Even a decade after its debut—Steve Jobs unveiled the Cube at the July 2000 Macworld Expo in New York and the desktop shipped a month later—the Cube still stirs passionate debate between its detractors and defenders.
Category: Apple
The Apple Extended II
Dave Caolo, on his favorite keyboard:
First is the sound. That lovely wooden-stick-on-a-hollow-log “thonk” that announces each keystroke is yet to be duplicated. It’s satisfying in a way that affirms your productivity. Much like the jackhammer operator feels content at the end of a noisy day’s work, I feel that I got much accomplished with all that thonking and clacking.
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I also love the keyboard’s feel. Apple’s Bluetooth keyboards are nice, but the keys barely move when pressed. In contrast, the Extended Keyboard’s keys just drop when pressed, providing wonderful tactile feedback. They then spring back with perfectly appropriate force. I’ve used some keyboards that either repelled my fingers on the upstroke or yielded like cold oatmeal when pressed. They’ve all made me long for the ancient artifact in my office.
Missing That New Car Smell
The first Mac I did serious work on was a 450 Mhz Blue and White PowerMac G3. It was a few years old when I started laying out pages and mixing audio on it, but with OS 9 and 512 MB of RAM it was by no means a slouch. Even so, it wasn’t able to do much more than one intensive thing at a time. The computer’s limitations necessitated doing one thing at a time — the hardware just couldn’t cut it.
A Modern Beginner’s Guide to the Newton
AT&T Not Expecting ‘Material Negative Impact’ Over Future Loss of iPhone Exclusivity
AT&T Inc. said Friday it doesn’t expect to suffer a “material negative impact” from the end of its exclusive arrangements to carry handsets, including its lucrative deal for Apple Inc.’s iPhone.
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“We do not expect any such terminations to have a material negative impact on our wireless segment income, consolidated operating margin or our cash from operations,” AT&T said in the filing with regulators on Friday.
Papermaster Leaves Apple
Mark Papermaster, the Apple executive in charge of hardware for the company’s flagship iPhone, has left the company in the wake of widely reported problems with the antenna of the recently introduced iPhone 4.
It is not clear if Mr. Papermaster was ousted or left on his own accord.
Word is he was let go.
Yoko, on the Beatles in iTunes
Steve Jobs has his own idea and he’s a brilliant guy. There’s just an element that we’re not very happy about, as people. We are holding out. Don’t hold your breath… for anything.
Is there anything that woman can’t ruin?
Apple, Third-Party Apps and Patents
As usual, Nilay Patel brings sanity to a confusing legal situation.
iDisk Offers Audio Streaming to iOS Devices
Quietly mentioned in the release note of version 1.2 is the ability to play music files from remote storage in the background. I say “quietly” because this capability is not among the bullet list of features.
What this means is that for any music files such as MP3 or Apple’s AAC files stored in your iDisk account you can play them on your devices while you use your device for other operations. This makes streaming practical from Apple’s online storage. This new release brings this capability to iPhone, iTouch and iPad. You can stream music to multiple devices simultaneously.
The CSS Keyboard
Chris Michel created an Apple aluminum keyboard out of nothing but CSS and HTML5:
I began with the function keys and thought I would just leave the icons out, just using the “F1”, “F2”, to keep it simple. But once I got that row done, I just had to take a crack at creating the little icons with some beautiful CSS. I started with the sound-off icon, and successfully rendered it close enough for what I was going for. That little icon started a monster, because some of these icons were quite tedious to design. I spent a couple hours just on the function row icons, after that things started to speed up. I mainly focused on Safari and Chrome for this, so those will render the keyboard most accurately.
iPad Retina Display
OK, the iPad’s screen is 1024x768 @ 130dpi. Physical dimensions work out to 7.88”x5.91”.
Those same dimensions at 326 ppi would result in 2568x1926 pixels — more than my current 30” Cinema Display (2560x1600).
I can see Apple bumping the resolution on future iPad models, but not that high. I’m not sure anyone would really want the company to do that, even.
The New Core i3 iMac
All in all, the Core i3 and Radeon HD 4670 more than lived up to their billing here – they provide a noticeable performance boost over the familiar Core 2 Duo / 9400m setup that was Apple’s standard kit for so long, and we doubt the average iMac buyer will run up against any performance limitations. In fact, if you’re considering a Core i7 MacBook Pro and you can live without portability, an iMac might even be the better bet.