Hasta La Gadget!

Apple has been through some extreme ups and downs, but today the corporation climbed to an all-time high. Apple surpassed longtime rival Microsoft in market capitalization, making the Cupertino, California, company the most valuable technology company in the world, for the moment, at least.

The milestone is even more remarkable given Apple’s single-digit share of the computer market. Microsoft, by contrast, runs on about 90 percent of the world’s PCs.

Steve Jobs should feel vindicated. After being fired from his own company in the 1980s, the company gradually became less and less relevant, its market share dwindling and its innovative edge dulled.

Now, over a decade after his return as Apple CEO, Jobs — once viewed as an opportunistic entrepreneur who would never have the chops to run a really big company — is the king of the tech industry.

From the first iMac to the revolutionary iPad, what follows is a list of key turning points that took Apple from an also-ran into a champion.

Above:

Jobs Returns, 1996

A nearly bankrupt Apple Computer welcomed back its ousted founder Jobs in 1996. Apple purchased Jobs’ startup, NeXT, to help build a new, Unix-based operating system — but the real prize was Jobs himself. A year later, Jobs replaced Gil Amelio as CEO to retake the helm. With the help of some financial backing from rival Bill Gates, the return of Jobs marked the beginning of Apple’s gradual recovery.

Photo: Gil Amelio, left, and Steve Jobs appear together at the MacWorld exposition in San Francisco on January 7, 1997
Associated Press/Eric Risberg

$20 might at first seem expensive for a USB charging cable, especially as it is limited to Apple’s iDevices. But when you are down to the last few excited electrons in your iPhone’s battery and you just have to Tweet that your iPhone is sooo nearly dead, the $20 will look cheap.

So go spend it on Scosche’s flipSYNC already, a keychain USB/Dock cable that folds up into a tiny plastic capsule which itself looks just like the non-key part of your car key. Crack open the case and you have yourself two plugs, ready to gulp down a little extra juice from any nearby computer or other USB-teat.

For those of us not bound up in Apple’s world, there is another version which includes a standard USB connector along with both mini and micro USB plugs. This one is crazy useful, letting you connect phones, hard-drives and even cameras and card-readers to a computer for charging or data-transferring duties, and costs the same $20.

If you can stomach buying replacements for things you already have, then these two adapters, snuggled together on your keyring, could be the most useful $40 you spend since that handy, tasteful Laptop Burka.

FlipSYNC [Scosche]

The folks at HardMac have received an image purporting to reveal protective skins for the next-generation iPhone. The shape of the skin and the round holes for buttons come in line with the characteristics of the prototype iPhone leaked by Gizmodo last month.

Third-party cases have provided clues about unreleased Apple hardware a number of times in the past — sometimes they were legitimate, and sometimes they weren’t. Former Wired.com news editor Leander Kahney explained that the third-party accessory industry has historically been a leaky boat because the people who create the plastics that come with the iPhone are likely connected to the companies making third-party protective cases. (They are all in the plastics industry, after all.)

This time around, however, it could be the case that third-party manufacturers are confident that the prototypes leaked by Gizmodo and a Vietnamese website are the near-final product. MacRumors’ Arnold Kim did a quick search and found additional cases for an “iPhone 4G.”

Via HardMac

See Also:

• iPhone Finder Regrets His ‘Mistake’
• Roommate’s Tip Led Cops to iPhone Finder
• Gizmodo Gets Hands On New 4G iPhone
• Gizmodo Dissects Unreleased Apple iPhone
• Apple May Have Traced iPhone to Finder’s Address

For $15, you can turn your notebook computer into what looks like a box of Lego. Those keys are in fact stickers which sit atop your MacBook keycaps and turn the keyboard into a sea of dimpled plastic bricks.

The stickers, made from easily-removed vinyl, come from Etsy-seller openandclose. They’re kind of neat, but the toy-nerd in me can’t help spot the non-Lego elements in these “Lego-style” bricks. First, the colors are way off. Whoever heard of pink Lego?

Second, the circular nubbins are too small on the function keys and too big on the letters. Only on the spacebar do you see anything approaching Lego-like proportions. Going by the shadows, though, it looks like openandclose at least made the stickers in real 3D, and didn’t just shade the tops to look as if they are raised.

Available now, for you to buy and use for five minutes before ripping them off in a fit of annoyance.

Lego Style MacBook Keyboard Decor Decal Sticker [Etsy via Oh Gizmo!]

Visa has announced a contactless payment system for the iPhone which allows you to use the phone as a credit card. It works using RFID tech, and is as kludgy as hell.

Called In2Pay, the payment method uses a modified microSD card with a near-field communications (NFC) chip inside. Because the iPhone doesn’t yet sport a microSD slot, the card sits in a case which powers the chip and allows contactless payments, just like those used to pay for toll booths or public transport. You would be able to hold your iPhone up to a compatible reader and make a transaction. It would work even if there were no clerk present, for instance at a vending machine.

The idea of schemes like In2Pay is to free you from carrying a wallet, allowing you to do everything with your cellphone. But this implementation, which requires carrying a cellphone case, is not much different from just taping your credit card to the back of your phone. (Or slipping it into a credit card-holding iPhone cover.)

It also requires a compatible card reader. What, the neighborhood restaurant doesn’t accept contactless payments? Sorry, there are only 100,000 merchants in the U.S. that have NFC payment readers, compared to millions that accept old-style credit cards.

However, it does come direct from Visa, lending a certain weight to the scheme, and when more phones accept the microSD it will be essentially invisible. Add to that the fact that iPhone users tend to be more disposed to trying out new tech and you can easily see that this is a pilot scheme from Visa designed to grow the infrastructure of contactless payments, which have so far failed to meet Visa’s inflated expectations.

In2Pay joins several methods for receiving credit card payments, including Square, a little white cube that slots into the iPhone’s headphone jack and allows you to swipe regular old credit cards. Soon, it seems clear, almost all payments will be made using cellphones, even the ones that involve paying your friend back that dollar he owes you. Just don’t lose that phone.

DeviceFidelity Announces Mobile Contactless Payment Solution for iPhone [Visa via MobileCrunch]

See Also:

• PayPal Fist Bumps Square
• Square Mobile Credit Card System (Beta)
• Swipe Credit Cards With Your iPhone