The Apple Blog

Seems like I just posted about 3G iPhone. Actually, that’s because I did. It’s not my fault the internet is aflutter with iPhone love.

At any rate, this morning I was greeted by some interesting news regarding the 3G options found in the Beta 5 Firmware plist file. As you can see, the ability to turn 3G on or off is present — accompanied by the standard message about decreasing battery life for data speed.

From this random and very unverified blog post (via MacRumors):

Note that this is not fake, it is in the beta 5 .ipsw, but will normally not show up on an EDGE iPhone. Turning 3G on will just crash the phone if you use an EDGE phone. If you do not believe me, then decrypt the beta5 rootfs dmg, and see for yourself in /Applications/Preferences.app/Network.plist

So what does this mean, exactly?

It appears that the old Edge phones are going to run the same set of software as the new models when released. Unless there’s further implementation of features that expand upon the options for screen size, battery life optimization and other factors, it’s likely we may not see a drastic change in iPhone hardware in this next version.

If they both can run the same software and that software doesn’t account for a lot of differences, there might be some heavy depression in the camp of people that were expecting high end new features (like videocalls, believe it or not).

Nope, it’s starting to look like the device will simply be a bit lighter, look a bit different (for example, the all black cover rumors) and support 3G. This would be somewhat of a disappointment for me. I was hoping to see a fairly different phone. Now that I really give it some thought, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Apple has a winning model here, they need to tweak some things to broaden the market availability of the device. And… that’s about it. Other than 3G support, we don’t need to go too crazy with features that involve a lot more than simple software updates for this round.

Probably like most of you, I have been reading post after post and article after article about how the 3G iPhone is right around the corner because the Edge iPhone is listed as “currently unavailable” in the Store.

Of course, saying that this means our beloved iPhone won’t be making a return to the shelfs until the imminent release of the 3G version is pure speculation. It is also entirely possible and perhaps plausible.

As with any business where you update product lines with new models, it makes sense to start shortening the stock before the hype of a new release starts drastically hurting sales. In my opinion, this could very well be just a mismatch of timing on Apple’s part. It’s not logical to keep pumping out iPhones when there’s stock on the shelves that needs buying and a new (better) model is just around the corner.

The theory might also be evidenced by the fact that, according to this ARS Technica post, there were apparently some shortages of iPhones by UK reseller O2 earlier this week (although temporary). However, ARSt doesn’t think these developments are necessarily a rock-solid indication of new iPhones right away but admitted that “there is at least some circumstantial evidence that iPhones could be running out.”

Previously there have been temporary shipping setbacks of between 5 to 10 days on new orders — depending on where you’re reading. The good old physical world Apple Retail Stores seem to be doing OK with supplies though. I called 2 local stores here in South Florida and they both said they were perfectly fine on the iPhone front. Remember though, this is precisely the extra old shelf stock they should be liquidating.

Over at AppleInsider, the somewhat blunt opinion is that “most analysts and observers now estimate that Apple will only truly recover from the shortages with the launch of its next-generation iPhone, which is widely predicted to surface in June.”

Like I said before, this seems logical. Cut back on (or stop) production and sell out as much iPhone stock as possible to release the brand-spanking new version. The question is, did Apple just get the timing wrong and ran out in some markets a little prematurely or is iPhone 2.0 coming even sooner than expected?

Speaking of raising the bar on virtualization, the new upgrade for Parallels 3 includes support for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 along with a few needed performance improvements.

Yes I know, as hard as it is to stomach the fact that people use Windows on their stylish Macs, we can’t judge their circumstances.  My experience the Parallels has been overall decent in the past — as good as using Windows applications can be, of course.  I’ve also heard some good things about the upgrade including enhanced performance, faster SmartSelect, and the ability to define your favorite Shared Folders instead of using either all Mac disks or your Home Directory.

The 88MB upgrade (to version 3.0.5600) is a free download from the site if you’re already rocking Parallels.

VMware announced the latest beta of their flagship Mac virtualization tool on Tuesday and I’ve managed to put it through a number of paces with mostly positive results. All tests were performed on a 2.4GHz MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM running OS X 10.5.2. The VM was my Windows XP SP2 Boot Camp partition.

Video Gone Wild!

When I read that Fusion 2 would have full support for multiple monitors in both Unity and Full Screen modes I was skeptical at best. After installing Fusion 2 beta, I’m wondering how I lived without the functionality. In Unity mode (where Windows applications appear to be running side-by-side with Mac applications), you can drag PC application windows across all active Mac screens. It just works. This makes it much easier to bring windows where you need to for quicker operations.

Similarly, you have the option for Fusion 2 beta to use all active screens in Full Screen mode. The PC VMware virtual adapters automatically adjust to the appropriate resolution and configure Windows to extend your desktop across all screens. I only have one additional monitor, but it worked as described, including seamless integration with Spaces. I was able to Control-cursor across different Spaces with no ill effects. It’s hard to describe what it’s like having all that screen real estate back without rebooting.

I do not do much in Windows that requires intensive graphics, but I managed to use the enhanced DirectX 9.0 3D acceleration to play EVE Online (without premium graphics), which is something that I was not able to do before, but I also did not engage in any heavy battles or head into highly populated areas. I’ll try that with a trial account and report back if the functionality does not meet expectations.
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Today, Davaid Wantanabe announced that Yahoo has acquired the rights to his popular Inquisitor for Safari.

Congrats to David, and a big “what the heck?” to Yahoo. I honestly can’t imagine what Yahoo would want with a plugin for Safari.

It has long been a Safari-only plugin so with the acquisition of it on Yahoo’s end, I’m curious how it will expand. David has said he will not be joining Yahoo as an employee, but he will continue to be the lead developer of the Safari version.

Along with the acquisition announcement, version 3.1 of the plugin was released that “improves performance, simplifies the process for switching search providers, and removes affiliate links from the program”. In lieu of the acquisition, it’s obviously not a surprise that Yahoo is now the default search provider (though you can easily change that in the preferences).

Anyone care to venture as to what Yahoo might do with Inquisitor or how it will benefit them?

[Via Daring Fireball]

Remember those old Powerbook adapters? Do you also remember how they used to catch on fire? I didn’t experience it, personally. I did have a friend that swore his PowerBook adapter was out to get him — almost burning his house, car and office to the ground (on separate occasions).

A lot of people definitely did though, because in 2001 Apple recalled about 570,000 of those suckers. I remember when Apple first gave the announcement about the faulty adapters and I picked a replacement up for free just in case (and because, well, it was free).

If you’re one of those lucky few to experience some extra heat on your lap, you may be entitled to a refund. If your adapter “dangerously frays, sparks and prematurely fails to work” Apple has agreed to throw you $25 to $79 for your troubles.

This class-action suit was actually way back in 2006 and alleged that Apple misrepresented problems with the power adapters. I can’t help but think most people have moved on from their old PowerBook immolation issues by now.

Here at TAB we’re hard at work to try to bring you more quality articles and news, more often.

We’re looking to bring on a few new writers to write on a regular (multiple times a week) basis. If you genuinely have the availability to write frequently, we’d really like to hear from you.

These positions are paid positions and previous writing experience is required.

To apply for a spot, please email info at theappleblog dot com with examples of technology writing (preferably blog-type posts). Previous examples of technology related articles are a requirement.

If you go job hunting on Apple.com/jobs, and you live in Colorado, you’ll be greeted by a bit of a surprise - There’s a new store on the horizon!

Colorado Springs, CO is on the board for an Apple Retail Store. This should be a welcome addition to the retail outlets, as I recall while waiting in line for the Park Meadows store opening, that several people drove the 50 miles from Colorado Springs to be there. So congrats guys, there are shiny things headed your way.

I know, you (or, if you are a mom, someone) have procrastinated another Mother’s Day and you only have time to run to the store, or buy some software online. Well, here it is: the people at Chronos know your pain, and they just updated their iScrapbook software, ready for you to purchase (or at least download and try for 30 days to make sure she likes it) for only $50.

I gave this software a try, and while I am not a scrapbooker, most women I know are. The interface is very clean and intuitive. Contextual tools and tips pop up when you need them.

Obviously, you can edit all the different parts of your scrapbook pages and album, including photos, as you can see in the picture above. You can export the album to PDF or an iScrapbook file. You can export the pages to PDF, iScrapbook, JPG, TIFF, and PNG. It is too bad that it doesn’t integrate into iWeb or iPhoto. That would make it much more appealing.

To print the scrapbook pages, you can print them from your printer, or send them off. Chronos offers printing options from Costco, Pure Designs (in Idaho), and Scrapbooks to Share (located in Florida). They don’t have a deal with any of these online printers, though, so you would have to pay whatever additional fees would be required.

If making scrapbooks isn’t all you want to do, you can also submit your designs to Chronos and have other people download them and use them as templates for their scrapbooks. Very Web 2.0 of them.

All in all, I think this is a good program for a scrapbooker that wants to do things digitally. Besides, you’ve only got a couple days until Mother’s Day, so you better hurry up. You can see the scrapbook page that I made below.

Silicon Alley is reporting that you can now watch episodes of “The Office” and “30 Rock” on your iPhone. It is no secret that NBC is not a big fan of Apple and iTunes, having pulled their network shows from the iTunes Music Store last year. All you have to do to watch the episodes is go to NBC.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch (while on a wireless network, not EDGE), scroll down a bit to where it says “Watch Full Episodes” and pick your poison.

I would assume that this is a pilot to see if it is feasible to transfer their TV shows from flash on HULU.com to the QuickTime format that the iPhone and iPod Touch require. It sure would be nice if Apple allowed Flash on the iPhone.

The quality is pretty bad. While watching it, my wife said, “It looks like my contacts are all fogged over!” So, if you have nothing else to do, and you are somewhere around a wifi hotspot, it might be worth it to watch some super-low quality TV shows.

[via Alley Insider]

It’s the fourth TAB Weekly Podcast! We’re covering previous TAB articles as well as the iPhone, AppleTV as a gaming console, the iMac’s 10th birthday, and more!

As usual, I’m joined by Brian Warren.

You can listen to the podcast here in the player below or subscribe to the feed in iTunes. You can also subscribe directly to the our podcast feed.

We’d love to get your feedback on what you’d like to hear and if you have anything you’d like us to talk about or questions you’d like answered, we’ll be glad to put them in the show.

Coldplay, that rockin’ British band has a new CD coming out in June, and if you pre-order now, you can get the title track today and also receive an acoustic version of the song “Lovers in Japan.”

The single “Violet Hill,” which you can listen to on their website (if you aren’t one of the 2 million that already downloaded that song), was offered as a freebie last week by the band on their website (click here to get it, thanks Patrix!).

You can also buy it without DRM in the iTunes Music Store.

I don’t know about you, but I like the idea of these bigger bands releasing some of their music for free to get people into it. It is so frustrating to buy an album just to realize that you don’t like it.

Finish Line Ltd., in Chandler, AZ, opened today announcing an exclusive partnership with Apple and Nike where people can “come in and test run a Nike product, find a local running route and get completely hooked up into Nike+.” This is a concept store of the future, with high school kids that have been trained to not be lazy sales clerks. What? Actually, they have been trained to get everyone set up with a Nike+ shoe system.

It is marketed at the 16-17-year-old demographic, to see if they are “energized by this kind of shopping experience.”

Anybody live down in Arizona that wants to run by the store and see if it truly is a “store of the future” and report back?

[via The Arizona Republic]

Not your animal instinct, but the new Samsung Instinct, offered by Sprint. We will have some embedded video on Thursday hopefully, but until then, hit this link to go to Kansas City’s video site to see a side-by-side comparison of Apple and Sprint’s “find my location” features. The video is one of five that will be launched before the Instinct is launched, and will compare the two phones among their internet surfing speeds, capturing video, streaming TV, and downloading music.

The $100 million advertising campaign kicks off on Thursday on those hip, new video websites. TV ads are so passé. You would think that kind of change could have bought some better quality, even the YouTube iPhone commercials look better than this. It will be interesting to see if this $100 million budget is killed before by the rumored new features of the 3G iPhone, allegedly coming out in June, also. If it has GPS, 3G, and other great features (renting movies from the phone, anyone?), this could be a wasted advertising campaign. The Instinct will supposedly have live streaming TV as well, and I don’t think Uncle Steve will be throwing that in to his “One more thing…” part of the keynote.

The Instinct site starts with “Finally, an amazing touch-screen phone with the network to back it up.” So, from that it looks like Sprint is saying that the iPhone still rocks, but the network (AT&T) stinks. I don’t think many people will disagree with that statement. I know that I would buy an iPhone in a second if I could have it on a different network.

The other thing that gets me about this campaign is that it was probably created in Overland Park, KS, at Sprint Headquarters. That means that the coverage for Sprint in that area, where nearly everyone is on Sprint, is exceptional. The screenshot below shows AT&T’s coverage for Sprint Headquarters.

AT&T’s coverage viewer claims that they have “good” reception in this area which means

GOOD: The areas shown in the medium orange should be sufficient for on-street or in-the-open coverage, most in-vehicle coverage and possibly some in-building coverage. This AT&T owned network provides GSM, GPRS, and EDGE service.

Even with 3G, it would be hard for AT&T to have better times if they have “possibly some in-building coverage.” I wonder if Sprint thought about that and intentionally set it up for them to do better, or if the Sprint network really is that much better than the AT&T network. Both carriers don’t work at all in my basement. Anyone had any experience with both that would like to vouch for either one?

Many schools foot the bill to get good Macs into their teachers’ hands. Mac developers know this and there are many different educational apps that teachers and students can use to make learning better. Pass this review along to your educator friends and let them taste a little bit of the good life.

Overview

The tagline for Planbook is “Making one part of your day a little bit easier…” Planbook by Jeff Hellman is a digital planbook, and a little more.
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You’d think by now we’d have see everything when it comes to screen image capture software for OS X. While Apple provides basic functionality out-of-the-box there are a plethora of add-ons that vie for your ⌘-Shift attention. One of the more recent contenders is grabUp, a simple enhancement to ⌘+Shift+4 that takes the selected screen area, uploads it to grabUp servers and gives back a URL for the image. That’s it. No accounts, sign-up, registration, etc.

You enable grabUp via System Preferences and can choose whether it is available at login and also whether you wish to give up any remaining, precious menu bar space (their menu bar item provides access to your screen shot history):

(That shot is also available via their site: http://www.grabup.com/uploads/5951fc424b702c5c85508f847f989369.png)

Uploading is fairly speedy and providing the ability to turn off ⌘+Shift+4 hijacking makes it a complementary screen grab tool as opposed to a competitor. I should also note that it does keep a local copy of the image capture, just like an un-enhanced ⌘+Shift+4 would generate.

I’d really like to see Growl support added so you know when the upload is finished and the URL is available, but there is built-in visual feedback for this if you do enable the menu bar icon (it turns green while the image is uploading). There is also no mention of how long your images will be available, but they are hosting over 15,000 captures as of this post.

If you download grabUp and give it a try, drop a note in the comments. (And, before there is a deluge, readers should be aware that Skitch provides a similar bit of functionality, but you do need to register to make use of it).

• iMac Wireless Issue
• Leopard Only Apps
• $30 to read RSS feeds? Really?
• What app would you refuse to give up?
• Macbook to have aluminium casing?

I have been looking for some decent headphones for my iPhone for a while (I’m not a big fan of the white earbuds). I finally found the Rivet Stereo Headset made specially for iPhone and couldn’t resist.

First Impressions

My first impression after taking the headphones out of the package was “huh?” They are made to be worn like a lanyard around your neck, which takes some getting used to. At first, I thought it looked and felt pretty silly, but after some use I love them.

Have you ever needed to take your headphones off for a minute to hear someone? What do you do with them? With the lanyard, you just take them out of your ears and they stay put. When you’re ready to listen again, just pop them back into your ears and hit play.

Sound Quality

The Rivet Stereo Headset does a good job at isolating outside noise. You might think they were noise-canceling headphones if you didn’t know the price. With the excellent isolation comes deeper bass and richer sound. It’s quite different from the open earbuds that ship with the iPhone, and at first can make the sound quality seem low.

However, after listening to them for a while, you will notice that the sound quality is just as good, if not better, than the OEM headset that ships with the iPhone.

Durability

I’ve had my Rivet Stereo Headset for about 6 months now, and have worn them every day. The headset cord is wrapped in a woven fabric, not plastic like the OEM headset. After a while, this fabric gets worn and dingy. I think after about a year, I’ll have to buy a replacement just because they’ll be worn out physically. This is probably the only real drawback to the headset.

Personally, I can’t make it a year without replacing mine anyway. Just about every pair of in-ear headphones I’ve ever had gets pretty well used in a year. I wear them everywhere and all the time… to mow the grass, working out, sitting at Starbucks, etc.

Value

If you’ve been looking for a replacement headset for your iPhone, you know how expensive they can be. Good ones can cost upwards of $100. Some alternatives are coming onto the market, but I haven’t seen any with a lanyard design like the Rivet Headset.

They list for $39.99 but can be had from Amazon.com for only $26.62. That makes them a less expensive replacement than the OEM headphones, if (like me) you’ve done something to destroy your OEM headset (I washed mine).

I think they are an excellent replacement for the OEM headset, and a great value. You can find them at the Amazon link above, or on the manufacturer’s website.

Today, Times, the newspaper-like RSS feed reader, has been released.

A few days ago we gave you an in-depth preview of this application from Acrylic Apps and are excited to see it finally released.

Be sure to take a read through our review of the app and then go download the free trial.

Times is $30 for a single license and $75 for a 3-person family license.

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