Founder, Publisher and Editorial Director of the 9to5/Electrek/DroneDJ sites.
Seth Weintraub is an award-winning journalist and blogger who won back to back Neal Awards during his three plus years covering Apple and Google at IDG’s Computerworld from 2007–2010. Weintraub next covered all things Google for Fortune Magazine from 2010-2011 amassing a thick rolodex of Google contacts and love for Silicon Valley tech culture.
It turns out that his hobby 9to5Mac blog was always his favorite and in 2011 he went full time adding his Fortune Google followers to 9to5Google and adding the style and commerce component 9to5Toys gear and deals site. In 2013, Weintraub bought one of the Tesla’s first Model S EVs off the assembly line and so began his love affair with the Electric Vehicle and green energy which in 2014 turned into electrek.
In 2018, DroneDJ was born to cover the burgeoning world of drones and UAV’s led by China’s DJI.
From 1997-2007, Weintraub was a Global IT director and Web Developer for a number of companies with stints at multimedia and branding agencies in Paris, Los Angeles, New York, Sydney, Hong Kong, Madrid and London before becoming a publisher/blogger.
Seth received a bachelors degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California with a minor in Multimedia and Creative Technology in 1997. In 2004, he received a Masters from NYU’s Tisch School of the Art’s ITP program.
Hobbies: Weintraub is a licensed single engine private pilot, certified open water scuba diver and spent over a year traveling to 60 cities in 23 countries. Whatever free time exists is now guaranteed to his lovely wife and two amazing sons.
More at About.me. BI 2014 profile.
Tips: seth@9to5mac.com, or llsethj on Wickr/Skype or link at top of page.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozsPZ9C15xw&w=640&h=505]
What’s more fun than playing Quake 3 at full rez on your iPad? (Maybe using some more of those accelerometers as controls? )
Anyway, expect it to hit (the new improved iPad version of) Cydia later today and note that it works on 4.2. You can get support and the GPL code at Paduser. Via Giz
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Interesting new product available at T-Mobile Stores in the US. Are they just looking out for AT&T iPhone and iOS device users or is there something bigger coming? Remember it was just this week that T-Mobile started running its AT&T bashing ads in Apple’s ‘Get a Mac’ format. via Engadget.
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Another bit to the death of the Xserve story today. In the transition guide, Apple notes that the Mac Pros can handle 64GB of RAM. While OWC and others have been offering 64GB kits up for awhile, this is the first time Apple has said the Pros can handle this much RAM. They still don’t have the option on the store however.
Another reference below:
Well, Apple didn’t take long to replace its Xserve today. Noting the change in its Xserve transition documents (PDF), we headed over to the Apple Store and lo and behold, there is a new Mac Pro Server option that fits nicely where the Xserve now does.
It ships within a month and can be configured with 12 cores where the Xserve maxes out at 8. We’ve compared max out setups below:
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Wow. As of January 31st, the Xserve will be no more. After almost a decade (it was introduced in 2002), Apple will no longer have a rack mounable server product unless you consider things like MacMini Colo a rack mountable solution.
The Enterprise business really never took off for Apple and besides some brief notoriety for their G5 Supercomputers in the middle part of the decade, Apple’s Xserves never really stood out in the greater enterprise community. Although they looked good and were great machines, they were expensive for their performance.
This will be a big blow to the businesses that use Macs as servers, but like everything else, Apple likely sees these businesses moving to the cloud for their Apple server needs. Perhaps we’ll see a MobileMe Enterprise edition coming out of North Carolina?
On the hardware side, businesses that would have otherwise bought an Xserve will be forced into buying Mac Pros or Minis…unless Apple decides to license its Server software to someone else. But we’re not even sure there will be a new version of OSX Server.
Does this also put 10.7 Lion Server on the endangered species list?
All we can say is: RIP to the best looking 1U Rack mountable server out there. It was always especially interesting to open them up and see how Apple arranged those motherboards, hard drives and other equipment in two dimensions. :(
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From C-section via Techcrunch:
This sounds more like the iPhoto Apple had originally planned on releasing. iPhoto 9.1 supports Calendars once again and includes the fix that helped prevent photo deletion during import.
This update adds several new print product options to iPhoto ‚11. It also improves overall stability and addresses a number of other minor issues.
- Provides the ability to create and order calendars in iPhoto.
- Additional letterpress holiday greeting card themes are now available.
- Fixes an issue that prevented videos downloaded from MobileMe or Flickr from importing correctly into iPhoto events.
- The update is recommended for all users of iPhoto ‚11.
Hit the Software Update for the goods.
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Google’s Instant steaming search results just hit the iPhone and presumably other iOS devices. Up here in New York, we’re still without. Hit us in the comments if you’ve got the Instant.
BusinessInsider is reporting that Apple is building a new office to house its iAds team. iAds reps have been working out of Apple’s Citi building presence in Midtown but is looking to purchase or lease space around Union Square.
Apple is building a new office in Manhattan for its iAd mobile ads sales team, we’ve heard from multiple sources. We’ve heard Apple is going to set up shop near Union Square..
I don’t know about “building” a new office or whether it will just knock down a few walls and floors in an already built structure. Apple has certainly ramping up its headcount, advertising for 12 iAds jobs in NYC alone in the past 10 days (above).
Most big advertisers have a connection with New york and “Madison Avenue” and having local access to them is important. Google is rumored to have purchased a whole city block of Manhattan for its New York presence.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=787jqu1mUaA&w=640&h=385]
It is nice to see the Mac Version of Skype starting to gain feature parity with the Windows version. But this looks totally different than any Skype I’ve ever seen. It is all in one window and has the following new features:
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Whoops! It looks like Apple is well aware of some issues plaguing those awesome little MacBook Airs released last month. BGR has a new Apple Genius ninja whose been snapping screenshots of the internal Apple computers lately and grabbed this one:
To summarize what Apple won’t say publicly:
Update: They are back up. Nothing new we can tell. Strange to have such a long day outage.
More pricing changes coming? Germany, UK, France, Spain and others are down in Europe. Perhaps just a holiday season update. US store is still up as of this writing. UPDATE: The store’s back and seems to have been tweaked a little with the addition of graphic elements which were absent this morning. Some resellers say they expected price changes, but we can’t see any differences so far in checks. Perhaps it was a server upgrade? Got info? Share it below.
According to CNET, Lightpeek 10Gb Tx/Rx bus technology is on the way for a 2011 debut, likely in Apple’s Macintosh computeres.
But Apple is expected to back Light Peak, if past comments from Intel still hold. Shortly after its annual developer conference in 2009, Intel said that it had showed the technology to third parties, got feedback, then incorporated the feedback into the next design, adding, at that time, that “Apple is an innovating force in the industry.
Steve Jobs recently panned USB3 in an email saying that Intel didn’t directly support it in their chips. Intel will natively support Light Peak. Below is a video on Light Peak:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izNoF1SWtSg&w=640&h=385]
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http://s.wsj.net/media/swf/microPlayer.swf
“People looking for a light duty laptops should consider an iPad.” –Mossberg
Remember a lot of non-techies follow this guy’s advice.
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Some hackers have got Plex client working on the new iOS-based AppleTVs. That means if you have a Plex server running in your house you could theoretically play any Plex content on your AppleTV. Here are the simple instructions.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LriKSoDzZOI&w=640&h=390]
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Well that was quick! After a few glorious hours in the App Store, it looks like Skyfire has been removed. We’re not sure if it was early or did something wrong or what. It seemed like Apple was playing along…maybe it was a little too popular?
Update: Hilarious! Skyfire pulled the app because it was so popular that it was overpowering their Flash-> H.264 video converting servers. They’ll enable it after they add some capacity…perhaps there was more desire for Flash video than expected.
Yeah, developers get your apps ready…
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The hackers at the Wall St. Journal have discovered a security hole in the iOS version of the Paypal app which allows a hacker sitting between your iOS device and Paypal servers (most likely at an Internet Cafe type setting) to spoof the Paypal security certs. The PayPal app bewilderingly doesn’t check the validity of this certificate.
A hacker would need skill and luck to make use of the vulnerability, which only affects users of the iPhone app connecting over unsecured Wi-Fi networks. It doesn’t affect the company’s Android app or users of the PayPal.com website.
A pretty blatant oversight by a banking company, nonetheless. Here’s how it goes down:
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Oh, snap! As part of the Q&A in today’s announcement, FaceBook CEO Mark Zuckerberg fielded a question about a Facebook App coming to the iPad. His answer? “iPad is a computer, not a mobile device.”
That wouldn’t be so bad if some douchebags weren’t installing it on Android tablets as we speak.
Not a huge amount of excitement on this one but if you are thinking about trying to get your Apple device repaired and want to know Apple’s threshold on dead pixels, BGR found the details in the below screenshot:
Skyfire, the browser that lets you watch Flash videos/movies via H.264 transcription is now live on the Apple Store, one day early.
The downside? It is $2.99. D’oh!
That big Facebook announcement today? Yeah it is a smartphone update, but not a Facephone. Zuck took to the stage to announce some feature updates to the Android and iPhone Facebook apps, including the new Places, Groups and tagging features. It hasn’t hit our App Store yet (Update there it is!) but I’m sure you’ll let us know in the comments when it does, won’t you?
We’re hearing from developers that Apple is already approving some iOS 4.2 Apps that take advantage of Apple’s Game Center platform. For instance, Big Bad Sudoku Book is already available for download with iPad Game Center compatibility.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KmfXupi9cg&w=640&h=390]
It doesn’t look like T-Mobile is getting the iPhone anytime soon.
Also, if you want to video chat over 3G on the iPhone 4, your options include YahooIM, Fring and Tango… or jailbreaking.
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