Apple has been having trouble keeping the entry-level white iPhone in stock since the new 3GS went on sale two and a half weeks ago. But as of Tuesday morning, it has all but disappeared.
The 16 GB model — apparently the most popular — is out of stock in the 30 of the 41 states in which Apple has stores, as well as in the District of Columbia.
Category: Apple
Paste and Match Style
This tip deserves to be in the OS X hall of fame. I’ve implemented it on both my Macs already.
‘Nothing Appeals to Everyone’
Are software touchscreen keyboards good for everyone? Certainly not. But this is another aspect of the Apple Way. Apple tries to make things that many people love, not things that all people like. The key is that they’re not afraid of the staunch criticism, and often outright derision, that comes with breaking conventions.
[…]
That the iPhone — or specifically its software touchscreen keyboard — does not appeal to everyone is not a problem. Nothing appeals to everyone. Even if you try to make something that appeals to everyone by adding every single clamored-for feature, you wind up with something like Windows that does not appeal to people with a taste for the elegant and refined.
On the Hackintosh
It’s important to keep in mind the system’s limitations: a relatively slow processor and an underclocked graphics chip, a tiny 1024- by 600-pixel screen, a cramped keyboard, no optical drive, and a horrible, horrible trackpad. It’s a discouraging list of drawbacks, but apart from the trackpad, you know about these limitations going in: you buy a netbook like this, regardless of the OS, because you’re willing to trade performance to get an inexpensive, 2.4-pound laptop with a tiny footprint.
On the Unknown
From the aforementioned NY Times story:
Health is the most private of all matters for very good reason, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has never disciplined a company for a failure to disclose health problems. In part, we all buy, sell and trade on someone’s health without knowing their fates. Sergey Brin or Larry Page, Google’s founders, may be fit as fiddles, but they could get run over tomorrow by a Prius in Palo Alto (a Prius would still hurt, right?).
Someone Missed the Memo
Didn’t Apple pull out of Macworld? The NY Times seems to have missed the memo:
Next February, when Steven P. Jobs — knock on wood — does his big reveal at Macworld, the geegaw people will most want to see probably won’t be on display.
Whoops.
Eee PC Gets Mighty Mouse Trackball
Speaking of Eee PCs, plastibots.com has a story covering a Eee PC hardware hack that adds the trackball from Apple’s Mighty Mouse into the case for fast-action scrolling:
I found the 2-finger scrolling using the touchpad a P.I.N.T.A. . So, since it’s never my intent to leave well enough alone, and I was itching for something to take apart and hack, I decided to integrate a trackball into my EEE 901. The Apple Mighty Mouse was the best candidate becase the trackball acts like a wheel on the mouse - I can use it solely for scrolling rapidly through pages of content. Of course, there are other options out there, but its ball acts as a mouse controller (not for scrolling) and I didn’t want to pay the price. I figured the Mighty Mouse would be more of a challenge anyhow.
Shots Fired in Virginia Apple Store
“We heard a woman scream back toward the bathroom area and all of us stopped. One of the staff members opened the door and one woman yelled, ”Call 911 someone’s been shot,’" said another unidentified witness.
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Investigators believe the gunman came through a rear loading-area door, fleeing the same way he came in. Police used helicopter and K–9 units to conduct a sweep of the area and are calling the incident as an attempted robbery.
Unibody Innards
I had to replace the unibody on a MacBook Pro yesterday, which requires taking everything in the notebook apart and moving it into the new case. Two hours later, it was like new.
Birdfeed: A New Way to Nourish Twitter
Birdfeed - a new twitter application by Buzz Anderson (of PodWorks and more) and designed by Neven Mrgan - is now in the App Store for $4.99.
Five bucks is high for a Twitter client, but Birdfeed is simply gorgeous. It fits nicely between Tweetie’s simple layout and Twitterrific’s design-heavy approach.
As a 1.0 release, Birdfeed doesn’t have all the features that other (and older) Twitter clients offer, but the app does offer some features that others don’t, such as a local cache (for offline reading), timestamps in the feed to show you when you left off, and the ability to load more tweets once you hit the bottom of the screen. The developers are saying more features are on the way, but they adhere to the “Real Artists Ship” theory crafted by Steve Jobs when working on the original Macintosh.
3GS Battery Issues?
Just a week after the release of Apple’s new iPhone, a few owners have complained about the handset’s high temperatures, which in some cases are high enough to start browning the white plastic on the back of the phone.
Only a small number of iPhone 3GS customers have reported their handsets are reaching very high temperatures. But because more than a million iPhone 3GSes were sold in the first weekend, the issue could put tens of thousands of new iPhones at risk, a component specialist told Wired.com.
Jobs Back at Work
“Steve Jobs is back to work. He is at Apple a few days a week and working from home the other days,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said. “We’re glad to have him back.”