The issues seem fairly widespread with Macbook Air owners explaining what is going wrong both in Apple’s Discussion Threads, as well as the MacRumors forums.

Image via flickr user landung2008

“I have recently noticed my 3 month old MacBook Air has 1/2″ to 1″ “play” or “slop” in the hinge. In other words, the screen will move 1/2″ to 1″ with little or no resistance. The hinge does not seem to have any adjustment or an easily fixed remedy,” one frustrated owner explains on the MacRumors forums. “…my apple air has a defect with the hinge. could apple please change your policy to accept hinge as warrant on apple air models,” another owner explains in Apple’s threads.

Both videos shown here address the issues, which Apple says are not covered under warranty. This makes for an unfortunate situation given Apple and CEO Steve Jobs’ level of pride when unveiling “the skinniest notebook in the world.” The level of attention to detail Apple claimed went into the notebook’s hardware design and manufacturing was staggering. They painted a picture of the Macbook Air as if it were chiseled by da Vinci himself. Now that the issue seems moderately spread, we’re curious to see how Apple responds, if at all.

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Air-o-matic makes Pull My Finger (iTunes link), which sells for $0.99. Competing developers InfoMedia Inc, make iFart Mobile (iTunes link), which also sells for $0.99. In a nuthsell, Air-o-matic is accusing InfoMedia of unethical tactics used to gain traction in the app store, which they are in turn profiting from.

Adversely, as VentureBeat has pointed out, Infomedia has now asked a federal judge in Colorado to determine that “pull my finger” as a phrase, does not fall under common trademark laws. Infomedia’s Joel Comm attempts to explain the situation on his personal blog, and has made the legal papers publicly available (PDF). Keep in mind this is from one side of the argument.

What Apple can do about situations like this remains unknown. After all, business is business and reviews can’t necessarily be moderated by humans unless they are proven to be fake. Directly slanderous motives such as writing negative reviews on what is seemingly a third party site (when it’s not), should definitely be punishable. Since Apple has chosen to run the App Store like a high scale application boutique with which they choose what happens, they should be able to intervene when spamming, and unethical behavior is accused, not after it has already been proven.

Air-o-matic’s legal team has sent letters to both Apple and InfoMedia in the hopes that this gets sorted out. We don’t mean to open Pandora’s box with these reports, however, unethical and slanderous behavior in the App Store should be brought to light, especially when people are profiting from it.

The video below explains everything from Air-o-matic’s point of view. They are speaking in the video (turn up speakers) as they explain the alleged unethical tactics used by InfoMedia. The video has been pulled due to the ongoing legal tussle.

Update: Air-o-matic got in touch to share their side of their story too. Good timing, the video below was made prior to the story going public, we saw it… But it was then pulled due to confusion and guidance from lawyers. Air-o-matic in general didn’t want to risk both apps getting banned and this hindering their business further. However, after recent allegations from both sides, they’ve gone ahead and made the video available to view. Here’s a direct link to “their side of the story.”

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Just two days after its release, the NVIDIA Graphics Update 2009 has been removed from both Apple’s website and software update system for seemingly unclear reasons. In addition to providing improved cursor movement, the update was also set to boost HD video playback on the new MacBook Pro’s running NVIDIA’s GeForce 9600M graphics cards as well Mac systems that use GeForce 7300 GT chips.

Apple discussion forums have been littered with cases of notebook graphic issues. AppleInsider notes that user, munchnstuf, reported issues in a Mac Pro thread, saying, “My new MacBook Pro display screen is blinking or flickering every few minutes now. I’ve only noticed it when I’ve switched to the integrated 9400M graphics processor. I don’t recall seeing any blinks when using the discrete 9600M GPU.” Others are under the impression that their troubles are stemming from a software issue adding, “My external display (lacie electron) goes black 4/5 times in hour, for 5sec each time, (then) go back to normal state… under bootcamp its PERFECT!!! No issue with the external display!!”

There are several YouTube videos that demonstrate some of the problems that users are experiencing.

You can clearly see the external display issues, as this user states, “This video captures the corruption on a 24″ external monitor powered by a late 08 macbook pro 2.53 using a Mini DP to DVI extension. The corruption occurred after shutting down OS X and booting, not restarting the machine or waking from sleep.”

This video reveals strenuous screen flickering that this user experiences when their external display awakes. As Apple has a tendency to remain secretive about software updates, the reason for the update’s removal remains unclear.

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Apparently, even amidst all of the incredibly heated reports regarding Jobs’ health, some people thought it would be amusing to post more fake rumors about the CEO going into cardiac arrest. As you can see from the screenshot below, Wired’s image viewer allows pretty much anybody to post anything online.

As we learned with iReport the first time a fake Steve Jobs heart attack story was published, user generated content (when not even slightly moderated) can lead to manipulated and unethical results. Not to mention potential lawsuits and investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Image via Gizmodo of Wired’s “Image Viewer”

Reports regarding Steve Jobs’ health have been incredibly heated over the last few weeks. First Apple announced they were pulling out of Macworld, then there was this letter directly from Jobs, then this letter from Jobs. In a nutshell, this has left Apple and Steve Jobs entangled in endless speculation. Every analyst around has weighed in with their own “analysis” regarding the situation, most notably Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

All of the ongoing reports, letters and seemingly smudged information has adversely sprung the SEC into action, probing Apple about “who knew what, and when they knew it” about Jobs’ health conditions.

The bottom line? LeaveSteveJobsAlone.com should sum it up pretty nicely.

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The report which first showed up on apcmag.com, claims that most of the macs shown in the image are in working order. “Apple Computer has been busy getting labourers to smash a rubbish skip full of computers in a Sydney warehouse, many of them in seemingly working order.”

Johnston (which is a fake name remember), “assumed he was in for an everyday job until he saw what he estimated to be $200,000 worth of Apple hardware, peripherals and equipment.” He doesn’t skimp on the details either.

“There were up to nine pallets,” Johnston remembers, “two were of MacBooks, both Pro and 13 inch versions, two were of iMacs, two were of Mac Pro towers, one had few Xservers on it and a few Mac Pros and one had Mighty Mice and a copy of Final Cut Studio – we went as far as manually tearing up the manuals.”

Upon discovering the equipment, Johnston says him and his team were surprised to discover that most of the Macs started up with no problem. “Several machines in the first batch I was involved in had emails included in the box or taped to the outside.” Allegedly, “Someone who’d been there about nine months said Apple had replaced the units because it was too expensive to send them to China for repair.”

However, Johnston claims that him and his team were instructed to destroy all of it. “The supervisor told someone to get some tools and they came back with two hammers and several screwdrivers. They wanted us to separate the two halves of the MacBooks and smash the screens of the iMacs with hammers.”

Apparently, someone who represents Apple on the site permanently gave Johnston the order to destroy the equipment. When they dumped all of the equipment into a large dumpster outside of the warehouse, people complained that it was sticking above the edge of the bin, and Johnston’s crew had to crush it down with a forklift.

Apple Australia Marketing Director Rob Small explained, “We only destroy stock that’s either beyond economic repair or is been deemed not fit for sale to a customer again.” Which means they do not destroy perfectly good Macs for no apparent reason. “Anything we recycle is done responsibly through certified recyclers. Nothing goes to landfill and we do not donate second hand products to charity or move them off-shore,” Small added.

E-waste has been a big deal for the technology industry around the world. Recycling has become more important, and as we progress and evolve as a society, our population increases and so does the need for efficient and proper waste management. CBSNews put together an incredible report tracking the origins of e-waste half way around the world.

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Chen has disclosed via Twitter that a past video tutorial on how to install Mac OS X onto a netbook, has gotten Wired into legal trouble as they are now being sued by Apple.

Gizmodo still has a copy of the video posted online.

The video tutorial in question gives an in depth play-by-play of how to install Mac OS X on a netbook, even discussing where to obtain copies of the software from a popular torrent site, The Pirate Bay, essentially being a Hackintosh for Dummies.

Gizmodo points out that it is more probable that Apple will be issuing Wired a cease-and-desist as opposed to actually bringing about financial sanctions. While the video explicitly breaks Apple’s EULA, Chen did offer this Disclaimer: “The following process potentially violates Apple’s End User License Agreement for Mac OS X. Please ensure you own a copy of Mac OS X Leopard if you wish to follow the procedure.” – if only he knew he needed more.

Update: Apparently we should disregard the following information as Brian Chen has released an additional tweet citing the whole situation to be one big misunderstanding. Apple is not suing Wired over the video tutorial.

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Brian Mastenbrook, a computer scientist using Apple’s Safari browser discovered the bug and reported it to Apple.

“I have discovered that Apple’s Safari browser is vulnerable to an attack that allows a malicious web site to read files on a user’s hard drive without user intervention. This can be used to gain access to sensitive information stored on the user’s computer, such as emails, passwords, or cookies that could be used to gain access to the user’s accounts on some web sites. The vulnerability has been acknowledged by Apple,” Masterbook explains. “All users of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard who have not changed their feed reader application preference from the system default are affected, regardless of whether they use RSS feeds or use a different web browser (such as Firefox).”

The vulnerability can give malicious users access to most information that is stored within browser cookies such as e-mails, passwords, visited websites, and so forth. As Ars Technica notes, this vulnerability affects any Mac OS X user that has Safari set to the default RSS feed reader. Even if you don’t regularly read RSS feeds through Safari, your settings may be set in Safari’s preferences, so make sure and check.

In regards to a specific exploit out in the wild, Masterbook explains that he hasn’t found or hear of one yet. However, as Ars points out, someone with enough free time and creativity may feel inclined to make that happen. Luckily, a person like Masterbook found this exploit instead of someone on the other side of internet security. As expected, he’s not revealing the exploit details as he has reported the bug to Apple and will most likely communicate with them to patch things up.

For now, the workaround is simple and if you haven’t already, follow these simple steps:

1. Open Safari and select Preferences… from the Safari menu.
2. Choose the RSS tab from the top of the Preferences window.
3. Click on the Default RSS reader pop-up and select an application other than Safari.

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NJection Mobile (iTunes link) is a speedtrap locating application selling for $0.99, just like Trapster (iTunes link) which is available free in the App Store. The developers of NJection Mobile are claiming that the people from Trapster are posting invalid and fake reviews, as well as searching for reviews on sites like this, and posting comments like these.

“I’m the maker of Njection Mobile (NMobile), an application available on the iTunes Application Store. It’s a driving application that alerts you to speed traps as you drive by them, and we’re adding support for alerts to traffic accidents and road work, so that you can be warned of traffic congestion before you hit it. Our goal is to keep drivers safe and driving under the speed limit,” the developer claims.

A screenshot of what is allegedly a bogus review of NJection Mobile, by Trapster’s developer.

“We’ve still had decent sales, and no other 1 star reviews, but we can’t help but to think that this has negatively impacted our sales. We’re not a big iPhone development shop, and we have a limited market, so a visible review such as this one that is basically an advertisement for a competing app is a problem. All signs point to this review as being from our competitor. The only other review has been on our competitor’s app, and the same person has commented on every single article related to our app.”

Additionally, NJection Mobile’s developers claim that people from Trapster, or people associated with Trapster are going around and posting bogus and spammy message in iPhone business groups and forums around the web. From NJection Mobile’s developer who caught this email online. “And the sockpuppeting is not limited to reviews. This was a post in the iPhone Business Forum on Google that has since been removed,” they claim of the image below. “Almost all of the registering account were either using a trapster.com email account or refer back to Trapster.com website.”

A screenshot from an anonymous user, who has allegedly been spammed.

Njection Mobile contacted Apple a few times and kept getting the same canned response.

Please know that iTunes takes customer reviews very seriously. We believe in the iTunes community and their opinions on our products and we will not restrict the community.

A review will not be removed unless an extremely false claim has been made or a comment has been made that will offend a number of people.

We understand that you are concerned about this, however, all applications are receiving customer reviews that could potentially be unfavorable and most of these reviews will not be removed. If you would like, you can mark this review as “unhelpful” to move it to the bottom of the review list.

Best Regards,iTunes Connect Support

It definitely seems like someone from Trapster is going around to all the reviews of NJection Mobile on different websites and entering the same comment or post: “Copycat of Trapster which is already on App Store (FREE!) with 100K iPhone users, has way more and better data, (plus supports lots of mobile devices and established for years).”

Perhaps some may see this as unethical, but it’s just business. If you have developed an application for the iPhone or iPod touch, get ready to defend it amongst a sea of incredibly opinionated Apple customers and developers alike. There’s so much controversy and heated debate swirling around the App Store, low-brow business moves are to be expected. While one negative review of any application that has 20+ reviews isn’t that big of a deal. Applications with less than 5 reviews may suffer greatly due to one negative review, and that review could be from a direct competitor.

When reviewing an application, users are encouraged to follow some guidelines Apple has set, including: “Praise applications on their own terms, not at the expense of other developers or their applications.” Clearly Jim from Trapster doesn’t appreciate Njection Mobile, and he has made sure to let everyone know his opinions.

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Cygnus Systems is suing the three companies saying that they infringed on its patent (#7346850) which was filed back in 2001, but only granted to them in March of this year.

As PCWorld explains, Cygnus Systems claims that products such as Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, Mac OS X, the Finder, iPhone and Safari all infringe on its patent. Quite a massive claim, clumping such a ubiquitous technology between all three companies shouldn’t hold over well in court.

It seems as though Cygnus Systems is just another company trying to exploit the legal system. A few quotes from the law firm representing them even further that argument. Matt McAndrews, a partner with Niro, Scavone, Haller & Niro, says the following: “They were a logical starting place for us…We’ve identified many other potentially infringing products that we’re investigating.” Sounds just like any other company hoping to cling on to legal loopholes, in the hopes of falling backwards into money. McAndrews continues to explain that Cyngus’ owner and president Gregory Swartz developed the “file previewing” technology while working on IT consulting projects. If the case gets into patents regarding the development of User Interface elements, Cyngus may as well cut their losses. Battling these tech juggernauts over “file preview” would not make any waves at all, let a lone a splash.

Cyngus Systems is looking for “a reasonable royalty” in addition to a court injunction preventing further infringement.

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Nearly 5 months have gone by since Apple launched Mobile Me. In the first months of Mobile Me being live, the service was plagued with downtime, lost messages, syncing issues and an overall stability meltdown. So much so that Apple launched a Mobile Me status blog and assigned a blogger named “David G.” to directly communicate with its customers.

Apple went through a series of public apologies, and ultimately offered Mobile Me customers a few months of free service. A few weeks after Mobile Me officially launched, an internal email from CEO Steve Jobs was leaked to Ars Technica. After some ethical debates over at Ars they posted the entire email verbatim. This came roughly two weeks after Walt Mossberg laid the hammer down calling Mobile Me “far too flawed to recommend.” By this point, most users who had attempted to make it through the Mobile Me transition were left stunned, frustrated and worse of all, had lost vital messages due to technical failures on Apple’s end.

A couple of comments from some MacBlogz readers during the transition:

“Seriously, a company with a market capitalization of about $150 BILLION dollars, with more than $10 BILLION available in cash/short term assets, should be able to provide a service to what, a few hundred thousand users, that doesn’t go down every couple of weeks.”

“It was Tuesday, July 29th when my email stopped working completely. Now it’s late Wednesday and it’s still not working. Signing on to the support site for an update and having them tell me everything is great is more than annoying. And now it’s too late for any chat support and they appear to have eliminated any kind of email support. If you are having a problem they don’t want to hear from you.”

“Well, I lost nearly 3 days worth of emails. Who can I complain to? How can they put a value on these emails?”

Looking back on the Mobile Me launch, it’s easy to say that Apple was over-ambitious. They launched the iPhone 3G, the App Store and Mobile Me on the same day. For a company that doesn’t launch many products or services throughout the year, was there really a reason to unveil all three things on the same day? After all, the Mobile Me issues were only a portion of the overall disaster. iTunes servers went down, people were sent home with bricked iPhones, and the new iPhone Firmware 2.0 was shaky to say the least. Not Apple’s brightest moment.

The problems with Mobile Me however, stem much deeper than what lies on the surface. Apple employees were fired over the meltdown, and iTunes service guru Eddy Cue was brought in to head Mobile Me’s team while reporting directly to Steve Jobs. It was evident that Apple was not happy with Mobile Me’s launch. After putting so much time into revamping dot-mac, when they finally thought they “got it right,” the new service didn’t work.

Apple should make it a point and take a serious lesson from its mistakes here. Internet services are not the same as downloaded desktop clients like iTunes. They require a much more scalable infrastructure, and when slammed to capacity, a backup plan (or five), should be in place. Considering Apple’s close relationship with Google, they should have reached out to the internet giant for some help.

The eternal battle between Apple’s priorities with form over function played a major role in this summer’s past Mobile Me meltdown. Apple puts so much emphasis on making sure every millimeter of the screen is pixel perfect, and that the User Interface is so shiny that you want to lick it. But when it comes to the core infrastructure of the service, or the back-end functionality holding up in critical times, it seemed like an after thought. Perhaps in the future they’ll spend less time on perfecting that gradient, and more time making sure their servers scale.

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