Hasta La Gadget!

Boo Apple PR. I understand that it’s your job to paint your company in the best possible light, but come on, Steve Jobs carrying ninja stars onto a plane? That’s downright legendary. I already thought he was a pretty cool dude, but this really put him over the top (though, admittedly, were he a real ninja, security wouldn’t have been that big an issue).

Apple responded to today’s report that Jobs had his ninja stars confiscated in a Japanese airport by issuing the following statement,

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

The second sentence is, of course, a direct response to the capper of the story in which Jobs announced that he refused to ever go to Japan again, after the whole kerfuffle. I mean, come on, a dude’s gotta have some throwing stars, just in case. Have you seen the size of Ballmer?

No, seriously. Bloomberg is reporting that Apple head Steve Jobs got busted attempting to bring ninja stars (shuriken) onto his private plane. Ninja stars! According to reports, airport officials wouldn’t allow Jobs to get on the plane with the dangerous weapons in his carry-on luggage, after discovering them during a security scan.

I guess he failed to charm them with his whole “one more thing” approach to airport security.

The Apple CEO told the officials that hijacking his own plane wouldn’t make any sense. According to the story, Jobs said that he will never return to the country. Bloomberg confirmed that a passenger was stopped by airport security, but authorities refused to identify the individual,

Takeshi Uno, a spokesman at Kansai airport, said a passenger using a private jet was stopped at the end of July for carrying shuriken, the Japanese word for Ninja throwing stars. The passenger, whom Uno declined to identify because of the airport’s privacy policy, threw away the blades, he said.

A quick note to Jobs: if you do manage to get the ninja stars into the US at some point, holding them the wrong way can lead to disaster.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

A decade ago at Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs provided a rare look into the vision guiding Apple. Breaking with naysayers foretelling the demise of the PC, Jobs said that the PC was now entering a third golden age of “Digital Lifestyle,” following those of productivity and the Internet. In this era, the PC would serve as a digital hub.

The presentation was rife with references that are amusing with a decade of hindsight, one in which Apple has received more attention for its work in advancing popular digital spokes. For example, in pointing out some peripheral devices that will connect to the digital hub, Jobs showed the Rio flash-based MP3 player as well as the Palm V, both of which would succumb to Apple’ own iPod and iPhone.

Continue reading Switched On: Why the digital hub died

Switched On: Why the digital hub died originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 20:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple certainly took its sweet time releasing iTunes 10 yesterday, and we’re beginning to think it’s because the company was making a last-second change to its new Ping social-network-for-music: the removal of Facebook Connect for finding friends. Seriously — although an option to find friends via Facebook was conspicuously present during Steve’s keynote demos, it’s not there anymore. Oddly, the option was there at the very beginning — several Engadget staffers definitely saw a Facebook button when they signed up for Ping last night, and there’s a whole thread on Apple’s support site of people who also saw it and are now wondering where it’s gone.

Just to make things even more confusing, Kara Swisher at All Things D got two very different statements from Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller at the event yesterday: Schiller was enthusiastic about finding friends via Facebook, while Jobs said Zuckerberg and co. were demanding “onerous terms” that Apple refused. We’re assuming Jobs was talking about something deeper than just finding friends via Connect, but it’s still all very strange — and as it stands, finding friends on Ping right now requires a fair bit of guesswork and searching, so we’re hoping this all gets sorted soon. Check the video of Phil Schiller talking about Facebook and Ping after the break, as well as a snap of it (sort of) working from last night.

Update: We can’t confirm this, but we’ve just gotten a tip saying the problem is primarily on Facebook’s end — the service is currently denying requests from Ping, and the resulting errors apparently caused enough other problems for Apple to pull the plug on the connection entirely until it’s fixed. That certainly would explain why Ping has seemed buggy and slow from the outset, but we’re still waiting for some official explanation of what’s going on.

Continue reading Why did Apple take Facebook Connect out of Ping?

Why did Apple take Facebook Connect out of Ping? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Apple Wednesday announced the next two versions of iOS, its operating system for iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPad, adding support for multiplayer gaming, HDR photography, and wireless printing.

The first revision to the operating system, iOS 4.1, will be available next week as a free download for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but not the iPad. IOS 4.1 includes bug fixes, support for making high dynamic range (HDR) photos, TV show rentals, and an entertainment feature for multiplayer gaming called Game Center.

Jobs says that the bug fixes are focused on the issues most frequently raised by customer support calls.

“We think we’ve nailed a lot of them and we think you’re going to be pretty happy with them,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said.

The next version, iOS 4.2, will available in November for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad users. Its feature enhancements will be focused on iPad users, with a focus on wireless printing from the iPad. It will also include features already available to iOS 4 users on the other two platforms, but which have not yet been made available to the iPad: multitasking, multi-threaded e-mail and folders.

Story continues …