After a nice weekend at the beach to clear my mind of all things Mac, I’m back now and face a tsunami of iPhone news stories and blog posts — joy. But on the plus side, some of those are mine. As I posted before, I was at the 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York on Friday to cover the iPhone launch for The Teen Tech Buzz podcast and Macworld. While The Teen Tech Buzz coverage hasn’t been posted yet, the Macworld stuff has, in three forms. The first is a written report of coverage from around the country of the iPhone launch. I have a few paragraphs in the New York section, with a byline, of course, and a photo right next to it. That photo, plus another that I did and several from other Macworld correspondents, is posted on a gallery on Macworld’s iPhone Central blog. Finally, some of my audio coverage is on episode #87 of the Macworld Podcast.
So, while not all of my coverage is online, all of it will be soon, in the form of Flickr photos, a special part of The Teen Tech Buzz podcast, and a set of MacUser/iPhone Central posts. So, to all you security guards, line-waiters, and Apple Store employees who doubted my press credentials — look who’s laughing now.
On Friday, June 29th (better known as “iDay”), I will be at the 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York (directions and map, Google Maps) covering the launch of the iPhone. I’ll be there with my friend and co-host for The Teen Tech Buzz podcast, Austen, doing interviews and stuff for the podcast, and also for Macworld. We’ll be there from about 5-6:30 PM, and I’ll be trying to manage doing work for The Teen Tech Buzz, work for Macworld, and my personal attempts to try out the iPhone, so I’ll be pretty busy. But, if you’re there, I’d be happy to interview you and even get you quoted in Macworld.
Also, I’d just like to point out that my employer, Macworld, has launched a blog devoted to, you guessed it, the iPhone, called iPhone Central. I haven’t written anything for it yet, though I may start to after launch. So, keep your eyes peeled and maybe you’ll see my byline sometime soon.
I’m a big fan of The Sopranos. Now, while I only came in at the start of this season (back in March of last year), I’m already a huge fan. I’ve already planned two posts about the show’s season finale on Sunday, but until then, I decided to work on this — a Sopranos Season Finale Countdown Widget (note, you may need to right-click on the link and click “Save Link As…” or something similar to download the widget). Yes, using the countdown template in DashCode and Photoshop, I managed to pull a simple little widget together. It’s not much, and it’s coming a little late, but it’s something and is a nice compliment to your WWDC countdown widget.
As I’ve said before “When the Apple Store’s down, new products are in town.” So, here are the possibilities of what will hopefully emerge from store.apple.com at 9, assuming that this isn’t just normal maintenance:
- Brushed metal iMacs (eww!)
- The new Back to School promo, which allows college students (which excludes me,a s I get stuff from my dad’s college professor account) to get a free iPod Nano (or $199 towards a more expensive iPod, but no iPhone) with a new Mac purchase.
- Updated MacBook Pros, with possibilities of upgraded specs and a LED display.
UPDATE: New MacBook Pros are out!
You know what they say: “When the Apple Store’s down, new products are in town.” OK, maybe only I say that.
I discovered an amazing new video podcast today. It’s called Mr. Deity (iTunes link). Basically, Mr. Deity, which comes in 2-5 minute episode installments, follows the story of “Mr. Deity,” a.k.a. God, Larry, Mr. Deity’s assistant, Jesus, the reluctant guy who gets promoted to co-partner if he redeems mankind, and Lucifer, or “Lucy,” the Devil. Together, these characters, combined with some terrific writing, take a humorous and witty look at some of theology’s toughest questions. It’s a great little video podcast and definitely worth checking out.
With Apple now floating around $100 a share (though it closed lower today at $98.84), a stock split seems imminent. A stock split, which involves splitting the shares of a stock (and thus giving shareholders extra shares), and then decreasing the share price appropriately so the market cap of the stock says the same. Basically, this activity doesn’t increase the value of the company, but instead makes the stock seem more accessible to investors due to the lower share price. So, while the stock split itself doesn’t do anything to the actual value of the stock, the price usually rises immediately afterwords, as a stock split is a sign of an increasing stock price (meaning an increase in the company’s value).
So, why would Apple split now? Well, the last split, a 2:1 (meaning the number of shares double and their value is cut in half) in February 2005, was decided upon when the stock hit about $80. Now, with the share price above that, it would make sense for a split to occur again, especially considering great earnings from Macs, iPods, and now even Apple TV sales. Of course, Apple could just be holding out for the iPhone’s release, which could either bring a lot of profits or be a huge failure. So in the end, an Apple stock split probably is going to happen within the next several months.
In contrast to my previous post, here’s a positive post about financial news: Apple Inc., better known to, well, everyone, as Apple, has announced its Q2 earnings this afternoon, and they’re pretty amazing at $0.87 EPS, which is up from $0.47 EPS in the year-ago-quarter, and $5.26 billion and $770 million in quarterly revenue and net profit, respectively. Apple has also sold 36% more Macs and 24% more iPods since last year. Plus, the Q2 earnings beat the $0.64 EPS analyst expectation by $0.23. What this means: Apple’s still growing and thriving, and its stock price has surged, going up $7.10 (7.45%) in after-hours trading at the time of publishing, all the way to an all-time-high (not including previous highs today in after-hours trading) of $102.45. So, whether you’re an Apple fan, shareholder, or both (like me), this’ll be good news to you’re ears.
Note: Apple has also announced that it’s not going to fight with ex-CFO Fred Anderson (who accused Steve Jobs of being responsible for the stock options scandal).
Note 2: From TUAW: “During this afternoon’s financial conference call, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer announced that a third Big Apple store is being planned. It’s been suggested that this building at 401 West 14th Street will be the third store’s location. At 52,000 square-feet, it would house one heck of a store.” And yes Dave, as you pointed out in your post, New Yorkers do get everything. Except free municipal Wi-Fi. And driving distance from Apple, Google, digg, Macworld and more headquarters. Damn you San Francisco!
Note: This applies to Mac users only. If you run Windows, buy a Mac or install Ubuntu. If you run Linux, good for you.
If you’re a Mac user and start to notice that your hard drive’s getting clogged, there’s a few things you can do. One is get an extra drive. Or, if you don’t want to cough up the cash, you can just go through your hard drive and clean out all of the unnecessary junk. Of course, this is easier said than done, so you can get some programs to help. One, OmniDiskSweeper, is a free app that simply gives you a folder hierarchy in order of the amount of space each folder/file takes up. While this works well, some people may want to visually see how much space their data takes up. That’s where GrandPerspective comes in.
GrandPerspective is simple: the free app scans any drive or folder, and then creates a grid of squares with proportional sizes to much drive space they take up. You can also change how squares are colored (the default is by folder), and what the color palette is. Overall, GrandPerspective works very well and is a great aid to cleaning up your hard drive.
[via MacUser]
Aaron Freedman is a 16 year old who's very passionate and knowledgeable about technology and journalism. He enjoys working on his two main projects, 
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