Apple Archive

After back and forth rumors about the health of Apple's revered Steve Jobs way back in last year and the beginning of 2009, it turned out that he really did have some health problems: complications with his liver requiring a transplant. It was supposed that he'd return to Apple by the end of June, and now he's finally made his first public appearance since he first took his medical leave of absence earlier this year.

It just goes to show you how much people love Apple. Would anyone ever post an article about SanDisk's five worst products, or Toshiba's five worst products? We complain because we love, so stop yer whinin' fanboys. Wired compiled an entertaining list from the Apple rogue's gallery. I spent a few minutes trying to think of my own list of crummy Apple products, and I realized that they were mostly things that I hated not because they weren't good, but because they didn't live up to the hype, or my high expectations, or they were just too ahead of the curve. The QuickTake, mentioned by Wired, is a great example of that. Too early.

Apple has posted the responses to the FCC's questions on its website. "We are pleased to respond to the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau's inquiry dated July 31, 2009, requesting information regarding Apple's App Store and its application approval process." AT&T made a short statement too. Update: And Google too.

"Apple today released Hard Drive Firmware Update 2.0, addressing issues with certain hard drives on the latest MacBook Pros models. Apple had been reported last week to be working on the issue, which involves intermittent 'beeping' noises and occasional brief system freezes on machines using 500 GB, 7200 rpm hard drives."

Apple doesn't have a particularly healthy relationship with the press; it has sued websites for publishing information it didn't like, and has tried to keep information under wraps that a journalist tried to uncover via the Freedom of Information Act. Now, however, it has tried to prevent The Times from publishing an article about Steve Jobs.

"Tuesday's piece on Ninjawords was really about two stories. The small story is that of a clever $2 iPhone dictionary app, the developers of which removed 'objectionable' words from its dictionary so as to get it published in the App Store. The big story is about the App Store itself, and whether Apple's management is attempting to correct its course. Yesterday afternoon I received a thoughtful email from Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller regarding Ninjawords and the App Store, and I think it bodes well for both stories."

" is a terrific app - pretty much exactly what I've always wanted in an iPhone dictionary, and, yes, with both a better user experience and better dictionary content than the other low-cost dictionaries in the App Store. But Ninjawords for iPhone suffers one humiliating flaw: it omits all the words deemed "objectionable" by Apple's App Store reviewers, despite the fact that Ninjawords carries a 17+ rating. Apple censored an English dictionary. A dictionary. A reference book. For words contained in all reasonable dictionaries. For words contained in dictionaries that are used every day in elementary school libraries and classrooms."

Apple today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, is resigning from Apple's Board of Directors, a position he has held since August 2006. "Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, "Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple's Board."

Almost everything has a processor and/or memory chips these days, including keyboards. Apple's keyboards are no exception; they have 8Kb of flash memory, and 256 bytes of RAM. K. Chen has found a way to very easily install keyloggers and other possibly malicious code right inside these Apple keyboards (more here). Proof of concept code is here as well.

Michael Arrington didn't feel like joining my revolution (officially, at least) but he did decide he'd had enough, and claims that he's paying a termination fee and dropping his iPhone. He'll be using an Android handset instead from now on. TechCrunch has been the epicenter of griping about Apple's handling of the App Store, and I don't imagine that just because Arrington is leaving his iPhone behind that they'll quit covering the issue over there.

It's obvious that physical album sales would decline ever since the rise of iTunes and other online music stores, and who wants to buy an entire album of filler songs online when you can purchase the three or four songs from the album that you want? Apple and its associated record companies have noticed the large decline in online sales of entire albums, which have higher profit than individual tracks, so they're working on a new perk to spark people's interest in buying albums again. What's more is that these doubtful rumors that have been going around about Apple's tablet actually seem to have some truth to them.

The news just broke that Apple has rejected the official upcoming Google Voice application, and stopped distributing the third party "GV" application, an app that was previously authorized. Read on for a quick commentary, from the point of view of not an Apple or Google fangirl, but from someone who genuinely appreciates VoIP SIP (even if Google Voice itself is not VoIP, read on). For those who have read my blog over the years, would probably remember my VoIP-related rants since 2005. UPDATE: A more direct, more personal, reply from me to Apple and AT&T.

While Apple faced bad news today, it also faced some seriously good news. The company announced the financial results for the third quarter of the year, and they are - again - very good, despite the sorry state of the world economy and the PC industry. We can now also say who of the two analyst firms were correct.

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner provides an inside look at the frustration iPhone developers face from Apple when attempting to distribute their apps through the iPhone App Store. Determined to simply dump an HTML version of his book into UIWebView and offer two versions through the App Store, Wayner endures four months of inexplicable silences, mixed messages, and almost whimsical rejections from Apple -- the kind of frustration and uncertainty Wayner believes is fast transforming Apple's regulated marketplace into a hotbed of bottom-feeding mediocrity. 'Developers are afraid to risk serious development time on the platform as long as anonymous gatekeepers are able to delay projects by weeks and months with some seemingly random flick of a finger,' Wayner writes of his experience. 'It's one thing to delay a homebrew project like mine, but it's another thing to shut down a team of developers burning real cash. Apple should be worried when real programmers shrug off the rejections by saying, "It's just a hobby."'