512 Pixels

Ten years ago today, Apple announced the G4 Cube at Macworld New York.

The G4 Cube was an interesting machine. It was a powerful G4, packed into a 8-inch cube, suspended in clear molded plastic. It ran silently, without a fan. It featured some of the most impressive industrial design Apple has ever shipped — the entire “core” of the computer came out with a single click, giving quick access to internal components.

Despite its great looks and powerful processor, the machine didn’t sell well. It did’t come with a display, was more expensive than a full-sized G4 tower and had a nasty habit of developing cracks in that clear acrylic case.

In 2001 — just a year after being announced — the G4 Cube was discontinued due to poor sales.

The Mac mini was introduced in 2005, and is viewed by many as a direct descendant of the Cube. It is small, powerful and quiet, just like the Cube. However, the Mac mini is priced lower than the iMac and Mac Pro lines — Apple is usually good about learning from past mistakes. In fact, Apple touted the Mac mini as the “most affordable Mac ever.” That’s a label the Cube never enjoyed.

(Be sure to check out the Cube’s announcement keynote, product video and ad.)

Fred Vogelstein at Wired:

Indeed, Jobs actively considered splitting with AT&T early in the partnership. Just months after the iPhone launched, and not long after Rinne asked Apple to limit YouTube usage, Jobs was investigating another possible solution: dropping AT&T and striking a deal with Verizon. But because Verizon’s network ran on a different transmission technology, making the move would require an entirely new chipset.

The whole piece is fascinating.

Jenna Wortham of the New York Times:

The Motorola unit that Nokia Siemens is buying supplies wireless carriers with the equipment needed to build and maintain cellular networks, including infrastructure for the fourth-generation mobile technologies known as LTE and WiMax.

$1.2 billion. Holy cow.

I got this email from a friend tonight:

So I swapped my iPhone 4 for another at an Apple store due to a proximity sensor issue. New phone has a smooth matte-like coating around band and over antennas. Can no longer run finger over antennas and feel gaps. Looks like they have silently fixed this in the newer production runs can’t replicate signal loss any more.

During the press conference, Jobs said that they company would “revisit” the topic at the end of September. If Apple is handing out replacement phones with this “matte-like coating,” it may be that the company is testing this as a long-term solution they will announce in the fall.

This theory seems to line up with some reports\* that have been floating around online saying that some customers are receiving these altered handsets while others aren’t.

Time will tell if a simple coating is enough to fix — or at least reduce — the issue.

—– *I totally disagree with Gizmodo calling this a “silent recall.” At best, this is a silent hardware revision.

The Consumerist:

Apparently, these are the droids consumers have been looking for: Early numbers indicate that the new Motorola Droid X, carried by Verizon Wireless, has been a big hit, selling out online and in many stores since its debut on Thursday. Time to get scared, iPhone 4.

The success of this smart phone compared to its biggest competitor, Apple’s problem-ridden, antenna malfunctioning iPhone 4, has got to be rankling Steve Jobs just a little bit.

Even as an Android fan, I think the Consumerist is dead wrong. I mean, if they were really bearing down on Apple, why wouldn’t Verizon or Motorola post the total number of units sold? I highly doubt they are selling a million a week, which is a little short of what Apple is doing with the iPhone 4.

Bloomberg is reporting that Jobs’ statement yesterday that he and his team are “working our butts off” means “cots in the engineering department and cars in the parking lot at all hours of the night.”

Yikes.

More yikes? Jobs was on vacation this week prior to Friday’s event. Here’s Jobs in the Q&A session after his presentation:

I’m doing fine, I was doing better earlier in the week when I was on vacation in Hawaii.

The perks of being CEO, I suppose.

The Des Moines Register:

The Des Moines Register will be one of five regional design centers for Gannett Co. newspapers, the company announced Tuesday.

The announcement is expected to bring 35 to 60 jobs to Des Moines, said Carolyn Washburn, the Register’s editor and a vice president. Gannett hasn’t determined the timeline for the project, but it is expected to take at least two years.

The Des Moines center will design news pages for 21 newspapers, including the Iowa City Press-Citizen, and other locations in South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana.

In short, the newspaper giant Gannet will be laying off designers at local papers and moving page design to a central office.

I spent almost 4 years designing my college newspaper, and let me tell you, layout went a lot smoother nights that I spent the afternoon in the newsroom. Design and writing have to be interlinked for a good, accurate product. Gannet obviously is putting cost above quality. Which is part of why newspapers are in such bad shape.

Finally, I can kick Evernote to the curb once and for all.

Apple’s press conference this morning is pretty much what a lot of people expected — lots of praise for the iPhone 4, followed up with a solution that doesn’t involve a recall or hardware revision.

I think Apple did a good job at highlighting that lots of other phones show the same issue that the iPhone 4 does. I know that my Motorola Droid exhibits the issue when I’m in an area with poor reception. That said, the whole thing came off as a little passive-aggressive.

The look behind the scenes at Apple’s testing facilities is super rare. It makes the fact that Apple considers itself an engineering giant. The company has a lot more going into antenna testing and engineering than a lot of us thought.

Apple’s overall stance on this entire issue seems to be that the problem has been presented online and in the media to be far bigger — and far worse — than it actually is. In a sense, Apple is trying to paint themselves as a victim. That said, Apple being open with the fact that the iPhone 4 drops less than 1 more call per 100 than the iPhone 3GS is appreciated.

Handing out free cases is the company’s response to that rise in dropped calls. I think by giving back money spent on Bumpers — in addition to offering free Bumpers and other cases — is a good move.

Does the iPhone 4 need a hardware revamp? Perhaps. Is the issue bigger than Jobs says it is? Perhaps. Time will tell, but I think today is a step in the right direction. No matter how unhappy Jobs was onstage.

This page on Apple’s site just leaked passive-aggressive juice all over my MacBook Pro.

Engadget’s Chris Ziegler:

Yes, eFuse will shut down a phone with an unapproved bootloader — but it won’t brick the phone, it just needs “approved software” to be dropped back on there.

In other words, the bootloader is locked, but it won’t kill the device if tampered with. Running custom ROMs is still pretty much impossible, though. In short, the situation isn’t as bad as it looked earlier in the week, but the Droid X is still far less hackable as the Droid.

Which is still a bummer.

Andy Ihnatko:

To sum up: no recall and no free bumper cases (putting the iPhone 4 in any sort of case completely solves the antenna problem). There will be no admission of any kind that Apple did anything wrong in the design of the iPhone 4. The only nod in that direction will be that it’s the nature of new technology that no matter how carefully and thoroughly you test it, you will always find ways of improving it later on and that any future firmware or hardware revisions to the iPhone 4 will be just par for the course.