Matt Tovey’s Hommade 2.8-TFLOP CPU Desk

Matt Tovey made this really slick table using 434 Itanium CPUs on the way to the trash can. Rather than waste some perfectly good hardware (list price as of last year for all those chips: over $800,000), he made a striking and unique desk for himself. Check out his detailed step-by-step, with plenty of photos, over at his blog…

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CONFIRMED: iPhone $100 Cheaper at the Apple Refurb Store

Do you think the iPhone is $100 too expensive? Well, you can get refurbished 4GB and 8GB iPhones for $100 less than their original price-tag at the Apple Store.

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Gizmodo: Digg Spam Sucks

“A new Digg policy here, out of respect for the Digg community.

-No badging of articles unless they have original content, new reporting, treatment, or photos.

It’s not fair when we get the Digg for someone else’s work. Let’s keep the signal-to-noise ratio high, dudes.”

The Best is to come……Bryan Lam down at Gizmodo.com put up a post about Digg Spam. He also posted to ask a Diggnation user “iwanttodiggthis” to stop digging the Gizmodo stories. User “iwanttodiggthis” put a comment up that said:

“If you don’t want me to Digg your story, then don’t put a “Digg This” button on it. Honestly, the nerve of some people.”

View this story at: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/announcements/digg-spam-sucks-268472.php

View “iwanttodiggthis” comments at: http://digg.com/tech_news/Gizmodo_Digg_Spam_Sucks

Ahhh….Gizmodo….What do we to with you guys!
-Eric

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Were Back!

Were Back! Sorry for being gone for so long!

The basics – Settings & built-in OS X screenshot functionality

Creating & managing screenshots on OS X may not garner the same type of attention had the topic been something more along the lines of creating a web development environment on OS X, cloning a hardrive, or improving your iChat experience. Regardless, those that do collect and amass a large collection of images can attest to the fact that such collections can 1) be tedious, 2) get quite unorganized, or 3) utilize more disk space than they should. All of these issues are easily resolved with a few simple techniques.

Capturing basic screenshots
Thankfully, OS X offers a number of options which allow a user to capture both entire screens and specifc regions using convenient keyboard shortcuts.

OS X keyboard shortcuts
Description Keyboard Shortcut
Full screen (Save to Desktop) CMD+Shift+3
Full screen (Save to Clipboard) CMD+CTRL+Shift+3
Select region (Save to Desktop) CMD+Shift+4
Select region (Save to Clipboard) CMD+CTRL+Shift+4
Select item (Save to Desktop) CMD+Shift+4 then Spacebar
Select item (Save to Clipboard) CMD+CTRL+Shift+4 then Spacebar
As you can see, OS X includes a great selection of basic screenshot options for quick screen grabs to send to contacts via email or instant message. For those that may prefer a graphical user interface (GUI) for screenshots, OS X offers the Grab utility located in Applications > Utilities. Grab allows users to capture a selection, a specific window, the entire screen, or a timed shot. While screenshots captured using one of the aforementioned keyboard shortcuts are saved as PNG files, Grab saves captures as TIFF files.

Although the free options included with OS X will suffice for most, others may yearn for additional options – including drop shadows, rounded corners, or alternative GUI’s. Check out any one of the following screenshot utilities: SnapNDrag, Snapz Pro X, or Screenshot Plus.

Configuring OS X screenshot commands

The built-in commands are most likely suitable enough for the average user without incurring additional costs that 3rd party software requires. Screenshots captured using one of the shortcuts above are automatically saved to the Desktop (default). If, however, the file format or default save location is unacceptable, download a copy of OnyX. In addition to providing users with an interface to tweak the default screenshot settings – including file format (PNG, TIFF, JPEG, PDF, GIF, PICT, BMP, SGI, & TGA) and the default save path – OnyX offers a great number of system maintenance options. Check out my favorite Finder tweak which aligns the Dock to the left or right of a screen.

Capturing entire web pages
Stumble upon an inspiration website worth archiving for later viewing? Previously, I would have recommended the lightweight utility known simply as Paparazzi. While Paparazzi captures excellent full length images of websites, the utility requires that users copy ‘n paste URLs in order to capture and save.

Although Paparazzi is more than capable as far as full web pages are concerning, Shiny Frog’s NetFixer one-ups the utility by providing a convenient bookmarklet which automatically captures your current web page.

Individuals hesitant to download additional software created for the sole purpose of capturing websites in their entirety can check out the Pearl Crescent Page Saver extension [Firefox required]. This handy extension captures multiple images – scrolling your browser window in order to view the entire site – and stitches the captures together into a single image file.

Capturing video & DVD screenshots

While most of the popular techniques for capturing images from movies or DVDs require paid software (see Snapz Pro X), one open source application requires no registration fees or upfront costs. Simply download a copy of the VLC media player and open your favorite video files, VCDs, or DVDs. During playback, simply select the ‘Video (menu bar) > Snapshot’. Alternatively, users can simply press the CMD+OPTION+S keyboard shortcut. VLC will automatically capture a single frame from the video file and save the ensuing PNG screenshot to your Desktop.

Optimize & compress PNGs
For those that elect to retain the higher quality default PNG file format, shave and optimize images using a tiny utility known as pngCrushrrr. pngCrushrrr was designed with one task in mind – PNG optimization – and requires no interface to do so. Simply drag any PNG file on to the utility icon and a crushed version is created.

Additional questions concerning the task of capturing screenshots on OS X? Feel free to drop comments, questions, or recommendations below. -Eric

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Steve Jobs Did NOT Help Design the Apple Computer

It is decidedly a nerd biography. iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It by Steve Wozniak (the true creator of the original Apple) and Gina Smith, shows how Woz thinks, eats and breathes like an engineer. Most of the high points in his personal narrative revolve around moments when he figures out how stuff works, gets stuff to work, or executes some offbeat prank.

Co-author Gina Smith joined Will Block and myself on the NeoFiles Show to chat about all things Steve. Smith herself has a great history in tech reportage, including ten years writing “Inside Silicon Valley,” a column for the San Francisco Chronicle, and six years as the technology correspondent for “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.”

The wonderful wizard, Woz himself, has said he would come in for a follow up show, and we intend to hold his feet to the fire. Literally. But in keeping with Woznakian ethics, we’ll remove his feet long before a harmless prank crosses over into the realm of cruelty.

To listen to the entire interview in MP3, click here.

RU SIRIUS: “iWoz” is not a conventional biography where you might expect some pathos, some childhood trauma, or whatever. It’s totally an engineer’s biography. The major scenes are the ones where he figures out how something works.

GINA SMITH: One of the first things he told me in our interviews was that he had never understood what his dad did for a living. Around the house, it was this big secret. And what dad did was — he was designing the Polaris missile. It was super high-tech, top-secret stuff that he couldn’t talk about at home. In a way, that’s what drove Steve to be an engineer. He wanted to understand the stuff that his father couldn’t talk about. In his childhood, he became fascinated with this world of transistors and resistors and diodes and putting together little projects. He was this little 200 IQ geek in 1960 California.

RU: And his father really encouraged him.

GS: His dad was sort of a teacher for him. He would use a blackboard. And while his dad couldn’t really get into it with him about what he did for a living, he was happy to say, “OK, here’s how electricity works. Here’s what a vacuum is. Here’s an electron. Here’s what happens when an electron goes through a wire. Here’s what happens when it doesn’t. This is a one and this is a zero.” He’s showing Steve how an AND gate and an OR gate works — the basic fundamentals of electronics. He explained all of that to Steve before he was even out of fifth grade.

RU: And he explained it all it in a way that helped him become an engineer. He started at the bottom of the process.

GS: That’s how Steve explained it. He’d ask something like, “Well, how does a computer work?” And his dad wouldn’t say, “Well, here’s how a computer works.” He would say, “Well, do you understand how electricity works? Because without electrons, there’s no computing. Do you understand what an atom is? Let’s look at the positive charge and the negative charge and how these things flow.” And from that bottom, he would go all the way up until Steve truly understood, from the basics, how computers at that time worked.

WILL BLOCK: What comes across in the bio is an incredible purity, innocence and delight in learning how the world works.

GS: That’s what the tapes of my interviews with Steve sound like. It’s all, “Wow! And then I was able to develop the Apple I, and… Wow! Then I was able to add color, and… Wow!” He hasn’t lost that innocence. He hasn’t lost that sense of enthusiasm. When he looks back, you can see that youthful kind of vigor in his face.

RU: He won a sixth grade science project by doing something kind of amazing.

GS: He essentially built a giant calculator in the 6th grade. This was before handheld calculators. It added or subtracted numbers. And basically, that’s all a computer needs to do in order to do everything else — it has to add and subtract. The judges took one look at this thing and he was awarded a ride on a jet. He was always known as the science and math whiz, since he was five-years-old. What my editors at Norton wanted answered in the book was, “Why Steve?” Why did he get to be the one who invented the personal computer and not a myriad of other people? And that’s what we tried to answer. Well, Steve was always miles ahead of his peers in terms of understanding electronics.

WB: Timing has a lot to do with computers and seems like a good metaphor for why it was him. He came into a unique environment with a lot of enthusiasm.

GS: Now we have to include Steve Jobs in this discussion. Steve Jobs looked at this little invention that Steve Wozniak has come up with. It was essentially a board that allowed you to input data using a typewriter keyboard and output it using an RCA TV screen — it had to be the RCA. Steve Jobs looked at this and said, “Hey! I bet we could make fifty of these! And sell ‘em!”

RU: The sound of ka-ching is heard by Steve Jobs.

GS: He was only 21 years old, and Steve Wozniak was 26. Steve Wozniak’s dad thought this was all very funny.

RU: What was it like working with Woz? Was it hard to get him to tell his story? Did you have to do a lot of coaxing?

GS: It was a lot of coaxing. I met him through a friend of mine who had met him at a Grateful Dead concert. I said, “I’d love his email address.” Because when I started covering technology in 1988, Steve Wozniak was already gone. He was out of technology, so I never had a reason to interview him.

So I asked Steve, “Have you ever thought about doing an autobiography?” And he said he tried it a few times, but had always sent the money back because he had never been
able to get a writer to do his voice.

So once we had our deal; in my mind, I was scared to death we were going to have to send the money back. This is how I make my money — writing books! Maybe Steve can send back a big advance, but I’d have to sell the house! So I was very very careful, in working with him, to always go over the chapters and make sure that he was always aware that I was trying to make it sound exactly like he speaks. That has gotten us a little criticism because people read it and say, “Hey, it sounds like somebody’s talking!”

RU: It has an “As Told To” flavor. But that’s who he is.

GS: That’s what it is!

RU: Did you ever want more “blood on the tracks” from him? More heaviness?

GS: Yes. We met two or three times a week for a year, and we either met at a coffee place called Pearls in the West Portal district of San Francisco, or we met at the Hickory Pit, which is a barbecue place in Sunnyvale. I’m a vegetarian, and I spent the whole year smelling meat and talking to Steve Wozniak. I thought we’d get all this kind of dirt, politics, Steve Jobs… what was going on in the early days of Apple. And what I quickly discovered was Steve Wozniak wasn’t privy to that. Steve Wozniak was an engineer whose head was in a breadboard. He wasn’t paying attention to what was going on. They put him in a building all by himself and said, “Complete the floppy drive.” So in terms of the down and dirty politicking happening, there’s not a lot of new stuff.

RU: I like the story about how they named the company Apple. Most people assumed that it was the influence of The Beatles. But there’s a great story about Wozniak picking up Jobs at the airport.

GS: Talk about coaxing; it took me probably eight months to get Steve Wozniak to tell me how the word “apple” came up. He was resistant to talking about it. And finally, the story came out. He had picked Steve Jobs up from the airport. And Steve Jobs had been living in a commune up in Oregon that was an apple orchard. So that was just the name that popped into his head, coming out of the commune — apple. And they both loved it. And think about how fresh that name was in 1975. They had the immediate concern — what about Apple records?

RU: … which only recently became a problem.

GS: Steve Jobs said “No, that’s music. This is computers. How could that possibly be a problem?”

RU: More than anything else, it seems Woz loves being a prankster

GS: If you look through history, a lot of geniuses and people of this ilk have also been pranksters. I couldn’t get Steve to stop telling me about pranks. In fact, most of the time, I wanted to get all this Apple stuff, and he wanted to talk about the time that he pretended he was Henry Kissinger and called the Pope. And I’m like, “This is funny, but I want the Apple stuff in the book.” He could do a whole book of pranks.

RU: He did his first prank when he was very young.

GS: The first one was when Richard Nixon was running for governor in California. It was really his mom’s idea. He got this pranksterism I think, in part, from his mom. I’ve met her and she’s a real card. When he was 10 or 11, she had him walk up to Nixon at a campaign rally with a placard that said that the ham radio operators of our little town back Nixon. And Nixon signed the placard, and someone took a picture and it was on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. In fact, there was no ham radio group and Steve Wozniak was probably the only ham radio operator anywhere near California at that time — certainly the youngest

RU: He evolved and developed a taste for pranks after that.

GS: I think it’s a way of dealing with his shyness, too, He talks a lot, and he talks rapidly, but he’s very shy. These pranks are a way to get people laughing, get people comfortable.
We used to spend the beginning of almost every interview with, “Pick a card, any card.” I’d be doing card tricks with him. And I’d be like, “O—kay. When are we going to get to the interview?” And he’d be, like, “Look at my lasers and how I can put them through my ears!” And I’d be, like, “O—kay! When are we going to get to the interview here?!”

WB: A prank is a form of creativity, and it continues on and on since you get to tell people about it again and again, so you revivify it. That’s the kind of spark of creative genius that some need as a trigger.

GS: One of my favorite pranks that he talks about in the book took place right around the time of the Altair. That was a kit computer that made Bill Gates a bit famous — writing a version of BASIC for that. So there was a big computer conference and Wozniak went through all this trouble to create these fake fliers for a computer called the Zaltair, because there was an operating system at the time that started with a Z. So it had all these Z jokes in it, but if you looked at the very first letter of every word in the topic sentence, it spelled out a competitor — P.r.o.c.e.s.s.o.r T.e.c.h.n.o.l.o.g.y. And he tricked Steve Jobs with this. It was fifteen years before he handed a copy of the flyer to Steve Jobs and said, “I was the one who did this.” He’s a prankster. I had a lot of salt in my coffee, a lot of red pepper in my eggs. And I was not going to show him that it bothered me, so I drank salty coffee and ate peppery eggs for a solid year without even blinking.

There are so many prank stories. I mean, they’re absolutely endless. Steve carries around books of two dollar bills. He actually goes to the mint — I guess if you have enough money, and you pay them enough money, they’ll give you your own sheets of money. And they’re funny, because they’re perforated. And so every time you go out with him,
instead of paying like a normal person and giving them the cash; he holds out these long rolls of perforated two dollar bills and says, “How much is it? Okay, let’s count down… 2, 4, 6, 8… Okay, I’ll tear right here!” And at this point, the woman or the man behind the register always says, “That’s not real money. We can’t accept that.” And of course, it is real money, it’s just how he presents it.

We were at our mutual friend’s wedding and he was selling two dollar bills off in the corner. And he was making a profit. He was selling these two dollar bills for three dollars to people, and telling them that the two dollar bills weren’t real. That’s part of the trick. People walk away with these wads of money that they’ll never spend. But I spent my two dollar bills on a lot of Starbucks. I needed coffee that didn’t have salt in it, so after I left him, I’d got to Starbucks.

RU: There’s a connection that lots of people in this culture would make between the spirit of pranking and the whole thing with phone phreaking. And it’s widely known that the development of Apple was tied in with blue boxes.

GS: Steve Wozniak was really one of the first phone phreaks ever. When people hear that word, phone phreaks, who do they imagine? Maybe someone who has done prison time. But back in those days, very few people knew the secrets of the phone company, and how to make a free call. All phones were rotary back then. He was able to develop a little box that you could attach to a payphone that would get the operator; open up a line, and then he could call anywhere.

Steve was really into ethics. So he felt he didn’t want to do this as a way to save money. He wanted to do it to have fun. Like he tried to call the Vatican, and tried to get a call in to the Pope, saying he was Henry Kissinger. You know, “Tal-king vith theees ac-cents,” saying “Hel-lo, this is Henry Kissinger…”

RU: It was 5 a.m. in Italy when he called.

GS: Yeah. And he and Steve Jobs made a little business of this thing. They were kids. Steve Jobs was maybe 17 at the time and Steve Wozniak was four or five years older. They were selling these blue boxes. You can bet that the people who were buying the blue boxes weren’t quite as ethical.

RU: Now we’re into the “outlaw roots” of Apple. Whatever Woz thought, the Phone Phreaking ethic was pretty much a Yippie thing. For a lot of them, it was about intentionally ripping off corporations. It was an anti-authoritarian thing. Woz was sort of half-in and half-out on that sort of thing. He was in the middle.

GS: He talks about his ethic. He says the Phone Phreaks weren’t about ripping people off, they were about exposing flaws in the phone system. And then he’s into the Homebrew Computer Club. They had this ethic that big companies shouldn’t be the only ones with computers. The idea was, “We’re taking the spare chips from the warehouses of the companies where we work, and building computers for ourselves.” So you’re right, they were kind of walking a line between ethics.

RU: He really admired Captain Crunch – John Draper – the great phone phreak.

GS: Certainly. Captain Crunch, the legendary phone phreak, really became famous through an article in “Esquire” before the two Steves began phone phreaking. before the two Steves began phone phreaking, John Draper spent time in jail…

RU: … where he hurt his back. Now you have to jump on his back if you want to talk to him. [laughter]

GS: He actually wrote the first word processor for the Apple computers from his cell in prison. And then, in the ’70s, he ran several pirate radio stations from his van. This was very cutting-edge crime.

RU: In a way, there’s a hint of that sixties radicalism in Woz, but in a very moderate form.

GS: He walks the line, You really see that throughout the book. Like, he put all that salt in my coffee. Finally at the end, I said, “Look, you know. How much salt have you put in my coffee?” And he said, “No, I haven’t.” And I said, “What is this ethic you have about not lying? You should be honest, because I know salty coffee, I’ve been drinking it for a year.” And he said, “A prank is different than honesty. If it’s a joke, you don’t have to tell the truth.” And that’s walking the line.

In the book, Steve talks about when he was at Berkeley and Captain Crunch was coming to meet him. He’s a kid and he idolizes Captain Crunch, and he expects this really dashing, suave character to come in because that was the impression he’d gotten from the stories he’d read. And then Draper comes in and he’s missing most of his teeth, his hair is all greasy, he’s smelly. The lawyers at Norton books asked, “Are you sure we can say all this stuff about John Draper? Couldn’t he sue us for saying he smells and he has no teeth?” And Steve said, “Well he does smell and he does have no teeth.” And we checked it all with Draper, and it was okay. “Yes, this is how I was in 1974.”

RU: We should talk a bit about Apple’s success and Wozniak’s disillusionment with some of Jobs’ actions. That’s a theme – the relationship between Wozniak and Jobs.

GS: I really had to coax these stories out of Steve. I did a lot of research before I actually started interviewing Steve, and I’d read this story in some book about Steve Jobs allegedly ripping Steve Wozniak off on a version of Pong called Breakout that they were doing for Atari. Jobs told Wozniak that they were getting paid one amount, but really they were getting paid much more. And so I asked Steve about that and he said, “No, no. I don’t want to put that in the book. I don’t want to hurt Steve.” And I said, “Look, the story’s out! It’s been published. It’s in a book.” I had to keep coming back to him for stories like that.

They had repeated arguments about things like opening up the Apple II. Steve Jobs didn’t think you should have slots — didn’t think you should be able to open up the system. And Steve Wozniak felt very certainly that — “I don’t know what these slots will be used for, but I bet you we’ll find a use for them.” And, in fact, that’s how the Apple II really took off. All these guys started coming up with adapter cards and expansion boards to put into the Apple II.

They’re just two guys with two different mind-sets. From a marketing standpoint, you could see why you’d want to close up the system. From a technical standpoint, you’d be nuts to close it up.

RU: What other myths are there about Apple, where Woz knows better?

GS: When I first started interviewing Steve, I said to him, “What should this book say?” And he’d say, “I hate reading anything about Apple. It’s all wrong. It’s all wrong!” And I’d ask what was wrong, and he’d just kind of brush his hand and say, “It’s all wrong! Everything ever written about me is wrong.” So I did a lot of research and I’d bring him stories and articles from throughout the years — “Is this wrong? Is that wrong?” And, in fact, a lot of the stuff out there that had been written about him was wrong. One common myth is that he was kicked out of the University of Colorado. He wasn’t kicked out. He’d run up so many fees from computer usage that he was afraid to tell his dad. So he chose not to go back the next semester and instead went to De Anza community college… With his 200 IQ and the perfect college board scores…

Another misconception that bothered him was the idea that he and Steve Jobs had designed the Apple I and the Apple II together. The sole designer of both those computers was Steve Wozniak. The sole designer. And that’s not to say that Steve Jobs isn’t an engineer in his own right; he may be. But he had nothing to do with the design of those two computers. He was the business guy there.

RU: And then there’s the myth that it was developed in a garage.

GS: It wasn’t done in a garage — that was HP. HP was started in a garage several decades earlier but not Apple! Steve Jobs worked in his bedroom of his parents’ house and Steve Wozniak was on the kitchen table.

RU: I guess some final tweaks were done in a garage.

GS: I think at the very end, when they have their first order of a hundred some units; they were actually just popping chips into sockets — some of that was done with Steve Jobs’ sister, and Dan Kottke, an early friend. Dan Kottke is a good example of one of the early employees who had everything to do with the success of these first computers — the Apple II, the first personal computer with color and sound.

RU: Steve Jobs treated these early employees very poorly.

GS: They weren’t rewarded. Now, you think if you’re at a startup and it does great — Larry Ellison’s personal assistant was a billionaire because she was there from the beginning. But back then, employees weren’t routinely rewarded like that. So while Steve Jobs and the board of directors all got stock options when Apple was the biggest IPO in a long time — I think since Ford — people like Dan Kottke and the people who really were instrumental in the early designs got nothing.

RU: The story I heard is that Wozniak told Jobs that “however much stock you want to give to Kottke, I’ll match it.” And Jobs said, “Zero.”

GS: Steve didn’t tell me that for the book, but that sounds about right. So Steve Wozniak came up with the Woz plan. He gave 2000 shares of stock to all the employees that he felt weren’t…

RU: … his own stock…

GS: Right. And those people, and I’m assuming including Dan Kottke, all came out OK. They were certainly millionaires.

WB: That’s the happiest part of this story, the ethical aspect of who Woz is. When Jobs smashes the Cloud 9 controller against the wall, he doesn’t choose to go there. Despite the fact that he doesn’t seem to spend a lot of time thinking about social issues; he chooses not to travel into the world of social competition.

GS: Steve Wozniak invented the Cloud 9 controller, and it was the first universal remote. This was in the 80s, before everybody had nine things and needed a remote to control. And it was designed also by Frog, another company. And Steve Jobs, I suppose, was furious that Wozniak had used Frog and he smashed it up against the wall. And Steve Wozniak’s attitude, always, is… “Whatever. I’m not engaging in this.” He is always ethical. And he was very concerned about how Steve Jobs would appear in the book. He didn’t want to hurt people. That’s Steve Wozniak. He’s very kind. There’s a kind of innocence there you don’t see often among billionaires and millionaires. -Eric

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Three New iPod Models to be released in intervals by Apple in 2007

As it stands, Apple Computer hopes to introduce three new iPod models during the 2007 calendar year, AppleInsider has learned.

A source often familiar with the Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s music plans says a copy of its current roadmap calls for three distinct models to make their debut at various intervals throughout the new year.

First and foremost is said to be a video-centric model that will either replace or supplement the aging fifth-generation iPod, though details of the two other models are unclear at this point.

Still, it could be some time before this much rumored “true video iPod” makes its debut, if at all.

People familiar with the matter tell AppleInsider that Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has so far been unwilling to commit the marketing and other resources necessary to bring the device to market.

That is, they say, until he can more adequately assess real-world reaction to the company’s new iTunes movie service and iTV set-top box, following the release of the device early next year.

In a much overlooked statement issued by Apple vice president of Worldwide iPod Product Marketing Greg Joswiak in October, the exec did his part in attempting to reset expectations of further iPod announcements in the near term.

“The new iPod shuffle completes our all-new lineup of iPods for this holiday season and beyond,” he said in a statement to members of the media when announcing availability of the company’s most affordable iPod to date.

Over the next several weeks, Apple will become an increasing focus of the mainstream media as it attempts to get a lead on the company’s plans for the annual Macworld gathering during the second week of January. -Eric

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Use a MacBook tilt sensor to control a Roomba

If you’ve got a MacBook and a Roomba, try out this way of using the MacBook’s built-in tilt sensors and Perl to control your Roomba. -Eric

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When iPods Die

This holiday season Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod is once again a top seller in stores and the music player’s white earphones remain a nearly ubiquitous sight on city streets and at gyms. But as it reaches deeper into the mainstream, more users are becoming familiar with a new sense of loss: the death of an iPod.

Among users of the device, it’s long been common to hear of iPods laid low by batteries that no longer hold a charge, malfunctioning hard disks and screens with cracks. In some cases, problems are caused by users who accidentally drop their iPods or otherwise subject them to abuse, but other users say their iPods go belly up even after normal use.

The iPod’s durability could become a more important issue as consumers become less dazzled by cutting-edge technology and more concerned about longevity, especially for a device that can cost hundreds of dollars.

“Some people swear there’s a self-destruct mechanism in it after the warranty is up,” says Matthew Bremner, a founder of iRepair.ca, an iPod fix-it service with a store in Toronto and on the Internet. “For a small device that’s that expensive it probably should last a little longer.”

Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., says the rates at which iPods fail — less than 5% — are “extremely low” compared with other electronics devices. “IPods are designed to last for years, but as with any complex consumer-electronics product such as digital cameras, they can be broken if dropped or mishandled by users,” says Mr. Dowling, who adds that the “overwhelming majority” of iPod users are happy with their devices.

Even if only a tiny percentage of iPods malfunction, the huge popularity of the devices means a significant number of users could be affected. Apple has sold nearly 70 million iPods in the five years since the product first went on sale. If just under 5% of that number failed, that could still amount to millions of affected devices. Apple declined to comment on the specific number of iPods that have failed.

WSJ.COM FORUMS

Have you had problems with your iPod? What did you do? How would you gauge Apple’s handling of complaints? Join a discussion.
Tom Westrup, an investment professional in Austin, Texas, has had worse luck than most with iPods. Mr. Westrup says he bought his first iPod online three years ago and it quickly began freezing up while playing songs. Resetting the device solved the problem only temporarily, so Mr. Westrup says he sent his iPod into Apple for a replacement.

The problems occurred again with the new iPod. He says he visited a technician at a local Apple retail store, who raised the possibility that Mr. Westrup’s problems were being caused by his PC but the technician couldn’t say how to diagnose the glitch. So Mr. Westrup says he again swapped his iPod for a replacement from Apple through the mail.

Mr. Westrup says he is now awaiting his fifth iPod replacement from the company after similar problems with subsequent replacements; the company has continued sending replacement models despite the expiration of Apple’s standard one-year warranty. (IPod users can extend the coverage period to two years from the device’s purchase date for $59.)

Mr. Westrup says he and his wife used the iPods carefully during activities such as walking their dogs or working out on an elliptical trainer. “I’m 51 years old — I’m not a teenager throwing it across the room,” he says. “I wouldn’t say I’m abusing it.”

WSJ.COM VIDEO

More consumers are raising questions about the lifespan of iPods, battery issues, repairs and easily scratched — or cracked — screens. WSJ’s Bryan Keogh reports.
The best-known complaint about the iPod, dating back to its earliest models, is about its battery. Many users grumble that the charge of the lithium-ion battery inside the device appears to get progressively shorter the more they use the music player. Last year, Apple agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by users whose iPods saw significantly diminishing battery life, agreeing to compensate owners of certain early iPod models $25 in cash or with a $50 Apple credit on Apple products.

What ticks off many users is that the iPod’s battery and other parts are not designed to be replaced by the average user. There are no screws on the outside of its case that allow iPods to be easily disassembled, giving the device a sleek, unblemished appearance. Apple replaces the batteries on out-of-warranty iPods for $65.95, including shipping charges.

Hard disks, which are used in higher-end iPods to store songs, can also fail. Bill Torpey, a software developer in New York, says the iPod he bought for his daughter, now in high school, a couple of years ago stopped working after the product’s warranty expired, and the hard disk inside of it started making a strange noise.

After doing some research online, Mr. Torpey decided on a somewhat daring fix for the problem: He held the iPod about six inches above a desk and dropped it.

The iPod family of models, including the Nano and Shuffle.
The fix worked for a few weeks, he says, but then the iPod stopped functioning again. Meanwhile, an iPod Mr. Torpey bought for his son also has begun acting up, restarting itself seemingly at random. “Caveat emptor,” he says. “I won’t buy another one.”

For such situations, there’s a cottage industry of independent iPod repair shops that offer replacement services for less than what Apple charges for comparable repairs, including do-it-yourself battery replacement kits ranging from $25 to $35 that usually include a special tool for prying open the iPod. In his experience, Mr. Bremner of iRepair.ca estimates iPod batteries, on average, last about two years before needing to be replaced.

Despite the beefs, consumers’ love affair with the iPod shows no sign of going sour. In spite of determined competitors in the portable-player market like Microsoft Corp. and SanDisk Corp., Apple’s share of the market for 2006 will likely end up roughly where it was last year, between 73% and 75%, says Stephen Baker, an analyst at retail sales tracker NPD Group Inc.

In an online survey of more than 6,400 consumers that NPD conducted earlier this year, the firm found that 82% of iPod owners were completely or very satisfied with the device, compared with 76% for rival music devices.

The iPod’s shortcomings “haven’t impacted their sales any that I can tell,” says Mr. Baker. “However widespread, obviously customers are not considering [a lack of durability] an issue.”

There’s also no getting around that the iPod is a sensitive piece of electronics and that some users are simply too rough with them. Ryan Arter, president of ResQ Systems LLC of Kansas City, Kan, says most of the devices his iPod repair service, iPodResQ.com, receives from customers are damaged by, for instance, being dropped on the ground or tossed around inside a book bag.

Some of Mr. Arter’s customers don’t immediately fess up to the causes of the technical problems, even when their iPods have dented cases. As a general rule, he says, “natural” iPod failures tend to occur with devices that are a year old or older.

Mr. Arter says roughly a third of the iPod repairs his company does are for damaged screens, a third for batteries and a third for other miscellaneous problems like hard-disk failures. He adds that newer models of iPods appear to be getting more durable. Mr. Arter says his company has seen far fewer repair requests for Apple’s new version of the iPod Nano than it did for the first iPod Nano, a slim device for which iPodResQ saw replacement orders for cracked screens quickly after its release.

As pricey as many models of the iPods are, some users seem to accept the idea that their iPods are more or less disposable, a phenomenon common in the cellphone market where users regularly upgrade to more stylish models. One gauge of that, Mr. Arter says, is the growing popularity of a buyback option iPodResQ.com offers for iPods with technical problems. Rather than pay to have the devices repaired, growing numbers of its customers opt to sell them for parts to iPodResQ, typically for between $35 and $95 — money that can then be applied to the purchase of a new iPod. -Eric

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MySpace blames Apple for hacked accounts – actually a MySpace flaw

A malicious QuickTime movie made the rounds across MySpace profiles last weekend, altering user profiles and changing links on their pages to redirect to phishing websites crafted to look like MySpace logins. The movie, CNET reports, actually capitalized on a MySpace flaw and QuickTime’s legitimate support for JavaScript to craft what has been dubbed the Quickspace attack. It is also worth noting that while this movie could infect users who simply viewed a compromised page, the attack (as far as we know) only works on IE and Firefox in Windows (in other words: if you’re on a Mac, you can resume your regularly scheduled MySpace obsession).

Yesterday, MySpace’s chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam contacted Apple to request a fix to plug the hole, even though it was a flaw of MySpace in combination with a legit feature of QuickTime that caused all the damage. Apple is reportedly working on a fix, but for now the two companies have ironed out some workarounds, such as blocking all the phishing URLs and scrubbing their network for compromised profiles.

On a side note: what exactly does one gain from harvesting MySpace account logins? Wouldn’t oh, say, credit card numbers be a little more productive? I know there’s a lot of kids out there who bank on whether they’re in some people’s top 8 spaces, but I’m still having a hard time seeing how or why phishers would deal in the
same currency. -Eric

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