A favorite phrase of Steve Jobs takes to the friendly skies, while the Macintosh says hello to another year, and Apple’s secret packaging facility is unboxed. The remainders for Tuesday, January 24, 2012 have returned their seats to the upright position.
Virgin America Names Jet After Steve Jobs (MacRumors)
Fifteen years ago, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson was featured in Apple’s iconic Think Different commercial. Now, after an internal naming competition, one of Virgin America’s Airbus A320s has been emblazoned with the phrase “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” The advice originally appeared on the back of the final issue of The Whole Earth Catalog, and was later appropriated by Steve Jobs, most famously during his Stanford commencement address in 2005. Speaking as someone who will shortly be boarding a Virgin America aircraft, the admonition to “stay foolish” isn’t exactly reassuring.
An Apple store is worth as much as the White House (CNNMoney)
Apple annually sells an average of $4709 of products per square foot in its stores, but someone had the bright idea of—for the kinds of inane reasons only found in tech journalism—comparing it to the the White House, which is valued at $4752 per square foot. Therefore, following that logic, the only reasonable conclusion is that there should be an Apple Store in the White House. Right?
Happy 28th Birthday, Apple Macintosh! (MacDailyNews)
We would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that January 24 marks the 28th birthday of the original Macintosh, introduced two days earlier during the famous 1984 Super Bowl ad. Congrats, Macintosh! You’re now officially old enough to…well..actually, nothing, really—28’s a pretty boring age.
Inside Apple’s secret packaging room (NetworkWorld)
If the legion of unboxing videos on YouTube are any indication, Apple’s packaging invites almost as much attention as its products. So it’s no surprise that the company puts the same attention to detail into the boxes its devices come in as it does the devices themselves. Turns out Apple even has a “secret packaging room” where those containers are designed to attain that elusive effect of making the consumer think twice before immediately throwing it out.
Product News:
MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 2.5 – Apple has issued a firmware update for mid-2010 13-inch MacBook Pros, enabling Lion Recovery over an Internet connection for the models. Free, available via Software Update.
Writing Kit 2.5 – Version 2.5 of Quang Anh Doh’s text editor for iOS adds more fine-grained editor settings, 16 custom themes, improved Markdown rendering for heading text, and a number of smaller changes and fixes. It now requires iOS 5. $5.
Yojimbo 3.0.3 and Yojimbo for iPad 1.0.4 – Bare Bones Software has updated both the Mac and iPad versions of its data storage app. Both address issues with data synchronization between the two versions. Yojimbo 3.0.3 is a free update to owners of 3.x, $20 for those upgrading from a previous version of Yojimbo, or $39 for a new, single license. Yojimbo for iPad 1.0.4 is $10.