Hasta La Gadget!

Apple on Tuesday morning debunked a juicy rumor that Steve Jobs vowed to never visit Japan again after security guards forced him to throw away ninja stars that he attempted to carry onto his private jet.

The rumor was first published by Japanese tabloid SPA! Magazine and reiterated by Bloomberg, who quoted a spokesman confirming that a passenger was stopped at the end of July for carrying shuriken (the Japanese word for ninja stars).

However, Apple in a statement suggested that the CEO is not a ninja after all.

“Steve did visit Japan this summer for a vacation in Kyoto, but the incidents described at the airport are pure fiction,” Apple told All Things Digital. “Steve had a great time and hopes to visit Japan again soon.”

(Damn. Because ninjas are cool. And by cool, I mean totally sweet.)

Apple hasn’t been showing much love to Bloomberg lately. The publication reported in July that Jobs was warned about the iPhone 4’s potential antenna problems. In a press conference related to the iPhone 4 antenna, Jobs referred to the Bloomberg report as “total bullshit.”

See Also:

• Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing – Wired – Wired News
• Google's 'Don't Be Evil' Mantra Is 'Bullshit,' Adobe Is Lazy …
• Want Porn? Buy an Android Phone, Steve Jobs Says
• Steve Jobs: iTunes 10 Icon Does Not 'Suck'

Photo: James Merithew/Wired.com

Today’s ridiculous Apple rumor comes from Apple Insider. The claim? That a new FaceTime-equipped iPad will be in stores in time for the holiday season, just six months after the original launch. Bull.

That there will be an iPad with a front-facing camera for FaceTime videoconferencing is certain, and it will probably be there in version 2. But the idea that Apple would bring out a new model so soon after the first one is nonsensical in many ways. First, Apple can barely make enough iPads to keep up with demand. Only in the last few weeks have order-times dropped to a reasonable 24 hours, and with the iPad’s Chinese launch coming soon, it seems that Apple will continue to sell as many iPads as it can make. Introducing a new model so soon would be pointless.

Second, Apple runs its portable devices on a yearly update schedule. Every summer sees a new iPhone, every September a new iPod lineup. And while there is no precedent yet for the iPad, its safe to assume that it, too, will receive yearly updates. One year is long enough that early adopters like me will be happy to buy every new model, and long enough not to piss off customers who feel that their toy has be obsoleted too soon. Remember the fuss about the iPhone price-drop? Imagine what would happen if a new iPad came out in a month or so.

Apple Insider’s source is “a person with proven knowledge of Apple’s future product plans” and says that:

A version of the tablet device with a built-in video camera and support for the new FaceTime video conferencing standard has already progressed to the advanced testing stages.

He also said that “there was an ambitious push inside Apple to verify the refresh for a possible launch ahead of this year’s holiday shopping season.”

Which brings me to a third point. Why rush an update into stores with just one tiny, incremental hardware change? It seems very unlikely that there will be a Retina Display in a new iPad so soon after launch. After all, if the prices of such a big, hi-res screen were already cheap enough to keep to the iPad’s $500 price-point, wouldn’t Apple have put them in there already? The same goes for an SD-card-slot, which I’m guessing will be in iPad 2.0. The price of the rest of the hardware will have to drop before these are added, and six-months into a product cycle seems to soon.

I say this rumor is nothing but a rumor. If you want a new camera-toting iPad, wait until April.

Slightly more credible is Engadget’s report that Target may begin selling iPads on October 3. The gadget blog has a screenshot of a Target point-of-sale device that purportedly shows the inventory information for the iPad.

Apple to move aggressively on FaceTime, camera-equipped iPads [Apple Insider]

Photo: Brian X. Chen/Wired

See Also:

• IPad to Get Two-Megapixel Camera This Year
• Concept Case Adds Camera to iPad
• Apple iPad May Ship With Webcam

Remember when Nintendo said it’d release its release date for the 3DS autostereoscopic portable game system on the 29th of this month? We may already have the magic number — depending on how you interpret a few Japanese words. You see, a supposed video game accessory designer by the handle “nocchisan” recently tweeted that eleven Nintendo 3DS accessories will be released on November 11th, and asked his or her followers to kindly buy them up… while purportedly remarking that the 3DS itself will arrive at the same time. While the tweets in question can certainly be read that way, and it makes a certain amount of sense for accessories to appear at launch, our admittedly limited grasp of Japanese suggests an alternative translation: that it’s the accessories themselves (and not the 3DS) that will all arrive at the same time. There’s also the little matter of nocchisan himself, whose Twitter account has already disappeared — we have nothing actually connecting him to the accessory company except a link in his tweet.

Rumor pegs Nintendo 3DS for November 11th in Japan originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 14:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Honestly, from this distance it’s hard to tell what’s going on, but 9 to 5 Mac says we’re looking at a next-gen camera-equipped iPad fielded specifically to test video calls. As you may recall, iPhone software surfaced with a very similar menu just weeks before the iPhone 4 came out, which either means someone was inspired to create a clever ‘shop, or that we just got our first real glimpse at iProd 4,1. Oh, and Mr. Extreme Closeup? He’s our friend Blurrycam’s old college roommate, didn’t you know?

Mr. Extreme Closeup suggests next-gen iPad is testing FaceTime… right now originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Sep 2010 20:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Perhaps you’ve heard that Apple’s investing in digital video distribution at the moment? Perhaps you’ve read that Amazon’s working on a subscription video network, too? Sony makes number three, as the Financial Times is reporting the electronics giant is looking to launch a multimedia platform of its own. Starting with the PlayStation 3 and PSP, and then later extending to internet-connected Sony TVs, Blu-ray players, Vaio computers and phones, the service will reportedly offer both music and video sometime next year in what’s no doubt an attempt to work out deep-seated guilt at the death of Connect. You won’t have to wait nearly that long, however, to find out what’s what — the publication says Sir Stringer intends to preempt Apple’s six-string reveal by announcing the PlayStation Network-based service from IFA 2010 in Germany. Call us crazy, but this sounds like a perfect fit for the Sony’s out-of-the-blue $130 Netbox.

[Thanks, dedparrot]

Sony’s scheming a streaming music and video subscription service, too? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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