Weekend Notes: Woz and Apple Firing, iPads in Israel, No Mac App Store, German Airline Offer
A few odds and ends of interest from the weekend Apple news cycle:
- Steve Wozniak reports that he was shown a 3G iPad by an Apple employee the morning of the Wi-Fi launch, and that Apple employee was subsequently fired.
I can tell you that the test engineer who showed me an iPad after midnight, for 2 minutes, during the iPad launch was indeed fired. I opted to spend 2 minutes with Numbers on this iPad, trying some stunts I'd seen on Apple's website demo video. I was not told that it was a 3G model and I had no way to know that. I was told that this engineer had to wait until midnight to show it outside of Apple's secure area. And I'm an Apple employee who he was showing it to. My guess is that he was allowed to take the iPad outside of the secure area but still not supposed to show it.
- Israel lifts ban on iPad imports. iPads were temporarily banned from being imported after it was claimed that they did not follow normal wireless standards:
The tests proved the device identifies the Wi-fi access point in its surroundings and adjusts itself automatically, enabling the iPad to be operated without interfering with other wireless devices, the ministry said.
- Steve Jobs reassures one customer in an email that there will be no "Mac App Store" that mirrors the iTunes App Store. There had been some wild rumors that Apple might be considering an approval-required Mac App Store for future versions of Mac OS X, but this has been denied.
- German Airline Lufthansa has offered the Apple employee that lost the prototype iPhone a free trip to Munich to visit their new Bavarian Beer Garden Business Lounge to "pick up where you left off". The next generation iPhone was lost at Gourmet Haus Staudt, a German bar in Redwood City, CA.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
