I’ve been coming across this term “predam iPhone” recently. If you do a Google search for Predam iPhone you quickly get this idea that it is an unlocked iPhone. Sometimes it is spelled “prodam iPhone.” It is a strange word, at any rate.
Apparently you can buy them on eBay, or from all sorts of weird sources. They even come in huge quantities, like I’ve seen pictures of a whole palette filled with these things. I found one source that says that predam means “break” or “unlocked” and I’m guessing that these are found in a lot of black markets in countries that don’t have the iPhone yet.
This did get me thinking as to why Apple still only sells iPhones in Apple and AT&T stores. Why not on Amazon.com, Best Buy and those multi-brand mobile phone stores? After all, Apple needs to reach that 10 million goal by the end of the year. More stores can only help.
I was recently in an Apple store and I overheard people who were not Mac fanboys like me talking about “Have you seen the iPhone? It is so cool! I think I need to get one. Me too!” etc. I think that salesfolk at mobile phone stores and electronics stores would love to push a $400-$500 device that practically sells itself.
Now, the reasoning I thought that Apple was going with to not sell in other stores was the unlocking problem. They wanted to keep close tabs on each iPhone that goes out the door. But obviously that is not working if there are so many unlocked iPhones floating around, and pages of “predam iPhones” are clogging the net.
It may be surprising that Rush Limbaugh has Mac Pro computers, but it’s not so surprising that he would think that he deserves concierge service from Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Limbaugh appealed to Jobs during his radio program on February 12th.
“‘Mr. Jobs, please help me.’ I know we don’t agree on anything. You love Algore — and by the way, I’ve got no problem with him now, but can you put me to somebody that can get this going, because I know it’s gotta work for most people. What am I doing wrong?”
Mr. Limbaugh said that he was a fan of Apple’s computers but has been having a problem on the computers since upgrading to Leopard. After the OSX 10.5.2 update failed to solve his problems, Rush felt it was time to directly appeal to Jobs for tech support.
Limbaugh didn’t disclose the exact nature of the computer problem, but said “Mr. Jobs, please, I just ordered six brand-new Mac Pros: four for me and two as gifts; maxed out, Blu-ray drives. I’ve loaded ’em up. Our whole office here is Mac, and I just want it to work because I love them — and these two things that aren’t working would seem to me, as a novice, to be a simple fix, but they’re not.”
Rush’s broadcast engineer, Mike Maimone said, “You don’t understand it. Jobs has you tagged. He’s making sure your computers don’t work. If you put out this appeal to Steve Jobs and ask him to help, his reply is going to be, ‘Mr. Limbaugh. Do us a favor and endorse Windows.'”
Perhaps the McCain campaign statement that they didn’t want an endorsement from Rush, would also apply to Apple.
There is a rumor based on a leaked AT&T document that we may soon have the ability to tether our iPhones to our laptops. The rumor looks pretty weak, so I won’t go into it here. But tethering is something that Apple and AT&T should consider.
A lot of my business friends have either a mobile phone or some sort of card that they can use to connect their laptops to the net from virtually anywhere. In addition to providing connectivity in places that don’t have wi-fi, it also provides security in a world where account IDs and passwords are sniffed from public wi-fi hotspots.
The type of people that would have both an iPhone and a MacBook (me!) are exactly the type of people that would want them to tether. The added value would be huge.
Now you might say: what good is a Edge-network-speed connection to a MacBook. The answer is: infinitely better than no connection. Even at slow speeds, it would allow you to get your email and check on critical information.
The iPhone should be the premier phone of choice for “the connected,” but it never will be until it has this key feature.
Do you want to sit-in on lectures from some of the most prominent professors at the most prestigious universities? You can at Apple’s iTunes U. iTunesU harnesses the power of podcasting for education.
By simply going to the iTunes Music Store in iTunes and clicking on the iTunesU link you can access courses and lecture from hundreds of colleges and universities. You can listen to Astronomy 101 at Stanford or the Philosophy Of Love at MIT, all without touching the parents nest-egg.
Course lectures aren’t the only thing at iTunesU. How about Mozart’s requiem sung by the Duke choir or art exhibitions and discussion from the Museum of Modern Art or video guitar lessons from Little Kid’s Rock?
While you may not be enrolled or paying tuition or have a diploma to show for it, you can say that you took engineering coursework at MIT and still pass a lie detector test.
Okay,they did the iTunes Music Festival London last year too, but that doesn’t make this years iTunes Live: London Sessions any less provocative.
According to Apple:
“Over 11 magical evenings, starting on Thursday February 21st, 2008, iTunes will host a series of unique recording sessions. More than 25 of the world’s most talented musicians — including KT Tunstall, José González, Tom Baxter, Roísín Murphy, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Spiritualized and many more — will perform solo and collaborative sets in London’s legendary AIR Studios. The performances will be recorded and sold exclusively on iTunes in March.”
By recording live performances and selling them it erases any doubt that Apple is indeed in the music biz. Hopefully, the blokes at Apple Corp. records are too busy counting their money from last years settlement. to notice this new turn of events.
BTW, looking at the artist pictures on the Website, since when did Nick Cave start sporting the sleazoid mustache?
So you may have heard that there is a rumor going around that the Adobe Flash Player is coming for the iPhone very soon. But I’m inclined to doubt it.
I updated my Apple TV the moment I got home tonight. The update was fast and went without a hitch. Take 2 includes a new menu interface that seems simpler, but otherwise has the same functionality. But of course there are the new parts: renting movies, Flcker and .mac photos, getting podcasts directly from the net, and the ability to buy music from iTunes directly, without a computer.
Apple has never encouraged anyone to modify their computers in the slightest way, in fact, dire threats of warranty violations abound at every turn. So that’s why its strange to see Apple actually linking to mod sites on the Mac Mini page.
Apple released a major upgrade to its Aperture professional photo editing software. Some of the new features are; highlight recovery, color vibrancy, local contrast definition, soft-edged retouching, vignetting and RAW fine-tuning as well as smooth publishing workflow to a .Mac Web Gallery for viewing on the web, iPhone, iPod touch and Apple TV.
Another new feature is “tethered” shooting, which is the ability to shoot images directly to a Mac from a camera via USB or FireWire and save the photos directly in an Aperture project.
Aperture 2.0 is available now for $199 at the online Apple store.
The price is a hundred dollars less than Adobe’s Lightroom photo editing software and trumps many of the older Adobe product’s features.
Aperture can also handle Adobe’s .DNG format files for smooth integration with Photoshop, but Lightroom still has the advantage of being a cross-platform application.
Both programs have free trial downloads, so you can compare the programs side by side.
Aperture 1.0 users can upgrade to Aperture 2.0 for $99 and recent purchasers of Aperture 1.5 (Jan 1-Mar 14, 2008) can upgrade for $9.95.
With Leopard 10.5.2, the Stacks feature of the dock now has a more sensible, “List” view. Rather than the fancy “Fan” view that is nothing more than a list with icons on a curve, or the “Grid” view, which is just a grid of icons, the “List” view is a nice space-optimize list. But even better, it includes multiple levels.
Starting now, you can use Software Update to get version 10.5.2 of Leopard. There are some bug fixes for iCal, Mail and iChat. In addition, we’ve also got some improvements.
One is a new list view you can use with Stacks. This looks like the way folders in the dock used to work. You can also make menus non-semi-transparent. Time machine is also now present in the menu at the top of the screen. iPhoto will now handle the RAW format of more cameras.
You can find a complete list of changes at Apple’s site.
The Mac blog site Macenstien reported last week that Apple would not be purchasing a booth at this year’s National Association of Broadcasters convention. Apple has traditionally had a huge presence at the annual event which is held the first week of April in Las Vegas. The NAB is the largest convention for broadcasters, video professionals and filmmakers in the US. Apple has used the convention to launch it’s professional video and film applications like Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Studio.
We’ve just added two new games to our iPhone Games collection. The first is a Pyramid Solitaire game. This is a pretty easy and fun card game. The second is a version of a game at the free online games that is also affiliated with MacMost. It is Add It Up, a number puzzle game. That makes a total of 18 games. We’ve got plans for two more by next week. Of course these also work on the iPod Touch.
