Bites from the Apple: Piper Down

May 15, 2009 · Posted in Apple

It’s now less than a month until Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which kicks off with the keynote address at 10am PDT on June 8 delivered by… Phil Schiller and a “team of Apple executives”. Thus, it looks like Steve Jobs is going to remain true to his word and stay away from work until his leave of absence officially ends at the end of June. So that’s one mystery solved with the bigger mystery of the next version of the iPhone still dangling in the wind. Earlier this week, the usually sane/reliable Apple analyst for Piper Jaffray, Gene Munster, took Schiller’s keynote announcement to mean that there would be no iPhone announcement and that the focus of the keynote and the conference would be on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. But, to quote the estimable John Gruber of Daring Fireball, “That’d be goofy.” As he points out:

(I)f there are any new hardware features — like say a video camera or magnetometer — that means new APIs, and if Apple wants to have WWDC sessions for the new hardware-specific APIs, they have to announce the hardware first.

And John Paczkowski over at All Things Digital reminds us that since Apple has pulled out of Macworld, WWDC is the only big event it has to unveil a major new release. My guess of what this may portend is that the new iPhone hardware is just going to receive some incremental bumps to its feature set (i.e., more memory, more imaging megapixels, etc.) and won’t get any new design overhaul (as was repoprted by Hard Mac this morning)–thusly placing more emphasis on the iPhone 3.0 software (which would rightly be the focus of a developer’s conference).

As for the new iPhone hardware, speculation is ramping up that there will be three models based on a snapped pic of Best Buy’s inventory system posted by Phone Arena (via Ars Technica among others), which shows three handsets labeled as “Project Charlie” coming from AT&T (most likely variations in memory size and color).

In other rumors, Hard Mac also claims that, as per Apple’s yearly refresh cycle, the iPod touch and iPod nano will get new models in September with both also tantalizingly getting cameras (since every mobile gadget that we carry today obviously needs a camera).
Amazon announced this week that it had created an iPhone-optimized rendering of its Kindle Store (seen at right) for easier browsing of books that you can wirelessly send to the Kindle for iPhone app (link opens iTunes). However, simply typing in the URL for amazon.com/kindlestore into Safari won’t get you there, as that opens up the full Amazon web page. Rather, searching for a title or selecting a category from the iPhone app’s How to Get Books section will open Safari to the appropriate iPhone-friendly template, or by using this iPhone-specific link (note that you’ll get a 404 error on any browser other than Safari on the iPhone).
This week Apple dropped the OS X 10.5.7 update, and if you found that it produced issues with external monitor resolutions, Andrew Bednarz over at The Apple Blog has some resolutions to your problem.
Tip of the week: controlling iTunes with just your keyboard from Macworld.
The SlingPlayer Mobile iPhone app is finally a reality, but it’s a $30 investment (on top of your initial Slingbox/catcher investment). And it only works when connected to a Wi-Fi network, as AT&T confirmed that it was behind the crippling of the app’s use of cellular 3G connectivity (unless you jailbreak your iPhone). For more on how good the app is, check out this hands-on review at Macworld
Apple and Microsoft continue to duke it out on the airwaves, with Microsoft’s latest Laptop Hunters ad (featuring a second Lauren)…

…followed up by Apple’s most direct response to date to the LH ads:
Microsoft also started going after Apple from another angle, with an ad featuring former Apprentice contestant Wes Moss pointing out that it costs $30,000 to fill the “latest” iPod (in this case, the large-capacity 120 GB iPod classic up with music and that the all-you-can-listen Zune Pass subscription (at $15 a month) for the Microsoft Zune player is the more economical way to go. As Dan Moren at Macworld notes, this uses some interesting accounting with each song purchased individually from the iTunes store (no album bundling) and nothing imported from your existing library of CDs. And the rub of the Zune Pass subscription model is that once you end the subscription, all of that music goes away unless you purchase those tracks and albums separately.
And finally… a very creative use of packing materials from Apple MacBook boxes–a chandelier dubbed the Styrolight, which won the Sustainable prize in Design Within Reach Austin’s M+D+F competition (via Cult of Mac).