“We recently discovered a manufacturing issue affecting a very limited number of iPhone 5S devices that could cause the battery to take longer to charge or result in reduced battery life,” said Apple spokesperson Teresa Brewer. “We are reaching out to customers with affected phones and will provide them with a replacement phone.”

A number of Dell users have complained that their Latitude 6430u Ultrabooks “smell of cat urine”.

Dell engineers have ruled out biological contamination, and said the smell was not a health hazard.

There are some jokes in there somewhere.

This article gave me a new perspective on the Surface 2. The author does a side-by-side comparison against the Asus T100, which runs Windows 8.1, something the Surface 2 cannot.

Over the past week, I’ve had the fortune to play with both Microsoft’s Surface 2 and the Asus T100 Transformer Book. These are very similar devices — convertible laptops with detachable keyboards — except for one big and fundamentally life-altering difference: Where the Surface 2 is powered by Nvidia’s ARM-based Tegra 4 SoC, the Transformer Book has Intel’s x86 Bay Trail under the hood. As a result, while the Surface 2 runs Windows RT, the T100 runs full Windows 8.1. Yes, every program and game that you use on your Windows desktop PC also works on the T100. Steam works on the T100. Team Fortress 2 works on the T100. Photoshop works (surprisingly well!) on the T100.

A common selling point of the Surface 2 vs the iPad is the fact that you can have the desktop experience on the go, as opposed to the desktop/tablet model the Microsoft marketing folks assail. This is a bit of a crack in that facade.

So much of Apple’s history stems from that house.

Steve Jobs built the first 100 Apple 1 computers at the Crist Drive home with help from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Patricia Jobs. The first 50 were sold to Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop in Mountain View for $500 each, according to the evaluation. The rest were assembled for their friends in the Homebrew Computer Club.

“I’d get yelled at if I bent a prong,” Patricia Jobs told The Daily News in an interview last month.

The original computers are now worth tens of thousands of dollars. One sold for $213,000 at an auction in 2010.

The home is also where Jobs courted some of his first investors, including Chuck Peddle of Commodore Computer and Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital, according to the evaluation.

The first partnership for Apple Computer Co. was signed on April 1, 1976, and nine months later the company was established and operations moved to nearby Cupertino.

“These significant events took place at the subject property,” Commissioner Sapna Marfatia wrote in the evaluation.

Pretty impressive results. John Poole, founder of Primate Labs, shared these thoughts:

The iPad Air’s A7 processor is running at 1.4 GHz, 100 MHz faster than the iPhone 5s’ A7 processor. It’s not clear if the iPad Air processor runs at a higher speed thanks to a larger battery (providing more power), a larger chassis (providing better cooling), or some combination of the two. I expect the new iPad mini’s A7 processor will run at 1.4 GHz as well.

The iPad Air is over 80% faster than the iPad (4th Generation), close to the 2x increase promised by Apple.

The iPad Air is over 5x faster than the iPad 2, yet is only $100 more expensive. I do not understand why Apple kept the iPad 2 around, especially at a $399 price point. What market are they targeting?

Three reviewers, three positive takes.

Walt Mossberg reviewed the iPad Air for the Wall Street Journal:

In my tests, the iPad Air far exceeded Apple’s claim of 10 hours of battery life. For over 12 hours, it played high-definition videos, nonstop, with the screen at 75% brightness, with Wi-Fi on and emails pouring in. That’s the best battery life I’ve ever recorded for any tablet.

I’ve been testing the iPad Air for about a week and found it a pleasure to use. This new iPad isn’t a radical rethinking of what a tablet can be, but it’s a major improvement on a successful product. It is the best tablet I’ve ever reviewed.

That isn’t just because of its slimmer, lighter design, but because Apple boasts 475,000 apps optimized for tablet use—far more than any other tablet platform. (The iPad also can run all of the million or so apps available for the iPhone.) By contrast, the vast majority of apps available for rival Android tablets are just stretched versions of phone apps.

Damon Darlin reviewed the iPad Air for the New York Times:

It easily runs for 10 hours on a charge, just as Apple promises — despite the battery’s smaller size and the increased demands put on it. In my test of pretty heavy use, it downloaded and played three hourlong episodes of “Game of Thrones” and a few hours of music. I scrolled through Twitter and Flipboard, played games and perused the web. That’s almost a typical day for me and my iPad. It will get you through a normal day and then some with no worries.

The iPad Air also sports two antennas to pull in Wi-Fi signals faster than the old one did. Called MIMO for multiple-input and multiple-output, these antennas make a noticeable difference when your fast Wi-Fi signal is weakest, like in a back bedroom or the basement. (You’ll have to have a recent MIMO compatible router to see the magic, though.)

Finally, David Pogue reviewed the iPad Air on his Tumblr, as he makes the transition from the New York Times to his new digs at Yahoo. Pogue points out much of the same things, but also made this point:

This time around, there’s no gotta-have new feature—nothing on the level of the Retina screen, Siri voice recognition, or even a fingerprint reader (like the one on the iPhone 5s).

That big public yawn must drive Apple’s engineers crazy. The thing is, making the iPad smaller, lighter, and faster without sacrificing battery life or beauty is a tremendous achievement.

Of course, if you haven’t already, be sure to read Jim Dalrymple’s personal take on the iPad Air, too.

I don’t like this as much as the Appetite Les Paul, but it’s still a nice looking guitar.

I use Trigger in my songs all the time, but I have tried Trigger 2 yet. The description looks pretty amazing.

Peter Kirn has a nice roundup of what music companies are saying about compatibility of their software with OS X Mavericks. I’ve always kept my music machine one OS version behind just to make sure I’m compatible.

Very cool. You can see how it’s done at Webdesigner Depot.

Some great charts from Benedict Evans.

The New York Times writer Catherine Rampell hit a new low of utter stupidity today claiming that Apple wants to purposely “bust your iPhone.” I’m not even going to link to the pathetic excuse for an article—instead, read Brian Barrett’s takedown on Gizmodo. At least he put some thought into what he wrote.

Great article by Kirk McElhearn, although I don’t agree with his conclusion:

On the other hand, Apple is clearly saying that overly loud music doesn’t have a place on iTunes Radio.

I don’t mind Apple using Sound Check for iTunes Radio and I don’t see it as a statement by Apple about loud music. It’s just a way to normalize the volume of many different songs to give the user a more enjoyable listening experience.

I do wish music producers would lower the volume on their music—give it some room to breathe.

Currently, all wireless broadcasting uses two frequencies, one for transmit, and one for receive.

The underlying technology, known as full-duplex radio, tackles a problem known as “self-interference.” As radios send and receive signals, the ones they send are billions of times stronger than the ones they receive. Any attempt to receive data on any given frequency is thwarted by the fact that the radio’s receiver is also picking up its own outgoing signal.

For this reason, most radios—including the ones in your smartphone, the base stations serving them, and Wi-Fi routers—send information out on one frequency and receive on another, or use the same frequency but rapidly toggle back and forth. Because of this inefficiency, radios use more wireless spectrum than is necessary.

The technique behind the startup is similar to that used in sound canceling headphones.

To solve this, Kumu built an extremely fast circuit that can predict, moment by moment, how much interference a radio’s transmitter is about to create, and then generates a compensatory signal to cancel it out. The circuit generates a new signal with each packet of data sent, making it possible to work even in mobile devices, where the process of canceling signals is more complex because the objects they bounce off are constantly changing.

Not sure if this technology is a game changer all by itself. This is useful when there’s a lot of back and forth, but not so much when receiving or sending large chunks of data. But I suspect it represents the overall direction of WiFi and cellular evolution.

I hate companies that do stuff like this.

Given how much analyst spin saturates all the reporting, good to have this baseline for comparison.

First, there’s the timing.

The opening of Apple’s first store in Rio de Janeiro will come just in time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which promises millions of tourists. Apple opened its first store in China in 2008 just ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

More to the point, opening an Apple Store in one of the economic centers of South America is a real challenge.

Several South American countries, including the two largest economies—Argentina and Brazil—heavily tax electronics that aren’t at least partially manufactured locally. The hope is that such taxes will coerce companies to set up local factories, but so far few have obliged. Apple has perhaps been the most stubborn of the lot; it makes no components of its products in the region. The result is that its devices suffer an enormous mark-up, between 60% and 70%. iPhones sell for as much as $3,500 in Argentina, and iPad prices are scarcely any more reasonable; South America is the worst place to buy an iPad.

Worth keeping an eye on the economics of this move.

Nice looking posters for a nice looking machine.

Doxie Go is the tiny, rechargeable mobile paper scanner that scans anywhere with no computer required. Scan paper, receipts, and cards, then sync to Doxie’s elegant Mac software.

Doxie makes it easy to go paperless, create searchable PDFs, and send scans to your favorite Mac and cloud apps – Dropbox, Evernote, and more.

It’s time to finally go paperless. Get your new Doxie Go direct from Doxie or Amazon.com.

Om Malik on the importance of keeping the local newspaper around. John Henry bought the Boston Globe. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Will the risk associated with billionaires owning a prominent local voice be balanced by the value of keeping those voices around?

Thoughtful piece from MIT Technology Review on the troubling growing pains of the world’s sixth most widely visited website.

The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-­ranking quality scores.

The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

A return rate greater than 30%. If this is true, that is a telling statistic.

Samsung has found that more than 30% of Galaxy Gear purchases are returned in Best Buy locations, and they have asked that Samsung employees on site help try to figure out why this is.

Read some of the reviews. Might be a clue there.

This was demo footage created to show off the EditDroid editing system. Watch it while you can. I suspect this footage won’t be up there very long.

Jim and Dan talk about the Apple event including the iPad Air, iPad retina mini, new MacBook Pro’s, Mavericks, and more.

Sponsored by Mailchimp, Shutterstock (use code DANSENTME1013 for 25% off), and Squarespace (use code DANSENTME10 for 10% off).

I’d like to thank IK Multimedia for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week with the iRig BlueBoard.

iRig BlueBoard is the first wireless MIDI pedalboard for iOS and Mac that allows you to control your music apps and more from the floor. Now control parameters of your MIDI-compatible apps like AmpliTube wirelessly from the floor. Switch between presets, change patches, turn effects on and off and control effects like volume wah pedals all from the stage floor without worrying about tripping over wires. Setup is as simple as turning the iRig BlueBoard on and telling it what you want to control. iRig BlueBoard features four backlit soft-touch pads housed in a sturdy, stage-worthy chassis, two TRS expansion jacks for connecting additional MIDI controllers like expression pedals, and is powered by four standard AAA batteries.

IK Multimedia’s iRig BlueBoard allows guitarists, vocalists and keyboard players wireless control of Core-MIDI-compatible music-making apps running on an iPhone (4s or later), iPad 4, iPod touch (5th gen) or Mac (models from June 2012). The pedalboard has four backlit pads up top, which can each be assigned controls to switch between presets and banks, tweak parameters or change patches on the fly. Expression, volume or wah pedals can also be connected to the two 0.25-in jacks on the side of the device for control of onscreen dials and knobs.