From 27-May-09 through 08-Sep-09, any Mac purchased with an education discount comes with a rebate for up to $229 - the cost of an 8 GB iPod touch. If eligible customers want an iPod nano, classic, or shuffle instead, they will be granted a rebate for the corresponding purchase price.
Psystar, the company that has been selling Mac OS-based computers, has filed for bankruptcy protection, citing the economic climate and increased component costs. Apple's lawsuit over copyright against the resilient company is put on hold during the bankruptcy proceedings.
Artist Jorge Colombo designed the cover for this week's New Yorker magazine using nothing but his iPhone and the painting app Brushes. Thanks to the help of Brushes Viewer, an app that captures and replays each mark made in Brushes, you can watch the cover image being drawn, step by step.
Come on, Apple, this is getting ridiculous. Eucalyptus is an app that allows users to download free ebooks from the Internet, specifically from the venerable Project Gutenberg. To reject the app entirely purely because it could be used to access what you consider naughty bits from the Internet is indefensible - Mobile Safari is just as culpable in that scenario.
Shawn King was curious about our coverage of the possible GPS accuracy problems, so Adam joined him on the Your Mac Life radio show to talk about how the problem came about and how it might be solved. Toward the end, the conversation turned slightly into issues of privacy, due to the mistaken impression some people have that they can be tracked by GPS satellites.
Skyhook Wireless, developers of the XPS positioning system, is reporting that LBS (location based service) iPhone apps are, on average, four times less expensive than their Blackberry counterparts. Location-aware apps in the Blackberry App World average $13.60 a pop, while the average price of LBS apps in the iTunes App Store is only $3.60. While the two marketplaces are separate, and different pricing trends are to be expected, this kind of discrepancy might be enough to encourage some to consider changing teams.
The Palm Pre, potentially the only serious competitor to Apple's iPhone, will be available 06-Jun-09 for $299. (Palm and Sprint are advertising the price as "starting at $199," but that price includes a $100 mail-in rebate. Buyers must pay $299 to get the phone and sign up for a two-year service plan, which must include an unlimited data option.) Sprint is the exclusive carrier in the United States, the Pre's only market at launch. Will people line up for the Pre as they did for the iPhone? Coming two days before WWDC, all eyes will be on Palm and Apple.
TUAW is reporting on a phishing scam disguised as a renewal notification from MobileMe. The scam comes in the form of an email message claiming that the user's account's credit card information is incorrect and must be updated before renewal. Moral of the story? Never, ever, click a link or button in an email message asking for financial or personal information.
Been hearing about the new computational search engine WolframAlpha, but aren't exactly sure what it's all about? Peter Cohen at Macworld has the skinny on the latest development in the world of search.
"Think Different" isn't just a marketing term. Apple's success since Steve Jobs returned to the company (and when he first headed it before being ousted) is due to the fact that Apple doesn't play by other companies' rules, but instead makes up its own.
Apple has announced that attendees at the Worldwide Developers Conference in early June will receive "a final Developer Preview release" of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. That implies that Snow Leopard will ship for the rest of us later in the year - anyone want to bet on October, given past release dates?
Wired.com's Brian X. Chen reports on a potentially dangerous default Bluetooth setting found on Apple notebooks. The setting enables a Bluetooth device to wake a machine even if its lid is closed. For a user packing a MacBook and Bluetooth mouse into the same satchel, this default could result in an overheated disaster.
Sick of hunting for Wi-Fi whenever you're out and need to get online? New York Times columnist David Pogue has the skinny on the Novatel MiFi 2200, a portable Wi-Fi hotspot that gets its Internet connectivity via Verizon's 3G cellular data network. It could be a great tool for frequent travelers, but beware the bandwidth charges if you need to transfer a lot of data.
In not altogether surprising news, Apple has announced that all newly developed iPhone apps must be compatible with the beta version of the iPhone OS 3.0. In an email to developers, Apple stated that new apps would be tested on the iPhone OS 3.0, and that current apps must be updated to be compatible or will be removed from the App Store after the release of iPhone OS 3.0.
Is the Kindle DX a ho-hum revision to Amazon's ebook reading device, or does its larger screen size and support for PDF make it more compelling than the previous models? Adam comes down on the side of "more compelling," although he also thinks that a color screen would be a boon for magazines and textbooks.