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Johnny Cash wins one lucky iTunes customer a $10,000 gift card and a personal call from Steve Jobs.

Would have been nice if they'd given him $10 billion to celebrate the 10 billionth song instead, would also have solved some of that "oops, we have a large pile of cash" issue as well. Typical tight-fisted Apple (I kid, I kid! In before Steve Jobs team of trained Apple ninjas snatch me from my home).

Transparent House showcases its 3D modelling talent by creating a medly of Apple products from 1976 to 2010. The modelling is very slick and professional but I can't help but wonder why you would model a mac laptop when you could film the real thing. The images for the modern computers are obviously fake, they are just too shiny but the older ones look very realistic (maybe because I have only ever seen them in photographs).

Agree Mike/Stimpson?

Amazingly well spotted there Al genius pairing that made me laugh to myself in the middle of a train station, and then recieve odd looks from everyone waiting for the train. Doh!

There are too many links to post on my phone but here are some headlines.

iPad owners who's batteries die will be able to get a whole new iPad for £99. Very good value for money in terms of battery exchange.

iMac has a lower total cost of ownership compared with Windows in enterprise.

An update for Snow Leopard was released yesterday (29 March 2010). It has a series of security and stability enhancements and should be updated as soon as possible. I updated yesterday and it was a smooth process.

Mac vs Windows Steam gaming performance results are in with Windows giving better speed and Mac giving 5 times the stability. Interesting stats. Steam for Mac has been a success with 11% of purchases made for Mac. This is roughly in line with Market share so it shows a quick embrase by Mac owners.

AutoCAD is probably heading back to the Mac platform after a 18 year holiday. I wonder if the famed Mac reliability will continue with the poor autodesk programming messing things up!

Apple is larger than Microsoft. Official.

iPad has officially been released today. I want to go and see one in the Apple store but I get the feeling that it will just make me want one. Unfortunately as the money would come from either a moving or holiday fund Lizzie has said if I buy one of these then she and Millie are going on holiday alone. . . .

I will have to wait until July to buy an iPhone instead - that has been pre-authorised.

£699.99 - iPad or laptop?

Personally, I think iPhone and laptop for the same outlay is more useful, but the iPad is certaiunly very slick and would look pretty good reading the nespaper on it on the train....

I went to see one of these today in the Apple Store Manchester. I was impressed but surprised that there were stock left. It is obviously not selling as well as the iphone or iphone 3G. I would pay £429 for the lower spec model. It would be a good entertainment device for trips out, at home etc. Unfortunately I have not the funds - if I win the lottery (£10 or above) you will know because I will be sporting one of these.

Safari 5 has been released with security updates and a new interesting feature called 'Safari Reader'. The Safari Reader manages to find articles on a page and then fade out the website and just load the basic text for you to read. It is an interesting feature and I will report back if it is any good.

On another note it is faster again - reports are by 30% but I can't benchmark the performance personally to verify. A good upgrade for both Windows and a Mac. Testing done by MacWorld.

EDIT: Interesting Article about the Safari Reader it is basically a tool to help you read the actual content of the website. I have been using this today and it is VERY good. I suggest that people try it. MacWorld or BBC are good websites to try the feature.

Rather than continuing to hijack the iphone thread I thought I'd update you on my ipod progress here...

I've got a big and (so I thought temperamental) 160gig ipod classic. For months I've been having issues where when I go to add music- either thru sync or manual management. The ipod would crash, blank itself or say it was corrupt.
This understandably drove me NUTS!!
Until I found a solution! At work I've been allocated an old eMac... running itunes 7.6 (the very edition released to coincide with my ipods original release!). After much fiddling on my home iMac I decided to try a restore and sync on my work machine... which worked perfectly! I've since added more tunes- which is where things usually go wrong. No problem! It seems that (Although apple strenuously deny it on their help pages) older models of ipod aren't fully supported/compatible with some of their software updates!
I'm just glad to find a work around allowing me to extend the life of my first (and favourite) ipod.

Apple music event yesterday (1 September 2010). I managed to miss the live announcement but here are some links to articles on Macworld and their summary.

iOS 4.1 and 4.2 announced. 4.1 will be released in about 1 week and will contain the Game Centre (allowing you to play games vs friends online); HDR photographs; Upload of HD video over wifi; TV rentals and an improvement to sluggish performance in iPhone 3G. 4.2 will bring the iPad up to date and will bring all of the above features and the new Social Music service from iTunes called Ping.

Redesigned iPod Nano and Shuffle. The Nano now has a touch screen interface and the shuffle brings back the buttons.

iTunes 10 has been announced and released immediately. This integrates a new function called Ping which allows you to follow a circle of friends and interact with artists directly. Its sort of a Facebook, MySpace, Twitter hybrid by the sound of the article. They are rather late to the game so it will be interesting to see if people actually get on board. If you couple this with self publishing on iTunes then it could be good for small bands.

iPod Touch. New retina display. Facetime (as the iPhone 4) and dual cameras that go with it! Impressively smaller and very desirable!

New Apple TV with complete streaming from iTunes and Netfix for films. At a couple of pounds per film and pennys for a tv show it represents good value at $99. Lizzie has wanted one of these for a while and now it looks like it is finally becoming more mainstream.