The iPhone 4S has a new digital assistant in it that understands speech. so you can talk to it like a person instead of trying to use buzz words like a machine. instead of stupid things like “command: dial number” you can just say “call my drug dealer” or “whats the weather like in Bangalore?” or “where can I hide a body“. No joke…
People are calling it Skynet (Terminator) but I see Siri as more of a HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey
Not cool enough for you? Microsoft is working on interactive holograms…
Don’t upgrade to iOS 5 on your iPad if you listen to Podcasts or Audiobooks.
Apple hid the Podcasts button in a “more” menu so you have to give an extra tap to get to them and the ability to control the speed (1/2x, 1x or 2x) is gone. Whats worse is that everything plays at 1/2 speed with no option to change it.
Issue not present in iOS for iPhone/iPod.
Please stop taking away features in new updates, Apple. hiding the podcasts in a menu that users are not allowed to rearrange (like they can on the iPod/iPhone) and taking away the speed feature, forcing all podcasts and audiobooks to play at half speed? Really, Apple?
Some users reported losing their email access as Apple formally launched iCloud, an online communications, media storage and backup service, on Wednesday.
Apple’s new operating system for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch — iOS 5 — also annoyed many users who encountered hours-long delays in downloading and installation.
Investors have high hopes for iCloud, which replaces MobileMe, a collection of Web-based products that have failed to impress critics or generate substantial revenues for a company that has had success in most other ventures over the past decade.
“It failed in a very nasty way in that mail sometimes vanished, sometimes appeared then vanished, and often there was a user and/or password-incorrect message plus some rather obscure additional error messages,” said David Farber, a professor of engineering and public policy with Carnegie Mellon University.
“The behavior suggests program problems,” added Farber, a well-known computer scientist.
But the iCloud problems are especially embarrassing for Apple, as the company introduced the new online service with much fanfare in June at its annual developer forum.
Co-founder Steve Jobs, who died last Wednesday, said “it just works” when he introduced the service in June. The software is key to the new iPhone 4S, which will be launched on Friday in seven countries.
Scrubber controls available are nothing like what’s in the iPad documentation PDF for ios5:
Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak reveals a lot in this interview, but his discomfort with Steve Jobs’ profit plan in the beginning days are specially interesting. Not only because it confirms the price hiking profit plan but because it shows that that was the whole idea from day 1.
“Steve had a background working in computer stores buying stuff cheap and selling it for a lot more. I was shocked when he told me how you could buy something for 6 cents knowing he could sell it for 60 bucks. He felt that was normal and right, and I sort of didn’t. How could you do that? I was not for ripping people off. But then we started Apple and I went with the best advice which is that you should make good profit in order to grow.”
It really illustrates how wealth can be created from thin air. Just like that. There’s nothing, and then some sharp mind comes along and turns it into something. and then a bigger something. and then a billion somethings. Pretty awesome.
Woz talks more about his non-profit state of mind vs Jobs’ profit-centric mindset, which is particularly interesting considering Woz was the one with the tech employment and Jobs’ was the one working with plants in a commune.
I never wanted to run a business. I had a perfect job for life at HP. I went to club meetings every week and I passed out my schematics for the Apple I, no copyright, nothing, just “Hey all you guys here is a cheap way to build a computer.” I would demo it on a TV set.
Then Steve Jobs came in from Oregon, and he saw what the club was about, and he saw the interest in my design. I had the only one that was really affordable. Our first idea was just to make printed circuit boards. We could make them for 20 dollars and sell them for 40 or something like that. I had given the schematics away. But Steve thought it could be a company.
This was actually our fifth product together. We always were 50-50 partners. We were best friends. We first did the blue boxes. The next one I did was I saw Pong at a bowling alley so I built my own Pong with 28 chips. I was at HP designing calculators. Steve saw Pong and ran down to Atari and showed it to them and they hired him. Whether thought he had participated in the design, I don’t know and I could not care less. They offered him a job and put him on the night shift. They said he doesn’t get along with people very well, he’s very independent minded. It rubbed against people. So they put him on the night shift alone.
Our next project was when Steve said that Nolan (Bushnell, head of Atari) wanted a one-player game with bricks that you hit out. He said we could get a lot of money if we could design it with very few chips. So we built that one and got paid by Atari.
I’m allegedly related to Nolan Bushnell, though I forget how the family tree works out in that regard since it was explained to me.
Woz was also asked about the legend that Steve Jobs cheated him out of some money in that first computer deal.
The legend is true. It didn’t matter to me. I had a job. Steve needed money to buy into the commune or something. So we made Breakout and it was a half-man-year job but we did it in four days and nights. It was a very clever design.
The next project we did together was we saw a guy using a big teletype machine that cost as much as a car hooked up to a modem dialing in to the Arpanet. You could get into 12 universities and log in as a guest and do things on a far-away computer. This was unbelievable to me. I knew you could call a local time-sharing company. But to get access to university computers was incredible. So I went home and designed one myself. I designed a video terminal that could go out over the modem to Stanford and then on to the Arpanet and bring up a list of university computers.
The far-away computers would talk in letters on my TV set. Instead of paddles and balls in Pong, I put in a character generator. The terminal was very inexpensively designed. We sold it to a company called Call Computer. They now had a cheap terminal. Steve and I split the money.
When the interviewer raised the seemingly odd partnership between the two Steve’s, Woz said they weren’t all that different in his mind.
We were very similar. We would hunt through stores in Berkeley looking for Dylan bootlegs. Steve was interested in computers, and he really wanted to find a way to build a computer out of these new devices called microprocessors. He thought that someday they could replace big computers and everyone could have their own computer relatively cheap. Steve had a background working in computer stores buying stuff cheap and selling it for a lot more. I was shocked when he told me how you could buy something for 6 cents knowing he could sell it for 60 bucks. He felt that was normal and right, and I sort of didn’t. How could you do that? I was not for ripping people off. But then we started Apple and I went with the best advice which is that you should make good profit in order to grow.
Steve was willing to jump right into that. Mike Markkula was the mentor who told Steve what his role would be in Apple, and told me mine. He was the mentor who taught us how to run a company. He’s very low-key. He stays out of the press and he’s not that well-known. But he saw the genius in Steve. The passion, the excitement, the kind of thinking that makes someone a success in the world. He saw that in Steve.
Mike Markkula had worked at Intel in engineering and marketing. He really believed in marketing. He decided that Apple would be a marketing driven company. He was introduced to us by Don Valentine. Don had come to the garage and I ran the Apple II through its paces and he said, “What is the market?” I said, “A million units.” He asked me why that was and I sad, “There’s a million ham radio operators and computers are bigger than ham radio.” We didn’t quite get the formula. Steve Jobs and I had no business experience. We had taken no business classes. We didn’t have savings accounts. We had no bank accounts. I paid cash at my apartment — I had to, because of bounced checks.
Woz left Apple in the mid 80s to start his own company but remained an Apple employee all these years and receives a salary of 200 bucks every two weeks.
It will never happen, but I would like to see him replace Tim Cook (Apple CEO) as the event host rolling out new products. Cook didn’t look like he’s into it or wanted to be there in that role in his first try while Steve Jobs was alive but recently resigned. Woz could do it and could breathe new life into it.
Mr. Jobs, the adopted son of a family in Palo Alto, Calif., was born on Feb. 24, 1955. A college dropout, he established his reputation early on as a tech innovator when at 21 years old, he and friend Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer Inc. in the Jobs family garage in 1976. Mr. Jobs chose the name, in part, because he was a Beatles fan and admired the group’s Apple records label.
I am glad he at least lived long enough to see The Beatles on iTunes. I thought it was silly that they made such a big deal out of it until I learned that it was a long struggling goal of Steve’s for many years and why.
Steve Jobs was Apple. He left Apple and Apple floundered. He came back in 1997 and made Apple boom. The company now produces $65.2 billion a year in revenue compared with $7.1 billion in its business year ending September 1997.
The prediction was just made on my Facebook that the Occupy Wall Street protest for socialism currently under way will probably include Steve Jobs memorializing since many of the protestors use and love his products. This would be wildly hypocritical.
I will be hugely insulted if those Occupy Wall Street protesters turn their anti-capitalism of rich people protest into a “oh, but not the one we deemed as being okay” addendum. fuck them. Steve Jobs spent his money better than any “Progressive” government has – and that includes his many donations to Progressive causes and candidates.
He made the products that hippies and hipster socialists use and love by the means that they protest: being non-union, utilizing corporate tax breaks and moving large operations overseas because it’s cheaper to manufacture and operate there.
His employees loved the hell out of him and he wasn’t evil and he wasn’t “greedy” just like the majority of the other CEOs and corporation founders who are responsible for the products and services we use and love.
Its because of people like them and non-“progressive” business practice like that that middle class income earners have the option of buying a hand held computer and telephone that can capture, store and send through the air high definition pictures and video all on a higher resolution screen than any television their parents ever owned growing up for $200 + a phone service contract.
It will be wildly hypocritical and insulting if anyone participating in the Occupy Wall Street protests publicly memorializes Steve Jobs. It would be nothing but flaunting their elitist douchebaggery. “we miss and love THIS billionaire whom we all benefitted from – but not the rest of you pigs! now join me, brothers and sisters in our fight to stop the next Steve Jobs from growing his business!”
Occupy Wall Street is a protest to prevent the Steve Jobs’ of the world from benefiting by serving humanity – which is what capitalism is. It’s the only philosophy that says (to quote myself):
Do what you want. do nothing if you want and the government won’t force you into action. but if you want nice things… you can’t just steal them from other people. if you want services from other people you can’t just force or enslave them – you must give them something they want to GET something you want. SO… if you want these wonderful advantages in life and if you want to be able to have the stuff and experiences your heart and mind desire: you can only do it by serving your fellow human being. Only by creating or providing something that someone wants can you amass wealth. Only by taking risks with your capital to make more of it can you become wealthy.
You have a choice. There are no guarantee’s except in your freedom to try.
Except when you DO try, you’ll find how true the wisdom of Yoda was:
Do. or do not. There is no “try”.
UPDATE: Judge Napolitano on Steve Jobs, Free Market Hero
Steve Jobs is dead. I’ve been archiving jokes and puns for months, but I dont feel like posting any of them now. in time. but for now: R.I.P and thanks for the amazing products and software I use every day to pursue my own dreams.
I’m unusually sad about this. Like, approaching tears welling up, legit-Sad. Not just “aw, that sucks. he was cool” thoughts of someone I didn’t know. I didn’t even think he was particularly “cool” even. I think i’m sad because of the unfairness of his death. Only 56 and was still chugging along so hard, creating new and wonderful things that help people like me create our own new and wonderful things. He wasn’t some retired CEO lounging in his billions. He was actively creating and innovating.
The Image above is the current splash page at Apple.com. The file for the picture is “t_hero.png”.
He’ll never get to see the next Pixar movie (he was a founding member of Pixar, if you don’t understand why I say that). He’ll never get to walk around in that one-of-a-kind space ship style new Apple campus being constructed in Cupertino. He won’t get to host any more Apple events (I might as well unsubscribe from the video podcast right now). He won’t get to hold the iPad 3 or 4 or 15 – but worse: His mind won’t have designed them.
Human beings can’t absorb the pain and sorrow of loss of people they don’t know or they would self destruct. We HAVE to have some kind of barrier when we hear about a shooting or an earthquake or the passing of some celebrity.
I’m terribly upset over the loss of Steve Jobs because he did life right and still got robbed.
He was responsible for a record of new and “magical” things that hundreds of millions of people got to enjoy and showed no sign of slowing down until literally weeks ago when his health forced such a slowing.
“Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives,” Apple’s board said in a statement. “The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.”
His family, in a separate statement, said Mr. Jobs “died peacefully today surrounded by his family…We know many of you will mourn with us, and we ask that you respect our privacy during our time of grief.”
..
In addition to laying the groundwork for the modern high-tech industry alongside other pioneers like Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison, Mr. Jobs proved the appeal of well-designed intuitive products over the sheer power of technology itself and shifted the way consumers interact with technology in an increasingly digital world.
Unlike those men, however, the most productive chapter in Mr. Jobs’ career occurred near the end of his life, when a nearly unbroken string of innovative and wildly successful products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad fundamentally changed the PC, electronics and digital media industries. The way he marketed and sold those products through savvy advertising campaigns and its retail stores, in the meanwhile, helped turn the company into a pop culture icon.
He turned fruit orchards into innovative technology that blew all our minds on a consistant basis. He was hard working, charitable, made countless lives better and he still got robbed by cancer. I’ve been teasing him and Apple hipsters just as much as anyone over the years, but damn. this is sad as fuck 🙁
Part of the reason, as many of you familiar with my world view and life aspirations may have guessed, that I’m so distraught over his death – even though it was known to be imminent – is that it’s a unique reminder of mortality. Everyone know’s they’ll die. I think I’m more conscious than most that my time is limited and that I could get incinerated in a plane crash or hit by a bus any day but that cant get in the way of attempting a full 90+ year plan on this earth. But Steve Jobs was hard at work doing big things and making billions at it and he still got robbed – not by a freak accident, but by a slow killing bottom feeder (which is why cancer is called that, btw: because it’s like a crab).
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960?s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
I am selling a 4 year old Apple laptop on eBay for a few hundred bucks less than the current one i’m looking to replace it with is. This Macbook Pro that I no longer use and had given to my parents will be traded in for a Macbook Air that I am ordering for them right now. I will spend about $300 on it, factoring in the sale of the Macbook Pro and they will be downgrading screen size (17 inch to 13 inch) and CD drive (Macbook Airs have none. which they don’t need) and will be upgrading the hard drive to a solid state one (no moving parts), getting an extra gig of memory, a bump in processor speed and an iSight camera in HD.
Another reminder that Apple users might be disproportionately hipster and douchey but Apple products also have a high resale value (compared with a 0 resale value of a Windows machine).
The rap on Microsoft is that they started out stealing from Apple and continue to look out their Windows onto the Apple orchard for things to take and implement into their own products. The worst and most obvious example is the Zune. I mean, comethefuckON Microsoft… MP3 players existed for a few years before the iPod and Microsoft didn’t want in until Apple revolutionized the market with something unique and game changing. Instead of entering with something also unique and game changing, the Zune was a straight up clone of the iPod complete with click wheel. Apple responded by immediately dropping the click wheel format, making it obsolete and punking Microsoft – a move siblings have been using for decades (“younger sister trying to copy you? completely change your style so all the things she bought to look like you no longer look like you. take THAT, bitch”).
But going back to the basics: isn’t it true that Microsoft stole the start of Apple and built a billion dollar corporation on it? For the answer, I turn to Hollywood. I skimmed the the made for tv movie The Pirates of Silicone Valley a few years ago and it appears to conclude that Steve Jobs got punked by a crafty Bill Gates.
Not all of these are steals. some of these things were just computer things that the Windows operating system made popular and then mac adopted. like how Microsoft “stole” the mouse. Apple didnt invent the computer mouse but no one used them in their hardware besides like…idk…NASA until apple started manufacturing them. Some in the list seem like stretches to label as stolen. like “control panel“. Apple had separate control panels, named as such, fist – then Microsoft stole the name and put them in one area – then Apple let Microsoft have the name and put their control panels into one System Preferences window. That’s marked as Apple stealing from Micro. and that’s a stretch.
Some might be valid steals that i guess that i didnt really think about before because i grew up using Windows first before i joined the cult of fruit but it still comes off as a little weak only because the features seem more common and not Microsoft-exclusive. Things you’d find in video game menu’s or software across all platforms or in Linux or in movies where they’re faking an operating system. but those are most likely Microsoft imitations as well, so it’s not really a valid argument. There is a Top 10 features Microsoft stole from Mac OS X too.
The recent copies are what I noticed, because Windows Vista came out right when I made the switch to using Apple for my main computing needs and I was just like “whoah… really??”
Steve Jobs is going to bulldoze a giant lot in Cupertino with ugly buildings and make it his new donut spaceship Headquarters with 80% landscape, including apricot orchards (i guess growing apples would have been too obvious/cliche?) and underground parking. Check it out.
I like that Apple is often called a cult and now they are building their new HQ to look like a Mothership that landed in the forest.
Apple interrupted my stream of Dexter from my laptop to television to let me know that an update for the device was available and I got excited thinking I was in for the awesomeness I’ve been waiting for: Apps on the AppleTV. FINALLY, Hulu, ABC video, news – and eventually games like Angry Birds where you use your iPhone or iPad as the controller will now make this $99 device a little black brick of bodaciousness.
Alas… it was some meaningless bug fix. DAMMIT Apple… what is taking you so long to make this device something noteworthy? what is the wisdom in letting GoogleTV upstage you with these features in new tvs while you lag behind only to be late comers? It makes no sense.
This dude on Macrumors.com summed it up better than I and it’s from a post that is not even responding to the current update of the AppleTV:
When the time is right? Yes, instead of offering an innovative and interesting new product with all kinds of potential 3rd party support and things to look forward to, let’s offer the same old product that didn’t sell before for a somewhat lower price, take away all internal storage so it’s even less useful in some areas, ignore ALL previous customer suggestions (say 1080p?) and hope it sells anyway. Then we’ll hint that SOME DAY maybe we’ll offer something useful or interesting to consumers IF we sell a whole boat load of them, which we won’t because it’s uninteresting and out of date just like the last version that didn’t sell for squat.
Sometimes I TRULY wonder how Steve ever got where he did. He’ll show all this innovation in some areas like the iPhone but then appear to be Forrest Gump when it comes to something that’s actually pretty simple like home theater products (i.e. offer the best quality and state of the art features for a reasonable price offering all the conveniences of the best products that already exist).
For example, if Apple TV had 1080p from the start, a DECENT sized hard drive (even if that meant making SLIGHTLY bigger to fit a 3.5″ hard drive; imagine THAT!?!) contained a DVR and Blu-Ray drive with support to convert them to be stored in iTunes automatically (like they do for CDs; a license would make this possible), had a front panel display that at least had a CLOCK on it (rather than just a little led light that does squat) and maybe even display title/artist information so you can see what’s playing music-wise when the TV is turned off and don’t have to wear out your projector bulb just to see a flipping album cover endlessly…or perhaps offer a cool visualizer to watch while you listen? What’s THAT?!? ), put in place the ability to add features like Netflix support, etc. as they become available (i.e. give the thing proper hardware assisted video decoding) and supported ALL the available formats so you can watch your home movies etc. without having to convert them to M4V and left provisions in place for gaming (and included a “remote” that could be used for gaming ala the “wii”) and offered it for around $500, MAYBE just MAYBE the thing would have actually SOLD because it would have the potential to replace most of the home theater gear out there (just add receiver and TV).
THAT is what it would take to be as innovative as an iPhone. Apple TV should be a general purpose computing device with slick controls that can be upgraded to do just about anything you’d want it to do, whether it be a DVR or a cookbook display for the TV in the kitchen/dining room. If it had the proper connections (e.g. input video as well as output it) and the right hardware inside (hardware assisted encoding/decoding) with enough room to store apps/videos/movies (1.5TB 3.5″ drives and larger are DIRT CHEAP for goodness sake!), it could do for TV what the iPhone did for smart phones. But no, some of those things MIGHT cannibalize iTunes music/movie sales, so we cannot include them! Never mind that we claim we do not make much profit from selling those sorts of things. We simply CANNOT offer a user-friendly do-everything type device because we want to sell SD 480p movies with low-quality video encoding and Dolby Pro Logic 2-channel sound to people that don’t think there is anything better….
This device just doesn’t do enough… It needs services from 3rd parties, it needs games, and it *should* just be open to the app store like the iPhone is and allow developers to build their own stuff for the device. Imagine calendars, weather, and other features made for the big screen, not to mention a Richardland TV channel option to stream directly to the living room and finally democratize tv.
After failing to meet the projected date for the latest release of Apples mobile operating system, the company has finally delivered a week later.
Apple plays Software Updates the way I play Just The Tip… they withhold even the basics for weeks, promising an upgrade, leaving our mouths to water with anticipation for something that should have been included on day one and then when we finally get it, its like a party instead of an anti-climactic let down. Well played, Jobs. I know the technique well…
FINALLY we can have the luxury of running more than one application at a time on the iPad (like listen to music and surf the web. I’m spelling it out for history to reflect how ridiculous it was that in 2010, a major electronics company actually released a wildly popular product that made you choose between tasks like listening to god damn music and browsing websites).
FINALLY I can make folders. Yes… the ability to make god damn folders on the iPad is one of the new features being rolled out today. This is pathetic.
