Edible Apple

Well it appears that the honeymoon between PA Semi and Apple is over. According to a report from CNET, PA Semi founder and CEO Daniel Dobberphui has recently left Apple to join another former PA Semi and Apple employee, Amarjit Gill, at another chip related start-up.

In 2008, Apple made headlines when it purchased PA Semi, a fabless microprocessor design company, for $278 million. PA Semi, at the time, was highly regarded for its ability to design extremely efficient chips that offered a lot of processing power while keeping power consumption to a minimum. It’s believed that the PA Semi team, once arriving at Apple, were soon split up into two groups - one group being tasked with developing ARM based processors for the iPhone and iPod and the other group reportedly tasked with developing the A4 processor that eventually found its way into Apple’s iPad.

It’s hard to gauge what sort of impact Dobberphui’s departure will have on Apple, but there’s no denying that Dobberphui was an A-team player. While at Apple, he was in charge of the PA Semi team Apple incorporated into the company, and is described  by Linley Gwennap of the The Linley Group as “the leading light at PA Semi.” Indeed, Steve Jobs has previously stated, quite explicitly, that the PA Semi acquisition was done to acquire their talent and engineering expertise.

Notably, Dobberphui isn’t the first high profile PA Semi transplant to leave the offices of Cupertino behind. In an New York Times article from this past February, it was reported that at least 6 PA Semi employees had left Apple since originally being acquired back in 2008, including Mark Hayter, one of the PA Semi’s most senior engineers. While it’s not entirely clear what prompted the exodus of PA Semi employees from Apple, the report speculates that it had something to do with stock option terms that weren’t as favorable (i.e the buy in price was too high) as some PA Semi employees would have liked.

It’s also possible that many of PA Semi’s employees simply didn’t fit in or feel at home at Apple, a common thread whenever a large corporation acquires a smaller company. Regarding, Dobberphui’s departure, Gwennap writes: “He was the CEO at PA Semi and leader of the team, and one of the guys that was driving the whole thing,” Gwennap said. But “those guys are start-up kind of people, and within the structure of Apple, they may [have been] chafing.”

A solid effort from Doritos spoofing Apple’s iPad promotional video. It’s not nearly as good as CollegeHumor’s hilarious production from a few weeks back, but for a Chip company, it ain’t too shabby.

And lo and behold, who is it that appears at the end of the video? Why it’s Evan from MTV’s Real World/Road Rules Challenge series. I guess ‘The Situation’ from Jersey Shore was busy.

Tim Cook, Apple’s reserved and multi-talented COO, is one of Apple’s most important executives. Steve Jobs has said during legal proceedings that Cook is one of Apple’s most valued employees, and it is Cook who Jobs has left in charge of Apple when Jobs has needed to take some time off to attend to medical issues.

Apple today filed a Form 8-K with the SEC wherein it noted that Cook was the recipient of a $5 million bonus from Apple in addition to receiving over 75,000 in Apple stock, in large part due to the masterful job he did in keeping Apple’s trajectory on course while Jobs was away.

On March 10, 2010, the Compensation Committee of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. (the “Company”) unanimously approved a recommendation by Steve Jobs, the Company’s CEO, to award Timothy D. Cook, the Company’s Chief Operating Officer, a one-time discretionary bonus of $5,000,000 and 75,000 restricted stock units in recognition of his outstanding performance in assuming the day-to-day operations of the Company for the period in fiscal 2009 during which Mr. Jobs was on medical leave of absence.

Fifty percent of the restricted stock units are scheduled to vest on each of March 10, 2011 and March 10, 2012, subject to Mr. Cook’s continued employment with the Company through that date.

Over the past few months, Tim Cook has stepped further into the public eye not only because of his on-and-off again position as Apple’s interim CEO, but also due to his insightful and sometimes blunt statements made at Q&A sessions during earnings conference calls. Cook, for example, has long stated in specific detail why Apple wasn’t interested in getting into the netbook market, and has provided a rare glimpse into the mindset of Apple’s notoriously private executive team.

Related: Tim Cook opines on a plethora of Apple issues

Technologizer has a fasctinating look at the development of Windows 1.0 with Tandy Trower, the man who served as the Windows 1.0 product manager.

Regarding the inclusion, and inspiration, for the mini-apps that fast became a standard on Windows PCs:

When the Macintosh was announced, I noted that Apple bundled a small set of applications, which included a small word processor called MacWrite and a drawing application called MacPaint. In addition, Lotus and Borland had recently released DOS products called Metro and SideKick that consisted of small suite of character-based applications that could be popped up with a keyboard combination while running other applications. Those packages included a simple text editor, a calculator, a calendar, and business card-like database.

So I went to Gates and Ballmer with the recommendation that we bundle a similar set of applets with Windows which would include refining the ones already in development, as well as a few more to match functions comparable to these other products. I also advocated that we include an experimental mini-word processor based on Microsoft Word which I named Windows Write. This latter got me in some hot water from the Application group, but Gates and Ballmer supported my recommendation.

And Trower also has some interesting insight into the Apple/Microsoft lawsuit from the late 80’s:

In 1988, Apple decided to sue Microsoft over Windows 2.0’s “look and feel”, claiming it infringed on Apple’s visual copyrights… To me the allegation clearly had no merit as I had never intended to copy the Macintosh interface, was never given any directive to do that, and never directed my team to do that.

The similarities between the products were largely due to the fact that both Windows and Macintosh has common ancestors, that being many of the earlier windowing systems such as those like Alto and Star (the latter shown at left) that were created at Xerox PARC. History shows that Jobs in fact visited PARC and hired people from there to join Apple. But Apple’s first graphical-interface computer, the Lisa, failed, and there was a time even in the first year of its launch that it was unclear whether the Macintosh would make it. From my perspective, Microsoft’s support of the Macintosh helped it survive through its most critical time and continues to be a platform the company continues to support. To me, the allegation was almost insulting. If I wanted to copy the Macintosh, I could have done a much better job.

The entire article is well worth a read if you wanna brush up on your Windows history.

Reports are trickling in that iPad pre-orders are off to an insane start. Earlier this morning, one user deduced:

We just bought two iPads, about 30 minutes apart. Our order IDs are 10,000 apart. Assuming those order IDs are sequential, and they appear to be, then Apple is selling 20,000 iPads per hour.

Now to be fair, not every order number is necessarily regarding an iPad, but the surge in order numbers is still quite telling. More recently, Victor Castroll of Valcent Financial Group did some investigating of his own, and even accounting for non-iPad orders, he deduced that Apple had processed 50,000 iPad pre-orders in just 2 hours. The iPad is fast becoming some kind of monster, Metallica style.

via CNN

This may be entirely new, or maybe we just haven’t noticed it, but Apple’s product page now has a listing for a wireless iPad keyboard for $69. When Steve Jobs demoed the iPad a few weeks back, he showcased an iPad keyboard dock where users could position their iPad vertically and type away. That’s all well and good, but a wireless keyboard sans the dock gives users that much more flexibility in setting up their work flow.  Now if only Apple made it compatible with the iPhone and iPod Touch.

In what appears to be a last minute hardware change, Apple has replaced what was formerly the “mute” switch on the iPad with a “screen rotation lock” switch. Pictured above on the left is how the iPad formerly appeared on Apple’s website, and pictured above on the right is how it appears now.

MacRumors writes why the change is necessary:

Like the iPhone, the iPad automatically senses its orientation and adjusts its display between portrait and landscape modes with no user input required beyond turning the device. One common complaint among iPhone users has been, however, that there is no system-wide mechanism to lock the screen in one orientation. The lack of screen rotation lock on the iPhone is particularly frustrating to those attempting to use their devices while lying down on their sides and finding their iPhone rotating the display to an “upright” position.

via 9to5Mac

It sure is a good time to to be on Apple’s legal team. Not only is there the much publicized lawsuit against HTC, but you might also remember that Apple and Nokia are also in the throes of a potentially significant lawsuit.

Last October, Nokia sued Apple for patent infringement claiming that Apple’s iPhone infringed on a number of Nokia patents relating to wireless standards and network technologies. Apple, in turn, countersued Nokia alleging that the Finnish handset maker has been infringing on a number of Apple patents such as the iPhone UI.

Nokia then raised the stakes by lodging a complaint with the US International Trade Commission (ITC), an international governing body with the power to actually ban imports of a product. And that’s exactly what Nokia is asking the ITC to do. But Apple, ever the legal adversary, responded in kind and filed its own complaint with the ITC seeking an effective ban on all imports of Nokia smartphones.

So where does that leave us today?

Well, it was decided in a recent court filing obtained by Reuters that a trial date for the epic Apple v. Nokia showdown will take place in 2012, “raising the spectre of a prolonged legal struggle.”

How to develop an app with EA Mobile - TUAW

Overdoing the interface metaphor - Marco.org

Apple’s HTC lawsuit, another reason for someone to buy Palm? - Business Insider

JooJoo revamps interface ahead of launch - Engadget

Apple’s iPhone Developer Contract exposed - Electronic Frontier Foundation

Add a second menubar to your second computer screen - Lifehacker

Making a tablet ain’t that easy, just ask Stantum - Wired

Apple must feature PixieTea in their next iPhone ad - Gizmodo

Mac Pro ‘hexacore’ Xeon Core i7-980x coming next week? Zdnet

Open GL 4.0 comes out to play - CrunchGear

It’s no secret that Steve Jobs and Apple don’t think too highly of Flash, with Jobs reportedly noting during an internal Apple meeting that the majority of crashes on Safari are due to Flash related bugs.

Apple has refused to budge from its position of not supporting Flash on the iPhone, and with the Flash-less iPad set to hit the streets in just a few weeks, we’ll soon find out if user demand for Apple’s latest and greatest product outweighs user demand for a complete web browsing experience.

In the video below, Anup Mura, Adobe’s director of technology strategy and development for the Flash platform, address’s some of the more common complaints levied against Flash.

In regards to the claim that Flash drains battery life, Mura responds: “We’re using the same video hardware, we’re using the same graphics hardware, we’re moving more things off the CPU into hardware acceleration that gives us similar performance and similar profile as all these other devices.”

Looking forward, Mura highlights some of the improvements we can expect to see in Adobe’s upcoming Flash 10.1 player

We’ve actually done some optimizations to look at where flash is on a web page, and if content is off-screen, we actually suspend that flash instance, so that there’s extra processing not happening off-screen. Browsers don’t necessarily do that, web pages don’t necessarily do that, we’ve actually been able to be thinking about this problem more broadly and it’s not just  about what can we do in the runtime and using hardware better, but also be thinking about how the application or the webpage is being rendered, and what is being rendered on the screen, where are we in memory..

That sounds pretty nifty, but the only way Apple will cave and support flash on the iPhone and/or iPad is if consumers start complaining with their wallets. Unless that happens, Adobe’s Flash improvements are akin to the school nerd buying the headd cheerleader flowers - it’s a nice gesture, but it ain’t gonna seal the deal.

Further Reading:

Steve Jobs disses Flash, calls it a dying technology

Steve Jobs calls Adobe lazy

AppleInsider is reporting that the next-gen iPhone will finally include support for system wide multitasking, an issue some users have been complaining about ever since the original iPhone first debuted.

While some know-it-all pundits have chastised the iPhone for its inability to support multitasking, the reality is that the iPhone OS is more than capable of running multiple apps at the same time. The caveat, though, is that Apple only allows its homegrown apps to run concurrently. So while you can’t check your email while listening to Pandora, for example, you can listen to music from your iTunes library while browsing the web.

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A few days ago we reported that Pink Floyd and their record label EMI were warring over iTunes royalties. Part of the problem was Pink Floyd’s contention that their contract did grant EMI permission to sell their music on a song by song basis via iTunes. While some artists have undoubtedly made millions of dollars via singles on iTunes, Pink Floyd believes that its albums should be digested in their entirety, and that each song is inextricably tied and connected with the next. That being the case, Pink Floyd believes that selling their album 1 song at a time is a knock against their artistic integrity.

The obvious problem, though, is that Pink Floyd’s current contract was drawn up in 1999 - years before iTunes even existed. So while EMI was prohibited from selling CD tracks as singles, the issues of whether or not that should apply to digital sales was somewhat cloudy.

Until now.

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