The month of the iPhone

Seems like most reports are putting sales at between 500,000 - 700,000 units, with an estimated 44% markup or a profit of $330 on the 8GB units.

Rumors of a $300 iPod Nano style iPhone from JP Morgan analyst Kevin Chang.

Patent filed July 5th for a cellular device with click-wheel based text input

Boosted shares up $2.00 on Tuesday.

Hacking is well under way

Discovered root password

Reporting gain full interactive shell access.

DVD Jon has a way to activate the iPhone without going through AT&T or Apple. Roll your own activation server.

A UK company, Uniquephones, claims to be close to unlocking the iPhone. It is legal to unlock phone in the US, but to get the iPhone to work on other networks you would also need to break the protection on the firmware, that could be a legal problem.

Jobs spotted in London

Fueling speculation that he was their to close a deal with a carrier for the iPhone

I think all carriers have been named a being the "one". Including Vodafone and O2 most recently.

Rumors say the T-Mobile unit of Deutsche Telekom will carry the iPhone in Germany as early as November of this year with a sale price of 450 euros (USD $612.00).

An AppleInsider report says it my be the $210/mo 500MB data plan (they don't do unlimited) from Rogers that is keeping the iPhone from Canucks.

Petition for Rogers for a reasonable iPhone data plan

CA iPhone Petition

Apple aquired iPhone domain

Until last week and since 1995 the domain was owned by Michael Kovatch who said traffic to the site dramatically increase over the last 6 months and said he was reluctant to sell because he planned to use the domain.

Guess the rumored $1 million dollar sale price changed his business plans

Is Apple creating a NAND shortage

Reports that Apple NAND suppliers Hynix and Samsung started stockpiling memory in early July.

Speculation is Apple needs to ramp up as product demands increase into the back-to school and holiday buying seasons.

Shortages could drive up future prices for NAND memory.

Most new product rumors seem to depend on Flash memory.

6th gen iPods

Ultra portables

Nano iPhone

Universal taking it's music an going home

A New York Times piece claims that Universal Music is not renewing it's long term contract with Apple and iTunes and opting to allow their tracks on iTunes "at will"

Apple flat out denies the claims and Universal had no comment.

Sales of digital music through iTunes and other sources accounted for more than 15 percent of Universal’s worldwide revenue in the first quarter, or more than $200 million. iTunes is almost 80% of that, so I doubt they have much leverage.

iPod Reset Utility 1.0.2

Apple released a new version of it's iPod reset utility for 1st and 2nd generation iPod shuffles

Completely erases all data and restores the device to factory settings

Can be useful if you are getting crashes, stalls or general bad behavior. Backup first.

Developer reveals Apple owns CUPS

CUPS creator Michael R. Sweet, reveled on his blog that Apple acquired ownership of the source code in February of 2007

CUPS, Common UNIX Printing System

Open source. Distributed under GPL2/LGPL2

Added to OS X under Jaguar (10.2)

Apple release Quicktime and iTunes Updates

iTunes 7.3.1

Fixes minor inaccessible iTunes Library issue

QuickTime 7.2

Security and bug fixes

Export for iPhone (.m4v) and Export for iPhone (Cellular, .3gp).

Full screen viewing in QuickTime Player

Updated the H.264 codec

MacFixit has reports of issues for some Intel based Mac users

Inability to launch and crashes with Carbon CFM (Code Fragment Manager) applications on some Intel-based Macs

Older versions of Photoshop (cs2 and earlier), MS Office, Eudora and others.

Why Apple doesn't do "low end"?

Interesting email from a listener

Adam i sure hope you agree with me...

More is not always better... The marketing must be good out there.

I have herd people saying.. " if i only had 8k for a Dual-4-core Mac Pro " But here is the thing... you are a software guy... there is still so many apps that are single threaded by design... I am sure a multi core system with unix can Break things up pretty well and get some use out of Multi cores...

Here is what i am getting at mainly... most mac users... what do they do.. i want to say most as in 80% of the users
what applications do they use? Safari, Mail, iChat, iLife

Most users would probably just as easily enjoy a single core 3ghz celeron. in some cases that may even be faster then a core 2 simply because of the raw clock speed.

I just don't get it my man... i have a g3 500 Mhz imac from 1999 it has a new 120 gig hard drive one gig of ram... Its lightning fast... Mainly because its a apple ... but it runs tiger great... it would suit 80% of the mac users out there.

i just don't know why apple has to charge so much they would get so many more customers if they made a Value mac. 599 for a mac mini is too much. Intel stuff is so dirt cheap now. i mean you can buy a gig of memory now for 34 bucks and a 3 ghz celeron for 40 bucks and those are retail prices!!!!! Wholesale has to be sickeningly low.

Let me know what you think... you are highly respected in my book!

I agree with you, but I don't think Apple does.

Apple has high margins, doesn't want to play in the commodity PC game.

Dell and other are using a "loss leader" strategy in hopes of selling peripherals and support contracts, or maybe up sell you the next time around?

For cheap Mac systems... get a hand me down. Clearance, refurbs.

Setting MP4 Metadata for AppleTV

Listener Rodney "shameless" plug

Meta X

www.kerstetter.net

I tried it briefly and it worked pretty good (one crash). Also, a little slow applying, but you can batch and it accesses Amazon.com data.

Based on Atomic Parsley

Neat little app. Love the icon!

Maccast One Minute Tip Returns!! Special characters

Play Maccast One Minute Tip

For more tips and to subscribe to the OMT podcast

www.oneminutetip.com

Repartitioning drives

From Listener Michael

1.) I Have a partitioned External Hard Drive on my mac mini (ppc) (1st gen) how can I repartition it without losing data (iPartition tells me that it cannot read the map and that I would have to create a new one{or something like that})

I generally don't advise trying to repartition a drive with data on it. I back it up, reformat and re-partition, and then restore the data. If you must then you could try a product like VolumeWorks

VolumeWorks

2.) If I were to buy a new External HD what brand would I want (which one is the safest, cheapest, and which one is the best)

I prefer Seagate or Hitachi drives. For branded externals I like OWC, www.macsales.com or La Cie, www.lacie.com

iPhone Quick access punctuation

From David Pogue's new iPhone Missing Manual. Credit to Andrew McCallum for the tip.

Normally punctuation is accessed from a separate keyboard accessed by pressing the ".?123" key. After which you need to press the "ABC" key to return to the QWERTY interface. This tip allows you to type punctuation and return automatically.

1. Touch the “.?123” key, but don’t lift your finger as the punctuation layout appears.

2. Slide your finger a half inch onto the period or comma key, and release. Incredibly, the ABC layout returns automatically. You’ve typed a period or a comma with one finger touch instead of three. In fact, you can type ANY of the punctuation symbols the same way.

Works because, unlike the ABC keys which type when you lift your finger from the key, the punctuation keys register on "press-down".

Rebuilding the Launch Services Database

A question from Fernando:

I sometimes have a need to "right click" on a file and select "Open with" to choose an application to open the file. The problem is that when I select "Open with", it will take a couple of seconds to pop up the menu and once it does, it will display about 4 or 5 copies of the same app. For instance, Adobe Photoshop CS3 will appear in the menu 5 times. How can I remove these multiple copies?

The issue is the Launch Services Database. OS X LaunchServices is how an application is found to run when you double-click on a document. If the program is in /Applications, or you launch it at least once, then LaunchServices should detect it.

If you backup or re-install an app, etc. You can sometimes end up with duplicates in this database

You need to rebuild your Launch Services Database. You can do this using a tool like OnyX, or Cocktail, If you are really adventurous and not afraid of the Terminal you can use some shell commands.

Onyx, OnyX

Cocktail, Cocktail X

Terminal Commands on MacOSXHints.com, Rebuild Launch Services