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Right now, I think its a restriction on any kind of trade (possibly excepting medical and other humanitarian aid) to Iran.

Of course, Iran can still import iPhones from China. I hear they are hot products.

I'm fairly certain that the reason iPhone 4 got a glass back was because the iPhone 3G / 3GS back could take enough abuse to look banged up without actually making the phone not functional. The result was a bunch of iPhones out there that looked like crap. Apple pays a lot of attention to aesthetics, and I would absolutely expect them to make that kind of sacrifice.

Apple blacklisted Gizmodo after they bought a stolen iPhone prototype a few years ago and refused to give it back before doing a full disassemble and report on every little detail. Since then, they've been left as the only major blog or news outlet that can't do firsthand reporting on the keynotes and product announcements, which has left them a little bitter. Small wonder that Gizmodo (Jesus Diaz in particular, of recent) has been saying all sorts of nonsense about Apple ever since.

Even if we ignore the chip on their shoulder, their reporting is shoddy and slimy, with them sometimes substantially altering their articles after they're posted. For instance, Briam Lam's account of returning the iPhone makes it sound like they got a letter from Apple's legal team and they sent it right back. What you don't see in that version of his account is that Brian received a personal phone call from Steve Jobs, asking for it. Brian responded with an e-mail in which he refused to return it until Apple went on record, then altered the online version of the e-mail he sent to Apple's legal department, since the original version made him look like an ass. The original reporting also contained a rosy accounting of a lot of those facts, but even that was later edited out in an effort to sweep it under the table as the original text of his correspondences leaked from other sources.

And that's far from being the only incident, though it is the most famous. RoosterTeeth lampooned Gizmodo and their "reporting" a few years back. They're a bunch of classless jackasses who treat facts as malleable ideas for their own benefit and cannot be trusted.

The guy (Steve Jobs) parked in handicapped spots,

Fun project: look up Apple's campus on Google Maps, and compare the number of free general parking slots to free handicapped slots. I guess the wheely workers are all late or gone early.

The guy (Steve Jobs) parked in handicapped spots, and even went so far as to only keep his cars long enough to skirt under the registration requirement so he couldn't be ticketed for it.

I know there are a lot of Apple haters out there, but everything I've ever read about Steve Jobs as a person is totally negative and points to him being an asshole of epic proportions. This makes it hard for me to believe he was a philanthropist in secret.

This quote in particular cracks me up:

“He’s gotten a lot of criticism for not giving away tons of money, but I think it’s a bum rap. There’s only so many hours in a week, and he created so many incredible products. He really contributed to culture and society.”

Only in today's twisted world can creating Chinese-made, throw-away consumer goods sold for premium prices be considered "giving back to the world". It fits well with this whole mythology we're building up around the wealthy these days, how it's just such a burden being rich and all that...

I very much doubt he was seriously involved in the development of software products, except at a very high level.

Actually, Jobs was famous (some might say infamous) for involving himself in the tiniest details of user interface design and software features. See, e.g., this article: "The design process behind OS X 10.0 and Steve Jobs’ remarkable level of involvement".

If you had any common sense, or were awake for the last half of a decade, you'd understand where my ATT+iPhone comparison was coming from, especially in regards to how a company could sell their product (either content for Netflix and Sony, or monthly phone service for ATT) to a large number of customers and still end up making very little profit due to their "partners".

Case(s) in point:

The $200/phone that ATT doesn't pay to "all those other phone manufacturers"
http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/26/sprint-pays-apple-200-more-per-iphone-than-att-and-other-carriers/

How wonderful the business "synergy" works out for one of the companies involved.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/08/technology/iphone_carrier_subsidy/index.htm

Did you seriously just crawl out of a pre-2000 rock just to troll?

Oh, believe me, I know that Congress and the Senate voted for these fucking loopholes, but that's not a valid excuse for this crap. You don't think that Steve Jobs knew that he was paying an effective tax rate well below the entry-level guys he had working 70 hour weeks? This is a guy that parked in handicapped spaces looooooong before he actually got sick we're talking about here. He rationalized it as "Horray for me, fuck everyone else", and that's a trait you see a lot among these 'Master of the Universe' types. People all over the world metaphorically polish his knob every time the subject of Apple comes up, but rarely do people talk about what an unbelievable prick he was, and I don't just mean the way he treated his employees, he treated everyone that way.

Yes, congress passed laws allowing these companies to do this shit. Congress didn't make them move their "offices" to tax havens all over the world. They didn't make them send all that money to banks in the Caribbean to hide it from the IRS. Nobody forced them to be leeches, sucking in subsidies while raking in billions. Apple's sucking up $30 million in Texan taxpayer dollars despite the fact that they are literally the most valuable corporation in the fucking world. They've got $10 Billion (with a b) in cash in the bank, and they still need Texans to cough up a little extra to build that fucking plant? Come the hell on. That's the extortion bullshit I'm talking about. They're taking $30 million from who knows how many social programs, schools, infrastructure...and in exchange we get what? The privilege of working for them so they can earn more money off of our labors?

I mean, an unemployed mother looking for food stamps, she's a fucking leech on society, but the most valuable corporation on earth gleefully taking huge transfers of wealth from public coffers into their private accounts is what? A goddamn pillar of the community? A company to admire? Please. They're the real leeches. Let these mother fuckers move their corporate offices to fucking China, or better yet, let them take their shit and go to Africa, far from these pesky taxes and everything else. I don't really much give a shit, but I'll be damned if I'm going to sit here and subsidize their goddamn profit margin while half the houses in my neighborhood are sitting fucking vacant because the families that lived in them lost their jobs and then lost their homes, and then, when they hit the lowest point and have to go get some sort of assistance to make sure their kids eat decent food, get called "parasites". Fuck that shit. You want to see the real parasites, go fucking read Forbes.

The stylus technology may have come from the Apple Graphics Tablet. The display is a high res (for the period) B/W LCD.

As has been shown, there efforts have no evidences of working at all.

But hey, lets not let facts stand in they way. They do it different then here, clearly we should change.

Why is it when something is from 'someplace else' no one applies critical thinking to what they are saying?

IT's abusive, denies innocent traveler and is a show front to move mossad.

also, they don't seem to like macbooks:
http://www.edibleapple.com/2009/12/15/israeli-airport-security-pop-a-few-caps-into-a-macbook-pro/

you know, we ahd a pretty good track record. And in fact it wasn't a security failing that allowed 9/11 to happen.

It was cultural. Until then, getting hijacked meant a 5 day trip to Cuba. So not resisting had been the best response based on the data.

So, we don't need isreali screening techniques, we don't need the current screening process we nede the old process, sturdy cock pit doors*, and an emergency activate autoland feature. Once engaged, no one on board ahs control. It alert there is an emergency, and goes to the nearest airport and lands.

*Old ones you could easily push right through, even if locked.

I wonder how much of this is the result of Larry Page having a long conversation with Steve Jobs, where Jobs told him that he should be asking "what does Google want to be when it grows up." In his typical harsh way, Jobs said that Google is going in every direction at once, and there is no focus to half of what they're doing.

This might be part of Google's attempt to regain focus.

Source: excerpt from the Jobs biography, at http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/22/steve-jobs-advice-to-larry-page/

I tried looking and I can't find absolute numbers. Very old numbers suggest 40k iOS and 10k Androiddevelopers (probably equal by now?? there is much less need to register to try Android development). What's clear is that there are about 100k iOS apps and about 2k blackberry apps. If we have a 13:1 ratio (note the massive error bars) on the proportion of people making money, that suggests that about five times the number of develpers are making money on iOS as are making money on Blackberry.

In other words, Blackberry is doomed :-b

If such a direct inspiration doesn't count as prior art I don't know what else would be.

I'm sure they have patents covering the distinctive features of their particular connector - that doesn't mean that they have a patent on the idea of a multi-pin accessory connector.

I think latter-day electronic gizmos such as the Sharp Zaurus 5500 - I have one and it uses a wide, thin edge-connector type thingy for docking - are rather more obvious prior art than some superficial similarity to the flash connector on a camera.

Of course, the Zaurus, along with most modern PDAs and phones, owes a little something to this - which in turn may have been somewhat inspired by this little muse from Xerox PARC.

What would have happened if Xerox had actually got round to commercializing the wonders that they dreamed up in their PARC labs (the GUI, Smalltalk, Laser Printers, Ethernet...)? Superficially, it looks like they could have owned personal computing.

The store icons are pretty fucked up, i wonder if that is actually an official samsung store though, kinda like those unofficial apple stores?

Yes, it is an official Samsung "store in store", "coincidentally" opened the same day an Apple Store opened in the same mall. http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=it&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsamsung.hdblog.it%2F2011%2F09%2F24%2Fcuriosita-samsung-shop-in-shop-aperto-lo-stesso-giorno-e-nello-stesso-luogo-dellapple-store-di-catania%2F - BTW, Samsung changed the icons after a few hours: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsamsung.hdblog.it%2F2011%2F09%2F26%2Fsamsung-si-corregge-spariscono-le-icone-apple-dallo-shop-in-shop-di-catania%2F

And on the same blog I found yet another example, though not actually by Samsung itself. Maybe. Samsung is selling (or rather giving away) this Bada app. Notice something familiar about the icon? Yup, the background looks remarkably like the the iOS Maps App icon. But that's kinda generic, isn't it? Guess again

I think he planned it this way a couple months back. This touching picture of Jobs and his wife after te last WWDC seems rather apropos. In hindsight that kinda looks like a guy who knows he's climbed on that stage for the last time enjoying the moment.

Plenty of geeks also own refrigerators. It doesn't make refrigerator news geek worthy.

Oh yeah?

If you read the actual letter, you'll find that the Sentators do not claim these apps are illegal.

http://www.edibleapple.com/us-senators-ask-apple-to-remove-apps-that-alert-users-of-dui-checkpoints/

Gates could not control every aspect of the company. Remember his usability rants?

He knows what is needed, but there are too many project managers and fiefdoms and it's not a single company working towards a single goal. No Fortune 100 company could possibly be run by a single person. He gives up some control to people, they are expected to focus on that aspect.

In my mind, I would rather have the CEO finding problems with a product and complaining about it.

But that's not the point. The point is, so many things surprised Bill, and Steve is still stuck playing catch-up in so many different markets. They have lost their focus and now want to be everywhere, like Google. Except Google knows how to stay ahead of trends. Neither MS CEO knew how to drive that. The best thing for Microsoft is to hire a young guy, make the guy use everything Microsoft, from phones to cars (yes some run Windows), and give him the authority to call out problems. Bill is not the solution, just like Steve isn't.

No, they pulled that app after their fanbois protested.

I don't think Apple has ever determined that they must win.

In the early years Apple (Jobs) wanted to do to IBM what Microsoft (Balmer) wants to do to Google today. In the early days Apple saw IBM as their main competition.

Pics or it didn't happen? Yes.
http://www.edibleapple.com/old-school-steve-jobs-flicks-off-ibm/
http://www.pidjin.net/2010/04/11/stop-me-if-i-can/

Google still has a load of patents with which it can countersue any third party that isn't a pure-play non-practicing entity.

No, Google isn't a patent powerhouse. Its patent portfolio is only a fraction of the size of Apple, for an example, and even Apple isn't extremely big compared to some others. Look at this analysis, for an example:

In a recent investor note from Deutsche Bank, analyst Chris Whitmore compares the patent libraries of Apple, Google, and HTC. What he found was that in the past few years, Apple has been issued 3,000 patents, Google has been issued 316 patents, and HTC has been issued a measly 58 patents.

Also, if Google had the ability to do this, why would they stand on the sidelines when Android adopters such as HTC are being sued or when royalties are collected from them?

The money isn't there, people just think it is. I've yet to meet an Iphone developer who has even managed to break even with the US$99 a year fee, let alone the cost of buying a Mac. The Iphone market is overcrowded and Apple's restrictions prevent you from creating anything that could be considered new and innovative.

Developing an app for the iPhone is not much different from being a musician or an actor. Most won't make a lot of money but a few will. How many indy artist playing at local pubs can quit their day jobs?

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/09/indie-developer/

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/33212/iPhone-key-for-EA-this-year

(Just to be honest)
http://www.edibleapple.com/ifart-developer-makes-40000-in-2-days/

Do you really believe that the top 100 in each category aren't making money? Do you think major developers would be developing for the iPhone if there were no profit in it?

I called someone an idiot for believing Apple wouldn't be the source of leaks, when it's their admitted behavior. Just because they've never leaked hardware specifically before doesn't change anything.

Oh, wait a minute. Looks like they do leak hardware.

No problem. Sorry to have pull those blinders off so hard. I'm sure it stings a little, but I'm sure you'll get over that soon.

Read it and weep, fan boys.

I can't believe it took this many posts in /. for someone to post this. All Woz needs to do is find a friend with a video camera, reproduce the problem, post it on YT and we're done.