Author: Blancer

Will iPhone 4 be less likely to depreciate in value due to its front and rear glass, which is not as vulnerable to nicks and scratches as the metal or plastic that made up previous generation iPhones? If so, you may be able to sell your iPhone 4 on eBay for more than you would have earned selling past iPhones.

I have sold about six iPhones on eBay and have always been surprised at how much I am able to sell them for. I once sold an iPhone 3G on eBay for $415, close to what I paid for it new a year earlier. But the condition of the used iPhone affects how much you are able to sell it for. I suspect that my iPhone 3GS sold for considerably less precisely because it had some nicks and scratches on the back (which I described and photographed in my eBay listing).

For the same reason, I am guessing my iPhone 4 will sell for more, since after nearly a year it remains in near-mint condition. It was almost impossible to avoid damaging the rear side of previous iPhones. Either you went without an iPhone case and the back got scratched up from being placed on surfaces and mingling with keys or coins in your pocket, or debris got trapped inside your iPhone case and scratched up the back. There was almost no avoiding scratching the back of your previous iPhones. But the iPhone 4 is virtually immune to scratches due to the glass making up both sides of the phone.

Therefore, assuming you don’t crack your iPhone 4 glass, you may be in a position to get a good price for it on eBay. Just be weary of eBay iPhone scams.

Will iPhone 4 Have Higher Resale Value Due to Scratch-Proof Front & Rear Glass? is a post from Apple iPhone Review.

Several Apple employees have appeared in a video for the It Gets Better project, which is part of The Trevor Project, an organization out to prevent suicides in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered youths. The video, posted below, is pretty powerful stuff and doesn’t really require much additional commentary on our part. Keep in mind there’s language and themes discussed in the video that are probably NSFW, so maybe wait for your work commute or until you get home to watch it.

[via MacStories]

Note: Due to the topic of this post, we will be strictly moderating comments.

Continue reading Apple Employees appear in ‘It Gets Better’ video

Apple Employees appear in ‘It Gets Better’ video originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After I wrote a post about the changes in Lion’s Dictionary app and made suggestions about how Apple could still improve it, I got a nice email from a reader asking if I would write an article about some other writing tools I use. One of my favorites is Visual Thesaurus by Thinkmap.

Visual Thesaurus is an interactive — almost organic — dictionary and thesaurus for your Mac. Enter a word and you’ll be presented with branch nodes displaying synonyms or antonyms for that word. The lines between the words are color-coded to indicate parts of speech. Depending on how you are using the word, click on its proper definition and then delve down through the semantic relationship of the word by clicking on its node. The whole process is a really fun way to find the right words you are looking for. You almost feel like an explorer traipsing through a thesaurus thanks to the interactivity of the app.

In addition to containing 145,000 English words, the app also features 39,000 proper nouns, and American and British word pronunciations. Visual Thesaurus is available as both a web app and a Mac/Windows app. The web app costs US$2.95 per month or US$19.95 per year. I opted for choosing the actual Mac app, which costs US$39.95. The advantage of the Mac app is that you don’t need an Internet connection to access the thesaurus, which is handy if you’re like me and commonly take your MacBook to various non-connected places to write. Visual Thesaurus for the web requires Mac OS X 10.0 or higher, an Internet connection, and a web browser. Visual Thesaurus for Mac requires Mac OS X 10.0 or higher.

Visual Thesaurus is a great tool for writers originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s a great time to be in the market for mass storage for your Mac. Hardware manufacturers keep coming out with new solutions that either provide more speed (like SSDs) or greater capacity, and the prices keep coming down.

Western Digital is now shipping the My Book Studio Edition II, a two-drive enclosure filled with 6 TB (that’s right, six terabytes) of RAID 0 storage and a quad-interface (FW800 / FW400 /eSata / USB2.0) for only US$549.99. That price is quite amazing, since the competing LaCie 4 Quadra array sells for almost $400 more. The My Book Studio Edition II takes advantage of WD’s 3 TB Caviar Green drives, two of which are nestled into an enclosure. The product comes with a power adapter usable in the U.S., Canada, and most European countries, FireWire 800 and USB cables, a FireWire 800/400 cable, and a CD containing a user manual and a selection of software.

The My Book Studio Edition II drive comes pre-formatted for Mac OS X, and can be reformatted for use with Windows 7. While the array comes set up as a 6 TB RAID 0 stripe set, it’s possible to use it as a mirrored pair (RAID 1) of 3 TB drives. For those who are looking for redundant storage, the RAID 1 solution makes a lot of sense. If it’s raw storage capacity that you want, RAID 0 is the way you’ll want to go — just be sure to buy a second array for backup purposes.

To see how the My Book Studio Edition II array stood up during our tests, turn to the next page.

Continue reading Western Digital’s My Book Studio Edition II: 6 TB of low-cost storage

Western Digital’s My Book Studio Edition II: 6 TB of low-cost storage originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yesterday Perian updated its QuickTime plugin for the Mac. For those of you who don’t know about it, Perian is a plugin allowing Mac users to view a virtually unlimited number of video codecs in QuickTime Player. Among the codecs are AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW, just to name a few.

The 1.2.2 update adds compatibility with WebM/VP8, compressed MKV files, and FFv1 lossless video formats. Perian 1.2.2 requires Mac OS X 10.4.7 or later. But users of older Mac OS versions are forewarned — this is the last version of Perian that will support PowerPC Macs or any Mac running Mac OS X 10.5 and below. Going forward, future releases of Perian will only support Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.6 or higher. Perian is a free download.

Perian QuickTime plugin updated; A must-have for every Mac originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion trillion dollars.”

If there’s one company that will hit a trillion dollar market cap, it will be Apple, according to USA Today. Apple could do it in the next three years. USA Today came up with Apple’s trillion dollar market cap based on its five-year geometric mean average increase of 59% a year. So given today’s market value of about $310bn, if Apple continues to increase in value by 59% each year, in 2014, we’ll have the first trillion dollar company. How huge is that? The most valuable company ever was Microsoft in 2000. That year it hit a $604 billion market cap.

So, could Apple beat Microsoft’s value in its best year by more than 65%? My money is on Apple (and has been since November of 2002 when I started buying the stock). The way I look at it is that Apple has its hands in three primary markets: computers, smart phones, and tablets. The first market is fairly maxed out — there’s not a lot of room for the market as a whole to grow — but since Apple only has around 10% of that market, they still have lots of space to grow in it. The inverse is true for smart phones and tablets. Apple is a key player in both those markets, but each of those markets still have decades of growth in front of them, which means that even if Apple doesn’t hold a lead spot, it still has tremendous room for the growth of its products in those markets.

Continue reading Apple will be the first $1 trillion company

Apple will be the first $1 trillion company originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You can add even more kindling to the rumor fire burning around Apple’s new data center in North Carolina. AllThingsD reports that the company picked up Kevin Timmons as a new employee; he’s been working as Microsoft’s Manager of Data Center services since 2009. Microsoft confirmed that he left this week, and while it’s unclear exactly where he’s headed, rumor has it that he’ll be with the gang in Cupertino.

Timmons also worked in a similar role at Yahoo, so he seems like the perfect candidate to help kick off a new cloud service for Apple, if indeed that’s what they’re working on. Of course, rumors have been flying for a long time about some type of data center-based service around iTunes or some other, but we’ll have to wait a little while longer (probably WWDC?) to see just what Apple (and now Mr. Timmons) is working on.

Apple hires Microsoft Data Center manager originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s almost here! Sources report that Ion Audio’s iCade arcade cabinet for the iPad has passed FCC approval, just in time for the planned release on May 31. The cabinet was originally seen as an April Fool’s Day joke on ThinkGeek, but in the past few years it’s steadily moved towards reality, and will soon be available for $100 from that site, along with partners Ion Audio and Atari, who’ve already released over 100 retro games ready to be played on it.

One interesting note: the cabinet will apparently be powered not just by the dock connector on the iPad, but with two AA batteries as well. That’s only a minor inconvenience (and small price to pay for having a fully-working set of arcade buttons and joystiq to play iPad games with), so it shouldn’t stop retro-loving iPad gamers from grabbing this one when it finally becomes real at the end of May.

[via TiPB]

iCade iPad arcade cabinet one step closer to late May release originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As if Safari and iOS updates weren’t enough for one day: Do you use a Canon printer (including all-in-one printer/scanners) with your Mac running Snow Leopard? If so, you have an exciting new update waiting for you. There’s no indication of what the new Canon Printer Drivers 2.5 version actually changes, so fire up Software Update, cross your fingers and hope your printing experience magically improves.

If Software Update doesn’t show you have an update available you can download the driver manually from the the relevant Apple support page.

[via The Mac Observer]

Canon printer drivers hitting Software Update originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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RIM is aiming to launch its PlayBook tablet on April 19, but reviews of this QNX-powered tablet started to hit the wire last night. The consensus among reviewers suggests the PlayBook will not threaten Apple’s dominance in the tablet market.

Most reviews point to the lack of available applications for the tablet as one major detriment. The PlayBook will launch with a catalog of 3,000 applications, a figure derived from the number of developers that have submitted applications to the BlackBerry App World. This number was bolstered by RIM’s promise to give a free PlayBook to each developer whose application is approved before the launch of the tablet device. RIM expects to expand this catalog with Android and BlackBerry OS emulators that let users run applications from the Android Market and the BlackBerry World. This feature will land later this year.

A small application catalog is one drawback to the BlackBerry, but there are more. Read on to find out what other issues reviewers encountered when using RIM’s tablet device.

Continue reading BlackBerry PlayBook reviews say that it’s not an iPad killer

BlackBerry PlayBook reviews say that it’s not an iPad killer originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For the first time in six quarters, worldwide shipments of personal computers declined during the first three months of 2011, according to reports from Gartner Inc. and International Data Corp. (IDC) released this week. Despite faltering demand for PCs, Apple enjoyed increased sales and market share compared to the year-ago quarter.

IDC’s report indicated 80.6 million PCs shipped worldwide during the quarter — a 3.2% decline from the same time last year. Gartner’s figures showed sales dipped by 1.1% to 84.3 million units. In the United States, both firms agreed PC sales dropped from about 17 million units in the first quarter of 2010 to about 16.1 million PCs this year. Meanwhile, Apple watched its figures grow in the US, netting either 8.5% or 9.3% of the market — a healthy jump from the 7% share the Cupertino-based company saw at the start of 2010.

Apple’s iPad may have also taken a significant bite out of PC sales. IDC said tablets like the iPad, which weren’t included in either reporting firm’s PC shipment calculations, contributed to shrinking demand for more powerful — and more expensive — notebooks and desktops.

Continue reading Apple takes a bite out of PC market

Apple takes a bite out of PC market originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“Intel is going to support USB 3.0 in the 2012 client platform. We’re going to support Thunderbolt capability. We believe that they’re complementary.” CNET reported this remark from Kirk Sakaugen, a VP of the Intel Architecture group, in a presentation streamed from the Intel Developer Conference in Beijing. This dual-I/O support will arrive in the first half of 2012 with the rollout of the “Ivy Bridge” processor, which will be the next generation after the “Sandy Bridge” technology currently built into the the newest MacBook Pros.

This is the first time in ten years that Intel has built the most current USB technology into its processors. Currently Intel uses USB 3.0 in a small number of high-end motherboards, sourcing a component from NEC to make it work. USB 3.0 is ten times quicker than USB 2.0, topping out at a theoretical speed of 4.8 Gbps. Thunderbolt, in turn, beats out USB 3.0 easily; it allows transfers of data and DisplayPort video simultaneously at speeds of up to 10 Gbps on one cable.

Although nothing specific has been said about when Intel will integrate Thunderbolt technology, The Inquirer notes that the January launch of “Sandy Bridge” would have been the perfect time for Intel to build USB 3.0 into its silicon. By dragging its heels, the company may be promoting the integration of Thunderbolt. Currently Apple is the only computer maker using Thunderbolt, but AMD as well as Intel have said they will eventually include Thunderbolt support.

Intel announces USB 3.0 in “Ivy Bridge” and will support Thunderbolt originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’m in the midst of reading Steven Levy’s book about Google, “In the Plex,” and I was fascinated with the account of Steve Jobs hiding the iPad’s development from Google CEO Eric Schmidt while Schmidt was sitting on the Apple board. We noted this striking example of corporate confidentiality last week.

Jobs was reportedly angry with Google for allegedly ripping off iPhone features like pinch to zoom that eventually wound up in the Android phone.

Eventually Schmidt stepped down from his position on the Apple board, and the rest is history. Or maybe not. Our former colleague Nilay Patel, ex of Engadget, says in his personal blog that the story can’t be that simple. First, he says Apple didn’t have a patent on pinch to zoom until October of 2010. The Android G1 shipped in October 2008, and didn’t have pinch to zoom, but it finally made it to the Google Nexus One in February 2010. Now all Android phones have the feature.

Continue reading The unanswered questions about Jobs, Schmidt and iOS features

The unanswered questions about Jobs, Schmidt and iOS features originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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