Seth Weintraub

Updated 10am ET to reflect that Contractor is going after the seller

Gizmodo today runs a post by the guy who tried to sell one of Apple’s 5th Avenue Store Stairs on eBay. The eBay posting was taken down one day into bidding without a word about the circumstances.  Until now.

A year and a half ago, I was an Apple employee at the Fifth Ave flagship store. In that time, there was a silly, unfortunate accident. A woman came down the magnificent spiral staircase, and dropped a Snapple bottle…After bouncing once or twice, the bottle severely cracked one of the steps. Since these steps are so well engineered, the structural integrity of the step wasn’t compromised, but it was certainly a cosmetic problem. Later that month, four or five very big men came to replace the step with a new one. After they were finished, and the steps that were replaced were out on the curb, I left the store. Off the clock and in civilian clothes, I asked the contractors who were there on behalf of Seele, the manufacturer, if I could have a step. “It could be a collectible some day,” I said. They, of course, saw no problem with it, and even collectively helped me lift it into a vehicle. That is the story of how I came to be in possession of a step from the spiral staircase at Apple Fifth Ave.

First of all, a $10,000 stair that can be destroyed (as in needs to be replaced) by a Snapple bottle dropped from waist height may need some re-thinking.  That might be why Apple and the contractor would like this stair to be swept from existence.

Apple, who is obviously putting pressure on the contractor to get the stair (which is patented) back, could have just bought the thing at the “Buy-it-now” price of $2500.  The contractor also could have made the purchase and cut their losses.

Now, they’ve gathered more publicity and therefore bidders to the new auction, which by the way is at $6300 as we speak, much more than double the “Buy-it-now” price of the original auction.  

If Apple wants it back now, they are going to have to pony up

Jon Stokes at Ars has an interesting take on the iPad’s A4 processor.  He says it doesn’t have ARM’s next-generation Cortex A9 design which supports multicore processors.  Instead, he contends that it is a single-core ARM Cortex A8 design which is along the same lines as the current iPhone 3GS, iPod touch as well as the Palm Pre, Droid, etc.

As I watched the videos and read the reports of the iPad in action at the launch event, I was thoroughly convinced that the device was built on the out-of-order Cortex A9, possibly even a dual-core version. But it turns out that the the A4 is a 1GHz custom SoC with a single Cortex A8 core and a PowerVR SGX GPU. The fact that A4 uses a single A8 core hasn’t been made public, but I’ve heard from multiple sources who are certain for different reasons that this is indeed the case. (I wish I could be more specific, but I can’t.)

Stokes speculates that Apple’s performance gains are likely the results of the chopping off I/O and camera components from the design (other companies get these generic chips with everything in them).  He contends that the reason Apple hasn’t released any information on the A4 is because there is no “wow” factor to it. (10 hours of video on a bright 10-inch notwithstanding)

NVIDIA was the first to announce a high production ARM Cortex A9 based processor which should be getting put inside the Boxee Box from Dlink soon.

…seems to be a pretty good formula

Via @Jack

(I guess we’re assuming Lennon was balding)

Besides the iPhone being announced/released in 2007, we can get behind this image from Begeek (via Gizmodo).  Wonder where they found the bottom photo?

Rob Griffiths, the founder of our favorite Mac tips website, MacOShints.com is leaving  to join a company called Many Tricks.  Before he leaves, he drops his top ten favorite tips of all time, which we’ve pasted below.  Good luck to Rob and here’s to hoping Macworld can find a worthy successor. 

1. Run a screensaver as your desktop background: This one is still my all-time-favorite hint for showing off the power of OS X. It lets you run a screensaver as your desktop
   

Today, the Associated Press announced that they will be offering a paid subscription to their content for their readers with iPads, though the service may start out as a free app.  We’re not quite sure how this will differentiate itself from the free AP feeds that are already available on the Internet and wonder what the incentive would be to pay for a special AP app.

This will be one of the first moves for the news agency’s new AP Gateway division.

“AP Gateway will serve as the launching pad for new products and services from AP and other interested news publishers.”

The new applications for delivering content immediately will be available throughout the ecosystem of recently announced mobile reading devices such as the iPad. It has not been said yet how much this service would cost or if Apple will be taking its standard 30% cut of the profits. Currently the Associated Press offers a free push notification-based application on the iPhone App Store.

via MacObserver.

Parallels today announced an addition to their MacOSX Server virtualization lineup. Parallels Server 4.0 for Mac Bare Metal Edition allows you to run virtual machines on your XServe or Mac Pro without installing OSX Server on the machine first.  Older versions of Parallels Server for Mac ran on top of OSX.

The elimination of OS X as the primary OS cuts un-needed overhead, giving administrators the ability to add more virtual machines, including MacOSX Server.

More information here including a downloadable trial. 

Parallels Server 4.0 for Mac Bare Metal Edition is the first Parallels solution that can be installed and used on bare Apple hardware. Simple to install and simple to administer, Parallels Server 4.0 for Mac Bare Metal Edition is a cost-effective, fully supported server virtualization solution that is certified to run on bare Apple Xserve.

Simplicity. Savings. Scale.

With Parallels Server 4.0 for Mac Bare Metal Edition you can