The file became public because Jobs passed away and much of it isn’t that surprising if you’ve really been following the charismatic Apple CEO. The FBI interviewed Jobs and multiple friends and colleagues and the one bombshell quote is the description which said he has a “tendency to distort reality in order to achieve his goals.”

The “reality-distortion field” was long attributed to Jobs, as he had a way of presenting products and talking to people so convincingly that almost everything else you knew to be true went out the window. Some people questioned his honesty but he was almost universally endorsed to hold the advisory position.

Other neat details also indicate that he was a mediocre student (C+ average in high school) and that he experimented with marijuana, hashish and LSD. Again, most of this was known before and it didn’t seem to disqualify Jobs for the position.

You can read the entire 191-page file from the FBI’s website here.

[Via The Star, photo credit]

Carriers pay Apple the subsidy that is able to keep the iPhone down to its $199 price point even after cramming in loads of new features in every release. For Apple, this is good. For consumers, this is good. For carriers, this is very bad.

During 2009 and 2010 before Verizon Wireless was selling the iPhone, its EBITDA margin was at an average of 46.4 percent. Right after the Verizon iPhone became a reality, the profit margin dropped to 43.7 percent. Last quarter, which was the first quarter to include iPhone 4S sales, Verizon’s margin was at 42.2 percent.

Fortunately for Verizon, its margins are comparably high to those of AT&T and Sprint. AT&T’s EBITDA service margin last quarter was 28.7 percent, an 8.9 percent decline year-over-year. Sprint’s margin last quarter was even worse at a sad 9.5 percent. The year before that when Sprint wasn’t selling the iPhone, its margin was 16 percent.

The good news is since Apple sells so many iPhones, carriers are still making plenty of money off of them. Don’t ever lose sleep about them not making money — if something doesn’t add to their bottom line, you can bet carriers will not go through with it.

[via CNN Money]

You see many pieces of Apple tech which can bring up nostalgia or even some rage. I still hate the one-button mouse and the Newton was a joke – or if you want to be kind, it was too ahead of its time for its own good. What really stands out to me in the rapid procession of products is that the iPhone gets a few seconds to stand out. It should.

It seems silly now but the iPhone was never a guaranteed hit and Steve Jobs said he would be happy to sell 10 million in the first year. It sold 37 million iPhones last quarter. The iPhone business alone is generated more revenue last quarter than all of Microsoft. Today’s stock results have also pushed Apple to being worth more than Google and Microsoft combined.

Remember, Apple was on the brink of destruction when Jobs came back, so this video is kind of a timeline to its meteoric rise to the top.

[image credit]

The numbers may not mean anything because movements always start small but this seemed like a layup for this city, as it involves workers’ rights, moral outrage and iPhones. It’s easy to pick on Apple too because it has nearly $100 billion in the bank and it could likely take a hit on its profit margin and still be fabulously wealthy, but the dirty secret about pretty much the entire consumer electronics industry is that all these awesome gadgets are generally made in working conditions that we wouldn’t accept. We’re talking about conditions where child labor is accepted and people work so hard that they commit suicide.

A great New York Times piece sheds some light on what these workers have to go through in order for us to have our fancy iDevices and some of it is heart wrenching. The part that I thought would make this protest larger is when a former Apple executive told the paper that if Apple demanded that the conditions had to improve, it would. Instead, it seems like Apple has chosen higher profit margins over the well-being of people in China.

Apple, Dell, HP and every other companies are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value and producing devices in China and other countries with abysmal labor laws can greatly add to the bottom line. Even Nokia is moving its production to China in order to save on costs but also because these factories enable companies to be more nimble with production. Nokia wants to get high-quality phones out at a quicker pace and right now, that’s only possible using Asian factories.

The moral outrage argument feels right but it may not be totally. Paul Krugman is known for leaning toward the left and even he believes that these “sweat shops” are needed and provide value because “bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all.” He also argues that these conditions may be appalling but they are better than the cruel existence of subsistence farming or or having no work at all. He writes:

In short, my correspondents are not entitled to their self-righteousness. They have not thought the matter through. And when the hopes of hundreds of millions are at stake, thinking things through is not just good intellectual practice. It is a moral duty.

Krugman has forgotten more economics than I’ll ever know but it’s tough to shake some form of moral outrage. Yes, every country may have to go through an industrial revolution of sorts which includes some nastiness but in this interconnected world, we can demand better conditions if we really want them. The only way to do this is with your dollars.

The timing of the announcement fits in nicely with Apple’s previous launch schedule for the iPad. Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPad in January 2010 and the iPad 2 in March 2011. It would only make sense the iPad 3 would make its debut one year later in March 2012.

Though the report did not have any new information on the hardware. AllThingsD’s source supposedly confirmed earlier rumors that suggest the iPad 3 will have a faster processor, retina-like display, and improved graphics. The form factor will stay about the same. As expected, an Apple spokesperson would not comment on the report.

[Via AllThingsD]

Now before anyone gets upset about this, note that we don’t have any information about what kind of cores Apple is using. We can easily imagine Apple wanting to go with ARM’s Cortex A15 processor, which clock for clock is 40% faster faster than the ARM Cortex A9 inside the iPad 2. In other words, two 1 GHz Cortex A15 chips should deliver the same amount of compute power as two 1.4 GHz Cortex A9 chips. Assuming the Apple A6 chip is built on a new 28 nanometer process, Apple could easily clock those Cortex A15 processors to 2 GHz, which would be the equivalent of a pair of Cortex A9 chips running at 2.8 GHz. Translation? Ludicrous speed.

At the end of the day though there’s no need to get too hung up on specs. People who buy the iPad don’t care about what makes the iPad tick, they care about the apps that they’ll be poking and prodding at for hours on end.

These iPads are to replace the paper charts and technical manuals its flight crews carry. With this kind of purchase it’ll be the the largest single federal order for any tablet. The Air Force plans to get these slates at the lowest price possible through a firm, which is necessary with such a potentially large order.

This is an interesting move because Apple’s iOS platform has yet to receive security certification from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST). The man behind the Army’s smartphone project, Michael McCarthy, estimates that certification should come in November or August 2012 at the earliest.

On one hand I think it’s cool the Air Force is converting to iPad’s, but on the other hand, it’s a little irresponsible for Uncle Sam to issue out 18,000 iPad 2 units that would cost taxpayers around $8,982,000.00 (if you factor in the $499 cost). Keep in mind, our government has been crying broke for the last couple of years, but oddly, it has the money to pay for almost 10 million dollars in iPad 2′s.

[via Nextgov]

Tweetbot is a Twitter client that uses clean, useful designs and subtle sounds to make browsing Twitter an amazing experience. It’s very simple to read through you timelines, open links from tweets and even see the conversation history of tweets. Unlike the new Twitter apps, I believe Tweetbot packs both style and functionality in a neat little package.

The iPad app uses the tablet’s space well and you have all the usual actions and gestures that you’re used to if you have the iPhone version. If you’re a newbie, there are some quick instructions which make it simple to understand. The 2.0 version on the iPhone includes an updated timeline view, new thumbnails and more.

So, I now have my go-to Twitter app on my iPhone and the iPad but I’m still looking for some great solutions on Android and on PCs. What are some great Twitter apps that I should be using?

You can download the Tweetbot app for iPhone here or the iPad version here (iTunes link).

The fact that Siri has had such a large impact on Wolfram Alpha in only a few months not only proves iPhone customers are actually using Siri, but how useful Wolfram Alpha’s technology is. It may also prove a long-term threat for Google, as technologies like Siri could become a disruptive platform that stands between users and search engines.

I’ve always been interested in Wolfram Alpha because it’s called an answer-engine rather than a search engine. This implies that there isn’t a need to search — you just get what you asked for. I own an iPhone 4 so I don’t have access to Siri, but I’d be willing to bet I would use Wolfram Alpha much more often if I had an iPhone 4S. Its website, wolframalpha.com, isn’t exactly the easiest URL for beginners to remember. Plus, since Google, Bing, and the like are all baked into most web browsers, it’s more convenient to use those search engines.

Now the tables could be turning, as technology generally simplifies as it evolves over time. The next logical step for search engines is to remove the search part of it and just get users directly to the answer they are looking for. This isn’t a viable solution for every query, but Wolfram Alpha executes this in as many ways possible. Google should feel a little bit threatened by Siri and Wolfram Alpha. Combined, search engines can seem second-rate.

[via PhoneArena]

We don’t have anything else to say about David, but we’d like to explore the future of the iPhone. Last month was the five year anniversary of Steve Jobs’ announcement of the Jesus Phone. That’s right, the iPhone is half a decade old. So let’s be honest with ourselves for a second, despite the iPhone achieving record sales quarter after quarter, the platform is starting to feel a bit dated. Depending on what Apple shows off this year with iOS 6 and the iPhone 5 we’ll know whether the company will stick to their “grid of icons across a swath of pages” user interaction model or actually try something new. Android is kind of sort of the same as iOS, and Windows Phone is the newest, though least proven, so what can Apple do differently besides make Siri more advanced?

If we had the answer we’d be in a garage coding it up right now, so we’re open to your suggestions: What does Apple need to do to iOS and the iPhone to keep it fresh?

Instead of a dedicated chip like the iPhone 4, Apple is licensing Audience’s audio technology and embedding it directly into the iPhone 4S’ A5 chipset. Audience’s latest earSmart technology used in the A5 is newer than the background noise processing found in the iPhone 4. The improved audio hardware found in the iPhone 4S may be the reason Siri is a 4S-only product.

Siri is often advertised as a hands-free solution you can use at any time, even when your phone is sitting on your desk. Trying to reduce background noise over a long distance like this isn’t easy and Siri may need the advanced audio processing found in the iPhone 4S. In other words, the iPhone 4 doesn’t have the hardware to handle the noise reduction Apple’s version of Siri requires. Though developers may be able to hack Siri onto older devices, the hardware differences between the iPhone 4 and the 4S may stop Apple from officially releasing the voice assistant on its older devices.

[Ars Technica and EE Times]