Shares of Hong Kong-listed Lenovo rose as much as 5.9 percent percent to a 23-month high on Friday, helped by expectations of strong growth in the sector and speculation that it could bid for the U.S. company once considered a pioneer in the smartphone space.
“A most suitable candidate will be a mainland Chinese company,” said Lu Chialin, an analyst at Macquarie Securities in Taipei. “They’ve got a lot more free cash and don’t have the brand presence in the United States, so that will all give them that boost they need.”
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G5s Sneak onto new ‘Obselete’ List
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.
On Gizmodo
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.
On Stolen Property
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 Posts Massive Profits
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.
Now It’s Just Bullying, Gizmodo
In other news, Github user digdog has posted a Cocoa app that will block Gizmodo via DNS. Brilliant.
History Repeats Itself
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 Next iPhone’s Pixels
Shawn Blanc has put this helpful little graphic together to show what 960x640 actually looks like.
Apple Asks Gizmodo for iPhone Back
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.
In a Nutshell
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.
Gizmodo’s ‘Checkbook Journalism’ Runs Deep
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:
Photoshop CS5 Gets Reviewed
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.