Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on July 01
In its latest round of ratings on smart phones, Consumer Reports has given Apple's iPhone its two top spots.
Two? Yup. The iPhone 3GS came in at number one, and the iPhone 3G came in at number two. On the 3GS, the display, battery life and other features is what carried the day over the Blackberry Storm and the Palm Pre, though CR says those models bested the iPhone on messaging. CR also produced an iPhone vs. Palm Pre video that's worth watching.
Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on July 01
Good news for Apple on the Mac education sales front. The Maine Department of Education said it has placed an order with Apple for 64,000 MacBooks and will order another 7,000 within the coming week. They'll be going to students in grades 7 through 12 throughout the state. The machines are being purchased under the auspices of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, which has provided students in that state with Macs since 2002. More details in the original announcement here. Meanwhile Ars Technica's Chris Forseman notes that Kansas, Iowa and Louisiana are handing out Macs to students as well.
Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on July 01
Last night as I was closing today's story about the application Evernote, I learned an interesting bit of trivia, that Newton fans will find interesting.
Evernote founder Stepan Pachikov was a co-founder of ParaGraph, a Russian concern that in 1993 supplied the CalliGrapher handwriting recognition engine to Apple's Newton line of PDAs. Retired in 1998 not long after Steve Jobs took over as CEO from Gil Amelio, the Newton is fondly remembered by enthusiasts, but more widely remembered for being lampooned by cartoonist Garry Trudeau in Doonesbury, mainly because its text recognition abilities weren't quite ready for prime time.
As anyone who's used it can tell you, one of Evernote's best features is its ability to quickly recognize text in photos, and even in images of handwritten notes on paper or white boards. I asked CEO Phil Libin if there were any connection between the two. There is, absolutely, he said. Some of the people who worked on the original CalliGraphy engine are working on Evernote's text-recognition capabilities now, and so the two products are very much related, he says. So if you're an Evernote user now, and were a Newton user at any time in the past, you can appreciate the connection.
Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on June 29
Bloomberg News moved an alert on its wires at 12:36 PM Eastern Time saying that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is back at work. The Associated Press followed up with an alert of its own at 12:48 PM. This now makes it official.
I don't know exactly why anyone should be surprised, given how its both the end of June, and Apple has consistently, maddeningly, repeated over and over in response to practically any question about the CEO, that "Steve looks forward to returning to work in June."
That statement, usually attributed to Apple spokesman Steve Dowling has been replaced by a new one: "We are very glad to have him back."
Additionally, there was the little bit about Steve being quoted in the press release concerning sales of the iPhone 3GS.
Apple stock is up 32 cents or 0.22% as of 1:20 PM EDT.
The next step in the process is for Jobs to be seen at some kind of Apple event. I'd start looking for that in September. With the iPhone and MacBook upgrades now out of the way, there isn't a lot of major product news to expect from Apple for the remainder of the summer, though I should hedge that by saying that Apple hasn't — at least in recent months — been sticking to its well-worn product-introduction patterns.
For the last few years Apple has refreshed its iPod line every September since 2005, and it would seem that the iPod touch would be the next likely candidate for some attention. Now that the iPhone 3GS is sporting 32 gigabytes of storage capacity, it would make some sense for the iPod touch to go to 64 GB, and to perhaps get a camera and maybe even an internal microphone — for audio recording apps and for VOIP-over-WiFi apps like Skype, and to ship with iPhone OS 3.0 pre-installed. It would make sense for Steve to introduce just such a product in person at an Apple media extravaganza, would it not?
Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on June 24
Finally there has been some official confirmation about the June 20th report in The Wall Street Journal that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has received a liver transplant. Word comes from the hospital where the operation took place, Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute, in Memphis. The official press release from the hospital is here. The disclosure was made with the permission of Jobs himself, though there are still many details unknown, such as the date the operation took place, nor the precise nature of the condition from which he was suffering. More from the Associated Press here.
I've confirmed that Dr. James D. Eason, (pictured) program director of Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute and the source of the hospital's statement, was the lead surgeon on the team who performed the transplant. Jobs is, Eason says, "recovering well and has an excellent prognosis," but declined to give any further information about his condition. Eason is a former Major in the US Air Force, received his medical degree from the University of Tennessee, and is an associate editor of the American Journal of Transplantation.
The hospital also shot down any speculation that Jobs' received any special treatment because of his wealth or status. Under a medical scoring system called MELD – short for Model for End-Stage Liver Disease – Jobs was the sickest patient on the waiting list with his blood type when a liver became available. More about the MELD system can be found at Medscape, and at Wikipedia
Apparently, Jobs picked a good place to have the transplant done. Methodist University Hospital performed 120 liver transplants in 2008, making it one of the ten busiest liver transplant centers in the U.S.
And while this disclosure may certainly cool any lingering criticism around how the transplant came to happen, it still satisfy the corporate governance critics who say Apple, and specifically its board of directors, hasn't been forthcoming enough with information around the medical condition of the CEO. But as I reported on Tuesday, there has been precious little guidance from the US Securities and Exchange Commission on precisely when the illness of a CEO becomes a material matter that must be disclosed to shareholders. That leaves companies to meet, arguably, only the minimum requirements of the law.
Update: Now the United Network for Organ Sharing has put out a statement on transplant. This is the organization that under federal contract operates the national Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), and it explains more about the MELD score. "Whenever a person known to the public receives a transplant, it is tempting to compare that person's waiting time to national averages," it says. "Any comparison of one person's experience to that of thousands of others can be misleading."
It goes on: "Liver waiting time is greatly influenced by a formula that assigns priority for organ offers based on the candidate's risk of dying within three months without a transplant. For candidates 12 or older, this formula is called a MELD score."
MELD uses tests of liver and kidney function, and can range from 6 which is least urgent, to 40, the most urgent score. Those candidates with a score of 15 or higher are at considerable risk of dying in the short term without a transplant. OPTN policy assigns a priority to liver candidates in the local region of the donor with a MELD score of 15 or higher before less-urgent candidates may be considered.
Of candidates listed in the United States with an initial MELD score between 19 and 24, half receive a liver transplant within approximately 15 weeks, the organization says. Of those listed with an initial MELD score of 25 or higher, half receive a transplant within 20 days. Candidates with lower MELD priority may often wait months to years for a transplant opportunity, it says.
We do not know what Steve Jobs' MELD score was. Based on the fact that it was reported first in January by Bloomberg News that Jobs was "considering" a liver transplant, and that the operation itself occurred in April, then we can deduct that his need for a transplant was fairly urgent, and as such that his MELD score was likely higher than 15. If this is the case, then it suggests that the illness was serious enough that Jobs was closer to death than anyone has yet indicated. It's hard to argue under any circumstances that this was not a material fact to which investors aren't entitled, medical leave or no.
