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The Newton is back in the spotlight, and once again, is creating waves in the Apple community.

The Newton 2010 bug has made news before, but just re-surfaced on a prominent Apple blog. Here’s TUAW:

Apple’s ill-fated and technologically advanced personal digital assistant was hot stuff in the 1990s until it was axed in February of 1998. There are still a good number of Newton MessagePad fans who not only use their devices every day, but are also working together on hardware and software updates to their units to bring them into the 21st Century.

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Documents To Go - the premiere mobile app for editing Office documents - has been released for the iPhone. This makes the iPhone even more attractive to businesses.

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From Apple’s PR group:

“Safari 4 is an incredible success on Mac and Windows with more than 11 million downloads in the first three days,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari users love the incredible speed and innovative features like Top Sites, Full History Search and Cover Flow.”

11 million downloads sounds real, real impressive. And without a doubt, Safari 4 is one of - if not the best - browser out there, for either platform. But is the download count misleading? MacWorld’s Robert Strohmeyer thinks it may be:

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From the MacRumors forums:

1.) It appears nearly certain that the new 13“ and 15” MacBook Pros are all reporting a SATA interface running at 1.5Gb and not the faster 3.0Gb rate that has been in pretty common use for the last few years. These new models have the Secure Digital (SD) slot and also appear to have redesigned motherboards.

2.) Those who are using standard hard disk drives will probably see no difference in performance. If that is you, you can stop reading now.

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The New York Times has posted a lengthy piece on data centers - the buildings that power web services, store our data, and more. They interviewed Michael Manos, a former Microsoft employee:

At Tukwila — as at any big data center — the computing machinery is supported by what Manos calls the “back-of-the-house stuff”: the chiller towers, the miles of battery springs, the intricate networks of piping. There’s also what Manos calls “the big iron,” the 2.5-megawatt, diesel-powered Caterpillar generators clustered at one end of a cavernous space known as the wind tunnel, through which air rushes to cool the generators. “In reality, the cloud is giant buildings full of computers and diesel generators,” Manos says. “There’s not really anything white or fluffy about it.”

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iLounge:

…the iPhone 3G S sports 256MB of RAM — up from 128 in the original iPhone and iPhone 3G — as well as a faster processor running at 600MHz, compared to 412MHz in the first two iterations of the device. The second-generation iPod touch also sports a faster processor than that found in the first two generations of iPhone, running at 532MHz.

Sweet.

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From a DriveSavers email blast:

DriveSavers just launched the first and only hard drive simulator for iPhone and iPod touch! Known as DriveSaver, the free hard drive simulator features a virtual environment that allows you to explore the inner workings of a common hard drive. It simulates various types of hard drive failures using ultra-realistic sounds and visuals and includes essential backup and data loss prevention tips.

DriveSaver is a fantastic demonstration tool to help illustrate hard drive data storage technology. It’s educational, it’s functional and it’s fun! It might even help you identify problems with a bad hard drive. Anyone who has ever wanted to see inside a hard drive or learn how drives work and why they fail, must try it!

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Check out this post by Gizmodo, showing off part of Apple’s display at WWDC:

Apple stationed a little bit of eye candy in the Moscone Center lobby: a 5x4 matrix of Cinema Display monitors, set adorned with thousands iPhone app icons. The twist? Whenever someone purchases the app, it pulsates.

Apparently it’s not quite real-time, but the effect is extremely slick. Grouping the icons by their approximate colors creates a subtle gradient, which is a nice touch.

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A few days ago, John Gruber wrote:

Also, in Mac news, I’d bet a small amount on a refresh to Apple’s notebook lineup, with a branding change where the “MacBook Pro” designation is used for all aluminum models,and just plain non-Pro “MacBook” is used for plastic models.

Gruber was right. The new 13-inch based notebooks both have backlit keyboards and FireWire 800 ports. The 15-inch got a new display panel, but lost its ExpressCard/34 Slot. All of the machines are faster, built-in batteries (like the 17-inch model) and all 3 sport lower prices.

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Apple will be releasing the final version of the 3.0 software to exsiting iPhone and iPod touch customers on June 17, with the new iPhone - the iPhone 3GS - two days later on the 19th.

It’s a good thing. Last year - on July 11 - Apple released the iPhone 3G and OS 2.0 on the same day. Between all the new devices being activate in iTunes and everyone upgrading (and thus re-activating with iTunes), the iTunes servers bit the dust. Hopefully by spreading the pain out over a couple of days, Apple’s infrastructure won’t fail this time around.

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Sunday, May 31

Dear Diary, Jill woke me up in the middle of the night, saying I was crying again in my sleep. I keep having the same dream. Phil’s on stage, and the clicker stops working. He makes a little joke, and retrieves the spare one from the table. We always have a spare one. But the extra clicker also fails. Instead of joking, he takes the clicker and chunks it into the Cinema Display on the table, then grabs the demo iPhone, smashing it into bits on the stage.

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WWDC is set to start Monday with a keynote from Phil Schiller at 10 a.m. PST. Here’s what I think we will see.

Snow Leopard

• A refined GUI - darker, more like iLife ’09.

• A good look at how Exchange integration for iCal, Mail and Address Book will crush Entourage.

• Apple will show a bunch of graphs showing how much faster it is than Leopard.

• A quick tour of 10.6 Server. Expect updates to imaging and push mail/calendars/contacts. Think ‘MobileMe for Companies.’

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