Ultimate Apple

After months of silence, Bob Levitus (Houston Chronicle) wanted to “share my opinion of iPhone after seven months of heavy use.” After saying that he couldn’t “imagine living without one” way back in July, Levitus adds “that is still true today, as well.” Seven months later, he says, “I believe the iPhone is the best darn mobile phone money can buy.” “Where else,” he wonders, could “can you find a world-class phone, plus video, audio, Web and e-mail, all in a single hand-held device with an intuitive user interface?”

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Filed under: Macworld, iPod Family, iPhone, Apple TV, MacBook Air

Let’s face it. Macworld Expo 2008 didn’t exactly blow people away with its product intros. There was the MacBook Air, Apple TV Take Two and…um…not much else. And there could have been. Think about it. The Mac Pro was quietly upgraded in the days that led up to the event (psst, hey you, interested in some raw computing power?), and now the iPhone and iPod touch have received some major memory upgrades in the February slump. Both upgrades, as we have now seen, were relegated to Tuesday-morning sticky notes.

It’s not as if Apple couldn’t have announced this morning’s memory upgrades in January. I’m pretty sure these new iPods and iPhones didn’t just magically spring into existence within the last 3 weeks. The product that was announced, the (*yawn*) major AppleTV upgrade with movie rentals. is already delayed, and no sign yet of the “late February” iPhone SDK.

So what’s going on with Apple? Is there some sort of mojo shortage? Or maybe Steve just wanted some of us to do badly in our keynote predictions[1]. You tell us in the comments.

[1] See “tinfoil hat“

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Maybe it’s experience, maybe it’s wisdom, maybe old age but I’m absolutely obsessed with backups. Part of it comes from a bad experience with data loss many years ago (sounds like Tequila, doesn’t it?), part of it comes from recovering friends data over the years and another part of it comes from using a notebook [...]

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After (finally) getting my data migrated over to the MacBook Air (hint: use Ethernet) I took yesterday off to watch the SuperBowl. The MacBook Air was the life of the party I attended and kinda has the “new gadget” novelty that the iPhone first had. Typical reactions were “ooh, I want one” and “how much [...]

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Filed under: Apple Corporate, Odds and ends, iMac, Steve Jobs, Apple

And they found … not that much. There’s something not-quite-right about these snapshots purportedly from inside Apple’s Cupertino campus. They look like they come from almost anywhere — despite the plentiful Apple products (and one notable Microsoft natural keyboard), there’s no major signs of genius — no “the crazy ones” posters, iTablet prototypes lying around, or “how to act around His Steveness” employee pamphlets. Could it be that the people who work at Apple are, strangely enough, just like us?

No, surely not. These pictures are also a bit out of date, we’re told, as rumor has it that the front lobby always shows off the new products, not the old iMacs. So clearly these snaps are from the late ’90s, when the rest of us were using beige boxes and OS 9 to compute, and only Apple employees had the luxury of using thin keyboards and horizontal LCDs gone vertical (madness!) in their super-futuristic office space. There: our worldview is back to normal. As normal as it gets, anyway.

Thanks, Steve!

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Filed under: iPod Family, Apple, iPhone

After a brief downtime, the US Apple Store came back online this morning with updated, larger-capacity iPhone and iPod touch models. Our colleagues at Engadget called this update about five hours before it hit the street.

The iPhone is now available with 8GB (at $399US) or 16GB (at $499US) of storage.The iPod touch is now available in three models; 8GB ($299US), 16GB($399US) and 32GB($499US). Note that the 16GB iPhone and the 32GB iPod touch are both $499, while there’s a one hundred dollar difference between the 16GB iPhone and the 16GB iPod model.

I guess your hundred bucks either buys you a phone or double the storage space. The choice is yours.

[Nik notes from across the pond: the 16 GB iPhone is available in the UK for £329, and the 32GB iPod touch is also £329 (inc VAT).]

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

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Filed under: Freeware

I love it when I find freeware that is not only functional, but practical. File List is no exception. File List is an awesome utility that allows you to quickly and easily change batches of file names quickly. There are many types of ways you can rename the files including: find and replace, number, change case, and more.

This is nearly identical to the Automator action “Rename Finder Items.” However, for those of you who don’t want to sit through creating an Automator workflow, then this might be the application for you! In my opinion, one of the coolest features of this application is being able to create a “droplet.” These droplets allow you to simply set up the action you want, create the droplet, then just drag your files and drop them on it to run the action on the files.

This very creative piece of software also won a 3.5/5 from MacWorld’s Mac Gems review. This software is available for free (donations accepted) from the Many Tricks website.

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Filed under: iPod Family

You have so got to love Apple. If you own a jailbroken iPod touch and have bought the January Software Upgrade, navigate yourself over to /private/var/mobile/Applications. There, you’ll find your nikita_receipt.plist. Open it in your favorite property list editor, copy the payload (from <data> to </data>) and use your favorite online base64 converter to decode.

Perhaps Apple engineers wish they could vote for Lincoln this time around.

Thanks to the amazing Francis who discovered this

Continue reading Super Tuesday iPod touch Easter Egg

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The options for the iPod touch and iPhone got a little more diverse today, as Apple added a 32GB touch and a 16GB iPhone. Both retail for $499. The touch will ship in 1-2 business days and comes with free engraving, while either iPhone will ship in 1-3 business days.
So if you’ve been holding [...]

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After you get over the size of the packaging you can’t help but to notice the size of the MacBook Air itself (it is, after all, the thinnest notebook computer in the world). After using it for six days, the size difference between the MBA and pretty much every other notebook computer is pretty dramatic. [...]

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