The Macalope Weekly: No news is no news, MobileMe can’t have the car, and analysts say the darndest things

Posted on Nov. 7, ’08, 11:19 AM PT by The Macalope

Category | Macalope

That’s A Wrap, Everyone! See You In January!

The Macalope regrets to inform readers that Apple has announced that there will be no more Apple announcements for the year.

After this one.

Of course, it’s just two months until Macworld, so that’s not exactly a big hardship, is it? If you can’t go for two lousy months, you might need to check yourself into a 12-step program. The rumors had Apple announcing new iMacs and Mac minis, the latter of which is feeling “not so fresh.” The refresh speculation had followed speculation the mini would be summarily dropped, which always causes a great wailing and rending of garments.

AppleInsider then learned that an Apple representative told a miffed miniphile to “be patient”, which everyone is now parsing as “GLORIOUS MINI UPDATE COMING SOON! WILL INCLUDE LASERS AND FREE PIE!”

While the horny one believes the mini will continue to be with us in some form or another, color him brown and unimpressed with this news. Was “be patient” anywhere near “your call is important to us” and “stay on the line” in this conversation?

Apple VP Papermaster files court, er, papers

Posted on Nov. 7, ’08, 9:30 AM PT by Dan Moren

Category | Legal

Do not mess with the master of paper, friends. He will file his way into court so quick even The Flash gets dizzy. Firing back at the suit launched by IBM that the former employee violated his contract when he went to Apple, the company’s new senior vice president of devices hardware engineering Mark Papermaster said that he believed he was in the clear.

IBM says that the executive’s contract contained a non-compete clause and that his acceptance of employment at Apple constituted competition. Papermaster maintains that Apple and IBM are not competitors, and that his knowledge of IBM trade secrets is irrelevant, since he will be working on the iPod and iPhone.

“To the best of my knowledge, IBM does not design, manufacture or market consumer electronic products,” said Mark Papermaster, in a court document filed Thursday. “Instead, IBM focuses on high-performance business systems such as information technology infrastructure, servers and information storage products, and operating systems software,” Papermaster noted.

[…]

“I do not recall a single instance of Apple being described as a competitor of IBM during my entire tenure at IBM,” Papermaster stated.

Big Blue is asking the court to prevent Papermaster from working at Apple, so it’ll be up to a judge to decide whether the claim has merit. Now, we’re certainly not legal scholars here, but we’re pretty sure that Papermaster will come on top in the ensuing contest—unless, of course, IBM throws scissors.

10-K roundup: Employees and Mac sales get a boost and guess the executive’s age!

Posted on Nov. 7, ’08, 8:33 AM PT by Dan Moren

Category | Business

We brought you news yesterday on some of the risk factors Apple sees in the year going forward, gleaned from the densely informative 10-K form that they filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Of course, that’s hardly the only diamond in the 100-page rough, so here’s a round-up of other interesting details that have been extracted.

First up, Apple has apparently staffed up considerably in the last year, going from 21,600 full time employees to 32,000, an increase of 48%. Most of Apple’s employees work in retail and the company opened 50 new stores in 2008—between that and adding employees to existing store, it accounts for about 8,000 of those 10,800 new employees.

The second figure was a staggering increase in the number of Mac sales, which rose by 2.7 million units from 2007 to 2008, a rate of 38% in both units and net sales. Apple sold 9.715 million Macs in 2008 and, as TMO points out, the $14.2 billion in Mac sales trumped Apple’s total revenue of $13.93 billion in 2005. That’s quite a jump in just three short years.

As Infinite Loop reports, a special note was added towards the end of the 10-K spelling out Apple’s arrangement with outgoing senior VP Tony Fadell, whose title is now Special Advisor to the CEO. Fadell will continue to draw a $300,000/year salary and pull down benefits through March 24th, 2010 (Mac OS X’s 9th birthday, coincidentally?). While Fadell will lose 155,000 shares of unvested stocks, he’ll get 77,500 restricted shares that vest in full on March 24th, 2010—as long as he continues to work with the company. He also agrees not solicit Apple employees with employment offers for a year after he leaves the company, making me wonder if maybe Tony plans on striking out on his own.

Finally, a little game for you. The 10-K lists not only all the members of Apple’s executive team, but their ages as well. See if you can match the exec with the age (answers provided after the jump).

Patent filing suggests Apple ‘eyePod’

Posted on Nov. 7, ’08, 7:28 AM PT by Aayush Arya

Category | Apple » Speculation

A recently uncovered patent, filed by Apple in February, reveals that they may be working on a wearable display that can simulate the experience of being in a virtual environment with the help of intelligent sensors. Apparently, these sensors will be able to detect movements of the head and even the eye, adapting the video accordingly to make the wearer feel like he’s actually in a real environment.

Of course, it is entirely possible (and highly probable) that, like most Apple patents, this idea will never actually see the light of day. The invention of this idea has been credited in part to Tony Fadell, the father of the iPod and, up until recently, Apple’s senior vice president of the iPod division.

Although not quite as sophisticated as the patent suggests, wearable displays have existed for quite a while now (the Myvu and iWear series are good examples) but all of them offer too little for too much. The display resolution is low, the designs awkward, and the prices sky high.

I really love the concept though and if Apple were to make such a device, I would be first in line to lay my hands on one of these things. What do you think?

[Via Electronista]

WPA has been partially cracked

Posted on Nov. 7, ’08, 6:14 AM PT by Derik DeLong

Category | Security

When using wireless technology, security is important. Anybody can observe the traffic between your computer and your router. The only thing keeping your data private (unless otherwise guarded by something like SSL) is the encryption you’ve set up on your router. WEP is about as strong as a wet tissue. We’ve relied on WPA being strong to keep our data safe.

It turns out that dependent upon how you’ve configured the WPA you use, it may not be as safe as you thought. Researchers have found a way to crack into a WPA with TKIP connection. For now, it only allows the hacker to read the data coming out of the router. In 12-15 minutes, the researchers can collect enough data to gain access.

For now, if you’ve got the equipment for it, you should configure your router to use WPA2 with AES. This latest crack doesn’t work in that configuration as it seems to rely on weakness in TKIP. More details will be revealed at PacSec next week.

FunctionFlip flips off (and on) function keys

Posted on Nov. 6, ’08, 1:27 PM PT by Dan Moren

Category | Software

I love when I come across a solution to a problem I’ve only just encountered. With my brand new aluminum MacBook in hand, I found myself confronted by an unfamiliar row of special function keys, which Apple’s rearranged and reassigned a couple of times since my original MacBook. Since every F-key now has a special function, it meant that I couldn’t use my F8 shortcut to summon my drop-down Terminal window without either hitting Fn-F8 or inverting the entire set of function keys—it’s an all-or-nothing proposition.

Enter Kevin Gessner’s FunctionFlip, which I learned of courtesy my colleague Dan Frakes. FunctionFlip is a preference pane that lets you choose exactly which F-keys you want to flip. So I can leave most of them with the hardware functions, but since I rarely adjust the ambient keyboard lighting (ooh, how I love the ambient keyboard lighting), I can re-assign those keys as shortcuts, letting me keep my Visor hotkey on F6.

Best of all, FunctionFlip is free and works with pretty much any Mac, though you’ll have to tell it which keyboard you’re using so it can get its bearings.

Use an iBook as a night light

Posted on Nov. 6, ’08, 10:59 AM PT by Cyrus Farivar

Category | Geekery

My fiancée is still rockin’ an iBook G3, so I’m not sure why you couldn’t spruce up an iBook G4 for something beyond an art project, but no matter. As art projects go, this one is pretty swank.

Uruguayan Mac lover “yosoyelger” recently made this neat lamp as a birthday gift for his girlfriend using the “carcass” of an iBook G4 (more pictures of the lamp are on his Flickr account). Hrm, maybe we should start taking up a site to repurpose old Apple hardware, instead of just leaving it by the side of the road?

[via Gizmodo]

Apple’s 10-K notes ‘risk factors’

Posted on Nov. 6, ’08, 10:42 AM PT by Cyrus Farivar

Category | Money

It’s that time of year again: Apple has filed its annual 10-K report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The required report on Apple’s business activities, as expected, outlines lots of fun and thrilling info about Apple’s financial activities. Boring, right? Wrong: the 10-K is pretty much the only public document that companies have to release in which they have to come clean about almost everything.

Among the items required are “Risk Factors”. So what’s Apple afraid of this year? Here’s a few:

- “Economic conditions could materially adversely affect the Company.”
- “The matters relating to the Company’s past stock option practices and the restatement of the Company’s consolidated financial statements may result in additional litigation. “
- “Future operating results depend upon the Company’s ability to obtain key components including, but not limited to microprocessors, NAND flash memory, DRAM and LCDs at favorable prices and in sufficient quantities. “
- “At present, the Company is vigorously defending more than 21 patent infringement cases, 13 of which were filed during fiscal 2008, and several pending claims are in various stages of evaluation.”
- “In certain countries, including the U.S., the Company relies on a single cellular network carrier to provide service for iPhone. “
- “Political events, war, terrorism, public health issues, natural disasters and other circumstances could materially adversely affect the Company. “
- “Unfavorable results of legal proceedings could materially adversely affect the Company.”
- “The Company is exposed to credit risk on its accounts receivable and prepayments related to long-term supply agreements. This risk is heightened during periods when economic conditions worsen.”

Now there’s no reason to panic just yet—likely a lot of these are just to cover the company’s posterior—but still, things to keep in mind.

[via Apple 2.0]

Yahoo regrets Microsoft breakup, wants to get back together

Posted on Nov. 6, ’08, 9:41 AM PT by Dan Moren

Category | Money

Somebody should tell Jerry Yang that it’s not seemly to reek of desperation. Earlier this year, the Yahoo CEO appeared to be pretty adamant that his company would not be sold to Microsoft. Redmond had rifled $44.6 billion in the Y!’s direction, a deal that Yahoo soundly rejected.

Unfortunately, things haven’t been going well for YMCA in the meantime. The company had secured an ad deal with search rival Google, but unfortunately, the agreement fell through after the Department of Justice raised antitrust concerns and Google decided it was best to leave.

Now, Yang’s changed his tune on an acquisition by Microsoft. That tune? The Jackson Five classic “I Want You Back.”

“To this day I would say that the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo,” Yang said during a keynote appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Come on, Microsoft. I know there were some harsh things said. You didn’t like my broccoli casserole, and I may have called your mother an overbearing battleaxe. And sure, when things fell through, I fled right into the arms of your worst enemy, who ultimately dumped me like a carton of two week old milk. But those are all behind us now! We can still be together.

Microsoft, for its part, is still smarting after Yahoo’s out-and-out rejection. At a recent event, when asked about the possibility of a merger, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was heard to sniff only “Yeah, who?”

Will two of the tech industry’s biggest darlings give it another shot? Will it end in wedding bells or tears and recriminations? Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of Desperate Corporations.

MobileMe blog is on a totally different cloud

Posted on Nov. 6, ’08, 8:27 AM PT by Dan Moren

Category | Internet

Ever wondered what that “IMAP” business in your email client was all about? Well, lucky for you, Apple’s using its public mouthpiece at the MobileMe blog to let you know all the gory details:

There aren’t many industry acronyms it helps to know about, but IMAP is one of them. The words the letters stand for, Internet Message Access Protocol, don’t exactly cause the heart to leap, but the protocol itself defines a promise that matters a lot to anyone who handles their mail from more than one location.

Is it just me or is the MobileMe blog is getting increasingly odd? Posts pop up at seemingly random, as though some engineer somewhere is slapping his head and saying “Oh, crap. I forgot to write a post for that blog?”, then digs through Wikipedia to find something to write about. This from one of the few places on the Web where Apple actually communicates directly with its customers—customers who pay $99 a year, no less. Nothing about the service having issues on Monday? Or other issues? You mean to tell me that MobileMe is working perfectly smoothly right now? In the immortal words of Messrs. Campbell and Algar: “cha, right.”

Anyway, this is just my way of saying: gee, thanks, Apple. I can’t wait to see your rendition of how a bill becomes a law.