I’m seriously not making this up. It’s right there on 9to5Mac.
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MacRumors gets the goods, based on photos of the case for the iPhone 5 which apparently have been arriving in AT&T stores and photographed by super-spies who leaked them to the press. (Right.) As you can see in the photo, there are huge changes coming. Once again, Apple has rewritten the rules of the game. One enormous design shift: The mute button now has been moved to the other side of the phone. Also: The overall size is larger, but the phone is thinner. And it’s tapered. Tapered! Business Insider has a story on this too, which actually links you to a previous BI story about iPhone 5, which links to BI’s really informative 10-click slide show about what to expect in the new iPhone. All I expect is to be knocked senseless by the Zeus-like power of Tim Cook when he strides on stage next week. And I know I will not be...
Learn MoreThat’s the rumor of the day, from VentureBeat. Poor Ruby. He’ll need to get all new business cards — again.
Learn MoreChris Espinosa is impressed by the Silk browser which will “capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users.” Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence. The main target of all this? No, not Apple: Fire isn’t a noun, it’s a verb, and it’s what Amazon has done in the targeted direction of Google. This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation...
Learn MoreIt’s tough work, trying to predict the future. Especially when it comes to technology products. As I tried to point out yesterday in the post about all the nutty reports about the features that the new iPhone 5 might or might not have, it’s really pretty much impossible to guess in advance what some new product will look like. Nevertheless people keep trying, because let’s face it, stuff like this drives page views, and page views are what modern journalism is all about. The problem is, these “scoops” are often wildly wrong. Yet people keep writing them, and readers keep reading them and linking to them and citing them as if they were actual news. Why is that? I think it’s because most people are not dickish enough to go back, after the real product is announced, and compare the actual news to the rumors that were spread around before from people who just knew, based on some source(s), exactly what some company was going to announce. In that spirit, let’s go back to Sept. 2 and take a look at the huge scoop that TechCrunch reported after one of its writers didn’t just hear some rumors about the forthcoming Amazon tablet but actually held it in his feverish...
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