512 Pixels

HardMac is making me feel old. I used to swap logic boards on original iMac G5s daily, at the height of the capacitor failure that plagued these machines and the “ALS” models that followed them.

Chairmen Gruber:

First, I’m fascinated by their apparently cavalier attitude regarding the legal implications of their actions. I’m not offended by their decision to obtain this unit and publish everything they were able to ascertain regarding it. It simply boggles my mind the stakes they have effectively wagered that Apple will not pursue this legally.

Second, publishing the name, photographs, and personal information of the Apple engineer who lost the phone is irrelevant to the story. It was the dick move to end all dick moves. Gizmodo is, ostensibly, a gadget site. The interest of their readers in this saga regards the phone. Publishing his name did not clarify in the least bit how they obtained the phone. The people whose identities I’d like to know are those who obtained and then sold the phone, not the guy from Apple who lost it. There is no interest served by outing him other than taking sociopathic glee in making a public spectacle of someone who made a very serious but honest mistake.

I think he’s exactly right. It’s almost as if Gawker is trying to piss Apple off. I wonder if they were surprised by the backlash from their readers and the wider public. My guess is that they are. Even though they shouldn’t be. But then again, common sense seems to run thin at Gizmodo HQ.

Jeff Bercovici at Daily Finance:

Put simply, Gawker Media brazenly, publicly flouted the law. It subsidized a crime: the selling of stolen merchandise. Then it published a misleading, whitewashed account of the seller’s actions meant to make it look as though he was not acting with criminal intent. It published this account in order to disguise its own culpability in the matter.

Apple PR, on the company’s best non-holiday quarter ever:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2010 second quarter ended March 27, 2010. The Company posted revenue of $13.50 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.07 billion, or $3.33 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $9.08 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.62 billion, or $1.79 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 41.7 percent, up from 39.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Apple sold 2.94 million Macintosh computers during the quarter, representing a 33 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 8.75 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 131 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 10.89 million iPods during the quarter, representing a one percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.

Jesus Diaz is a jackass.

In other news, Github user digdog has posted a Cocoa app that will block Gizmodo via DNS. Brilliant.

Bruce Tognazzini:

The blogs have been filled for three years now with the constant wailing of the technorati complaining bitterly about the iPhone’s, now the iPad’s, closed system.

It’s nothing new.

The Mac now connects to everything, but the first Mac did not. It was designed to always have a fixed amount of memory—128k—with no way of ever expanding it. The core of the OS was in ROM, not RAM. It was Steve’s vision that if you made every single computer with the same exact OS and the same amount of memory, developers would always have a fixed platform for which to develop, making their jobs easier.

The difference is the App Store.

Shawn Blanc has put this helpful little graphic together to show what 960x640 actually looks like.

Bruce Sewell, Senior Vice President & General Counsel wrote this letter to the blog:

It has come to our attention that GIZMODO is current in possession of a device that belongs to Apple. This letter constitutes a formal request that you return the device to Apple. Please let us know where to pick up the unit.

Brian Lam replied:

Happy to have you pick this thing up. Was burning a hole in our pockets. Just so you know, we didn’t know this was stolen [as they might have claimed. meaning, real and truly from Apple. It was found, and to be of unproven origin] when we bought it. Now that we definitely know it’s not some knockoff, and it really is Apple’s, I’m happy to see it returned to its rightful owner.

P.S. I hope you take it easy on the kid who lost it. I don’t think he loves anything more than Apple.

I’m sure they are happy to return now that they’ve displayed it for all the world to see. If they were so concerned with who was the “rightful owner,” why post the photos in the first place?

Hopefully all of this is over.

Craig Hockenberry:

The person at fault is the shithead who stole the phone, not some overworked engineer drinking beer.

Yet Gizmodo won’t publish that person’s name. Despicable.

The AP is reporting that Gawker paid $5,000 for the iPhone 4G prototype Gizmodo posted photos of this morning.

Additionally, Gizmodo has posted a follow-up story outlining how the phone ended up in the wild in the first place. In this story, there is no mention of how the device ended up in Gizmodo’s hands, just how an Apple software engineer left it at a bar back in March.

Here is there version of the story, from the guy who first found it, until now:

He reached for a phone and called a lot of Apple numbers and tried to find someone who was at least willing to transfer his call to the right person, but no luck. No one took him seriously and all he got for his troubles was a ticket number.

He thought that eventually the ticket would move up high enough and that he would receive a call back, but his phone never rang. What should he be expected to do then?

[…]

Weeks later, Gizmodo got it. It was the real thing. Once we saw it inside and out, there was no doubt about it. We learnt about this story, but we didn’t know for sure it was Powell’s phone until today, when we contacted him via his phone.

No mention of the $5,000. No respect for an young engineer who made a mistake — granted a big one — that very easily could have cost him a great job.

This whole thing continues to highlight Gizmodo’s drive to beat everyone else to a story, no matter who or what stands in the way. After posting the photos of the device, what does sharing the guy’s name do? And why not tell readers the name of the guy who found the device, and how much the site paid him for it?

Jesus Diaz closed his post with this:

He [the Apple engineer] sounded tired and broken. But at least he’s alive and apparently may still be working at Apple — as he should be. After all, it’s just a fucking iPhone and mistakes can happen to everyone — Gray Powell, Phil Schiller, you, me, and even Steve Jobs, a hero of Gray’s who he, on his Myspace page, declared as someone he would one day hope to meet.

The only mistake would be to fire Gray in the name of Apple’s legendary impenetrable security, breached by the power of German beer and one single human error.

Diaz needs to take his own advice. It is just an iPhone. And just a mistake.

What Gizmodo has done to “journalist blogging” in the last 24 hours is atrocious. I don’t consider what they do journalism after this. Not after what they’ve done to that poor Apple employee and withholding details of how they acquired the device that drew millions of viewers to their site this morning.

Update: Be sure to check out the New York Times’ post on the matter.

David Girard over at Ars Technica:

It’s truly impressive that Photoshop CS5 is successful at adding a lot of useful, engineering-heavy features in CS5, all while porting over to a new and stable Cocoa 64-bit code-base on OS X. And it’s encouraging to see that a program that has no real competitors isn’t just being phoned in. Against the on-going daytime drama of “Apple vs. Flash,” Photoshop is still just a great program and CS5 is a worthwhile update for a broad cross-section of users. My complaints are about minor issues—things like the low-res preview in HDR Merge Pro or window layering with AIR filters—can be addressed in a x.1 update without really slowing people down in the meantime. Nine thumbs up.

I think Girard just nailed the biggest feature: Cocoa.

Chairman Gruber just linked to Gawker’s Nick Denton tweet about the iPhone 4G prototype that was posted on Gizmodo this morning:

Yes, we’re proud practitioners of checkbook journalism. Anything for the story!

That is a bold statement. And one that has gotten a lot of people into trouble in the past — ABC comes to mind quickly.

While I’m not sure that what the gang over at Gizmodo does is legitimate journalism*, this doesn’t help their case much. Paying for a story is a big no-no to most journalists. Of course, Gizmodo have stepped over the line before, as have several blogs in the attempt to be first with a breaking story.

Not to mention, two million page views an hour is a difficult temptation to ignore. It would seem that was at least a large part of their motivation here.

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*I’m not sure what I do here is, either. And that’s fine.