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This may be one of the fewest times when Microsoft has not told a fib. For years big brother Microsoft has been growing a reputation of lies and deceits, but today they seem to changing all of that (even if it’s just momentarily). Recently Microsoft has hired Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the ad agency behind the campaign pairing Bill Gates with Jerry Seinfeld, to recruit ‘unwitting subjects by posing as a market research firm studying laptop purchasing decisions’. It still tickles me pink to know that Microsoft would rather hire ‘dumb, computer illiterate’ people to help promote their products. It’s almost as if Microsoft is saying ‘If your dumb, then buy Windows. If your smart, go with Mac’, but we won’t get into that today.
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A clause in the Apple/developer agreement for the App Store, if enforced, could put a financial pinch on developers. Apple already gets 30% take of every sale made from its store. That means if an app sells for $10, the developer gets $7 and Apple gets $3, which is arguably a hefty share for basically being a distributor. Apple claims the fee includes advertising and access to Apple’s loyal user base, as well as an easy way for potential customers to find the developer.
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The stylish, ultraportable laptop features a chassis milled from a single piece of aluminum, a scalloped backlit keyboard, an edge-to-edge glass display, and a choice of onyx or pearl colors.
Written By: Fareed Warrad | March 16, 2009 | 04:48 PM EST
Dell (Dell) Adamo Laptop Less than an inch thick with a 13-inch screen, the Adamo supports three USB ports and an eSATA jack, which could be used for plugging in an external hard drive.
Everyone these days is taking note when it comes to design ingenious and beauty in regards to Apple’s products. Everyone including Dell, who just released it’s new Adamo Laptop, ts first stylish, high-end, ultraportable laptop that flexes the company’s design muscle against Apple’s MacBook Air. “Dell’s Adamo is aimed at the affluent PC buyer willing to trade style for horsepower and features found in more mainstream laptops. The system is unique for Dell because it’s clearly meant to appeal to people not interested in a low-cost business or consumer system, which is Dell’s typical offering.” Antone Gonsalves of InformationWeek said.
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Written By: Fareed Warrad | March 15, 2009 | 11:28 PM EST
I just read an article from CNET claiming that “Apple, the makers of the IPhone, have filed a set patents for a Wii-style wireless controller that looks to be made for the Apple TV and could be used for a number of applications.” The patent filing, including the image above, clearly shows an icon for Safari, as well as images that appear to be an iPhoto-like app.” CNET corpsonent Mat Hickey said in the article. He continued on stating “The filing, which describes a ‘remote wand for controlling the operations of a media system,’ specifically uses the Apple TV as a reference. Could this mean games on the device?”
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Originally Published: 03:00 PM EST
Proving once again that the best way to reach Americans’ brain is through their funny bone, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show continued his warpath aimed at irresponsible financial reporting by CNBC, specifically calling Jim Cramer out for his comments on how easy it was to profit from misinformation aimed at Apple.
Calling it “disingenuous at best and criminal at worst,” Stewart grilled Cramer, the host of the frantic energetic “Mad Money” entertainment show, for his act of being “doe-eyed innocent” while celebrating the admittedly illegal shenanigans of hedge fund managers.
Stewart played clips of Cramer describing — shortly before the iPhone was first announced — how hedge fund managers could spread lies about the product through either gullible or willing media sources, creating either fear or excitement that would distort the company’s stock, allowing the fund manager to profit.
Fomenting the market
In the clip filmed for The Street, Cramer notes that this practice of “fomenting the market” is “actually blatantly illegal, but when you have six days and your company may be in doubt because you are down, I think it is really important to foment.” Cramer specifically cited the example of stirring up rumors that Apple’s iPhone would be rejected by both AT&T and Verizon Wireless, and that it wouldn’t be ready to demonstrate in time for Macworld in 2007.
Apple’s stock performance leading up to the 2007 unveiling of the iPhone made it a prime candidate for foment and manipulation, as media figures spewing misinformation could easily cause temporary, panic-induced drops that manipulators could then use to profit dramatically from. Other companies, including Microsoft, had seen so little change in their stock price since the 2000 bubble popped that they simply couldn’t be manipulated as easily.
Fomenting the market against Apple, however, “is very easy, because the people who write about Apple want that story. And you can claim that it is credible because you spoke to someone at Apple, because Apple isn’t in [a position to comment on unannounced products]. It is an ideal short.”
Along with Apple, Cramer also cited RIM as a company that was easy to beat down with false information. “It might cost me $15 to $20 million to knock RIM down,” he said, ” but it would be fabulous because it would beleaguer all the moron longs [investing in RIM’s success].”
“Who cares about the fundamentals?” Cramer said, “Research in Motion just blew out the quarter. But look what people can do. That’s a fabulous thing. The great thing about the market is that it has nothing to do with the actual stocks.”
“It’s important to get people talking about it as if something is wrong with RIM. Then you would call the [Wall Street] Journal and talk to the bozo reporter on Research in Motion and you would feed that Palm has got a killer it is going to give. These are the things that you must do on a day like today. And if you are not doing it, maybe you shouldn’t be in the game.”
Cramer added, “I think it’s important for people to realize that the way that the market really works is to have that nexus of: hit the brokerage houses with a series of orders that can push it down, then leak it to the press, and then get it on CNBC; that’s also very important. And then you’ll have a vicious cycle down. It’s a pretty good game. It can be played for a percent or two.”
Cramer vs Cramer: The Street and CNBC
While playing a comical character on CNBC, Cramer’s articles and video clips on his own “The Street” website reveal an entirely different side. “When I watch that,” Steward said, “I can’t tell you how angry that makes me. Because what it says to me is you all know, you all know what’s going on [...] a game you know is going on but that you go on television as a financial network and pretend it isn’t happening.”
The Street’s War on Apple
Following the original iPhone pre-launch rumors Cramer talked about in The Street video clip, his site continued a merciless attack on the iPhone over the next year, including a “report” by Brett Arends which claimed that buying the iPhone would actually cost users $17,670, followed up by Arends’ lists of reason not to buy it, many provided directly by industry flacks working for competing companies.
Cramer himself floated a false story immediately after the iPhone’s launch that Apple’s wireless partner Cingular (later renamed as AT&T) would provide a year and a half of free mobile service for the iPhone. The story was picked up by blogs and widely publicized on syndication sites like Digg. A myth busting report on the scam noted, “Saying that Cingular will give away $1440 worth of free service to perhaps ten million subscribers in order to earn just $480 from them across two years is an insane prediction.”
The Street’s Scott Moritz also served as a willing accomplice in filing dubious reports aimed at nailing Apple’s stock, including the idea that Apple’s spectacular launch weekend was actually disappointing because the company had really intended to ship a million units within three days, citing unnamed “whisper” sources.
In reality, legitimate analysts had actually expected Apple to ship 150,000 to 350,000 iPhones at launch; Apple reported selling 270,000 in the last two days of June quarter which made up most of the launch weekend. However, Moritz described a bleak scenario where Apple had failed to sell out its inventory, despite very constrained availability of the iPhone at most of Apple’s 200 retail stores and many of AT&T’s outlets over the first month. Because of this supposed failure to launch, Moritz insisted, “There’s a lot of rejoicing at Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile.”
The Street would also frequently take factual reports and add a hysterical, frantically panicked spin, sometimes to directly bring the stock down and other times to create impossible expectations invented to cause a temporary bubble. One suggested that Apple’s AT&T revenue sharing deal was “unheard of,” despite the fact that similar revenue sharing had long been underlying RIM’s BlackBerry success. That provided Cramer with the timing to announce “I am being abject and adamant: Sell some Apple ahead of earnings.”
Never mind the iPhone 3G: Steve Jobs is sick!
Last year, the Street continued badgering Apple, brushing aside the global launch of the iPhone 3G to try to focus coverage on Steve Jobs’ health in a video segment titled “Without Steve Jobs, There is No Apple.”
“This is a company that thrives on innovation, and the innovation is all being driven by one man.” Cramer said of Apple. “That’s okay, the one man is not a stock. I mean, you can’t. The multiple of one person is zero. Well, one. But I would warn people that this company… I don’t want to call it nothing without him, but it is not investible without him, because he is the driver of ideas. Now behind anybody there’ll be other ideas, but I remember the original Apple, and it was all him, too.”
Cramer has largely been successful in spreading the meme that Apple is wholly dependent upon Jobs for its survival, but the idea that Apple’s success has all been flowing all from the veins of one man is as absurd as the idea that the original Apple of the early 1980s did, too. “Jobs was regarded as a pariah in the business community, a maverick that drove down profits to advance technology and the state of the art. Had Cramer been anything of note in the mid 80s, he would have been slamming Apple for not acting quicker to rid itself of Jobs,” a report on Cramer’s take noted.
Originally Published: 11:20 PM EST
The latest, most petit version of Apple’s iPod shuffle music player can be disassembled without major challenge, according to a new tear-down report, which notes that the player is compatible with third-party headphones if all you want to do is listen to music straight and not control playback or volume.
Apple’s third-generation shuffle was announced just yesterday with 4GB of storage and a new aluminum design that’s smaller than a AA battery. The controls, somewhat controversially, have been moved to the earbud cord, with VoiceOver speech technology for navigation.
The Apple teardown experts at iFixit have posted their first look at the new shuffle, observing that a single MacBook Pro 17″ weighs as much as 286 of the miniscule players. Even more tiny is the battery, about the size of a dime, with a 73 mAh capacity representing less than half the size of the power reservoirs used in previous shuffles. The weight of the entire shuffle is less than 11 grams, and the rear cover and clip by themselves weigh as much as the rest of the components.
As part of its examination, the iFixit team found the new third-generation shuffle isn’t compatible with the second generation dock, nor did the third-generation cable work with a second-generation iPod shuffle.
“Interestingly enough, normal headphones can still be used to listen to music,” the solutions provider says. “The only drawback: without Apple’s proprietary headphone playback control, you will not be able to change songs or adjust the volume.”
Before taking it apart, the technicians couldn’t resist placing the diminutive device into a police line-up for a size comparison against a quarter, nickel, dime, PEZ dispenser, SanDisk flash drive, and paper binder clip. While it’s not the row’s smallest suspect, the shuffle is certainly guilty of being significantly shorter than the dedicated flash drive and just slightly taller than the binder clip.
“We begin by inserting a metal spudger into a crevice between the rear cover and the rest of the shuffle,” iFixit wrote. “Inserting the metal spudger creates a gap big enough to insert an iPod opening tool.” Sliding the tool across the length of the gap dislodges the left side, then the same procedure is applied to the other side to pry the device open. Once inside, the team was impressed with the clean, simplified interior design (”Is this the future? A single IC, a battery, and some user interface components”).
With the outer casing removed, the electronics and battery weigh just four grams, or less than a single sheet of paper. While it’s a little bit of a challenge to separate the two halves, once inside there’s only one screw to remove.
iFixit noted the back aluminum cover is “fairly easy to bend,” recommending caution whenever dealing with that part. With the full shuffle taken apart, the CPU, RAM, and 4GB of flash memory can be seen on a multi-layered stack connected to the battery, while the headphone jack and shuffle switch come out as one unit. According to a stamp inside the casing, the device appears to have been built on March 3rd, meaning iFixit’s lucky shuffle had been assembled no more than nine days before being dismantled.
Below are all of the internals (”There are not many parts in this iPod”) laid out for comparison with a dime the iFixit team said they found inside (geek humor).
For the full disassembly guide, complete with additional details and photos, is available at iFixit’s website.