Category: Apple

Mark Milian of the Los Angeles Times:

In April, on the Friday-afternoon launch of Apple’s tablet computer equipped with an AT&T 3G Internet chip, Wiens and co-founder Luke Soules arrived at the Apple Store a mile and a half away from their office just before the 5 p.m. sale. They were surprised to find a line there even though it was just an upgrade.

Not even a month earlier, Wiens and Soules were scrambling to be the first to put an iPad under the microscope — both figuratively and literally; they use a $1,000 scientific instrument for analyzing miniature parts.

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It’s come to light that the iPhone 4 — at least some of them — have a nasty habit of dropping calls if a user’s hand is on the lower-left edge of the phone, where the left and bottom portions of the steel band that run around the phone — and house the antennas — meet each other.

Apple, via Engadget:

Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.

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Andy Ihnatko, in his review of iOS 4:

Many of iOS 4’s “new” features are old hat on other phones. Custom screen wallpaper! Bluetooth keyboards! A built-in way to move random documents on and off the device! Multitasking! They’re wonderful! And they’re also features you could get in most phones since well before the first iPhone hit the market.

Which is par for the course for Apple products. Historically, they’d rather say “we did this feature exactly right” than “we did this feature before anybody else.” That’s a very correct and user-focused attitude, best illustrated by the way the iPhone handles cut-and-paste. It just plain works, and it works the exact same way in every iPhone app that wasn’t written by idiots. When I cut-and-paste in Android, there’s always that Christmas Morning sort of excitement, as I wait to see exactly how, or if, it’s going to work in this particular instance.

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Everyone knows about the set of Steves that started a little company named Apple Computer in a garage in Palo Alto back in 1976.

Hardly anyone has heard of Ron Wayne, who was the third co-founder of the company.

Wayne was hired by Jobs to produce Apple’s first logo — an artistic piece of Newton sitting under a tree — and the manual for the Apple I. He has been described in several books as the one person who could get in between the two Steves and help them reconcile their often different points of view.

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The Apple PR Machine:

White models of Apple’s new iPhone 4 have proven more challenging to manufacture than expected, and as a result they will not be available until the second half of July. The availability of the more popular iPhone 4 black models is not affected.

Whoops.

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iLounge has highlighted this comment by one of their readers o n their homepage:

Originally a little miffed at Apple for not allowing Home screen wallpaper on the 3G but after a day of use, I’m beginning to think Apple should have added the iPhone 3G to the incompatible list alongside the original iPhone and iPod touch. This thing is painfully slow now. Were it not for the combined Inbox feature I’d have already attempted a downgrade back to 3.1.3.

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TUAW has a nice roundup of posted reviews, as does Mac Rumors. The guys over at Boy Genius Reports have a great hands-on, as does Engadget — coupled with Joshua Topolsky’s excellent review of the device.

A few things have struck me as I’ve read through these reviews — that this phone feels as good as it looks, the screen really is as awesome as Steve said it is and that the box is really, really ugly.

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Walt Mossberg, in his review of the iPhone 4:

The most important downside of the iPhone 4 is that, in the U.S., it’s shackled to AT&T, which not only still operates a network that has trouble connecting and maintaining calls in many cities, but now has abandoned unlimited, flat-rate data plans. Apple needs a second network.

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The following article was written by my younger brother, Mark Christopher Hackett, for Operation Broken Silence, the anti-genocide organization he founded in 2007.

In  2006, I, like many others, purchased an Apple laptop. At the same time  I was purchasing what has been a very valuable product to me, a woman was getting raped in eastern Congo every few seconds. Like everyone else, I had no idea. At the time of my purchase, Apple also posted what was then the second highest quarter in terms of sales in Apple history.

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Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng:

Despite its flaws, the iOS 4 update is certainly a solid one with enough new features to make it worth upgrading for pretty much everyone. Trying to live without even the most basic aspects of multitasking (notably state-saving) can be frustrating once you have used it for a while.

The most exciting part about iOS 4 is really what third-party developers will do with the 1,500 new APIs. After all, the iPhone experience has become one that is almost defined by its apps, and Apple has opened up a new world of possibilities with its latest API offerings. As we go into the second half of 2010, we’re sure to see plenty of new apps that do creative things with Game Center, multitasking capabilities, the camera, and more.

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Serenity Caldwell for Macworld:

You may not be able to completely shut off Apple’s new iAds system when it shows up on iOS 4 devices in July, but at the very least, you can stop it from using your personal information to tailor ads to you.

Similar in structure to Google’s ad preferences, which allow the user to opt in or out of “interest-based advertising,” Apple on Monday released its own Web-based tool, which, when visited on a device running iOS 4, will opt the user out of the iAds targeting system.

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No multitasking, no home wallpaper and no bluetooth keyboard support make up the sadder part of the list.

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