Apple

New MacBook Pros weren’t the only thing updated quietly in the Apple Store this morning. Apple has updated the whole line of Smart Covers for iPad. You’ll notice the Orange Smart Cover is now gone and Apple has added a lovely Dark Gray Polyurethane model. Apple has added “color matched microfiber lining” to the description of the leather products (gone are the gray lining across the board) as you can see in the images below:

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Apple has also improved the colors of the Smart Covers as well:

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The whole line gets new part numbers but prices have not changed. Notice the subtle color change comparisons below:

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As leaked by Mr. X (and it didn’t take until November) Apple quietly updated its MacBook Pro line this morning. There are slight processor speed improvements across the board with updated hard drives and video cards peppered throughout. Compare today’s MacBook Pros, above, with yesterday’s MacBook Pros, below:

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In anticipation of Citrix Synergy 2011 in Barcelona, VMware has just pushed out a huge update to all of their mobile View clients, which are used to access a Windows virtual machine from your iPad and other mobile devices.

Other than a refined and slightly resdesinged UI, the name of the game for the iPad client update (version 1.2) is definitely iOS 5 support. That means you will now be able to use multitasking without losing your current session. Before today’s update, lack of the feature really took away from the experience of being able to use native iPad features/apps and your virtual machine’s apps simultaneously. Parallels ($79) has had much of this functionality for awhile now.

Also included as part of the iOS 5 support is AirPlay. While the previous client allowed you to hook up to a larger display via HDMI or VGA adapter, the updated View client has full AirPlay support allowing you to use the $99 Apple TV as a wireless go between. Another really nice addition that goes great with AirPlay support is a new full-screen keyboard and trackpad combo (image above). This will of course only be enabled when using an external display.

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We’re getting reports that the Steve Jobs bio is hitting Amazon Kindle early and we’re just hearing that it has hit the iBookstore as well (it has been hitting at midnight the world over but looks to have gone a bit early because of Amazon’s jumping the gun).

Apple also offers an Isaacson Jobs-Einstein-Franklin three pack for $47 and and Audiobook version of Steve Jobs narrated by Dylan Baker over 25 hours ($30).

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Apple has posted the full video of the Steve Jobs memorial and celebration of his life at the Cupertino, California campus. The event was held on October 19th and was only streamed to Apple employees who were not physically attending the event. The full video can be viewed at Apple’s website.  Don’t come wearing any browser except for Safari.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jqSK8Qv4ZY]

CBS has posted the full 60 Minutes program of the interview with Walter Isaacson, the author of ‘Steve Jobs’ — which is due out tomorrow (already available on iBookstore). Part 2 below, family life, competition and more.

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I took Twelve South’s BookBook for Air for an extensive spin through a bunch of everyday usage scenarios and in various urban and Mediterranean settings.

I have an admission to make: I’ve never been a big fan of protective cases for Apple products. There, I said it. I especially have an issue with notebook cases, many of which unfortunately can be brushed off as cheap-looking, overpriced gimmicks that don’t hold a candle to Apple’s industrial design. I didn’t cave even after the paint had started to come off of my first Apple notebook, a titanium-clad PowerBook G4, because I bumped it one time too many.

It is fair to say that in all those years I’ve never gotten my head around utilizing protective sleeves to keep my pricey hardware in pristine condition. To me, Apple gear is meant to be displayed, touched and marveled at. The BookBook case for Air has changed my preconceived notions overnight. Oozing style, premium quality, convenience and authenticity, it’s the first case I reckoned would actually protect my Air whilst keep those prying eyes at bay. It’s what notebook cases are meant to be, at least in my view.

If there ever was such a thing as the ultimate hollowed book trick, this is probably it.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghdTqnYnFyg]

Among other interesting tidbits on Steve Jobs, technology investment pioneer Ben Rosen reveals that the new Apple CEO invited the then Compaq Chairman and CEO to Silicon Valley in 1999 to inquire about licensing Mac OS X:

After we finished with the amenities and reminiscences, we got to the purpose of the meeting. Steve wanted Compaq to offer the Apple operating system on its PC line, adding to the Microsoft OS that had always been our sole OS. At the time, Compaq was the world’s largest manufacturer of PCs. Our adopting the Apple OS would be seen as a feather in Apple’s cap (and a pretty visible slap at Microsoft). The catching up with Steve was fun, the food was great, but the OS idea never gained traction. Upon further analysis, it didn’t make sense for either Compaq or Apple. Compaq wasn’t about to declare war on Microsoft, our partner from our birth in 1982, and Steve had second thoughts about licensing their crown jewels.

What’s interesting here is this is a year after the introduction of the iMac and more than a year after Jobs had terminated Mac Clone licensing deals with Power Computing, Motorola and others. This was something else entirely.

This is also around the time OS X was being tested (the server version which was a NeXT port was released that same year). From the Intel transition announcement (4:40 above) we know Apple always had an Intel version of the Mac OS X being built alongside the PowerPC version (codenamed Marklar) but it now appears that Apple was seriously considering licensing the Intel version alongside the PowerPC version when the Mac OS X client was released way back at the turn of the decade.

Imagine an alternative universe where Compaq Macs competed with Apple’s Macs through the last decade. Weird.

Also, Rosen has a warm email contact with Steve Jobs where he reveals that though he was a Compaq CEO and Chariman for 20 years, he’s back to using a Mac as of 2007, below:

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As it passes into Monday in Australia and across the World, the Steve Jobs bio is hitting the iBookstore (full shot below). It is still a $16.99 pre-order in the US but should become available at midnight tonight. It also hasn’t begun shipping in hardcover form from Amazon $17.88, but the Kindle downloads should be available at about the same time. We saw that some bookstores had begun stocking them prematurely yesterday and readers have been sending in lots of scanned pages since then (thanks).

Thanks Dean!

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Update: Training for Apple Store Grand Central employees began today at a hotel in Times Square,will end Nov 11, ahead of end of Nov opening. (thanks @iDannyOcean)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpBEcpw3wqA]

In August, we had the opportunity to do a thorough walkthrough of the Grand Central Apple Store space (video above) as construction was just getting kicked off. Shortly thereafter, Apple built a wall around the space so that onlookers can’t get a sneak preview of what is to come (though the renderings, below give you a pretty good idea what Apple has in mind).

Today, a tipster from the MTA has provided us with a progress report of sorts. The pictures, show below and taken yesterday, show that construction is well on its way but as we near its anticipated November launch, still show significant work is left to be done. Talking to one of the construction workers, our source said that Apple plans to have it open for Black Friday, if not sooner.

Remember, this is only one part of the huge space which is said to make it one of the biggest, if not the biggest, Flagship Apple Stores in the world. Additional images below:

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From 9to5Toys.com:

Ending this weekend, Best Buy takes 15% off all Apple iTunes Gift Cards. With free shipping, that’s the best deal we could find on these cards and the first time we’ve seen them discounted since June, when Target took 20% off in-store only. After the discount, a…

$15 gift card costs $12.75.

$50 gift card costs $42.50.

$100 gift card costs $85, among others (3 pack of $10 for $25).

They’re good for music, videos, iBooks and iOS/Mac app purchases.

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When iOS 5 came out, Google got caught with its pants down because for most users Google Voice wouldn’t even start up without crashing.  We’re not certain what the Voice team was doing during that beta testing window (maybe the last minute Siri inclusion threw things off?)

All of that is water under the bridge right now because Google Voice is back in the App Store and works great on iOS 5.

What’s New in Version 1.3.1.1891

Fix for sign in crash introduced in v1.3.0.1771.

Next step iPad version?
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The New York Times reveals yet another tidbit from the Steve Jobs bio: The next business he wanted to transform was the school textbook business.

He held meetings with major publishers about partnering with Apple, the book says. If textbooks were given away free on iPads he thought the publishers could get around the state certification of textbooks. Mr. Isaacson said Mr. Jobs believed that states would struggle with a weak economy for at least a decade. “We can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money,” he told Mr. Isaacson.

It isn’t exactly clear how the business model would work in this case but perhaps the fruits of that labor will be seen in coming months and years.

Perhaps more tantalizing, the Times teases that in his resignation meeting, Jobs also peppered Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller with questions about the data capacity of 4G cellular networks and what features should be in future phones. (FaceTime?!)

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The Washington Post details an interesting revelation from Steve Jobs to biographer Walter Isaacson prior to his death earlier this month.

“He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant,” Isaacson wrote.

Isaacson continued: “‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.’”

That is particularly interesting when you consider that Apple has been rumored to be entering the TV business since the beginning of time. There has also been speculation that Apple’s Siri Voice control could play a big part in Apple’s HDTV venture.

Jobs’ passage could also relate to the current Apple TV model which Apple just makes the pass-through box, instead of Apple actually manufacturing the LCD TVs themselves. Obviously with iCloud only being released this month, there could be some Apple TV updates coming shortly.

Meanwhile, CBS posted another clip from the 60 Minutes interview with Isaacson in which Jobs himself reveals on tape the circumstances around meeting his biological father, below:

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Here’s another excerpt from the upcoming Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, which goes on sale Monday in electronic, hardcover and spoken word formats. The juicy bits published by the Huffington Post teach us about the books and music which had shaped the brilliant mind of the entrepreneur and cultural icon who would go on to transform computers, music, mobile, publishing, digital entertainment and cell phones, to name a few. Jobs’ artistic sensibilities drew from the influences he picked up along the way from his reading and listening material, most of which he had discovered and consumed back in the teen and college years.

So what did Jobs read and listen to back then? The music part is easy:

Jobs called Bob Dylan “one of my heroes” and had over a dozen Dylan albums on his iPod, along with songs from seven different Beatles albums, six Rolling Stones albums and four albums by Jobs’ onetime lover Joan Baez.

Jobs’ love for the Beatles became widely known when he likened Apple’s creative process to that of the Beatles, here’s that quote from 60 Minutes:

My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other’s negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are never done by one person, they are done by a team of people.

As for literature, Jobs’ “required reading” spanned a variety of genres that includes the likes of William Shakespeare to Paramahansa Yogananda, whose “Autobiography of a Yogi” remained one of Jobs’ favorite reads throughout his life and the only e-book he downloaded onto his iPad. Jobs also liked Shunryu Suzuki’s “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” and Chogyam Trungpa’s “Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.”

Apple’s co-founder in the early days was deeply involved in a spiritual search for enlightenment and he experimented with marijuana and LSD starting at the age of 15.

Jobs found himself deeply influenced by a variety of books on spirituality and enlightenment, most notably Be Here Now, a guide to meditation and the wonders of psychedelic drugs by Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert. “It was profound,” Jobs said. “It transformed me and many of my friends.”

Moby Dick and Dylan Thomas’ poetry were also among Jobs’ favorite reads, but the books which really shaped Jobs’ artistic sensibilities and enriched them with a touch of the much-needed technology flare are…

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vq993Td6ys]

Remember back in 2007 when Apple first told developers that to develop for the iPhone, they’d need to build WebApps for Safari? Well, that really was the plan. At the time, Jobs said:

The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps.

And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.

The App Store came later and apparently as a reaction to jailbreakers and developer backlash.

The App Store nowadays is arguably the most vital app community on any platform, but Steve Jobs initially resisted the idea of users customizing their iPhones with third-party programs, later to become known as apps. The revelation is another of the many interesting nuggets to leak from the upcoming Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, which goes on sale Monday. According to the Huffington Post which obtained an early copy of the book:

Apple board member Art Levinson told Isaacson that he phoned Jobs “half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps,” but, according to Isaacson, “Jobs at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.”

Some other tidbits: Jobs informed Cook on a flight to Japan that “I’ve decided to make you COO”. Also, the initial lukewarm reception to iPad “annoyed and depressed” Jobs.

As for Apple’s seemingly unstoppable mobile application bazaar, Jobs – of course – would later embrace the App Store fully as it had become the central theme around Apple’s famous iPhone commercials featuring the “There’s an app for that” tagline. Upon releasing, the original iPhone immediately captured attention of the hacking community which had begun tinkering with the product. Soon thereafter, popular tweaks ensued which added more functionality to the device despite the lack of the official software development kit.

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If you are the type that likes a 10″ display for driving navigation, TomTom just updated its $59.99 iOS turn-by-turn navigation app to be universal and optimized for the iPad. You’ll of course want to have a 3G version of the iPad/iPad 2 or be tethered through an iPhone that can share GPS.

TomTom also hints that a new version with some interesting features is on the way:

iPHONE 3G USERS: THIS IS THE LAST VERSION OF THE TOMTOM APP FOR iPHONE THAT WILL FULLY SUPPORT YOUR DEVICE. You will be able to download and use the next version of the TomTom App but new features will not be available to you.

More screenshots and full description below (thanks Caleb!):

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Details from the upcoming Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson continue trickling in as big media got an early copy of the book. Both the Associated Press and the New York Times have published excerpts that offer a unique insight into the life of the famously private Silicon Valley luminary. According to a New York Times article from yesterday, after attempting to combat a cancerous tumor on his pancreas with a special vegan diet, Jobs then turned to the latest in modern medicine, which included an experimental gene therapy:

According to Mr. Isaacson, Mr. Jobs was one of 20 people in the world to have all the genes of his cancer tumor and his normal DNA sequenced. The price tag at the time: $100,000. The DNA sequencing that Mr. Jobs ultimately went through was done by a collaboration of teams at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Harvard and the Broad Institute of MIT. The sequencing, Mr. Isaacson writes, allowed doctors to tailor drugs and target them to the defective molecular pathways. A doctor told Mr. Jobs that the pioneering treatments of the kind he was undergoing would soon make most types of cancer a manageable chronic disease. Later, Mr. Jobs told Mr. Isaacson that he was either going to be one of the first “to outrun a cancer like this” or be among the last “to die from it.

A 60 Minutes preview with Walter Isaacson also touched on Jobs’ cancer treatment, with the biographer revealing that Apple’s late CEO in hindsight was regretful for going with a special diet rather than chose to operate on it sooner. Another interesting tidbit from the New York Times article: Apple’s co-founder began designing his own luxury yacht back in 2009. This is a surprise since Jobs was many things, but not the kind of guy who would display his wealth:

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Al Gore had some words on the passing of Steve Jobs at the AllThingsD conference in Asia last night. He said that Jobs was “the kind of guy that comes along once every 250 years.”

On Apple after him, Jobs relayed to Gore that Disney, where Jobs’ served on the board after selling Pixar, fell on hard times after Walt Disney died. Often, the board at Disney would ask “What would Walt do?” and trying to figure that out would end up being the wrong answer. Jobs, according to Gore, didn’t want this to happen at Apple. He wanted Apple to make its own decisions moving forward based on the decisions of the current management team.

Gore wasn’t terribly revealing on specifics but he did say “There’s a lot of stuff in the pipeline and the team [Steve Jobs] left behind is really firing on all cylinders”.

Finally, when asked about Apple’s future, Gore said that the management team is the best in the world and that “Everyone on that management team could be CEO of a world class corporation”. Gore acknowledges this is both a blessing and a curse and, as with the case of Ron Johnson, other companies will be trying to pick them off.

Gore also talked about the AT&T&T-Mobile merger during the Q&A answering a question from TIMN’s Joanna Stern saying that the merger would be unlikely, and would be hard to overcome Justice Department’s challenge.

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Last week we exclusively reported that the current line of MacBook Pros is severely constrained and that part numbers for a new MacBook Pro line had surfaced. Based on these similar internal part numbers, the new MBP’s design should be the same as the current design.

Now, we’ve received pricing for the new laptops and the prices for each unit are the same as the prices for the current generation.

With supplies only becoming more constrained, and with shipments already touching down in select countries, we think a launch next week is likely (between Tuesday and Thursday). That is, of course, if there are no unforeseen circumstances. Thanks Mr. X! 

One more thing… after the break:

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I have a feeling the next couple days are going to be busy as the Steve Jobs bio comes out in bits and pieces. Next up, according to the AP, which bought a copy Thursday (where can I get one?), Jobs had extremely harsh words for Eric Schmidt and Google after Android started looking more and more like iOS.

Isaacson wrote that Jobs was livid in January 2010 when HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted many of the touch and other popular features of the iPhone. Apple sued, and Jobs told Isaacson in an expletive-laced rant that Google’s actions amounted to “grand theft.”

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

Jobs used an expletive to describe Android and Google Docs, Google’s Internet-based word processing program. In a subsequent meeting with Schmidt at a Palo Alto, Calif., cafe, Jobs told Schmidt that he wasn’t interested in settling the lawsuit, the book says.

“I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.” The meeting, Isaacson wrote, resolved nothing.

So it is fair to say Jobs is not a fan of Android. While I can see why he’s upset about Android, the jab at Docs doesn’t seem to be as obvious.

But there is more…

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