As everyone in the world knows by now, Apple bumped the iPad's screen to retina-display density, quadrupling the number of pixels to a whopping 3.1 million. That's fantastic news for iPad owners—the display will be gorgeous—but it also means more headaches for designers and a potential blight on your bandwidth bill and download speed. In bandwidth terms, pixels are heavy, and four times the pixels means four times the image size for bitmap images, give or take. If you want to take advantage of this gorgeous screen, every image you push down the wire is about to put on a ton of weight. That has implications in lots of places.

The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.

Throughout our history, Apple has created entirely new products — and entirely new industries — by focusing on innovation. As a result, we’ve created or supported more than 500,000 jobs for U.S. workers: from the engineer who helped invent the iPad to the delivery person who brings it to your door.

I just found out that Apple is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography.

Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon store. IE page 35, David Weinberger link.”

So this is going to be challenging for affliates and publishers trying to include links in their ebooks.

Apple, apparently, won’t carry an ebook that contains a link to buy a hardcover book from Amazon.

Finally Seth's advice to the ebook stores:

I think that Amazon and Apple and B&N need to take a deep breath and make a decision on principle: what’s inside the book shouldn’t be of concern to a bookstore with a substantial choke on the marketplace. [...] These stores can’t have it both ways. The web works because it’s open. The stores (all three of them) need to be too.

I personnally think it's pretty useless not being able to link to sources of content on the web from an ebook. Ebooks can be kept up to date easily and links to new sources curated by the author. Not being to include links takes away one of the benefits of digital books...

As for the next-generation iPad itself, sources say it will be pretty much what we’ve been led to expect by the innumerable reports leading up to its release: A device similar in form factor to the iPad 2, but running a much faster chip, sporting an improved graphics processing unit, and featuring a 2048×1536 Retina Display — or something close to it.

Page 39, FBI File on Steve Jobs The FBI has released its file on Steven Paul Jobs, the late Apple founder, compiled mostly during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. According to the The Vault description, “In 1991, Jobs was considered for an appointed position on the U.S. President’s Export Council. This release consists of the FBI’s 1991 background investigation of Jobs for that position and a 1985 investigation of a bomb threat against him.” The background check includes tidbits like, “Several individuals questioned Mr. Jobs’ honesty stating that Mr. Jobs will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals.”

Today the Apple rumor mill is fixated on a photo doing the rounds which allegedly shows the back housing of the next iPad (the iPad 3, or iPad HD, depending on who you talk to). The image, which surfaced on the Repair Labs Blog, is said to be similar to the previous model's back (that's the iPad 2 on the left, iPad 3 on the right), save for changes which will allow for a larger battery, slightly reconfigured logic board, new cameras, and a different screen. Normally it's hard to tell whether or ...

Oh boy, i hope it's coming soon! I can't wait to get an iPad.

Apple on Thursday announced a new platform for creating and reading digital textbooks.

"In like five minutes flat, we created an e-book and deployed it to the iPad. I hope you find that as inspiring and empowering as I do," Apple's Phil Schiller said at a press conference at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, according to live blogs of the event posted online.

At the press conference, Schiller mocked paper textbooks, saying, "They're not portable, not durable, not interactive, not searchable." Books on the iPad are all of those things, he said.

A new report from Ars Technica says the company is about to unveil a set of tools to create interactive e-books

This is going to change the world of e-books.

Instead, they undesigned it by creating the simplest shape possible. The iPad is the core essence of what a tablet can look like.

Apple is really good at this. Look at the Cinema Display, the Apple wireless keyboard, the Macbook Air, the iPod, and all their other devices. The reason why their "design" is so successful is because they are not actually designing their products. They are reducing them to the simplest form possible.

It is beauty through simplicity.

You cannot force people to add design elements that don't need to be there. You can trademark design, but not simplicity.

Wow, some really interesting stuff in here.

I thought about becoming an Apple Genius briefly.

Apple's successful retail formula includes intensive control of how employees interact with customers, scripted training for tech support and consideration of every store detail, confidential training manuals and interviews with former employees reveal.

excerpt:

Apple is working on a line of smaller, less-expensive iPhones and a software overhaul that would make it easier for customers to access entertainment and personal photos and videos.

The person who saw the prototype of the new iPhone said the device was significantly lighter than the iPhone 4 and had an edge-to-edge screen that could be manipulated by touch, as well as a virtual keyboard and voice-based navigation. The person said Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., also plans to upgrade the iPhone 4.

Competition is a beautiful thing!

Unfortunately, I'm still sitting here on my iPhone 3GS, unable to pull the trigger on an iPhone 4.

I've been paralyzed until recently by the Verizon launch (to which I will not be switching).

But now I'm stuck waiting for the iPhone 5.

I need to break the iPhone upgrade cycle. If I upgrade to the iPhone 4 now, I won't be able to get an upgrade price on the iPhone 5 until like 2013 at which point I'll get stuck waiting for the iPhone 7.

Damn you apple and your release cycles that are less than half that of the mobile provider upgrade periods.

But Apple TV has one killer feature which I think will play a role in the real future of television. That is the ability to “beam” content from your computer to your TV at the press of a button.

Now, the computer is the content discovery device and the TV simply becomes a screen. This solves a few big problems. One, it allows us to avoid interacting with a convoluted and limited TV interface, which will necessarily be less efficient than the dedicated laptops, iPhones, and iPads that we’re used to. I’d much rather find content on my computer first and beam it to my TV, instead of fiddling with an awkward custom television remote. Plus, there’s a ton of free content online. The networks have blocked their shows on Apple TV and Google TV, but they haven’t yet blocked them online. Our only choice at the moment is to use the laptop to find content.

Does apple TV really do that? Anything that I'm looking at on a computer on my network can be displayed on the TV?

So, say I fire up a show in Hulu. Make it go full-screen. And I can see it the same way on the TV.

And is it in HD?

If the answer to that is yes, I'm going to buy one today.

Great tip.