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.
Here is new look on a nine month old iPhone. A Chinese parts manufacturer offers up a kit to replace those iPhone glass panels with transparent ones. Click below to see the finished project and twice click on images for full sized glory. Downsides include possible “less than Gorilla” glass strength and transparent glass letting in light for degraded picture quality (same issue with orig. white iPhone 4).
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According to SAI and Asymco’s tweets (follow!) this morning, Tim Cook in an interview with Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi had some enlightening information on how Apple sees the future of the iPhone.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but Apple has stopped production of the original iPads and cut of supplies to the channel. We are getting reports that global retailers are no longer able to get their hands on iPads. We’ve been told that this indicates Apple have halted production of 1st gen iPads and ceased shipments.
MB292LL/A – iPad 16GB WiFi – Constrained – No ETA
MB293LL/A – iPad 32GB WiFi – Constrained – No ETA
MB294LL/A – iPad 64GB WiFi – Constrained – No ETA
MC349LL/A – iPad 16GB 3G – Constrained – No ETA
MC496LL/A – iPad 32GB 3G – Constrained – No ETA
MC497LL/A – iPad 64GB 3G – Constrained – No ETA
The retailers we’ve talked to say that they only have what is currently on the shelves and could be sold out today or tomorrow – which sounds exactly right.
Thanks Mr. X!
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Apple laid the first stages of JointVenture out to Apple Retail staff today and as West Coast employees exit the meetings we are getting our first information on the new small business program. JointVenture will be launched on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.
First the price: Apple will charge $499 for up to 5 users and $99 for each additional user/year. They really want to hit the under 10-person organizations hard. Apple thinks Microsoft is exposed in this area because small businesses of this size are more agile, aren’t as likely to be connected to a complicated Microsoft infrastructure and don’t have a dedicated IT person to steer them wrong.
That $500 is also on top of the 3-year Applecare (not instead of), but retail employees were told that they business customers could receive enough in discounts to offset some, if not all of the price of JointVenture.
What does that $500 buy you?
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More Lion news keeps rolling in. When adding iChat accounts, you can now add Yahoo! and it conveniently includes audio and video conferencing.
Additionally, you can now get the iOS key menu by holding down a key for a second or two.
And finally, by mousing over a URL link, you now get what is called a “live preview” of the web page (below).
A 9to5mac reader writes in telling us he/she’s found some interesting files in Lion. These files are labeled “MobileDocumentsFolder.icns, Mobile Documents 32.png and SidebarMobileDocumentsFolder.icns” and show new types of icons for a Cloud file system. Clearly, this would seem to be the successor to iDisk and is probably shows a more transparent interface between the desktop and the Cloud, perhaps a little more like Dropbox. We’re also thinking there is an iWork.com component as well since these are “documentsFolders”.
– here’s the new sidebar icon.
We’re expecting to hear more about the future of MobileMe at the iPad 2 announcement next week. Hope this tides you over until then.
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We’re starting to see Apple pull Lion videos off of YouTube. Posting videos is a violation of the developer agreement but it doesn’t seem like something Apple can really contain. Plus, competitors can just spend $99 to get access to everything we’re seeing on Youtube. But whatever.
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The Wall St. Journal talked to Verizon CEO Daniel Meade about the iPhone launch and the lack of lines. He said 60% of sales were online and staggered and that the lack of lines were planned. Apple was just being cautious by having all hands at the Apple Store early as well. Regardless, Verizon isn’t announcing numbers until their earnings release.
More importantly, he talked of 4G.
Mr. Mead also said he expects Apple to offer mobile devices on the carrier’s 4G technology, although he declined to specify the nature of those products or when they would be released. Verizon’s fast fourth-generation wireless network, which it recently launched, runs on a technology known as Long-Term Evolution, or LTE.
“You’ll see more coming from Apple on LTE,” he said. “They understand the value proposition of LTE and I feel very confident that they are going to be a part of it.”
Here’s what’s interesting: We saw three different types of iPad 2 in the SDK: K93, K94 and K95. Initially we thought: One GSM, One CDMA and one Wifi. However, since then we discovered that the Verizon iPhone and likely the iPad 2 use a Qualcomm GOBI chipset that allows both CDMA and GSM connectivity. We also know someone at Apple is working on LTE right now.
That leaves another class of iPad. Could that mean 4G?
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TRIM? Oui!
Another Lion discovery making the rounds today is its support of TRIM on SSDs. In short, TRIM allows the machine to write faster to the SSD.
TRIM was introduced soon after SSDs started to become an affordable alternative for traditional hard disks as permanent storage in PCs. Because low-level operation of SSDs differs significantly from traditional hard disks, the typical way in which operating systems handle operations like deletes and formats (not explicitly communicating the involved sectors/pages to the underlying storage medium) resulted in unanticipated progressive performance degradation of write operations on SSDs. TRIM enables the SSD to handle garbage collection overhead, that would otherwise significantly slow down future write operations to the involved blocks, in advance.
Here’s an example:
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1
Consumer Reports is almost comical at this point. They say the Verizon iPhone has the same issue as the GSM version but since Verizon’s network is better, people don’t notice the degradation.
We subjected the Verizon iPhone 4 to a full complement of regular tests in order to add it to our smart-phone Ratings, available to subscribers. We also put it through the special tests we carried out last year on the AT&T iPhone 4 after a rash of consumer complaints about signal reception with that model. There has been no such outpouring of complaints about the Verizon version of the phone.
In addition, to provide a comparison to some alternative models available from Verizon, we also tested five other Verizon smart phones that we rate highly: the Samsung Fascinate; Motorola Droid 2 Global; HTC Droid Incredible; LG Ally; and Motorola Droid X.
Oh, boy. Any non-Androids? How about BlackBerry or Palm…or a Kin?
The special tests were all carried out in the controlled environment of CU’s radio-frequency isolation chamber at our National Research and Testing Center in Yonkers, NY. In this room, which blocks interference from outside signals, our test engineers mounted each phone on a stand and established a continuous signal connection to our base-station emulator, a device that simulates the signals phones receive in the field. We then placed a finger to each phone in a range of locations around its edge, and monitored any changes to the phone’s performance at each position.
The only phones in which the finger contact caused any meaningful decline in performance was the iPhone 4, the sides of which comprise a metal band broken by several thin gaps. As with our tests of the AT&T iPhone 4, putting a finger across one particular gap—the one on the lower left side—caused performance to decline. Bridging this gap is easy to do inadvertently, especially when the phone is in your palm, which might readily and continuously cover the gap during a call.
Bottom line, they can’t recommend it even though it is their highest rated smartphone on the highest rated network.
Mac OSX Lion just hit the Torrent sites but obviously it isn’t wise to download and use software from there. In fact, since Lion was downloaded from the app store, it likely has a developer’s signature which might lead to his/her banishment from the developer program. The software also talks to Apple at swscan.apple.com (not to be a little snitch)
It really makes little sense to download it from a shady site however when Apple offers a Mac Dev account for just $99. Access to the dev account has traditionally given developers access to not just the current version of the Mac OS Client and Server software, but also to the newest builds including timely Lion updates.
As for us, we’re seeing a pretty heavy influx of Lion users. Interestingly, the explosion started two days ago when we saw about 20x increase (perhaps Apple had an internal rollout) and then of course yesterday we saw almost 1000 Lion visitors. So far today, that percentage has increased to almost 2% of our overall Mac traffic.
Expanding on the report from yesterday, a Genius (who uses Chrome interestingly) sent us this screenshot of the Apple Internal systems which shows that MobileMe is online-only now.
It also appears you can’t currently pay for MobileMe online. You can only sign up for a 60-day free trial. We’re anticipating some news next week.
Also, Apple Retail employees have been warned not to go to 9to5mac – so be careful out there :P.
From Lion’s Install notes:
– The Recovery partition may not be created when installing Lion on a drive with an unsupported partition scheme.
This is a pretty interesting addition to the OS. When you install Lion, it puts a little partition on the boot drive with some of the OS utilities. If something goes wrong with your Lion build, you restart with the option key pressed and you boot into this new partition.
For me this worked a bit different. I installed Lion on a Firewire hard drive. The recovery partition was installed on my Snow Leopard internal disk(!). So when I turned off my Mac and rebooted with the Firewire Lion disk removed, it defaulted to the recovery partition (scary). Changing the startup disk fixed this pretty quickly but installer beware.
The repair partition is basically all of the repair/utilities you find on a OSX Installer DVD.
The obvious reason that Apple does this is because Apple will soon be going to more devices without optical media. Having the repair partition built-in makes it easier to fix your machine if things go bad. And who wants to keep a OSX Install/repair disc or USB stick with them wherever they go?
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pT_2E5xI0&fs=1&hl=en_US]
The number one paid app in the App store right now is a great little game called Tiny Wings that ever so slightly riffs off of Angry Birds(now #2). The gameplay looks excellent and it is $.99 cents. The reviews are somewhat comical but almost 100% good.
I’m going to keep this short because I need to get back to playing this game. Basically, you can forget about Angry Birds, it’s all about this happy hopeful bird. Simple, yet addictive casual gameplay will keep you coming back for more. So what are you waiting for? Just press the download button, no need for hesitations here.
If you aren’t already addicted, get there.
The iFixit MacBook Pro Quad-Core Intel i7-2630QM Mobile Processor (labeled as 2V041112A0127) isn’t chock full of surprises but here’s what they found:
Some lucky people out there in Internetland are Geekbenching their new MacBook Pros Quad i7s with average Geekbench scores coming up right around 10,000
The 2.0 GHz Quads coming in a little lower obviously at around 8000 while the new dual core i7s hit about 6000. Interestingly, that’s a lot higher than last year’s top end models which were closer ro 5000 (below)! In fact, have a look at where these new laptops fit in Apple’s lineup:
LaCie is one of the first Light Peak partners to announce a Thunderbolt Drive with their Little Big Disk SSDs which promise to deliver absurd data speeds. Speaking of Promise, they also have a Thunderbolt RAID device in the works, the very same one that Apple posted on their Thunderbolt page (below) which appears to be on the beefier side.
Neither have prices or shipping dates but if you have to ask how much these cost…
I’m sure at some point in the future I’ll laugh about the days when two finger scroll down meant scrolling the page down rather than up. Today however,is a very difficult transition.
On Lion, the default motion you make when you scroll on the trackpad is the same motion you would expect to see if you were scrolling on the screen.
If that isn’t the biggest hint into the future of the Mac, I don’t know what is.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQpyqAa7OxA&fs=1&hl=en_US]
Of course you can revert to the old way in the system preference, pictured below:
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We’ve just recieved some screenshots from Apple Retail which confirm the demise of the MobileMe packaging along with the previous generation MacBook Pros.
It would be an extremely bad idea to go and buy MobileMe from a third party this week. We’re expecting a MobileMe (free/tiered?) announcement on March 2. Another shot below:
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Apple today updated its line of MacBook Pros. We’ll not tell you more than visiting the site. Press release follows.
Good ol’ Apple is charging a buck for the final version of FaceTime on the Mac. The reason? Probably to get people into the Mac App Store, get a purchase under their belt and of course get their credit card entered into the system.
Oh and it does 720P on supported Intel Macs.
FaceTime for Mac makes it easy to talk, smile and laugh with friends and family on their iPhone 4, iPod touch or Mac. Getting started is quick and easy — simply enter your Apple ID and you’re ready to go. Whether you’re talking to someone on an iPhone or on another Mac, video calls with FaceTime look great. There’s no better way to stay in touch with all your favorite faces.
Update: Apple says this was a Accounting requirement.
More screenies and description below:
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiI25P9W1eo&fs=1&hl=en_US]
We’ve been given this info which should be confirmed shortly (Thanks Mr. X!)
MC700LL/A – MBP 13.3/2.3/2X2GB/320/SD-USA
MC724LL/A – MBP 13.3/2.7/2X2GB/500/SD-USA
MC721LL/A – MBP 15.4/2.0/2X2GB/500/SD/GLSY-USA
(via)
MC723LL/A -MBP 15.4/2.2/2X2GB/750/SD/GLSY-USA
MC725LL/A – MBP 17/2.2/2X2GB/750/SD/GLSY-USA
All models ship within 24 hours. GLSY means you have a matte option.
We know the low end of the MacBook Pros are getting the integrated Intel HD 3000 GPU.
CNET offers some more info on the upcoming high end MacBook Pros which until now have had NVIDIA discret GPUs.
15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro/AMD graphics: AMD (formerly ATI) “discrete” graphics silicon is now offered in the larger, more powerful MBPs. As in previous MacBook Pros, the discrete graphics chip is only fired up when heavy lifting is needed. When power savings is paramount or high-end graphics processing is not necessary, the system defaults to Intel’s graphics.
CNET also mentioned that Apple would wait to release their new notebooks after Intel’s Thunderbolt announcement at 10am PT. Sure.
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