Amid all the iPad hype and iPhone fever comes a lone voice from Wall Street, cautioning that even with Apple, the rules of gravity still apply. Revenue and growth by the Cupertino, Calif. maker of consumer electronics will start to slow, an analyst warned investors Tuesday.
Despite projections of $75 billion in revenue in fiscal 2011 and $85 billion for fiscal 2012, “the law of large numbers should cause revenue and earnings per share growth to slow meaningfully during the next two years,” Citigroup analyst Richard Gardner writes.
AT&T began selling the iPhone 4 on a first come, first served basis Tuesday after suspending pre-orders for the eagerly-desired handset. When pre-orders began June 15, the exclusive U.S. iPhone carrier announced they experienced their busiest online sales day.
Although the carrier provided iPhone 4s June 24 to customers who had initially pre-ordered the device, today is the first day AT&T will sell the handset to those who were not able to place a pre-order. Once inventory is depleted, buyers will be given the option to have the iPhone 4 delivered to their home, business or an AT&T store.
If you’re going to steal an iPad, try not to target an Apple employee.
Case in point: two thieves had the bad luck to swipe a pair of iPads from the home of an Apple employee in San Jose.
The 31-year-old employee had already installed Apple’s Find my iPhone app, a free service to MobileMe paying subscribers that launched days just days earlier.
He called the police, then fired up the service from his iPhone. When the police arrived, they tracked the iPad and radioed in the location of the getaway car.
“He’s heading north; he just made a left,” the officers told the dispatcher.
Since they couldn’t pinpoint the exact car, they had to wait, watching the little icon move across a map of the city until it arrived in a cul-de-sac in a residential area where police could make their move.
By the end of the day, officers had returned all of the stolen equipment, identified by serial numbers, to the manager.
Two thieves in their early 30s had ransacked the Apple employees’ house for a total of $20,000 in computer equipment and other electronics including two iPads, an iBook, three laptops and an old PC, according to police reports.
Will some song and dance put smiles on Foxconn Workers?
Despite Apple’s earlier statements that it was “all over” the issue of a recent spate of suicides at a Chinese plant manufacturing iPhones, that interest apparently has limits. The Cupertino, Calif. company is “reluctant” to go along with a plan to pay some Foxconn workers $300 per month to build the iPods and iPhones, according to a Monday report.
Apple was hesitant about the plan, which included building a plant for up to 300,000 new workers outside the main Foxconn site in Shenzen, because it might affect production, the Financial Times reports. However, Apple now seems to be onboard. Although Foxconn makes devices for other electronics companies, Apple is the plant’s largest customer, giving it a large say in decisions.
“I got the idea when i first got my iPhone 3G two years ago… At the time I made a stand out of a paper Starbucks cup for my iPhone. I was reminded of that this morning after scouring the Internet for a practical and affordable stand. My cousin finished a box of Trix and as she was making her way to the recycling bin, I decided to do a little recycling of my own.”
The finished stand should support your iPad in either portrait or landscape, plugged in or running on battery.
He’s reckons the project took about 10 minutes — here’s a complete how-to on his blog — and if you’ve got on how to improve his design, let him know.
Hold the phone — and don’t bother holding it “correctly” — law firm Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP is looking for iPhone 4 owners for a possible class action lawsuit.
They are looking for people who “recently purchased the new iPhone and have experienced poor reception quality, dropped calls and weak signals.”
It’s a tough call for many cult of mac-ers: if you ordered ahead, waited in line and found the iPhone 4 drops reception faster than Britney Spear’s panties, you’re probably not happy about it. They’re banking that enough of the 1,700,000 iPhone 4s sold in just the first three days of the device’s release have enough unhappy owners to warrant a class-action suit.
They are not the only ones demanding Apple give customers some satisfaction: Gizmodo has stomped its sour grapes into a petition demanding the Cupertino company give up some free cases that may help fix the faulty phones.
Do you put faith in Steve Jobs’ claims that the slight snafu will be soon fixed or would you be willing to talk to the lawyers about it?
Perhaps you’ve seen a few XtraNormal text-to-video movies already. It says here you’ll be seeing more in the not-too-distant future.
Perhaps you’ve even seen this one already, but no matter, it’s funny enough to be worth watching again and again and again. Definitely NSFW for strong language, esp toward the end.
Details, details. Seems the EXIF data pushed to photographs taken with iPhone 4’s nifty new 5MP camera report the photographs as having been taken with a 3G, according to a discussion thread over at Flickr Help. One intrepid Flickr Pro user has crafted a script to handle the problem and even Flickr staff are admitting to having to use “a little hack and a script” to get the proper EXIF data displayed for iPhone 4 images.
Looks like there’s another to-do on the iOS4 patch everyone’s looking for any day now to fix that non-existent antenna problem.
If you haven’t already played Giana Sisters, you’re missing out! It’s one of the best platform games on the iPhone & iPod Touch and I highly recommend you try it. If you share my love of Giana Sisters, you too will be pleased to hear that a HD version is making its way to the iPad soon, according to Touch Arcade.
Originally released in 1987, The Great Giana Sisters was first developed for the Amiga, Atari, Commodore 64 and other consoles of the era. It was quickly pulled, however, after running in to legal trouble with Nintendo due to its similarity with Super Mario Bros. The game was reborn in 2005 when it was renamed simply Giana Sisters, and made its way on to mobile phones, and a few years later, the Nintendo DS.
Today, 5 years on, Giana Sisters is one of the best platform games in the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and Touch Arcade have reported today that its developers, Bad Monkey, have sent them a bunch of screenshots for their upcoming HD version of the game. You can check them out and find out more info here, or read Touch Arcade’s review of the current game here.
If you can’t wait until the iPad release on 9th July, you can find the iPhone & iPod Touch version in the App Store here.
In an intriguing move, Amazon has updated its Kindle software application for the iPhone and iPad with features not available on the company’s e-reader hardware. Users of Apple’s iOS-based devices can now read Kindle e-books with audio and video.
Examples of Kindle editions already available with audio and video feature a cake-making video and audio clips of bird songs. Other expanded editions available on Amazon include “Les Miserables”, “Rick Steves’ London” and “Knitting for Dummies.”
The iPhone 4 was selling like the proverbial hotcakes during the first days the iconic handset was available to consumers, one analyst told investors Monday. Indeed, on June 24, when the new phone went on sale, 60 percent of Apple Stores and all participating retailers had no stock left by the end of the day.
“We believe initial weekend volumes were 1 million plus,” Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore wrote Monday. “But shipments could have been dramatically higher if there was more supply,” he added. Apple announced Monday it sold more than 1.7 million iPhone 3 units between Thursday and the end of Saturday, June 26.
As they are wont to do, the guys over at iSuppli have ripped apart their pretty new iPhone 4s, done some math and figured out how much it cost to make.
What’s the damage to Apple? The 16GB iPhone 4 costs $187.51 to put together in hardware costs alone, with the fancy new Retina Display costing $28.50 per unit, the A4 CPU costing $10.75 and the new gyroscope only coming in at around $2.60./
Needless to say, there’s a lot more money spent on every iPhone 4, including marketing, design and manufacturing, so this isn’t a complete view of how much profit Apple is looking at per device, but I still always find this stuff fascinating, like taking my dental records down to a pawn shop and seeing how much I could get for my fillings.
Steve Jobs just can’t seem to make up his mind. Just a few days after he tersely told a customer that people experiencing rampant reception issues with their iPhone 4 that people were “holding it wrong,” Steve Jobs has written to another Apple customer, saying “There is no reception issue [with the iPhone 4]. Stay tuned.”
Isn’t that a bit of a contradiction? Even if a forthcoming iOS 4.0.1 update does fix the reception issues, that still implies there wasan issue. Plus, why do we need to hold it in a specific way if there’s no issue whatsoever?
More interestingly, what are we “staying tuned” for if there’s no issue with the iPhone 4’s reception at all? A placebo? If you want one of those to work, Steve, you’re not supposed to tell the patient.
Cult of Mac reader Angela says all of this dedicated clothing design for the iPad is superfluous: “If you think iPad’s an overpriced iPhone/iPod touch that won’t fit in your pocket, you’re wearing the wrong pants.”
Here she is, wearing what she describes as a “fairly normal pair of pants (well, they look big on me, but they’d look normal on a guy) that fit an iPad into a side pocket.”
What do you think — time to put the cargo back into those cargo pants or not?
More than 1.7 million iPhone 4s were sold from Thursday, June 24 through Saturday, June 26, Apple announced Monday. CEO Steve Jobs called the new iPhone “the most successful product launch in Apple’s history.”
Jobs also apologized for the long lines some people encountered while waiting to purchase the device. “We apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply,” he said by statement.
Apple’s taken to list making with their latest addition to the App Store, Awesome iOS 4 Apps. It seems a strange and disparate bunch of apps to highlight, and while many of these are awesome apps indeed, the vast majority of these apps don’t take particular advantage of iOS 4 except through Apple’s new built-in save stating option. Still, it’s always interesting to see which apps in particular Apple has their eyes on.
In order to demonstrate “Two of mankind’s greatest inventions, together at last, “iPad owner Jesse Rosten create this fantastic little video which is as much a paean to Apple’s tablet as it is to that wonderful element, Velcro. In fact, the video’s so good that Apple themselves have chosen to highlight it on the official iPad webpage… although you’d think they’d be less cavalier about people strapping their expensive tablet computers onto objects like a wall or motorcycle.
The mouse has once again darted around the cat. Just a few days after the official release of the iPhone 4, userland has once again managed to find its way around Apple’s updated security measures to jailbreak the handset and get root access to the device.
Don’t expect to do this yourself for now: because the exploit uses remnants of Apple’s own code, it can’t be released to the public just yet, and it’s possible the forthcoming iOS 4.0.1 update might put a kibosh on this particular jailbreaking strategy.
But if you’ve got dreams of high-res Cydia apps dancing in your head, be patient and keep waiting for Dev Team Christmas.
Jonathan Mann once wrote a tune about Paul Krugman that went wildly viral and landed him on the Rachel Maddow Show. Now he’s written one about Steve Jobs and it remains to be seen where this one might take him, but it’s at least a pretty good song by our reckoning: “he’s the best at what he does though I hardly can define/what it is and what he has and that kinda blows my mind.”
Mann is a busy, creative guy who’s led a very interesting and adventurous life so far, which you can hear more about on his YouTube site. He has been writing a song and making a video a day since January 1, 2009 and while he admits he wants to be a star, he also cops to simply “trying to make my way through life.”
In addition to Steve Jobs’ Head (song #541), he recently posted song number #543, Let’s Get Along, which he shot and edited on his new iPhone 4. A dedicated Apple fan, Mann also uses a Mac Pro and a Macbook Pro to record his material.
How come no one ever uses Windows gear to write songs about Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates?
Well, that didn’t take long. Within days of the iPhone 4’s public launch savvy entrepreneurs are already jumping on the device’s video chat capability to expand their offerings — and opportunities — in the sexual services industry.
With promises of a free iPhone 4 and a “very competitive salary” to women who want to participate, an online interactive pornography firm in New York has an ad up on Craigslist with a job description including “talk to potential clients and chat with them and perform various acts as desired by clients.”
The firm is requesting information and pictures – and hopes to launch before 9/1/2010.
I wasn’t able to pre-order an iPhone 4 for delivery and ended up standing in the reserve line for one here in Houston instead. However, I was able to pre-order some accessories: a black iPhone 4 Bumper case and a pack of white Universal Dock Adapters. I installed the Bumper and that is when I started to have problems with some cable accessories. I also have an example of not having black Universal Dock Adapters when Apple is shipping black iPhones and not white ones. I thought come on Apple how about some black Universal Dock Adapters — is that to much to ask?!?!?
Sonos product manager Joni Hoadley shows off the company's upcoming iPad app.
I just got a sneak peek at Sonos’ upcoming iPad app — and it looks awesome.
Sonos sells wireless music players that make it easy to get multi-room audio around your house. Plug in a player in each room and stream music to each one (or the same music to all of them). Sonos’ products have won kudos for painless setup, ease of use, relative low-cost (you can spend a lot more) and innovation — this is the home stereo of the future.
Sonos is about to take it to the next level with a fantastic iPad app that makes digital music very easy — especially listening to online music services. Using the iPad as a big Wi-Fi remote control, you can play music from your iTunes library, thousands of online radio stations, satellite radio subscriptions, or online music services like Pandora, Rhapsody and Last.fm (and soon the fantastic Mog.com).
I was gutted to find this morning that my brand new iPhone 4 didn’t work with my beloved TomTom Car Kit — the best automotive cradle/charger for the iPhone, bar none.
The iPhone 4 fits in the cradle OK, but it doesn’t charge. Discovering this filled me with disappointment. I love the TomTom Car Kit (which costs $100 but is well worth it). It holds the iPhone just where I want it for navigation and music. It charges the iPhone, and boosts the GPS signal when using TomTom’s excellent navigation app. And it doesn’t move, even if I clumsily bash on the iPhone’s screen with my big sausage fingers.
So I’m delighted there’s a simple and inexpensive fix for the charging issue — a small strip of velcro.
As Engadget tipster Ben Peacock Martin Alaniz discovered, you cut a small strip of velcro (the soft side) and stick it to the back of the Car Kit cradle, just behind the dock connector.
There is no need to attach anything to the iPhone itself. The velcro acts as a cushion holds the moving part of the cradle flat, pushing the Car Kit’s electrical contacts against the iPhone’s. Simple and cheap.
What it is:Auto Verbal Pro (iTunes link) is handy, if not quite full-featured augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) software that gives non-verbal people an inexpensive tool to communicate using an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.
Why it’s cool: Other high-end AAC solutions such as Proloquo2go (iTunes link) cost well upwards of $100 while Auto Verbal Pro hit the iTunes store a couple of weeks ago at 99¢. The introductory price won’t last long but even when NoTie Software kicks its offering up to $30 it will still be a bargain for the help it can bring to people with autism or other conditions that make it difficult for them to communicate verbally.
With over 100 pre-programmed icons in its intuitive interface, Auto Verbal Pro makes it easy for a non-verbal person to say basic phrases such as “I am tired,” or “I am OK,” and things such as numbers, days of the week, shapes, colors, food items, animals and so on. There are 10 icons which can be custom programmed to utter more complex phrases, such as “This software is the bomb, isn’t it?” and a text entry field in which any phrase can be typed and played through the device speakers. Users can choose between large and small buttons, which can be very useful to the visually impaired or fat-fingered, and between male or female sounding computerized voices in low-fi or hi-fi quality.
While great strides have been made in recent years developing software to speak for us, Auto Verbal Pro showcases some of the limitations that persist. The built-in low-fi voicings are certainly intelligible but lack any kind of nuance or expressiveness. Hi-fi voicings are even more intelligible and slightly more expressive, but they require WiFi Internet access in order to work, since the files live on NoTie’s servers. When a custom or typed phrase is called on to use a hi-fi voice, the software connects to NoTie and plays back the sounds using QuickTime, which results in clunky, irritating delays. Where no Internet access is available, the program defaults to the low-fi voicing.
All and all, this is useful and potentially even quite amusing software; with good reason it quickly jumped into the Top 5 Paid Medical apps on the iTunes App Store.
Where to get it:Auto Verbal Pro (currently English-only, but with French, Spanish, and German versions planned) is available on the App Store for a limited time at 99¢, after which its price will jump to $30. It’s well worth investing a dollar now to see if it’s something that could be useful to you or someone you care about.
