How would you play Pac-Man on the iPhone?
  • Available in more than one color? Probably a few months after launch...or it could be right away.
  • Parallels running on the iPhone was a joke, folks. Just pulling your ARM.
  • Don't you think that maybe every company should fire their founders after a few years and then hire them back a few years later? I mean, how crazy is it that Apple birthed the Apple II and the Macintosh -- each a significant achievement that taken alone would have sealed Apple's reputation for innovation in the history of computing -- and then fired the guy that got them there, stumbled badly enough that they were heading for mediocrity and obscurity, and then brought Jobs back, who spurred a string of successes that has nearly overshadowed the company's earlier achievements: OS X, the iMac, the iBooks/PowerBooks/MacBooks, the iPod, iTMS, and now the iPhone. It's insane! Not to mention fun to watch. Perhaps Google should fire Larry and Sergey with the idea that they'll take them back in a few years when they're a little older, a little wiser, a little more seasoned in business, with a new perspective, and possessing an enormous amount of motivation to prove that their dismissal was a bad move.
  • My favorite comment from the Digg thread about the model iPhone I made out of cardboard: "Nothing says you've never kissed a girl like toting around a paper iPhone."
  • From the Time article, a quote from Steve Jobs about how Apple does business: "Everybody hates their phone and that's not a good thing. And there's an opportunity there."
  • Interesting thoughts from Adam Baer in the wake of the iPhone announcement:

    Apple has figured out a way to retain a hold on hearts and minds in a business previously based on bytes. I applaud its designs, I worry about its tactics and what they mean for the future of marketing and group think. A group that wants our devotion but doesn't need the press, doesn't want the press, can't keep the press off its backs, is a group that's more interested in mind control than in improving lives with its products.

  • Some miscellaneous links: Watch the MacWorld keynote with the iPhone announcement. Fortune piece on how Apple kept the iPhone a secret for two years. David Pogue got an hour of hands-on time with the iPhone. The Digg post of the announcement got almost 20,000 diggs, more than 1,400 comments, and nearly crashed my browser when I went to look at it.

And that's enough, I think.

By Jason Kottke    Jan 11, 2007    Apple   design   iPhone   iPod   mobile phones   Steve Jobs   telephony   zune

iPhone running Parallels

The iPhone runs on OS X, right? So theoretically, shouldn't you be able to run IE for Windows XP in Parallels?

iPhone ruiing Parallels, har har

By Jason Kottke    Jan 10, 2007    Apple   iPhone   OS X   parallels   Windows

Comparison of the iPhone with other smart

Comparison of the iPhone with other smart phones...a nice companion piece to the comparison of my cardboard iPhone to various iPods, mobile phones, etc. So far, the market thinks that Apple's got something good on their hands: Apple stock was up $7.10 today while RIMM (makers of Blackberry) dropped $11.16.

By Jason Kottke    Jan 9, 2007    Apple   iPhone   iPod   mobile phones   music   telephony

The Apple iPhone

Apple's new iPhone looks like a thing of beauty. Widescreen touch interface, no buttons, runs OS X, useful widgets, integrated email, Google Maps, Google/Yahoo search, visual voicemail (see who voicemail is from before you call), SMS, Wifi, etc. etc. Oh, and it plays music.

A lot of people are wondering just how big this thing is. Using the technical specs from apple.com, I grabbed some cardboard, scissors, and glue and made a scale model of the iPhone. Here it is:

cardboard iPhone

My hands aren't that big (I can barely palm a basketball on a good day), but it still seems to fit pretty well. How does it stack up against similar devices?

Here's the iPhone vs. my current mobile phone, the Nokia 7610:

iPhone vs. Nokia 7610

iPhone vs. a 5G iPod:

iPhone vs. 5G iPod

Thickness of the cardboard iPhone vs. the 5G iPod:

iPhone vs. 5G Ipod thickness

1G iPod shuffle, 3G iPod, 5G iPod and the iPhone:

1G iPod shuffle, 3G iPod, 5G iPod and the iPhone

iPhone vs. a TiVo remote and a Wii remote:

iPhone vs. TiVo remote

iPhone vs. Wii remote

That's all the gadgets I could find on a couple of hours notice.

I also dug up something I wrote a couple of years ago in the gigantic text file I keep on my Powerbook of ideas for kottke.org posts. 99% of the stuff in that file is completely dunderheaded, but I have to say I hit close to the mark on this one:

true convergence of phone + mp3 player will happen when someone solves this user experience puzzle: physically not enough room for two optimized interfaces (one for calls, one for music) on same small device. possible solution: no buttons, replace with touch screen that covers the whole front with one-touch switching between modes...

Once we're able to get our hands on it and use the interface, the iPhone could turn out to be a disappointment, but they're heading in the right direction at least. More thoughts soon.

(Like this story? Digg it.)

By Jason Kottke    Jan 9, 2007    Apple   iPhone   iPod   mobile phones   music   telephony

Apple introduces their iPhone. Keynote info here.

Apple introduces their iPhone. Keynote info here.

MacWorld 2007

Yesterday a weird smell descended on New York City, a miasma of natural gas odor. Today you might sense a low hum emanating from all over the Earth, localized in households whose inhabitants spend unhealthy portions of their paychecks on consumer electronics. Geeks the world over are vibrating in anticipation of Steve Jobs' keynote at MacWorld starting in, oh, 5 minutes. Since I too am slightly vibrating and won't be able to get anything done for the two-hour duration of his talk, I'll be following along here, sipping from MacRumors' live coverage. (Gizmodo, Engadget, and Twitter have coverage too.)

As an appetizer, here's a few of the less hysterical predictions for what Our Fearless Leader is going to provide us with today:

- MacWorld Expo 2007 Predictions from John Gruber at Daring Fireball.
- Jason Fried's Apple phone predicitons (I especially liked this one).
- Macalope's predicitons.
- Some thoughts from Steven Frank.
- Regarding MacWorld 2007 by Dan Benjamin.

Ok, here we go....

- BREAKING NEWS: Attendees still taking their seats!
- Started. Gizmodo is stumbling badly. Zero updates.
- Sales updates. Apple now sells more music than Amazon.
- The Zune has 2% market share, the iPod has 62%. What brown can do for you, apparently.
- Apple TV in September. Not an actual TV, but a device that hooks to a TV. Here's some specs: 802.11b/g/n, 40GB HD, 720p HD, component rca, usb2, ethernet, HDMI. Retails for $299. Shipping in Feb.

- New product: internet communicator, mobile phone, and widescreen ipod all in one. Steve is very excited about this one. Called the iPhone. No buttons. Multi-touch screen. (WHOA!) Runs OS X. Jobs: "Software on mobile phones is like baby-software." It does all the stuff that OS X does. Calendar, mail, movies, music, podcasts, etc. Turns off the display and sound when you bring it to your ear to talk. It's got an accelerometer (motion sensor) and a proximity sensor. 2 megapixel camera. Screen resolution is 160 ppi. Here's what it looks like (photos from Engadget):

iPhone

iPhone

- Free IMAP email from Yahoo for iPhone customers. (Shot over Google's bow.) And it's "push-IMAP"...works just like a Crackberry.

- The iPhone has a full copy of Safari. Just browse away.

- Apple's stock is up $2.68.

- Jobs just prank-called a Starbucks, attempted to order "4000 lattes to go".

- Google and Apple pushing hard to partner. "Merging without merging."

- Apple doing stuff with Yahoo too.

- Apple's stock now at +$4.51.

- iPhone ships in June in the US. $499 for 4 gig, $599 for 8 gig. Available only with Cingular as the carrier. (Can you unlock?) Can purchase either at Cingular or Apple stores. Have to sign up for a 2-year contract.

- RIM stock is down more than 8 points. RIM makes the Blackberry. Palm, Motorola, and Nokia are all down as well. (thx, eli)

- Apple is changing their name from "Apple Computer, Inc." to "Apple, Inc."

Interesting (and probably fake) photo of Apple's

Interesting (and probably fake) photo of Apple's alleged iPhone, which phone has no buttons...only a screen and a mousepad.

10 Zen Monkeys has an interview with Gina

10 Zen Monkeys has an interview with Gina Smith about iWoz, her book on Steve Wozniak. "Another misconception that bothered him was the idea that he and Steve Jobs had designed the Apple I and the Apple II together. The sole designer of both those computers was Steve Wozniak. The sole designer." (thx, david)

Pesky OS X bug: Powerbook/MacBook/MacBook

Pesky OS X bug: Powerbook/MacBook/MacBook Pro freezes when using Cmd-Tab. Has anyone else ran into this problem...or even better, a solution? It's happened on my Powerbook every 2-3 weeks since I got it about a year ago...and 3 times in the past two days.

By Jason Kottke    Dec 1, 2006    24 comments    Apple   OS X   Powerbook

Kevin Smith's iTunes Celebrity Playlist got rejected

Kevin Smith's iTunes Celebrity Playlist got rejected by Apple because his comments were too long. "This is a great playlist. Too great, actually. We don't have the space for comments that run that long."

By Jason Kottke    Nov 27, 2006    Apple   iTunes   Kevin Smith   lists   music

Why the functionality of MsgFiler isn't automatically

Why the functionality of MsgFiler isn't automatically built into Mail.app, I don't know, but I'm definitely coughing up the $8 on this because my life primarily consists of moving email from one folder to another. (via df)

Update: See also Mail Act-On. (thx, brandon)

By Jason Kottke    Nov 17, 2006    Apple   email   OS X

Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM, and

Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM, and United are integrating the iPod into their airplanes, so that you can plug in to charge and view movies on the seatback video screens. How about some standard 120V AC power outlets instead?

Update: KLM and Air France say that there's no formal deal between them and Apple. (thx, maaike)

By Jason Kottke    Nov 14, 2006    airfrance   Apple   flying   iPod   travel   united

New version of MAME for OS X

New version of MAME for OS X that works natively on the Intel machines. MAME is an arcade emulator that lets you play arcade games on your computer. (via df)

By Jason Kottke    Nov 13, 2006    Apple   games   mame   OS X   video games

Intelligent design of playlists

Merlin Mann recently wrote two posts about managing your music library using iTunes Smart Playlists. His suggestions for making music-only playlists (for those that have a lot of podcasts & audiobooks in their libraries) and the "sure you really like that?" playlist are especially helpful. One of my recent favorite Smart Playlists is helpful for discovering good stuff that I haven't listened to in awhile:

Smart Play 01

The Last Skipped bit is in there because while listening to this playlist, I found myself skipping stuff I didn't want to hear and that rule gets it out there so that it doesn't come up again. An item on my Smart Playlist wishlist is the ability to measure popularity acceleration (basically, something like "gimme the most played over the last week"), but there's no way (that I can find) to ask iTunes how many times a song has been played in the last x days.

Several more Smart Playlist suggestions are available at smartplaylists.com and Andy Budd.

By Jason Kottke    Nov 10, 2006    Apple   iPod   iTunes   Merlin Mann   music

Students, enter Apple's Insomnia Film Festival, where

Students, enter Apple's Insomnia Film Festival, where you'll have 24 hours to make a 3-minute film. (thx, undulattice)

By Jason Kottke    Nov 1, 2006    Apple   movies   video

On the perfection of Tiffany's "little blue

On the perfection of Tiffany's "little blue box" and how other luxury labels have failed to follow its seductive packaging lead. While Apple isn't strictly a luxury brand (they're more of an everyday luxury brand like Ikea or Muji...the luxury of well-designed items but without the price), but they definitely pay a lot of attention to their packaging. (via nickbaum)

By Jason Kottke    Sep 21, 2006    Apple   branding   Ikea   Muji   tiffany

Sam Brown has written a nice remembrance

Sam Brown has written a nice remembrance of his recently deceased Powerbook G4. "Last fall it got to the point where i thought that my powerbook had finally died for good. so i went to the apple store to purchase a new computer. only to get home and find out that the powerbook still worked. it just took it an hour or more to turn on once you hit the power button. so after that i was very careful about turning it off." (via mark)

By Jason Kottke    Sep 20, 2006    Apple   Powerbook   sambrown

John Gruber's latest piece contains a keen

John Gruber's latest piece contains a keen insight on Steve Jobs and his legendary reality distortion field. "Jobs, in my opinion, is a terrible liar and a poor actor. When he's able to convince people of things that aren't true, or that are exaggerations of the truth, it's because he believes what's he saying. The reality distortion field isn't something he projects willfully; it's an extension of his own certainty."

MacRumors has live coverage of the "September 12

MacRumors has live coverage of the "September 12th Apple Media Event" (exciting name!). Announced so far: new smaller iPods (but with more storage), iTunes 7, and games for sale at the iTunes Music Store.

Profile of Walter Werzowa, the man responsible

Profile of Walter Werzowa, the man responsible for the Intel Inside theme. More here about tiny music makers, including the Windows 95 startup sound by Brian Eno, the THX theme, and the Mac startup sound.

By Jason Kottke    Aug 31, 2006    advertising   Apple   audio   Brian Eno   Intel   Microsoft   music

"What would happen if the irrepressibly positive

"What would happen if the irrepressibly positive Apple repair technician I talked to this week about my broken iPod were to get a new job at a suicide hotline".

By Jason Kottke    Aug 28, 2006    Apple   funny   suicide

Quick review of Apple's Mighty Mouse. My

Quick review of Apple's Mighty Mouse. My scroll ball wheel thing had problems after a month as well. And side squeeze = hand/wrist pain waiting to happen.

By Jason Kottke    Aug 25, 2006    Apple

Preview of Leopard, Apple's newest version of

Preview of Leopard, Apple's newest version of OS X, due out in spring 2007. Some of that demo stuff was *really* corny; reminded me of the first demos of OS X back in the early 00s. Thoughts?

Update: Watch Jobs' WWDC keynote.

By Jason Kottke    Aug 7, 2006    51 comments    Apple   Leopard   OS X

MacRumors is updating this page live at

MacRumors is updating this page live at WWDC. (WWDC is an acronym for Apple Is Announcing Cool New Stuff Today).

By Jason Kottke    Aug 7, 2006    Apple   WWDC

Google Trends: Ubuntu vs. OS X. Ubuntu

Google Trends: Ubuntu vs. OS X. Ubuntu pulled ahead in early 2006, but it still has a way to go to catch "Mac" though. The trend predates the Pilgrim/Doctorow switch...I wonder what it'll look like after that.

By Jason Kottke    Aug 4, 2006    Apple   OS X   ubuntu

List of the 10 most beautiful OS X

List of the 10 most beautiful OS X apps. Newsfire is a well-deserved second.

By Jason Kottke    Jul 6, 2006    Apple   best of   lists   NewsFire   OS X

US college students won't download music provided

US college students won't download music provided by their schools even though its free because they can't take it with them after graduation, won't work with Apples, and can't play on iPods. That's not really actually "free" then, is it?

By Jason Kottke    Jul 6, 2006    Apple   business   college   free   iPod   music   stupid companies

More on the Apple Ubuntu switch

Now that the Mac/Ubuntu switch story has made it around the horn and back again (thanks for the non-link, Slashdot!), I want to clarify slightly what I meant by my assertion that Apple should be worried about "two lifelong Mac fans switching away from Macs to PCs running Ubuntu Linux" and that "nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this".

Mark and Cory's switching is not going to send large numbers of Mac users scurrying for Ubuntu, no matter how well respected they are in a small community. Two is not a trend. But it may cause people to briefly consider that 1) the Apple experience isn't all that it could be, and 2) if you want a potentially similar experience, there's a non-Microsoft option available to you. And once that seed is planted, well, you know where that metaphor is going. (I'm also aware of a few other people who are pondering the same shift independently of Mark and Cory.)

In the late 90s/early 00s, Apple got their act in gear with OS X and their iMacs, Powerbooks, G5s, and iBooks. People who cared deeply about their computing experience (you know, computer nerds) took notice of Apple's rededication to producing great products, switched to Macs, and thereafter the Macintosh gradually became a genuinely credible option for programmers, web builders, graphic designers, journalists, students, and grandmothers. Not cause and effect, but the so-called alpha geeks noticed something happening and reacted before everyone else did. So when you have two people who care deeply about their computer experience and who were dedicated Apple users for non-superficial reasons switch entirely away from Apple for equally non-superficial reasons, it may be wise for Apple and the rest of us to take notice that they did so and, more importantly, why.

If I were Apple, I'd be worried

If I were Apple, I'd be worried about this. Two lifelong Mac fans are switching away from Macs to PCs running Ubuntu Linux: first it was Mark Pilgrim and now Cory Doctorow. Nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this.

Update: Tim O'Reilly muses on the Ubuntu switchings.

Review of the current crop of Apple "

Review of the current crop of Apple "I'm a Mac..." commercials. Verdict? The PC is more like-able than the Mac. "[The ads] are conceptually brilliant, beautifully executed, and highly entertaining. But they don't make me want to buy a Mac."

By Jason Kottke    Jun 20, 2006    Apple   commercials   TV

From worst to first

Lest we forget, Steven Frank reminds us that for quite a few years (which period roughly coincides with Steve Jobs' absence from Apple), the Macintosh experience wasn't all it could have been. In the midst of those dark times, I made a post about how frustrated I was with the Macintosh.

I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

At my first web design job -- at a company that used to sell and service Macintosh computers -- they had Macs on all the desks. When I left a year and a half later, everyone had Dells running NT 4.0 instead; the difference in speed, stability, and price was not even close at that time. I didn't use another Mac until I bought an iBook after the second coming of Jobs and the advent of OS X.

BTW, that Mac sucks post has become something of a meme on Slashdot. It's been used to call out Java 1.4.2 fanatics, TI fanatics, SGI lava lamp fanatics, Apple laywers, Mac Mini hard drive performance, cat fanatics, Google fanatics, Amiga fanatics, Pittsburgh professors, Apple I fanatics, trolling losers, and so on.

By Jason Kottke    May 25, 2006    Apple   memes   OS X   Steve Jobs   Windows

Follow-up to Apple Store proposal (she said yes!)

Last week, I reported on a man using the video camera that Apple had set up to record the opening of their new store on 5th Ave in NYC to propose marriage to his girlfriend, one Uschi Lang.

Apple Store Marry 03

I got an email from Uschi and she couldn't be happier to announce that she said yes to the proposal and that her fiancé James has made her "the happiest woman in the world". Congratulations, you two!

Update: I emailed Uschi and James for some more details and just got a response back. James had been meaning to propose for a few months -- he'd had "the talk" with her father over the holidays -- and was looking for a good opportunity. They were both in line for the 6pm opening of the Apple Store on Friday when James noticed the camera and a proposal idea that was "unique, timeless, and surprising" popped into his head.

At 4:30 am, he snuck out of bed without Uschi noticing it and headed back to the Apple Store. Based on the timing of the time-lapse video already posted on Apple's site, James stood with the signs for about 15 minutes (5 minutes per sign) to ensure that they were visible in the video.

A few days later, James set up a "romantic trail of candles" leading up to his G5, showed Uschi the video -- which she had not seen despite some coverage on the web -- and she of course said "yes".

By Jason Kottke    May 25, 2006    Apple   marriage   NYC   video

Matt used MacSaber and his new MacBook

Matt used MacSaber and his new MacBook to recreate the Star Wars kid video. In related news, the Portland, Oregon area reported a huge nerdquake this afternoon.

By Jason Kottke    May 22, 2006    Apple   macbook   macsaber   Matt Haughey   memes   Star Wars   video

Update on the Apple Store marriage proposal:

Update on the Apple Store marriage proposal: she said yes!

Update: Not so fast....that acceptance is probably a fake. I got suckered!

By Jason Kottke    May 21, 2006    Apple   marriage   NYC

If you've got a Powerbook or MacBook

If you've got a Powerbook or MacBook with the built-in motion sensor, you can turn it into a lightsaber with MacSaber. Didn't work too well with my Powerbook, but what a cool idea. (thx, jon)

By Jason Kottke    May 20, 2006    Apple

Marriage proposal at the new 5th Avenue Apple Store

Apple opened a new retail store last night on 5th Avenue here in New York City. Since 5pm yesterday evening, they've had a camera trained on the store to capture the first 24 hours of the festivities and are displaying the results in a time-lapse movie on the store's site. During the 5am segment of the movie, an enterprising Apple acolyte showed up and proposed to his girlfriend by holding up signs in front of the camera:

Apple Store Marry 01

Apple Store Marry 02

Apple Store Marry 03

Does anyone know who this person is? Please email me if you do...I want to know how this turned out!

As it happens, this was the second marriage proposal at the opening...the eighth person in line proposed to his girlfriend right before the store opened and she said yes. Geek love!

Update: Uschi apparently said yes! (I say apparently because this blogspot site has the story and I'm assuming it was copied without attribution from a news site or newspaper but I can't find the actual source.) (thx, robert)

Update: My pal David thinks the acceptance is a hoax...that blogspot site is filled with other fake news stories. I was fished in!!

By Jason Kottke    May 20, 2006    Apple   marriage   NYC   video

Two graphic design teams recently went head-to-head

Two graphic design teams recently went head-to-head on The Apprentice. The winning team had flat-panel monitors, OS X, and Adobe Creative Suite while the losers were still using an old version of Quark on Mac OS 9 displayed on a gigantic CRT monitor. "Graphic Design Lesson A: Get the latest hardware and software, and you will win. Always."

By Jason Kottke    May 16, 2006    Apple   design   theapprentice   TV

Apple announces new MacBooks (iBook successor with

Apple announces new MacBooks (iBook successor with Intel chips) saying, "Meet the family. Now Complete." Does that mean no 12" MacBook Pro?

By Jason Kottke    May 16, 2006    Apple   ibook   macbook

You can use iTunes and a little

You can use iTunes and a little AppleScript to make custom ringtones for Mail.app. I could have it play When Doves Cry everytime I get email from Anil.

By Jason Kottke    May 5, 2006    Anil Dash   Apple   email   iTunes   Mail.app   music   OS X   ringtones

John Gruber has more information on what's

John Gruber has more information on what's going on with Aperture at Apple. Bottom line: by throwing too many engineers at the problem, they made a late project later (see The Mythical Man Month, one of my favorite business books), and after it shipped, all those extra engineers were redispersed within the company and the managers responsible for the debacle got the boot. Good stuff.

Good new series of ads for Apple; "

Good new series of ads for Apple; "Get a Mac". I'm pretty sure the chap playing the PC is John Hodgman (author, Daily Show correspondent, This American Life commentator, former literary agent, monthly readings holder, hobo expert). Can anyone confirm? (via df)

Update: According to MacRumors, the Mac is played by Justin Long.

Update #2: Yep, seems to be Hodgman.

Steve Jobs to Apple shareholders: I have

Steve Jobs to Apple shareholders: I have no interest in running Disney. He also said that he'll be spending less time at Disney than he did at Pixar, which is good news for Apple.

By Jason Kottke    Apr 28, 2006    Apple   business   Disney   Pixar   Steve Jobs

What the huh? Apple has disbanded the

What the huh? Apple has disbanded the development team for Aperture? Gruber, tell me what I think about this.

Short remembrance by Rob Janoff about designing

Short remembrance by Rob Janoff about designing the logo for Apple Computer. The logo was to be black & white to save on printing costs, but "Jobs was resolute, arguing that color was the key to humanizing the company".

By Jason Kottke    Apr 24, 2006    Apple   business   logos   robjanoff   Steve Jobs

The HIPerWall at the University of California,

The HIPerWall at the University of California, Irvine is a giant monitor made from 50 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays. It's built for science, but you just know someone's hooked a GameCube up to it and played Mario Kart. More here.

By Jason Kottke    Apr 23, 2006    Apple

How Coreaudiovisual shot a Karl Lagerfeld fashion

How Coreaudiovisual shot a Karl Lagerfeld fashion show and very quickly turned around a promotional DVD featuring the photos.

John Gruber on Apple's Boot Camp, which

John Gruber on Apple's Boot Camp, which lets you install Windows XP on your Mac (in beta). "You now get to choose between a computer that can only run Windows or a computer that can run both Windows and Mac OS X."

A list of the best Steve Jobs

A list of the best Steve Jobs quotes ever. A contradictory fellow, this Jobs.

By Jason Kottke    Mar 29, 2006    Apple   best of   lists   Steve Jobs

On The Steve Jobs on Magazine Covers

On The Steve Jobs on Magazine Covers page, you'll find, uh, ... See also the curl commands for sucking down all the images automagically.

Olympic snowboarders competed while listening to their

Olympic snowboarders competed while listening to their iPods. The goal? Effortless concentration. "It enables you to focus on what you're doing without actually focusing, if that makes any sense. You're not over-thinking, and that's the best way to perform the harder tricks and maneuvers."

Camino, a web browser for the Mac,

Camino, a web browser for the Mac, finally goes 1.0. It seems like 5 years have passed since I switched away from Camino. I loved it then and I'd switch back in a second if had the features of and was being developed to the extent of Firefox or Safari. (via df)

By Jason Kottke    Feb 14, 2006    Apple   browsers   camino   Firefox   OS X   Safari

Neat counter and waterfall of purchased albums

Neat counter and waterfall of purchased albums as Apple counts down to 1 billion songs purchased on the iTunes Music Store. (thx, scott)

By Jason Kottke    Feb 8, 2006    Apple   business   iTunes   music

The business of selling iPod accessories is

The business of selling iPod accessories is a $1 billion industry. Jesus.

By Jason Kottke    Feb 3, 2006    Apple   business   iPod

Matt calculates the cost of a la

Matt calculates the cost of a la carte television, i.e. ordering TV shows from iTunes. His yearly cable bill is $648 but the cost of watching all hs favorite shows from iTunes would be $800. I bet the networks love this math, especially since it cuts the cable companies out of the loop. But in an a la carte-only world, how would you discover shows in the first place?

By Jason Kottke    Jan 30, 2006    Apple   business   Hollywood   iTunes   TV

Some interesting photomosaics. This one of Steve

Some interesting photomosaics. This one of Steve Jobs is made of OS X icons and this woman is a collage of Macs and other Apple products.

By Jason Kottke    Jan 25, 2006    Apple   design   Mac   OS X   photography   Steve Jobs

It's a done deal...Disney is buying

It's a done deal...Disney is buying Pixar. This bums me out in a lot of different ways. The big winner? Apple Computer.

By Jason Kottke    Jan 24, 2006    acquisition   Apple   business   Disney   Pixar   Steve Jobs

Cool carpenter's level Dashboard widget for Powerbooks

Cool carpenter's level Dashboard widget for Powerbooks and iBooks. I'd never played with my Powerbook's accelerometer before so this had me squealing with delight. (via df)

By Jason Kottke    Jan 24, 2006    Apple   dashboard   OS X   Powerbook

Last 100 posts, part 6

[This is a semi-regular feature following up on stuff I've posted here recently.]

As expected, the Digg vs. Slashdot post got featured on Digg but not on Slashdot. In my analysis, I noted:

The Digg link happened late Saturday night in the US and the Slashdot link occurred midday on Sunday. Traffic to sites like Slashdot and Digg are typically lower during the weekend than during the weekday and also less late at night. So, Digg might be at somewhat of a disadvantage here and this is perhaps not an apples to apples comparison.

Several folks complained about this, some saying that it invalided the whole thing. The Digging of the DvS piece gives us another look at the Digg effect, from right in the middle of a weekday. Digg #2 was dugg 1441 times, got 98 comments, and sent around 10,200 people to kottke.org. By contrast, Digg #1 was dugg 1387 times, garnered 65 comments, and sent ~20,000 people to kottke.org. Digg #1 was actually more successful in driving traffic to kottke.org on a Saturday night than Digg #2 on a Thursday afternoon. Here's a graph that compares the three events:

Digg #1 vs Digg #2

It's hard to see the exact effect of Digg #2 on this graph (I forgot to grab a screenshot of the bandwidth graph when it happened, so all I have is the historical wide view), but it doesn't stand out that much from what happened the previous day (each one of those "bumps" is a day) and didn't have much of an effect beyond the initial spike. However, judging from the traffic that the individual Digg pages drove to kottke.org (Digg #1: 4525 people; Digg #2: 2668 people), it looks like the iPod feature was more interesting to the Digg audience than the Digg v. Slashdot post (which makes sense). So, still not exactly a fair comparison and raises more questions than provides answers.

The James Frey thread ended up with almost 950 comments before I shut it down because of redundancy and a lot of nastiness on the part of a few participants. The kottke.org record for most comments on a post is nearly 1800 on this post about The Matrix Reloaded (continued here)....that conversation, while nerdy, was a lot more civil.

After reading some of those comments and other things written about the controversy (but without having read the book), my take on Frey is that memories are subjective and readers need to cut authors some slack on that when writing memoirs. However, Frey stepped over the line in manufacturing situations that didn't happen and deserves the backlashing he's now receiving. My favorite observation on this whole deal was made by Stephen on a mailing list we're both on. In a 2003 interview for The Observer, Frey said:

I don't give a fuck what Jonathan Safran whatever-his-name or what David Foster Wallace does. I don't give a fuck what any of those people do. I don't hang out with them, I'm not friends with them, I'm not part of the literati...A book [Eggers' AHBWOSG] that I thought was mediocre was being hailed as the best book written by the best writer of my generation. Fuck that. And fuck him and fuck anybody who says that. I don't give a fuck what they think about me.

To Oprah on Larry King last week, Frey had this to say:

I admire you tremendously and thank you very much for your support. And, you know, it's -- I'm still incredibly honored to be associated with you, and I will for the rest of my life. Thank you.

The man knows who buttered his bread, that's for sure. Oh, and The Onion's take is good too. "Accounts of assault with a deadly weapon, narcotics possession, and incitement of riot actually happened during 2002 Grand Theft Auto session."

Several folks picked up on the year in cities meme...check out the trackbacks on my post and on IceRocket for a bunch of other people's lists.

Many didn't realize that my letter to Apple Support was a joke. Sure, I had post-MacWorld gadget lust, but my new Powerbook is great, does everything I want, and I don't really want the new one. Besides, everyone knows you don't buy the first version of new Apple hardware...I'm waiting until they work all the kinks out. Here's a not-so-positive review of the MacBook Pro announcement at Unsanity.

More chatter about the new corporate logos for Kodak, Intel, UPS, and AT&T.

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