At 83, Apple’s iPhone is a game changer when it comes to customer satisfaction. No other cell phone company has ever broken into the 80s.

But the thing is, Digitimes isn’t just wrong some of the time. When it comes to the big Apple stories, it’s wrong most of the time. Sometimes wildly so. It’s reported that its sources had said that Apple was going to release MacBooks with AMD processors, iMacs with touch screens, iPhones with built-in projectors and iPads with OLED displays. Those products, and others mentioned in Digitimes articles, never showed up.

After several years and 13 million users, Apple summarily removed iKamasutra from the App Store on February 20, 2012, ostensibly for adding brown hair coloring to our drawings. Then, on March 14, it was just as arbitrarily pulled from the Google Play Store. I have been trying to understand Apple's and Google's sudden concerns and address them, but with limited feedback and no real dialog from them, despite all our efforts, our options have dwindled.
In fairness to the millions of users who purchased the app and have been emailing us asking why they can't restore their purchases, why other apps have copied our designs and icons, and what the future is for iKamasutra, I'm writing this blog post. I hope to address all those concerns, and give a little insight into the daunting task independent developers face in all the app stores for mobile devices.
iKamasutra is (or was) available for virtually every mobile device on each app store, so we have a unique perspective. I understand that ultimately Apple and Google have high standards for the apps in their respective stores, and frankly so do we, so it is unfortunate to see them make decisions that undermine those very guidelines and hurt their users.

Together with CPU’s often being “fast enough” I would expect that the macbook air kind of formfactor becomes way more of a norm than it used to be. Apple was ahead of the curve, and I absolutely have higher expectations of the hardware I use than the average user probably does, but at the same time I’m convinced that the notebook market will finally get where I think it should be. Sure, some people will still want to use the big clunkers, but making a good thin-and-light machine is simply not going to be the technical expensive challenge it used to be.

In other words, we’ll take the whole Macbook Air formfactor for granted in a few years. It’s been done, it used to be pretty revolutionary, it’s going to be pretty standard.

It *did* take a lot longer than I thought it would take, admittedly. I’ve loved the thin-and-lights for much longer than the Macbook Air has existed. It’s not like Apple made up the concept – they just executed well on it.

Apps are the new Starbucks. Apps are our new guilty pleasure.

A daily "pick me up" that gives a longer and more fulfilling dopamine rush than a frappuccino -- and without the calories (y'all heard on "60 Minutes" that sugar is now toxic, right?).

If you're going to burn $3 to $5 a day consuming something, an app is the perfect little fix.    

Apple's neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) has trained us to solve our problems with apps.

You have problems? We have solutions.

"There's an App for that" is a cult manifesto on par with "live your best life!"

Bottom line, we've been programmed that "installing" the latest app will make our lives better. The progress status bar at the bottom of an app icon is an emptying syringe.

We're all app junkies, and for good reason: they're a delightful rush and cheap.

There's a reason why crack and apps are the same price.

The Mac App Store has been a huge boon to Mac software developers, but has an enormous flaw: it needs to allow developers to charge existing customers a discounted price for major upgrades.

Right now developers selling through the Mac App Store face a lose/lose choice: either provide all major upgrades to existing customers for free (thus losing a quarter of our revenue), or create a “new” product for each major version (creating customer confusion) and charge existing customers full price again (creating customer anger).

A few days ago I updated this site’s Web clip icon to be 300×300 pixels.

It looks great in Reeder, and it looks good as a Home screen icon on new and old iPads and on the iPhone 4/4S.

There are two (yea, three) ways to upload your Web clip icon and make it discoverable:

This topic contains answers to many common, general questions about Time Machine.
It does not, however, cover diagnosis and correction of specific problems or errors.  See Time Machine - Troubleshooting  for such help.
For questions and problems specific to Time Capsules, see Using Time Machine with a Time Capsule.  General problems with Time Capsules are covered in Apple’s  Time Capsule  forum.

However, Apple’s definition of a “Retina Display” is actually for 20/20 Vision (defined as 1 arc-minute visual acuity). 20/20 Vision is just the legal definition of “Normal Vision,” which is at the lower end of true normal vision. There are in fact lots of people with much better than 20/20 Vision, and for almost everyone visual acuity is actually limited by blurring due to imperfections of the lens in the eye. The best human vision is about 20/10 Vision, twice as good as 20/20 Vision, and that is what corresponds to the true acuity of the Retina. So to be an actual “True Retina Display” a screen needs at least 573 ppi at 12 inches viewing distance or 458 ppi at 15 inches. The 326 ppi iPhone 4 is a 20/20 Vision display if it is viewed from 10.5 inches or more. Unfortunately, a “20/20 Vision Display” doesn’t sound anywhere near as enticing as a “Retina Display” so marketing and science don’t see eye-to-eye on this…

One of the more interesting questions raised by the new iPad and its retina display is whether or not web sites should deliver higher resolution images when there is no way to know the connection speed. AppleInsider found that Apple.com is being prepped to deliver high-res images and documented how you can test it in Safari on your desktop.

As you can imagine given my research on responsive images, I was keenly interested to see what approach Apple took.

What they’ve chose to do is load the regular images for the site and then if the device requesting the page is a new iPad with the retina display, they use javascript to replace the image with a high-res version of it.

The heavy lifting for the image replacement is being done by image_replacer.js. Jim Newberry prettified the code and placed it in a gist for easier reading.

Sir Jonathan Ive, Jony to his friends, is arguably one of the world’s most influential Londoners. The 45-year-old was born in Chingford — and went to the same school as David Beckham. He met his wife, Heather Pegg, while in secondary school. They married in 1987, have twin sons and now live in San Francisco.

As Apple’s senior vice-president of industrial design, he is the driving force behind the firm’s products, from the Mac computer to the iPod, iPhone and, most recently, the iPad. He spoke exclusively to the Evening Standard from the firm’s headquarters.

The reason that the 1080p versions of the iTunes Store videos can be a good deal better without doubling the file size—or worse—can be found in the tech specs of the new AppleTV and the new iPad. The AppleTV now supports H.264 compression for 1920x1080 resolution video at 30 frames per second using High or Main Profile up to level 4.0, the iPad and the iPhone 4S the same up to level 4.1. The profile indicates what kind of decompression algorithms the H.264 decoder has on board—the "High" profile obviously has some tricks up its sleeve that the "Main" or "Baseline" profiles known to previous devices don't support. The level value indicates how many blocks or bits per second a device can handle.

The A4 SoC that Apple used in the iPhone 4 and the second generation AppleTV as well as the A5 in the iPad 2 can handle Main Profile level 3.1, which is good enough for 1280x720 video at 30 frames per second. The original AppleTV can only handle 720p at 24 frames, and earlier devices are limited to SD video. This means that the increased 1080p resolution breaks compatibility with everything older than the iPhone 4S anyway, so Apple is free to use the high profile, resulting in better compression for a given quality level. The files are larger, but not that much larger. Whether the increased resolution comes with extra visual fidelity, however—and thus worth the extra download time—will vary from movie to movie and show to show.

While the focus of Wednesday's Apple event was primarily on "the new iPad" and the perpetual hobby that is the Apple TV, we would be remiss to forget iOS 5.1. Past point releases of the OS included notable improvements like Game Center in iOS 4.1, and the Nitro JavaScript engine, better Home Sharing, and Personal Hotspots in iOS 4.3. While Apple updated apps, and released the stunning iPhoto for iOS, how is iOS 5.1 itself likely to be compared to past releases? To some, it will be a little disappointing. 

With the help of Ars's Macintosh Achaia to refine the points for this article, here are ten annoyances that will remain with us as part of iOS—at least until the next iOS release rolls around.

Apple’s product launches may be the most obsessively-covered media events on the planet — presidential press conferences possibly excepted — but that doesn’t mean that people understand them.

Actually, as I mulled over today’s new iPad event and its implications, I’m struck by how little of the conventional wisdom about these rollouts feels like wisdom. Much of it is crude, out of date or just plain wrong. Including some of my own assumptions.

(PHOTOS: Apple Announces New iPad)

So here are seven things that a lot of people seem to believe they know about Apple’s events. The more attention you pay, the less they ring true. I think of them as, well, mythperceptions.

Welcome! This page will automatically check for the keynote stream on Apple's website. The links to the stream will be displayed below the moment they're up. Please do not reload the page, as it will do this for you automatically to provide you with a perfect spoiler-free experience.

As an active member of "The Internet" and vocal Objective-C coder, I get a lot of questions surrounding the language. They're often framed around thinking about learning the language or trying to write an app, but they also usually involve a phrase like "Objective-C looks really hard" or "what are all those minus signs about?" Both of these are pretty good questions, and I'd like to address why someone might be more hesitant to jump into iOS or OS X development compared to, say, Ruby or Java.

In an age when Apple has become the top music retailer without selling a single physical disc, audio engineers are increasingly creating specially mastered versions of songs and albums designed to counteract the audio degradation caused by compression. Though audiophiles typically scoff at paying for compressed audio, preferring vinyl or high-end digital formats such as DVD-A, mastering engineers are doing their best to create digital masters that can pass through Apple's iTunes algorithms with minimal sonic corruption.

To highlight work done to improve the sound of compressed music files, Apple recently launched a "Mastered for iTunes" section on the iTunes Store. It now also provides a set of recommendations for engineers to follow when preparing master files for submission to the iTunes Store. To qualify for the "Mastered for iTunes" label, Apple says that files should be submitted in the highest resolution format possible, and remastered content should sound significantly better than the original.

How does this work? Ars spoke with Masterdisk Chief Engineer Andy VanDette, who recently completed a project remastering the bulk of Rush's back catalogue. As part of the process, VanDette created special versions of each song specifically for uploading to the iTunes Store. He described the often lengthy, trial-and-error process of trying to make iTunes tracks sound as close as possible to polished CD remasters.

Take, for example, the case of iOS developer Anton Sinelnikov. By looking at the screenshot taken a few weeks ago, you are faced with an incredible feat. Sinelnikov has managed to create not just one popular iOS app, but several! Hits like Plants vs. Zombies, Temple Run, Tiny Wings and Angry Birds, all coming from one developer!

Oh. Wait a second. My mistake, it turns out that instead of coming up with original ideas, Sinelnikov takes a different strategy. He copies other applications, takes a similar name, and then forces the application into the Top 100 list, where users mistake it for the original app. After a day or so, Apple notices that these apps aren’t actually providing they promise and kick the apps out, but not before users spend tens of thousands of dollars on the apps – money that the developers get to keep, as users rarely ask for a refund.

Of course, this wouldn’t be such a big deal if it was one developer, but the problem is that close to a dozen scam apps have made their way into the Top lists on the iOS App Store, netting a veritable fortune for the scammers. Some developers have been pointing this out for a while, asking Apple to fix the situation and be proactive. Apple has yet to respond with the needed force.

We honestly thought we had satisfied all of Apple’s complaints about Air Dictate. But what we failed to anticipate is that they might just totally make up an excuse to reject Air Dictate 2.0, for the sheer sport of it.

Steve Jobs worked very hard to create great drama and excitement in his product launch keynote presentations.  From the classic “…and one more thing” to the great use of the Keynote software to maximum effect, Steve commanded the stage and his audience.  There simply is no executive in technology or just about any business category that has come close to his use of excitement, humor, and drama.  None of what Steve did on stage was unplanned, in fact everything was planned to just about the minute.

On January 9, 2007 at 9:00 a.m. Steve Jobs took the stage at the 2007 Macworld Conference & Expo and just about 35 minutes into his presentation he said, “This is a day I have been looking forward to for two and a half years…” And at just about 9:42 a.m. Steve announced the iPhone.  Thus frozen in time is the near exact time the iPhone was officially announced. 

I toss all my Mac app ideas that require more than the default sandboxing rules — no matter how cool the idea is.

The sandbox has a chilling effect on at least one developer. I’d be surprised if it were just me.

Why other manufacturers were not able to create anything like Apple's MacBook Air: thin aluminum body and an attractive price?



The answer is obvious but few people stop for a second to wonder about this. After all, it is not like Apple has control over all aluminum in the world. Apple were just the first to see the potential of such bodies and began to increase their orders. In just a few years Apple became the main partner of Catcher Technology, a company that possess the necessary expertise to manufacture such bodies. Apple's production orders amount to 60% of the company's production capacity. It takes three hours to create just a single body of this quality and, naturally, it is more expensive than a plastic body. On the video below Apple's head designer Jonathan Ive explains how a MacBook Air chassis is created:


Thanks to the production scale these aluminum chassis cost Apple just as much as carbon fiber chassis cost to Sony and just a bit more expensive than plastic chassis for laptops of that price range.


By controlling the resource, aluminum unibody production in this case, Apple left very little space for maneuver for their rivals and ensured low production costs. Other unibody manufacturers can now dictate prices to Apple's rivals who have to pay. But the production capacities are low so they can only use such chassis in flagship products while Apple is using them in mass products. Apple rivals go to great lengths trying to change this situation: Intel created a fashion for ultrabooks and aluminum bodies seem only natural for them but manufacturers are not able to get enough production capacity to satisfy the demand for aluminum bodies. Instead they use the old trick: they make 'aluminum sandwiches' – aluminum sheets cover a plastic chassis. Naturally, this solution is not very elegant though it costs slightly cheaper (applicable to laptops $1000+).

This solution is too expensive to be used in laptops in the below $1000 bracket so manufacturers are forced to use all sorts of plastic there. This is a result of insufficient supply of needed components.

Drafting this one for 2014, because we like to write our blog posts a couple years early at Impending. Let’s hope I’ll never have to dig it up again.

As we’ve learned from Apple’s latest earnings call, App Store revenue growth for developers has begun to stall and slip behind device sales, resulting in many beloved indie studios closing shop or selling to larger companies, folding to the pressure and tighter profit margins.

Considering the past two years with hundreds of scams, fraud apps, hoaxes, and clones that have hit the top of the charts, it’s no surprise the atmosphere in 2014 among both App Store customers and app developers can only be described as cynical.

Most significantly, what we once took for granted before 2012, the “impulse buy”, has largely evaporated. Consumer trust in apps is now completely broken, and even customer reviews can’t be trusted due to more and more elaborately sleazy services for hire to game the system. In this fallout, we have come to understand how important the impulse buy was in a market environment dominated by rock bottom pricing. Developers have raised app pricing to compensate, kicking into effect a feedback loop resulting in sustaining revenue (for now) but plummeting sales, reach and cultural relevance for popular apps.

Customers have also in turn begun to rely more and more heavily on existing giant brands, and are avoiding less trustworthy upstarts, independent developers and studios, and apps that stray from the familiar. As a result innovation in the App Store is in a slow death spiral.

I remember early in 2012, which we can now recognize as the peak of an App Store bubble, when what felt like a utopia took a distinct left turn for the worse with the first wave of scams. Now that we’re stuck in this hole, the road to recovery, if it exists at all, will be painful and take years of education and pro-active improvements from Apple.

iOS knows when I’ve read an iMessage, and when I’ve unlocked the screen. OS X knows if I’ve got Messages running, and if I’ve moved the mouse cursor recently (and thus likely haven’t walked away from my laptop). When it’s clear that I’m at one terminal, the others shouldn’t be buzzing away. They should, of course, continue syncing the messages — but if I’ve just responded to something on OS X, my iPhone and iPad ought to stop screaming. Once it becomes even the slightest bit unclear where I am (if, say, my portables don’t send any read receipts back to the server and I’ve suddenly stopped responding on OS X), sure — let’em sing.

Too hacky? Fine. Give me a button that lets me say “I’m on this device. Silence iMessage everywhere else” that automatically disables itself once I’ve sent an iMessage from another device.

The larger point is that Apple lived or died based on Jobs' judgement and intuition. And since his judgement and intuition were among the best in the history of business, Apple thrived and became one of the greatest companies in the history of business.

That point seems to be lost on John Siracusa. On this week's Hypercritical podcast, in the midst of a length rant against Isaacson and the book generally¹, Siracusa argued that it proves in many cases that Jobs was the "enemy of success." Based on a few examples, Siracusa goes on to assert that the book is "stabbing in the heart the notion that Steve Jobs knows exactly what's going on and is responsible for Apple's success."

In fact, each of Siracusa's examples prove exactly the opposite -- Jobs had near total control, he insisted on having his concerns addressed and he almost always made Apple's products and strategies stronger as a result. Without Jobs, there would have been no success. He was as responsible as could be.

“This is not about the technology,” Mark Edwards, superintendent of Mooresville Graded School District, would tell the visitors later over lunch. “It’s not about the box. It’s about changing the culture of instruction — preparing students for their future, not our past.”

As debate continues over whether schools invest wisely in technology — and whether it measurably improves student achievement — Mooresville, a modest community about 20 miles north of Charlotte best known as home to several Nascar teams and drivers, has quietly emerged as the de facto national model of the digital school.

Mr. Edwards spoke on a White House panel in September, and federal Department of Education officials often cite Mooresville as a symbolic success. Overwhelmed by requests to view the programs in action, the district now herds visitors into groups of 60 for monthly demonstrations; the waiting list stretches to April. What they are looking for is an explanation for the steady gains Mooresville has made since issuing laptops three years ago to the 4,400 4th through 12th graders in five schools (three K-3 schools are not part of the program).

The district’s graduation rate was 91 percent in 2011, up from 80 percent in 2008. On state tests in reading, math and science, an average of 88 percent of students across grades and subjects met proficiency standards, compared with 73 percent three years ago. Attendance is up, dropouts are down. Mooresville ranks 100th out of 115 districts in North Carolina in terms of dollars spent per student — $7,415.89 a year — but it is now third in test scores and second in graduation rates.

Apple's new AirPort Utility 6.0 for OS X was released yesterday, bringing over the slick UI from its pre-existing iOS version -- but as my colleague Chris reported, it also removes access to a number of features in the process. At the same time, Apple are still hosting downloads for the older version of the tool which still has the full feature set. Predictably, there's been some indignant fallout from this admittedly curious decision, but what sorts of features are missing, and should you care? I loaded up the old and new version of the tools side-by-side to see what I could find out.

Speaking of Radar, we encountered a fairly nasty problem after launching xScope. Many of our customers are designers and developers who love SSDs. It’s common to use a symlink in your Home folder to put big datasets like Pictures, Music and Movies on a separate hard drive. When you do this, folder access in the application sandbox container breaks. A small number of users who use symlinks are also getting crashes after launching the app that was downloaded from the Mac App Store:

xpchelper reply message validation: sandbox creation failed: 1002
Container object initialization failed: The file couldn’t be opened.

Humiliated by a bunch of bloggers, amateur analysts and assorted day traders

With revenues that grew 73% and earnings that more than doubled, Apple (AAPL) proved Tuesday that the fourth quarter results that so disappointed Wall Street last fall were a fluke. The company that Steve Jobs built is still that rare beast in American business: A $400 billion giant that acts -- and grows -- like a start-up.
Tuesday's results also revealed another fluke: The shellacking that our team of independent analysts suffered in October at the hands of Wall Street analysts with some of the worst track records in the business. (See Apple earnings smackdown: The bloggers got clobbered.)
This time, as evidenced by the preponderance of Wall Street blue on the bottom of the chart at right and the dominance of Indie green at the top, the order we had documented in more than half a dozen consecutive quarters was restored.

"Jag har läst alldeles mycket om iPad på nätet den senaste tiden, både sågningar och hyllningar. Här kommer mina tankar sammanfattade:"

Mina första kommentarer om iPad efter lanseringen. Ganska träffsäkra sådana.

By forcing us to adopt the two-column approach imposed by the skeuomorphic design, Apple is effectively deprecating groups as a feature. They are still there, but using them has just become much more painful. You cannot see groups or select one at all while you are viewing the contact details of a specific card. You first have to click on the red bookmark button at the top:

Apple may eventually move to USB 3.0, but sync and external displays will be done over wireless technologies. Thunderbolt remains a very high performance spec that we'll see limited to notebooks and desktops for the foreseeable future.

Apple - please give some serious attention to the mess you’re creating with your Calendar APIs and apps, please. I could complain about the mess you caused by duplicating calendars when people upgraded to Lion to be able to support Reminders outside of event calendars, or I could complain about how you’ve yet to provide a way to use your CalendarStore framework to sync directly to iCloud and still require iCal to do this, but I won’t. 
I will, however, complain loudly about the mess and inconsistency shown with your current implementation of Reminders. (Specifically, the concept of “due times”, which you fail to properly implement in 2/3 of your own calendar apps). It is impossible to create a Reminder due on a certain time with Lion’s iCal, or even iCloud.com!

Before Lion it was possible to run an external display off a laptop and have the internal display disabled, even if you opened the lid. This can be useful for a myriad of reason including energy saving and better wifi reception. With Lion the internal display will always turn on when the lid is opened, even if there is already an external display connected.

A solution was posted on the Apple support forums by user chenga.8.

To go back to pre-Lion behaviour enter the following command in Terminal:

sudo nvram boot-args="iog=0x0"

To undo this change type type the following command or zap the PRAM (press Cmd+Opt+p+r at power up):

sudo nvram -d boot-args

A database of hidden settings for Mac OS X

Those who have had a phone lost or stolen are familiar with the horrors that follow: the thief (or the person he sold your phone to) starts to send texts as you to your family and friends, leaving you scrambling to de-activate the device as soon as possible. For modern iPhone owners, though, such a phenomenon should be in the distant past thanks to the advent of remote wipe capabilities, right?

Perhaps not. Some unlucky iPhone owners are beginning to discover that, despite their best efforts to remove all information from their stolen phones, thieves and unsuspecting buyers are still able to send and receive iMessages as the original owner—even after the device is registered under a new account. Almost nothing seems to work—remote wiping, changing Apple ID passwords, or even moving the old phone number to a new phone—and users are becoming more than frustrated that thieves are so easily able to pose as them.

Technology companies these days are scared to death to make a product that varies too far from Apple does because they fear being left behind. Some companies even go so far as to say that Apple’s inventions were inevitable — if that’s the case why weren’t they done before?

Why did it take Apple to enter the MP3 player market with the iPod to change the way people thought of those devices? The same thing happened with the iPhone and again with the iPad.

In each case, Apple’s competitors copied those products as closely as they could, without bringing the wrath of Apple’s legal team. That didn’t always work.

Clearly Apple takes option two when developing its products. After the success of the iPod, I believe that Apple knew it had a really good chance to dominate the smartphone market and there was no question at all that it would dominate the tablet market.

That trend won’t change. If Apple enters a market, I think it knows the product is different enough from the beginning that others will follow.

Apple is not motivated by the same things that drive other companies. Market share and profits are a result of making great products. To do that, you can only have that one singular focus.

This hasn’t been one of those experiments-for-the-sake-of-experimentation in which someone temporarily forsakes a PC for another device in order to write about the experience (like, say, this). No, I’ve been using the iPad for my daily activities–running Technologizer, writing for TIME, CNET, and AllBusiness.com, and more–because I find it to be the preferable tool in multiple respects. I’ve been using it about 80 percent of the time, and using my MacBook Air about 20 percent of the time. I have no desire to go back.
If this startles you, I understand. It seems to startle most folks who notice I’m doing it. I’m startled myself. Or at least I was at first–at this point, I’ve been doing it long enough that I forget there’s anything unusual about it until someone reminds me.

The genius of Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, and the rest of the Mac team was recognizing a huge untapped market for home computing among artists, musicians, writers, and other creative weirdos who might never have cared enough to master the arcane complexities of a command-line UI or blow a fortune on hulking digital workstations.

The challenge of designing a personal computer that “the rest of us” would not only buy, but fall crazy in love with, however, required input from the kind of people who might some day be convinced to try using a Mac. Fittingly, one of the team’s most auspicious early hires was a young artist herself: Susan Kare.

I'm a bit of a shutterbug, so Photo Stream is something I was really interested in when it was announced as part of iOS 5's feature set way back in June. Frictionless, automated sending of photos from my phone to my computer? Sign me up!

Of course, as is too often the case with Apple, the nitty gritty of how this would work wasn't explained in any detail -- particularly for Aperture, which often takes a back seat to iPhoto when Apple is showing off its apps.

Hopefully, this article will answer all your questions about how these two products interact. If not, please leave a comment pointing out what I've overlooked.

Before we start, some basic housekeeping. Photo Stream isn't going to appear in your Aperture at all if you don't first upgrade to v3.2. You'll also need OS X 10.7.2 or later, and iOS 5 on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. If you've done all that, you're all set.

The Mac needs to be as secure as the iPhone. The good news is Apple already has the tools. The bad news is they are forcing developers to use the wrong ones.

There are three primary ways Apple increases security of applications running on the Mac and the iPhone: Sandboxing, Code Auditing, and Certification. While all these are incrementally valuable, none is perfect on its own.

The problem Mac developers are facing is that the two that Apple is enforcing on the Mac App Store (Sandboxing and Code Auditing) are implemented currently to be actively bad for developers and not particularly good for users. And the method that would provide the most benefit for developers and users (Certification) isn’t enforced broadly enough to be useful.

Apple announced today that, starting in March 2012, all apps on the Mac App Store will be required to run in the so-called “App Sandbox”.

The sandbox is an environment that locks down the Mac in ways that match (and exceed) the limitations found on iOS. A sandboxed app doesn’t have direct access to any files or frameworks on the system. It can’t access the network or any devices.

For the app, nothing else exists on the system except for those files and APIs that the operating system explicitly makes accessible to it:



By default, the sandboxed app doesn’t really have anything of its own. Even files in its own Application Support subfolder may be deleted by the operating system if it wants to e.g. reclaim some disk space. The sandbox analogy is quite fitting indeed — inside it, an app’s data has all the permanence of a sand castle.

Some outlets have suggested that he doesn't care and will happily pay a fine if ever confronted by police; others, quoting Steve Wozniak, suggest that he had some kind of permit to do so.

Neither is true.  In fact the truth is far simpler.

Steve (or someone close to him) spotted a loophole in the California vehicle laws.  Anyone with a brand new car had a maximum of six months to affix the issued number plate to the vehicle.

So Jobs made an arrangement with the leasing company; he would always change cars during the sixth month of the lease, exchanging one silver Mercedes SL55 AMG for another identical one.  At no time would he ever be in a car as old as six months; and thus there was no legal requirement to have the number plates fitted.

One might also assume that the leasing company was happy - they had an endless supply of luxury cars to on-sell with the previous driver being none-other that Steve Jobs.

That would be a win-win-win situation for Steve, the leasing company and for the subsequent buyer.

Many people have explained what one can learn from Steve Jobs. But few, if any, of these people have been inside the tent and experienced first hand what it was like to work with him. I don’t want any lessons to be lost or forgotten, so here is my list of the top twelve lessons that I learned from Steve Jobs.

The initial reaction to the iPhone 4S was cooler than Apple might have hoped. Expectations had been hyped to such a point that people were looking for a leap forward equivalent to the first iPhone. When they couldn't immediately see it, many were disappointed. But that leap was there — it's just not one that is easily seen. Siri, the new iPhone's voice-control software, is going to have as big an impact as that first iPhone did. It's going to fundamentally change our relationship with computers.

Steve and I were talking about children one time, and he said the problem with children is that they carry your heart with them. The exact phrase was, “It’s your heart running around outside your body.” That’s a Steve Jobs quote. He had a level of perception about feelings and emotions that was far beyond anything I’ve met in my entire life. His legacy will last for many years, through people he’s trained and people he’s influenced. But what death means is you can’t call—you can’t call him. It’s a loss. I’ll miss talking to him.

Onion News Network: Apple Announces Plans To Release Steve Jobs 2
Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that in 2012 the company will release the Steve Jobs 2, an updated version of the revolutionary Apple founder featuring a richer, deeper voice and a sleek new white turtleneck.

You don’t have to work very hard to find things about Steve Jobs to dislike. You aren’t obligated to give the company he co-founded any money. You can even root against it, and take pleasure in its failures. But all Jobs ever did was make products that people were free to choose or ignore. Stallman and Raymond, however, seem to be confident that they understand what’s good for Apple customers better than Apple customers do. They’d be happier if the choices offered by Apple didn’t exist: Both say they hope that Jobs’ passing might hasten the end of the Apple we currently know.
Freedom, apparently, is just another word for agreeing with Richard M. Stallman and Eric S. Raymond.
Explain to me again what’s so damn liberating about that?

IN the memorials to Steven P. Jobs this week, Apple’s co-founder was compared with the world’s great inventor-entrepreneurs: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell. Yet virtually none of the obituaries mentioned the man Jobs himself considered his hero, the person on whose career he explicitly modeled his own: Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography.

Land, in his time, was nearly as visible as Jobs was in his. In 1972, he made the covers of both Time and Life magazines, probably the only chemist ever to do so. (Instant photography was a genuine phenomenon back then, and Land had created the entire medium, once joking that he’d worked out the whole idea in a few hours, then spent nearly 30 years getting those last few details down.) And the more you learn about Land, the more you realize how closely Jobs echoed him.

That same footnote on the Siri page also says "requires Internet access." We never did find out exactly what that big data center Apple built was for -- given that iTunes content is mostly stored in CDNs and iCloud is implemented on top of Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's EC2 platforms.

I'm speculating that at least some of that data center's huge processing capacity is for Siri, and that at least some portion of Siri's sophisticated voice recognition works in the cloud. Presumably not all of it, otherwise it won't work when you are in a weak signal area; but consider what happens when you dictate text to the Siri software. It reads the text back and asks you to confirm that you are happy with the transcription. This is a classic setup for machine learning algorithms, and I think perhaps that each time you teach Siri a correction for a word it is uploaded to the cloud and, eventually, downloaded to everyone else's Siri implementations. There's very few effective ways to build a phenome database of all the world's dialects and accents, but this would work (for a fascinating look at how Google solved the same problem, look at the history of GOOG-411).

If my rampant and baseless speculation is correct, this means that Siri is a huge, powerful, learning network with nodes all around the world. Hopefully it'll never become self-aware, eh?

Apple big event, crammed into 90 seconds.

"Artists should use git," Greg told me one day, and I didn't believe him at first. But it's true: the programmer classes have version control, permanent history, easy collaboration, and "The Cloud" while the more creative types are stuck with ~/Desktops full of "Site mockup-round 2 FINAL tuesdayrev.jamesversion #3 actuallyfinal.tweaks.psd" files. (Or Adobe Bridge. Haha.)

But Greg and I saw an out: GitHub, a social network purpose-built around versioning and collaboration with stellar usability, and the iPad, the end-user right-brain machine to end them all. Even artists should be able to use git, we reasoned, if properly covered in a glossy coating of iOS! I set to code.

This is the story of how that weekend hack became a summer-long ordeal, as we found ourselves caught constantly on the wrong corner of three-way fights—reviewers vs. appeals board, Apple vs. GitHub—that Apple, eventually and inevitably, wins.

They're pronounced the same, but, technically speaking, there is a distinct difference between a disc and a disk.

There’s trouble in my laptop paradise. I ended that with this caveat:

It’s much more comfortable to type on the 2011 model, with one big exception: the 2011 model runs much hotter.

I need more time to form a concrete opinion, but it seems so far that this CPU’s awesome performance definitely comes at a cost of increased heat and reduced battery life. For my intended usage as a desktop most of the time, that’s an acceptable tradeoff.

This turned out to be worse than I thought it would be, and today, the last day of my return period, I decided to return it and exchange it for a slower model.

The problem
Not only does the 2011 15” MacBook Pro run much hotter than previous generations, but as a result, the fans very frequently kick up to full speed (6200 RPM), greatly annoying anyone in the area who’s not wearing headphones.

I’ve done a lot of Google research and impromptu Twitter surveys, and this seems like a very common problem, exacerbated by a number of factors:

The recently released Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” (read my review of it at The Guardian) includes a new version of Mail, Apple’s desktop email client. There are several new features in Mail that I’m enjoying, and one of the least promoted is the new Favorites Bar. I think it’s very useful, particularly if you like to use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible, and so I’ve written this brief article describing how it works.

His argument of why the departure of Steve Jobs would cause an increase in the stock price was based on the fact that the market would have discounted it and the only question would be when it would happen. Since that uncertainty of when was unresolved, it would weigh on the shares until the uncertainty would be lifted and the price would resume its value based on other factors.

You may recall Seth Willits, whose app QuickPick was rejected from the Mac App Store for being “confusingly similar” to 10.7’s Launchpad. Even though QuickPick has been shipping for years before Launchpad and also runs on 10.6.
Seth submitted a formal appeal to Apple’s App Review Board on April 7 2011. After seven weeks Apple denied his appeal. Seth asked for a supervisor, was promised contact info, but never received it.

All signs seem to be pointing at it but no one seems to notice. My gut says that Apple is planning to launch not one but two new iPhones this fall and both will be available on all four major US carriers. I believe we will see a mildly revamped iPhone 4 and an “all-new” iPhone 5.

Apple will however downplay the 4′s revamp with a comment like “the iPhone 4 has proven to be the most popular phone in history and it’s not slowing down so today we’re making it available to T-Mobile and Sprint customers too”. No new name, and no upgraded specs they’ll want the press to focus on the iPhone 5, not a bunch of internal changes to a 15 month old device.

How will they do this? Instead of individual models for individual carriers I believe that both the revised 4 and the new 5 will have both CDMA and GSM chips in them will be compatible with all four carriers right out of the box.

I have come to the conclusion that what has made Apple so different is that instead of having a profit motive at its core, it has something else entirely. Many big companies like to pretend this is the case — “we put our customers first” — but very few truly live by that mantra. When the pressure is on and the CEO of a big public company has to choose between doing what’s best for the customer or making the quarter’s numbers… most CEOs will choose the numbers.

Apple never has.

As paradoxical as it is that the pursuit of profit is what causes the long-term failure of companies, I believe that Apple’s lack of focus on profitability has actually made it one of the most successful companies in the history of capitalism.

Don’t buy Apple’s $69 OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive. The Apple Store webpage for the Lion USB Thumb Drive states: “When you install OS X Lion using the USB thumb drive, you will not be able to reinstall OS X Lion from Lion Recovery. You will need to use the USB thumb drive to reinstall OS X Lion.”

The reason for this limitation is that Recovery HD, before allowing you to reinstall Lion, checks with Apple’s servers to verify your computer’s eligibility. Unless you purchased Lion from the Mac App Store, the verification will fail.

What if you want both an Internet-free Install Lion thumb drive and the ability to use Recovery HD to reinstall Lion? Apple’s “official” solution is to purchase Lion from the Mac App Store ($29) and buy a Lion USB Thumb Drive. This will cost you $69 + $29 = $98.

But there is a far cheaper solution. Buy the Mac App Store version of Lion and make your own 5GB or larger USB Install Lion thumb drive, using a simple procedure detailed on numerous web pages (such as this Macworld article by Dan Frakes). Assuming your thumb drive costs $10, your final cost is $39 — saving you $59 over Apple’s official route.

Make no mistake, the changes of this week are deeply rooted and are based on pressures building for years. Nearly all the charts on this site are about these pressures. Like in an earthquake, pressure builds up gradually but is released suddenly.

On May 19, 2001 Steve Jobs took a cherry-picked entourage of journalists on a tour of the company’s first brick-and-mortar retail outlet located in the second level of Tysons Corner Center in Virginia. “Literally half the store is devoted to solutions. Because people don’t just want to buy personal computers any more. They want to know what they can do with them,” he later explained in the above promotional video shown to the gathering of devotees at the Macworld Expo 2001 conference.

As with all things Apple, however, pundits were quick to predict a huge fail. The store couldn’t possibly earn enough to cover the cost of overhead, let alone keep itself running, they argued. Naysayers came out of the woodwork all guns blazing, warning Apple would pay dearly for experimenting with such an expensive and unproven concept. Some critics even called Apple crazy to gamble away its fortunes. It wasn’t just the pundits and haters.

I’m wrong a lot whenever I speak in absolutes about Apple’s future plans, but I don’t think they’ll ever release a TV.

Dropbox injects code into the Finder in order to draw the green and blue badges atop your icons. I prefer to run a clean system, and it turns out that you can prevent your Finder from being patched by running these two commands in Terminal:

sudo rm -rf /Library/DropboxHelperTools
rm /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Resources/DropboxHelperInstaller.tgz
I first heard about this last year, and indeed it does not seem to interfere with any non-cosmetic functionality.

The first, at right, shows the cumulative record of three-dozen Apple (AAPL) analysts -- both professional and amateur -- over the past four quarters.

The list looks a lot like the one we posted this morning, with the amateurs bunched at top and the pros -- including some of the biggest names on Wall Street -- at the bottom.

Topping it, for the second quarter in a row, is Asymco's Horace Dediu, a Romanian blogger whom we featured in a post last October and who was profiled on Bloomberg.com Wednesday.

The way Jobs sees it, the stores look to be a sure thing. But even if they attain a measure of success, few outsiders think new stores, no matter how well-conceived, will get Apple back on the hot-growth path. Jobs's focus on selling just a few consumer Macs has helped boost profits, but it is keeping Apple from exploring potential new markets. And his perfectionist attention to aesthetics has resulted in beautiful but pricey products with limited appeal outside the faithful: Apple's market share is a measly 2.8%. "Apple's problem is it still believes the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers," gripes former Chief Financial Officer Joseph Graziano.

Rather than unveil a Velveeta Mac, Jobs thinks he can do a better job than experienced retailers at moving the beluga. Problem is, the numbers don't add up. Given the decision to set up shop in high-rent districts in Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, and Jobs's hometown of Palo Alto, Calif., the leases for Apple's stores could cost $1.2 million a year each, says David A. Goldstein, president of researcher Channel Marketing Corp. Since PC retailing gross margins are normally 10% or less, Apple would have to sell $12 million a year per store to pay for the space. Gateway does about $8 million annually at each of its Country Stores. Then there's the cost of construction, hiring experienced staff. "I give them two years before they're turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake," says Goldstein.

Jeff Yang muses on how Apple managed to beat the tech titans of Japan by playing their game, only better

The better part of a month has gone by, and most pundits have already weighed in on this year's CES -- the global gadget extravaganza that makes Las Vegas the gravitational center of the geek universe every January. The consensus? Meh.

That's because the cacophony and crowds and celebrity sightings -- is there a rapper who doesn't have an audio accessory line at this point? -- couldn't disguise the fact that Apple, the new king of the tech hill, had once again refused to participate in a gathering dominated by old-guard standouts like Sony, whose gargantuan 25,000 square foot pavilion is always the show's largest, and which traditionally pulls out the razzle-dazzle stops in its presser (last year: country pixie Taylor Swift; this year, the stars of "The Green Hornet" -- and their car).

The efficiency with which Apple creates sales is legendary. There can be many explanations for this but the most telling evidence of causality I can find is the small number of products in the portfolio. Tim Cook stated that given the sales value, there is more concentration of product at Apple than at any other company except perhaps an oil company. All the products Apple sells can fit on one average sized kitchen table and they generated $76 billion in sales last year.

Apple's 91-day quarter yields some impressive numbers -- take them apart a little and you get the kind of stats you can reel off at a dinner party without being seen as too utterly crushing a bore, for example, did you know there's one iPhone being sold for every two people being born into this world today?

Apple sold 16.24 million iPhones in the December quarter. That sure is a lot of iPhones, and while dwarfed by the 650 million bottles of Heinz Ketchup sold around the world each year means Apple sells more iPhones each year than there are cars sold worldwide.

Maybe you can't appreciate this now, but the summer of 2003 was the biggest turning point that independent music has ever had. Until that point, almost no big business would sell independent music. (That's why I had to start CD Baby, because nobody would sell my music.)

By iTunes saying they wanted everything, then their competitors needing to keep up, we were in! Since the summer of 2003, every musician everywhere can sell all their music in almost every outlet online. Do you realize how amazing that is?

But there was one problem.

iTunes wasn't getting back to us.

Yahoo, Rhapsody, Napster and the rest were all up and running. But iTunes wasn't returning our signed contract.

I imagine prior to the launch of the iPod, or the iPhone, there were teams saying the same thing: the copy + paste guys are *so close* to being ready and we know Walt Mossberg is going to ding us for this so let’s just not ship to the manufacturers in China for just a few more weeks… The Apple teams were probably embarrassed. But if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.

Apple’s Xserve was born in the spring of 2002 and is scheduled to die in the winter of 2011, and I now step up before its mourners to speak the eulogy for Apple’s maligned and misunderstood server product.

As a datacenter professional, I’ve been immersed in the world of servers for the past twenty years, and have worked in environments numbering from a handful of servers in a closet, to tens of thousands of servers distributed in multiple large datacenter facilities. I have hands-on experience with every server product that Apple ever shipped (and one that never saw the light of day), as well as servers from other manufacturers, such as Dell, HP, IBM, Sun, and many lesser-known and defunct brands. But this eulogy comes not solely from my experience, since I asked my industry peers via the Macintosh Managers mailing list to share their thoughts on this historic event, along with their collective history with the Xserve and its competitors and predecessors.

"Take iPod for example -- very expensive, only worked with Macs (latest with firewire). Then USB solution came, but still PCs didn't have iTunes, thus significant work arounds required. Nobody took Apple seriously on iPod -- too expensive & minute addressable market.

"Couple, three years later -- all in rapid succession -- Apple releases iTunes for Windows, iTunes Music Store, cut prices and introduced the iPod mini. Within 9-12 months iPod share exploded from 20-30% to 70-80%. Just like that Apple had sewn it up. It was too late for competitors. None of any valiant attempts were able to dent iPod share thus they folded their hands in concession. iPod created a new market.

The following inconvenient facts must be an affront to the horizontal, commoditized, open, market share zealots. Apple has launched three major new product lines since 2001: the iPod (October, 2001); the iPhone (July, 2007); and the iPad (April, 2010).

The company's stock is up 3,000 percent since the launch of iPod, 125 percent since the launch of iPhone, and 20 percent since the launch of iPad.

The real secret to Apple’s success is that there are no secrets.
Apple is dominating its competition in customer service because the company cares about creating a quality customer experience at every brand touchpoint. And they do this for a reason – it’s called “profit”.  Apple has built an immensely successful business model around the depth of caring about product experience, and it’s translating all the way from customer sentiment to Wall Street.  From corporate leadership and the vision of Steve Jobs to customized retail environments showcasing flawless product design, Apple is invested in delivering amazing experiences to their customers.
We often hear that Apple “plays the game” better than Sony, HP, Dell, etc – that’s not quite right. Apple is playing an entirely different game. What’s most amazing about this?  Nobody else seems to want to play with them, they just keep playing the “other” game, and poorly.

Smartphones were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws.

Then this happened:

Perhaps today's touchpads are intended to be more fixtures than usable input devices, a signal to the user that he should purchase a quality Bluetooth mouse and stick that in his laptop bag. But why? Over the past 20 months, Apple has shown me quite clearly that touchpads can not only be usable; they can be almost more fun and comfortable to use than a full-blown mouse. PC laptop makers don't seem to realize that aluminum panels and glossy display bezels aren't what make MacBooks great. It's the ergonomics, stupid.

I see this comment as a sign that Apple will not fix this, because to the dismay of typography experts (and mine), most people out there without significant reading impairment cater to justified text for aesthetic reasons only. Those are Apple clients, and Apple will please them before the typography experts.

There were two awkward moments yesterday at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference. A few sites have already made much of Steve Jobs' wireless networking difficulties during his demonstration. But the real awkward moment was when Jobs launched into his defense of Apple's app approval process, which was a kind of "take it or leave it" apologia that, for the most part, didn't answer any of the tough questions about why some apps get turned down. 

Jobs' point was to say, in effect, that those who want on Apple's mobile devices can embrace the open world of HTML 5 on the Web, and/or play by Apple's rules to get on the App Store. If you're a company looking for revenue, you've got two options: the big open Web, and the App Store, with its own mysterious brand of capriciousness (and a ton of money exchanging hands). 

You might think that Apple holds both in equal esteem, but its release of Safari 5 shows that Apple has less regard for publishers on the Web than it does for publishers (and developers) it wants to entice to come to the App Store.