512 Pixels

TUAW posted a link to this video earlier today.

To this day, Snow White may be my favorite phase of Apple design.

Engadget’s Paul Miller:

This is a wild one, and we’re still parsing through the announcement, but on the surface it looks like the Library of Congress has added new anti-circumvention exceptions to the DMCA that, among other things, allow people to tweak their handsets for the purpose of installing legally obtained software – known as jailbreaking in iOS land, and rooting in the Android / webOS world. Check out the full statement from the Librarian of Congress, which is mostly an update of existing exceptions on record, after the break, but here’s the primary excerpt:

9 to 5 Mac has screenshots from ABC’s report on the iPhone 4 antenna press conference.

Several reports from sources allowed into these labs after Apple’s press conference said that they were not allowed to take photos on the tour, so ABC’s coverage is unique, and frankly, pretty suprising.

Alexis Madrigal:

But that’s just it: the iPhone does mean something, and it’s the type of meaning that transcends rational optimizing about features and raw performance. “Apple weathered the storm because there is such brand loyalty through the religious narrative,” Campbell maintained. “When you’re buying into Mac, you’re buying into an ideology. You’re buying into a community.”

[ via Kottke]

Oh, mama:

Marco:

Know why the iPhone 4’s antenna grip got tons of attention but there aren’t stories about the same sorts of minor flaws on other phones?

Because if there’s a minor flaw with whichever Droid Xtreme Edition or HTC Whatever is being hyped by the gadget blogs this month, who cares?

Apple is on a pedestal, and people love knocking pedestals down.

Apple PR:

White models of Apple’s new iPhone 4 have continued to be more challenging to manufacture than we originally expected, and as a result they will not be available until later this year. The availability of the more popular iPhone 4 black models is not affected.

How could Apple have not foreseen the manufacturing nightmare they are now in?

In other news, I’m pretty sure this is how vaporware starts.

Priya Ganapati:

Android phones are being pre-loaded with trial software and apps that can’t be deleted off the device by the user. These apps touting mobile TV, football games, location-based search and games are the new face of bloatware, also known as crapware or craplets in the PC world. The term is shorthand for non-essential software or media files bundled with a device in a bid to boost revenue and ostensibly give consumers a chance to try new services.

This is a new brand of Android fragmentation. Now in addition to numerous skins (Sense, Blur, etc.), users have to deal with having customizations — bogus apps and poorly-written widgets — taking up space and processor cycles on their handsets.

It would be one thing if carriers would include good apps and widgets, or ship those customizations with an on/off switch. As it is, I am not even thinking about the Droid X, due to the crappy stuff Motorola dumped on top of an otherwise good mobile OS.

Verizon is guilty when it comes to the Droid X, at least by association — they approved this phone for their network, crappy widgets and all.

John Gruber:

It seems more clear now why Google made the Nexus One: it’s hard to get a phone with the default Android OS. It also seems clear that Android’s openness is largely about being open to the carriers’ ability to customize the user experience.

I can’t say he’s wrong here. It’s too bad, really. My Droid runs vanilla Android, and it’s looking like that’s becoming more and more rare.

Impressive showing by the iPad.

$15.7 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.25 billion, or $3.51 per diluted share. Hot damn.

Update: I’ll be live-tweeting the call.

The gist of the company’s 12-page response to Congress is that every iPhone “checks in” with its zip code once every 24 hours. (Of course, location-based services can be turned off in iOS by customers.)

The Computer History Museum:

The Apple Macintosh combined brilliant design in hardware and in software. The drawing program MacPaint, which was released with the computer in January of 1984, was an example of that brilliance both in what it did, and in how it was implemented.

For those who want to see how it worked “under the hood”, we are pleased, with the permission of Apple Inc., to make available the original program source code of MacPaint and the underlying QuickDraw graphics library.

These 5,822 lines of Pascal and 3,583 lines of 68000 assembly helped change the world.