It turns out that his hobby 9to5Mac blog was always his favorite and in 2011 he went full time adding his Fortune Google followers to 9to5Google and adding the style and commerce component 9to5Toys gear and deals site. In 2013, Weintraub bought one of the Tesla’s first Model S EVs off the assembly line and so began his love affair with the Electric Vehicle and green energy which in 2014 turned into electrek.
In 2018, DroneDJ was born to cover the burgeoning world of drones and UAV’s led by China’s DJI.
From 1997-2007, Weintraub was a Global IT director and Web Developer for a number of companies with stints at multimedia and branding agencies in Paris, Los Angeles, New York, Sydney, Hong Kong, Madrid and London before becoming a publisher/blogger.
Seth received a bachelors degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California with a minor in Multimedia and Creative Technology in 1997. In 2004, he received a Masters from NYU’s Tisch School of the Art’s ITP program.
Hobbies: Weintraub is a licensed single engine private pilot, certified open water scuba diver and spent over a year traveling to 60 cities in 23 countries. Whatever free time exists is now guaranteed to his lovely wife and two amazing sons.
In the meantime, have a look. You also might want to download these locally if you like them. A bunch of other videos are on his YouTube channel and below: Expand Expanding Close
Sir Jony Ive is no stranger to winning accolades in the United Kingdom, including Knighthood and what not, but he seems to be taken aback today with the U.K.’s highest children’s award, the Blue Peter badge. That’s all well and good, but, if you are like us, you were looking behind Sir Jony to Apple’s Industrial design workshop that we’ve seen in videos before.
After getting the award, Ive showed the presenter Apple’s pure aluminum CNC machines (that no doubt have crafted lots of current and future Apple products) in the process of making a much bigger version of the award for the BBC.
London-born Sir Jonathan is Senior Vice President of Industrial Design for Apple and a life-long Blue Peter fan. When interviewed by presenter Barney Harwood he vividly remembers the makes from the show, and loved that they reused products that you thought were no longer useful. In the special episode, Sir Jonathan reviews several product designs sent in by Blue Peter viewers through a series of video messages from the children behind the designs. On receiving his gold badge, he called the honour “absolutely incredible”. As a mark of honour for the programme, Sir Jonathan and his team made ‘something very special‘, a unique Blue Peter badge crafted from solid aluminium through a 10-hour process, and presented it to Barney in true Blue Peter style saying, “Here’s one that we made earlier.”
Apple has an unfortunate history of lockscreen vulnerabilities with iOS, and 6.1 it turns out isn’t immune. Folks with a lot of time on their hands are finding random combinations of actions to unlock the display using emergency calling in iOS 6.1 (meaning that iPads and iPods likely aren’t vulnerable). The two videos below show how these actions can unlock the home screen of an iPhone running iOS 6.1, giving access to important user data. One example was posted by Jailbreaknation with steps below:
To provide a leading browser on Android and iOS, this year Opera will make a gradual transition to the WebKit engine, as well as Chromium, for most of its upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers.
“The WebKit engine is already very good, and we aim to take part in making it even better. It supports the standards we care about, and it has the performance we need,” says CTO of Opera Software, Håkon Wium Lie. “It makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium, rather than developing our own rendering engine further. Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout.”
That means there are now three major browser engines: Mozilla’s, Microsoft’s, and now the WebKit engine that Apple adopted from KHTML/Konqueror. With Apple and Google (with its WebKit adaptation Chrome) dominating mobile and now tablets, it is no secret which engine is poised to dominate in the coming years. Good call, Opera.
Opera is already contributing code to WebKit and expects to start rolling out products at MWC this month. Expand Expanding Close
Apple Inc. has a team of about 100 product designers working on a wristwatch-like device that may perform some of the computing tasks now handled by the iPhone and iPad, two people familiar with the company’s plans said.
The team, which has grown in the past year, includes managers, members of the marketing group and software and hardware engineers who previously worked on the iPhone and iPad, said the people, who asked not to be named because the plans are private. The team’s size suggests Apple is beyond the experimentation phase in its development, said the people.
There is lots of both real and speculative information about Apple’s iWatch project floating around at the moment. So much so that it sounds like we’re ramping up to a launch in the coming year or so.
Bloomberg dropped two names of managers on the watch team: James Foster and Achim Pantfoerder. Interestingly, we understand that Foster reports to Bob Mansfield (head of chips and wireless), and not to Dan Riccio (head of hardware), which lines up with earlier claims that Mansfield is very interested in wearable technologies. Expand Expanding Close
Tim Cook, Jobs’ successor as Apple chief executive, was opposed to suing Samsung in the first place, according to people with knowledge of the matter, largely because of that company’s critical role as a supplier of components for the iPhone and the iPad…
…Cook, worried about the critical supplier relationship, was opposed to suing Samsung. But Jobs had run out of patience, suspecting that Samsung was counting on the supplier relationship to shield it from retribution.
Apple filed suit in April 2011, and the conflagration soon spread to courts in Europe, Asia and Australia. When Apple won its blockbuster billion-dollar jury verdict against Samsung last August, it appeared that it might be able to achieve an outright ban on the offending products – which would have dramatically altered the smartphone competition.
But, as the Samsung vs. Apple trial runs down to an effective stalemate, Reuters’ opinion is that Apple is likely to settle. The fact that current CEO Tim Cook was never in favor of suing Samsung to begin with (and he has said on multiple occasions that he hates litigation) makes it even more likely that a settlement will take place.
As the article pointed out, Apple has moved swiftly to reduce reliance on its one-time ally, but it still has a lot tied up in displays, memory, storage, and, maybe most importantly, Ax processor manufacture.
Perhaps the legal battles have been overblown, as one source suggested:
“People play this stuff up because it shows a kind of drama, but the business reality is that the temperature isn’t that high,” said one attorney who has observed executives from both companies.
Another interesting tidbit on the genesis of the Apple-Samsung relationship: Expand Expanding Close
Sprint’s numbers are out, and it is anotherrecord quarter for iPhone sales with the No. 3 U.S. carrier announcing sales of 2.2 million units. Perhaps more importantly for the carrier: 38 percent of those purchases were to customers new to Sprint, which also counted a small loss for the quarter due to costs associated with Hurricane Sandy.
The 2.2 million figure is up from 1.8 million in the year-ago quarter and 1.5 million in the last quarter. We’re still trying to guesstimate the percentage of smartphones sold (Sprint says 89 percent of post-paid phone sales were smartphones), but we figure it to be close to Verizon’s 63 percent and AT&T’s 80+ percent.
With Apple having eliminated optical media from just about every product it makes, including the redesigned iMacs, Mac Minis, and Retina MacBook Pros, many readers will be considering whether they need to procure a separate external DVD reader for emergencies. Some folks store archives, have software installers, backups, or have vast movie collection on DVD – and then there is Blu-ray…
Apple’s remedy is the DVD SuperDrive that costs $79(well, $70/$50 used if you know where to shop). The SuperDrive is an Apple-quality product and can be used as a boot drive for many Macs that need to be upgraded or repaired via DVD.
But perhaps we can get a little more for our $80?
Steve Jobs viewed Blu-ray as a “bag of hurt” from the “mafia,” and Apple would frankly rather you stick to the iTunes ecosystem for video watching. But there are many nice Blu-ray titles out there, and iTunes’ compressed 1080p content still doesn’t come close the video and sound quality of Blu-ray. So, for those thinking of dropping $80 on a SuperDrive, we think we have a better option:
‘Radio Buy’ buttons, above, enlarged, put together from files, below
Having a look around our newly jailbroken iPads with iFunBox, we happened on a new set of files in the iPad Music.app. The files are called some variation of “radio button” with an icon that looks similar to the radio icon that used to be in iTunes for Mac (it was traded for a more prominent top location in iTunes 11 without the antenna tower). The iPad music app currently doesn’t have any radio functionality, so our first thought was that Apple would be adding an iTunes-like ‘traditional’ streaming radio to the iPad. Notably, jailbroken iPhones don’t contain these files in the Music app.
Today’s update includes some updates around the Caching Server to allow Mac Apps to cache locally. Time Machine service monitoring also becomes more robust, while Wiki Server now supports Macs with Retina displays. Apple also includes the ability to use Active Directory groups within Profile Manager and an improved Centralized Certificate management interface.
The fixes are in for Profile manager deleting apps, SSL errors causing setup failures, and some “timely” fixes for upgrading from Lion Server.
According to research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple overtook Samsung to become the No.1 phone vendor in the United States in Q4 2012. The report, released this evening, shows that Apple sold 17.7 million iPhones in the quarter against 16.8 million for Samsung and 4.7 million from No. 3 LG.
That’s not smartphones. That’s phones. Samsung has been the No. 1 vendor for phones in the U.S. for 5 years. Apple’s sold more than one out of every three phones in the quarter in the U.S., a feat made even more remarkable when taken with the fact that Samsung and LG sell a great deal of feature phones and very inexpensive low-end smartphones.
Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “We estimate Apple shipped 17.7 million mobile phones for a record 34 percent share of the United States market in the fourth quarter of 2012. This was up sharply from 12.8 million units shipped and 25 percent share in Q4 2011. Apple has become the number one mobile phone vendor by volume in the United States for the first time ever. Apple’s success has been driven by its popular ecosystem of iPhones and App Store, generous carrier subsidies, and extensive marketing around the new iPhone 5 model. Samsung shipped 16.8 million mobile phones in the United States, for 32 percent share, during Q4 2012. This was a good performance from Samsung, as its market share rose 5 points from 27 percent a year earlier, but it was not enough to hold off a surging Apple. Samsung had been the number one mobile phone vendor in the US since 2008, and it will surely be keen to recapture that title in 2013 by launching improved new models such as the rumored Galaxy S4.”
If you are like these guys (right) and don’t normally use a case on your iPhone, Twelvesouth has a product that might make you change your mind.
The new SurfacePad is a fine-stitched Corinthian Napa Leather ‘jacket’ enclosure for the iPhone that comes in three colors: Pop Red, Modern White, or Jet Black. The leather product has a stickie back that cleanly adheres to the back of the iPhone and can be removed and added hundreds of times, according to the makers of the popular Bookbook cases.
Twelvesouth probably best sums it up by saying, “Holding an iPhone wrapped with a SurfacePad feels like curling your fingers around the leather steering wheel of a luxury automobile.”
I had a chance to use the SurfacePad at an event last night, and I can confirm it is credit card thin. It feels great in the hand, taking the edge off the iPhone’s square corners. I’m normally one to go without a case on my iPhone (unless I want to give it to my drooly toddler, and then it gets a LifeProof case), but I’d seriously consider this one.
Perhaps the most impressive—out of all of the demo units they displayed— is the one that had been in normal use for three months and had a nice worn in leather feel. The SurfacePad jacket also can prop up an iPhone 4,4S and 5 for watching videos or FaceTiming.
Today, we took some time from Macworld to head over to the Leap offices in SoMa San Francisco and check out its latest builds of the device. More importantly, the software (which is the company’s secret sauce) that goes along with it.
The device turns on immediately, and you’ll only see two small red lights from the top. The device is very iPhone-like in design, as you’ve probably noticed.
The ability to pick up five fingers was there immediately, unlike in our developer demo, and the motion was fast enough to play games like fruit ninja without a hiccup. Here’s a quick three-minute demo:
The video probably can’t show you how responsive and accurate the device actually is, but it picks up and detects microscopic movements from all 10 fingers. The software parses the data so developers can incorporate the movement into their UIs with the SDK.
Leap is incredibly excited about working with developers, and we’re already seeing some great applications.
Check a video of the point cloud of raw data, below:
As per usual, 9to5mac is on the scene here in San Francisco for Macworld|iWorld 2013. We’ve got some exciting things lined up for this year and we’re looking forward to seeing what the Apple community has on offer. Our coverage starts tomorrow morning.
A quick pre-setup run through video of the main exhibition hall is below: Expand Expanding Close
On declining Mac numbers: Cook: “If you look at the previous year, our Mac sales were about 5.2M. The difference is 1.1… iMac were down by 700k units Y-O-Y…. There were limited weeks of ramping on these products (iMacs) during the quarter.” We left the quarter with significant constraints on iMacs. Our sales would have been significantly higher… Our channel inventory was down by over 100K units at the beginning of the quarter.
–Cook says market for PCs is weak… “we sold 23 million iPads, we obviously could have sold more than this because we could not build enough iPad minis to come into a demand balance… Im sure there was some cannibalization of Macs there.” If you look at our portables alone we were inline with IDC’s projections of market growth.
While not making enough iMacs for Christmas shopping was a significant and uncharacteristic operational misstep, it doesn’t account for the significant drop in Mac sales overall year-over-year and even sequentially. iMacs and desktops in general have been a declining component of the Mac market as MacBooks take over the space, so even a significant drop in iMac sales wouldn’t account for a 20-percent drop year-over-year and sequentially. Apple also released new Mac Minis and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros in the quarter, and the rest of the Mac lineup (including the Mac Pro) was updated just a few months before the quarter began.
Cook rationalized why Macs weren’t even flat and are “inline with IDC’s projections,” even though Macs have outgrown the market for something like 20 consecutive quarters previously.
Without a major hardware change or drastic price cuts, it is hard to imagine Apple having another 5 million Mac quarter. It would seem that, like iPods a few years ago, Macs have peaked. Apple’s iPods were cannibalized by iPhones.
The good news is that Apple is cannibalizing its own Mac growth (as well as overall PC growth) with its own high-margin iPads—and lots of them. In fact, Macs now represent significantly less than 15 percent of the total of combined numbers (below and corresponding revenues).
Here’s some incredibly interesting news from today’s iOS updateextravaganza: Apple today released iOS 6.1 (or, in Apple TV talk, 5.2) for an heretofore unknown Apple TV called “Apple TV 3,2”. You can download it here. Apple’s current Apple TV — version 3,1 — was updated to 1080p with a single-core A5 processor in March 2012.
On the conservative side, this may just be a new set of chips cobbled together to do the same thing as the current model. On the optimistic/speculative side, this could foreshadow a new hardware product coming up soon-ish. Perhaps one with a large LCD attached?
Update 1: We can compare some internal codes here which seem to point to bigger changes happening in Japan.
Update 2: Apple is apparently referring to an Apple TV model dubbed “J33I”, as noted by MacRumors. For comparison purposes, the third-generation Apple TV sported the “J33” codename. So, the “I” could suggest an international variation of the set-top box.
Ashton Kutcher called the starring role scary and seemed to have an appropriate amount of reverence for the subject matter. However, reviewers seemed to have mixed feelings at best about the movie.
But, overall, jOBS works. The lead actors are likable and appear to have put serious effort into getting the spirit of the characters right. The film looks (mostly) good aside from some of what could likely be ascribed to budgetary constraints. And though the director is a tad indulgent here and there, it doesn’t take away from the overall feeling of ‘decent’ that I came away with.
This isn’t going to be the canonical Steve Jobs biography movie. Honestly, Jobs was such a complex individual that I can’t see one ever being made. But, as an impressionist portrait of a specific period in his life, it’s successful. Don’t go into it looking for complete verisimilitude or whip-crack dialog and you should like it just fine.
My primary disappointment was in how shallow the film felt, given the extensive historical record. In the early days Jobs’ co-workers had to wrestle with a man who smelled bad, who cried often, who yelled constantly, who missed deadlines, who overspent his budget by millions. He did it in service of products we love and use daily, and yet his obsessions took a toll on those around him. It also inspired others to do the best work of their lives, pushing themselves further than they ever imagined they can go. There is great drama to be found in all that, but it is not to be found in the saccharine “jOBS.”
Kutcher says that he started a fruit-only diet to prepare to play the Apple co-founder for the biopic Jobs, which premiered Friday night at the Sundance Film Festival.
The diet, which the film claims Jobs adhered to, ended up sending Kutcher to the hospital with pancreas problems.
“First of all, the fruitarian diet can lead to like severe issues,” Kutcher said after the film’s screening. “I went to the hospital like two days before we started shooting the movie. I was like doubled over in pain.
“My pancreas levels were completely out of whack,” Kutcher added. “It was really terrifying … considering everything.[Jobs died as the result of Pancreatic Cancer]”
Fremont may sound familiar, because we recorded more than a few of the new iMacs originated from Fremont after the November launch. These iMacs were delivered via FedEx and had the ‘Assembled in the USA’ moniker not only on the package but also on the actual machines. It now appears that Apple is confirming these products are indeed being assembled in Fremont.
Quanta, it should be noted, has U.S. assembly plants in both California and Tennessee. Previous package slips and Origin labels below.
Jim Cramer. Entertainer, analyst, and stock market manipulation veteran. After Apple’s earnings today, he told viewers “Apple is no longer magical. It is like IBM or Johnson and Johnson…well maybe not that good.”
Is what he said about AAPL stock true? Doesn’t matter, because a lot of investors and analysts are listening…and acting. Even after record-breaking earnings, AAPL’s stock is way down.
Microsoft announced today that its 10.6-inch display Surface Pro would début a month later than planned with specs that resemble a MacBook Air rather than a tablet including its $899 price tag. What do you get for your $899? AnandTech compared the specs of the Surface RT and Pro with those of Apple’s iPad:
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The interesting part is that AnandTech (of all websites!) wasn’t allowed to give the speed of the Surface’s Core i5 processor (think slow). Keep in mind: AnandTech is the website that does paginated novels on CPU speed of devices alone.
A better Apple device comparison might be one that BGR made with Apple’s base model 11.6 MacBook Air (note that prices are wrong):
The $899 Surface price is the same price that Best Buy and Amazon are selling their MacBook Airs, according to our product pages. In fact, you can get a refurbished current-generation Air for $850 from the Apple Store. Or even better, you can get a new previous-generation MacBook Air for $699 (the same price as a 64GB iPad and a CPU that’s more likely on par with the speed of the Surface).
The tradeoffs: Microsoft Surface has a smaller 10.6 but a higher resolution 1080p display compared to the MacBook Air’s bigger 11.6 but 1,366-by-768 res. The Surface also has a SDXC card slot like Apple’s bigger MacBooks (you can also pick up a USB-SD Card adapter for $2.50). You can hook it up via USB in your vehicle, an extra that can be installed by any bodyshop or windshield replacement houston company. The keyboard of the Surface is a snap-attached flat keyboard versus the Air’s built-on laptop display that makes the Surface lighter and thinner compared to the MacBook Air’s superior text entry. Apple’s MacBook Air will net you an additional hour of battery life (at least), as well.
The biggest difference obviously with the Surface is that you can use gestures like a tablet. The utility of Windows 8’s hybrid of touch and traditional input has been disputed, to put it mildly, so it isn’t certain if this is a pro or con.
Let’s see how this product does in the market. If it is a success, perhaps Apple will decide to enable touch and removable keyboards on future MacBooks.
When it comes to the state of Apple Computer, everyone has an opinion.
And at the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo97 here today, the CEO of competitor Dell Computer added his voice to the chorus when asked what could be done to fix the Mac maker. His solution was a drastic one.
“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders,” Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives.
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