Macintosh
Today in Tech: Usage-based plans coming to broadband cable?
June 27, 2012: 12:10 PM ETBroadband companies shift to usage-based plans; Best Buy founder considers a buyout.
Sweeping effects as broadband moves to meters [THE NEW YORK TIMES]
Here in South Texas, Time Warner Cable customers have been given the online equivalent of a scale in the bathroom, a "usage tracker" that adds up all the household's Facebooking and YouTubing. Customers who sign up for a light plan of 5 gigabytes of broadband — that's the equivalent of two high-definition movie downloads — are rewarded with a $5 discount each month if they don't go over. If they do, they pay $1 for every additional gigabyte.
The many sides of Jack Dorsey [WIRED]
In addition to his full-time job as CEO and unofficial chief design officer of Square -- one of the Valley's hottest startups, which recently sought a valuation of $4 billion -- he also serves as executive chair of Twitter, which launched in 2006 by springboarding off his idea that brief sneezes of communication could deepen human interaction. As the driving force behind the two startup darlings—and as a man who is often mentioned as the spiritual successor to Steve Jobs -- Dorsey is in major demand by media bookers, angel investment prospects, and event organizers seeking edgy marquee names to engrave on trophies. (One recent honor: a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Tribeca Film Festival.)
Zynga gets physical [FORTUNE]
The San Francisco-based company has begun signing offline branding deals with everything from toy-makers to apparel retailers to television studios. It's unclear if the company hopes such efforts will generate significant revenue, but it certainly believes that its brands can have life beyond desktops and mobile devices.
On Orbitz, Mac users steered to pricier hotels [THE WALL STREET JOURNAL]
Orbitz Worldwide Inc has found that people who use Apple Inc.'s Mac computers spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see.
McAfee discovers $78 million worth of sophisticated cyber attacks against banking systems [THE VERGE]
Using a series of highly sophisticated cyber attacks to target high balance accounts, criminals have been able to successfully bypass physical "chip and pin" authentication and use server-based fraudulent transactions to steal money from a number of accounts in Europe. The attacks originated in Italy, using SpyEye and Zeus malware to transfer funds into fraudulent accounts.
Winamp's woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself [ARS TECHNICA]
"There's no reason that Winamp couldn't be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started immediately upon acquisition," Rob Lord, the first general manager of Winamp, and its first-ever hire, told Ars.
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The story behind Norman Seeff's iconic Steve Jobs photo
"We were two guys goofing off having fun," he recalls 28 years later
Ray Basile, who hung out in Norman Seeff's Laurel Canyon studio as a teenager and now writes a blog called iPhone Savior, has posted a long interview with the South African photographer whose portrait of Steve Jobs ended up on the cover of Time Magazine and the book jacket of Walter Isaacson's' biography.
Seeff, who had long career as MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 20, 2012 5:56 AM ETPosted in: Apple, iPhone Savior, Mac, Macintosh, PCs, Ray Basile, Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson, Whitney Houston -
Video: Gruber, Ihnatko and Snell on Apple after Steve Jobs
One of the most fascinating panels on the Macworld stage during last week's Macworld | iWorld expo in San Francisco was a conversion about "The State of Apple" among Macworld editor Jason Snell, Daring Fireball's John Gruber and Chicago Sun Times columnist Andy Ihnatko.
We've excerpted the part that interested us most: 5:40 about what happens to Apple (AAPL) without Steve Jobs at the helm.
Our favorite bit: Ihnatko on why more companies don't emulate Apple.
"When you try to MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jan 30, 2012 3:13 PM ETPosted in: Andy Ihnatko, Apple, Chicago Sun Times, Daring Fireball, Jason Snell, John Gruber, Macintosh, Macworld, Macworld | iWorld, Steve Jobs -
By how many billions is Wall Street low-balling Apple?
With Q1 earnings due next week, the Street and the bloggers are now $4.5 billion apart
Perhaps professional analysts are just more comfortable underestimating Apple (AAPL). Perhaps they're still smarting from last quarter, when their numbers (for once) came in too high. Perhaps they're suspicious of reports that suggest that Mac and iPhone and iPad sales have never been so strong.
For whatever reason, Wall Street's estimates for what everybody seems to agree MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jan 16, 2012 8:25 AM ETPosted in: Apple, Earnings per share, Earnings Smackdown, iPad, iPhone, Macintosh, Quarterly earnings, Wall Street -
For any Mac users who are still using Quicken ...
Intuit is finally offering hope that there will be a version that runs on OS X Lion
Five years after it issued its last version of Quicken for Apple's (AAPL) Macintosh line -- Quicken for Mac 2007 -- Intuit (INTU) offered this belated assurance Thursday to any users who haven't already switched.
Maybe management took at face value the pundits' repeated warnings -- 56 since 1995, according to the Mac Observer's count MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Dec 22, 2011 5:06 PM ET -
Video: Steve Jobs in 1980 on PCs as 'bicycles for the mind'
An excerpt from a pre-Macintosh presentation in which he formulates a favorite analogy
In Revolution in the Valley, Andy Hertzfeld tells the story of how Steve Jobs and Rod Holt tried to change the code name of the new computer they were building from "Macintosh" to "Bicycle."
Apple (AAPL) had recently taken out a two-page ad in Scientific American that quoted Jobs comparing personal computers to "bicycles for the mind," and Holt MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Dec 14, 2011 11:36 AM ETPosted in: Andy Hertzfeld, Apple, Bicycles, Computer Museum, Macintosh, PCs, Regis McKenna, Steve Jobs -
Artificial stupidity: Siri suffers a 5-hour outage
The downside of server-based voice activated computing
Apple's (AAPL) Siri, to paraphrase Alan Kay's comment about the original Macintosh, is the first voice-activated artificial intelligent assistant good enough to criticize.
Good enough, in fact, that Asymco's Horace Dediu has suggested that voice-activation might be the next revolutionary user interface, as disruptive for future computing devices as the mouse, the scroll wheel and the touchscreen were before it. In his Critical Path podcast Wednesday (Back to MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Nov 4, 2011 8:08 AM ETPosted in: AI, Alan Kay, Apple, artificial intelligence, Asymco, Horace Dediu, iPhone, iPhone 4S, Macintosh, Mobile, Siri, VentureBeat -
When Steve Met Bill: 'It was a kind of weird seduction visit'
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were the ultimate frenemies. Read about the roots of their relationship in this exclusive excerpt from Walter Isaacson's new book, Steve Jobs, which hits bookstores today.
FORTUNE -- The complex relationship between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs began in the late 1970s, when Microsoft was making most of its money writing software for the Apple II. When Jobs began developing the original Macintosh in the early MORE
Oct 24, 2011 12:01 AM ET -
Mac's share of Web traffic hits 13.7% in U.S., 6.45% worldwide
Net Applications shows a 25% increase in Apple's global desktop share in fiscal 2011
"Mac gets back-to-school bump" is the headline of a brief report Saturday in Net Applications' September survey. It notes that Apple's (AAPL) share of desktop usage, as measured by visits to its clients' websites from machines running OS X, rose 0.42 percentage points in September to a record (for Apple) of 6.45% worldwide and 13.7% in the MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Oct 1, 2011 8:16 AM ET -
Guess who generates more revenue, Apple or Microsoft?
Apologies to readers who complain that I lean too heavily on the work of Asymco's Horace Dediu, but this one was too good to resist.
As promised on his Critical Path podcast Wednesday, Dediu has begun comparing Apple (AAPL) in a systematic way to some of its peers, starting with Microsoft (MSFT). On Thursday he posted a pair of charts tracking Microsoft's revenue streams by segment and Apple's revenues by product over MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Sep 29, 2011 5:55 PM ET
