Apple and Cisco have reached an agreement on the disputed “iPhone” trademark, and – surprise – Apple gets to keep using it. From the Cisco press release:
Under the agreement, both companies are free to use the “iPhone” trademark on their products throughout the world.
To further differentiate brands, the Apple iPhone will also be known as “the real iPhone”, with the Cisco model being referred to as “Oh, I thought you meant the other one.”
A recent discussion on the Well came around to the question of whether the classic Macintosh was “hacker’s” machine or not. Conventional wisdom would say no – it was the very definition of buttoned up. You couldn’t even develop software for it without a separate, more expensive computer (the Lisa) in the early days.
But I think there’s a counter-argument to be made. Yes, the old Mac was a closed box that didn’t allow access to the internals of the OS. However, it was a far more tweakable system for most Mac users than the fragile, inscrutable Windows of that era was for most Windows users.
In case you missed it, Apple has a new product. You can’t, you know, buy it or anything just yet – that’ll be about six months. And $500, please. While you wait you can compare it to the competition.
They claim that it runs OS X. Hm. I can imagine there’s a BSD kernel (running on what processor I don’t know), QuickTime, WebKit… but really, how much of the stuff in the standard OS X architecture diagram is actually going to be in that phone?
My friend Matt recently got a microcontroller kit as a present. It’s pretty geek-tastic – you wire up circuits on a little breadboard, write code on your PC, download the compiled code to the microcontroller, and run. At which point, depending on your skill and ambition, your LED blinks, your piezo buzzes, or your robot limbs and sensors do their thing. And your cat runs into the other room.
All very cool, but the language – a BASIC dialect called PBASIC – overwhelmed my delicate sensibilities. For example, take this bit of code (found on the web)…
If you just bought a MacBook Pro (especially the 15"), this will hurt a little: the new ones out today (same prices) all have FW800 in addition to FW400, up to 200GB drives, up to 3GB RAM, and a 6x dual-layer SuperDrive. Oh, and that Intel Core 2 Duo thing.