Watching our pals over in Gotham City get all excited about the new Big Apple Store just left us feeling vaguely melancholy and nostalgic for when the opening of an Apple Store was a source of excitement here in the bay area. It also reminded us how Apple is the quintessential San Francisco company. The products are expensive. They're not quite as fast as the others, but make up for it with style. There's constant... [continue]

We in the labs like to make fun of San Francisco, but if there's one good thing about SF, it's that it's not LA. The videogame trade show E3 is going on this week down in the City of Miserable Angels, and we're very happy to be skipping this year and not having to deal with the smog and money and sweat and desperation. Of course, we're still scouring the internets for any hint... [continue]

More nonsense from the world of videogames: the best-selling game of the moment is Bethesda Softworks' epic role-playing game Oblivion. That popularity has made it a target for modders and, now, opportunistic politicians. The story began when the Entertainment Software Ratings Board announced a re-rating for the game, bumping it up from its original "Teen" rating to "Mature." [all links in this article are from GameSpot News] The ESRB claimed that Bethesda and publisher... [continue]

Apple released a new batch of ads for the new Macs, with John Hodgman of "The Daily Show" and McSweeney's representing the stuffy, nerdy Windows PC, and Justin Long of Dodgeball representing the... well, we guess every bit as nerdy but maybe they were going for younger and slightly less stuffy Macintosh. In his FatBits blog on Ars Technica, John Siracusa gives his take on the new ads, one with which we agree. It's... [continue]

The Electronic Entertainment Expo is so close you can almost taste the LA smog and the tangy sweat of desperation. In honor of that, this week's round-up is all videogame-related news. Nintendo gave bloggers-who-think-they're-funny a present on Thursday by announcing the new name for their upcoming Revolution console (warning: slow-loading Flash site). It's going to be called "Wii." Seriously. With a "distinctive ii spelling" that's pronounced like "we," "wee," "oui," and "Wheee!" Early buzz... [continue]

Fellow Apple jihadies [sic], unite! Today Apple announced more stuff for us to buy! The MacBook Pro has a new 17" model with a faster SuperDrive, an additional USB port, and the FireWire 800 port that's missing from the 15" version. So if you were holding off getting one of the new versions until they came out with a ludicrously large screen, or until that somewhat abrasive distant relative kicked off and left you... [continue]

The fallout from Apple's Boot Camp continues, and we in the labs are struggling to keep up. For the record, we've now got our shiny new MacBook Pro dual-booting into OS X and Windows XP, and the process worked without a hitch. Once we bought another copy of XP, that is — they're really not kidding when they say you can't grab just any old installation disc. As soon as it was all up... [continue]

Seems like all the cool stuff happens when we're out of town. We can't leave San Francisco for a couple of weeks without Hell freezing over and Apple releasing a way to run Windows on Intel-based Macs. We have to admit to some relief when we heard the neighbor's dog going ballistic on the mailman this morning, and overheard some hipsters making fun of The Marina this afternoon — we were starting to worry... [continue]

Tech news you should be interested in this week: Microsoft announced on Tuesday that its Vista operating system won't be released until January of next year (link from CNet news.com). Office 2007 is also delayed to come out in tandem with the new OS. PC manufacturer Dell bought gamer-targeted manufacturer Alienware (link from Ars Technica). Alienware will continue to operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary, and at least at the moment, Dell continues to sell... [continue]

By Means of a Fictional Entry on Digg And Its Ensuing Commentary Apple Fires Employee For Having a Sense of Humor submitted by *** 2 days 5 hours ago Apple once again shows how it "thinks different" by firing one of its customer service representatives for doing just that! An employee was fired by his humorless VP just for doing a hilarious stand-up routine at an Apple-sponsored talent show, where he was by far... [continue]

If there's one thing we love more than passing along days-old links to non-stories, it's laughing and pointing at people on the internets getting all riled up at perceived assaults on their freedom of expression. The story is from the Infinite Loop blog on Ars Technica, complete with dramatic clip art. The human rights violation in question concerns a Dutch MacBook Pro owner who'd posted a Flickr photoset with pictures of his melted MagSafe... [continue]

This week Microsoft and Intel finally revealed the Origami, their "Ultra-Mobile PC" platform. Reaction from most of the blogs and news sites has been one of disappointment — there were a lot of teasers and speculation on what the device would end up being, but it turns out it's just a tablet PC that's smaller than a laptop but bigger than a PDA. Microsoft's goals for the platform are to be able to run... [continue]

It's a good thing we had to shut down the labs last week, because it let us put off admitting that we were wrong a bit hasty in our dismissal of the Mac rumor sites. Not two weeks after we claimed there was nothing to the rumors of a home media-based Mac mini or an iPod boom box, Apple held a "special" event where the company announced an Intel-based Mac mini with better support... [continue]

Here in the SFist Tech Labs, we're committed to two things: science, and our readers. So we'd never let anything like the debilitating headache we've been going through for the past 18 hours or so keep us from bringing you the links to tech news you deserve. While we read the symptoms on BBC's health page, you can follow along. Throbbing Pain Ars Technica is reporting on a new California bill that would ban... [continue]

Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google — the companies that internet wags are now calling "The Gang of Four" — were subjected to a verbal smack-down on Wednesday in a hearing about those companies' involvement with known Communists. CNet News.com has a transcript of the hearing, in which California Representative Tom Lantos grills a representative from each company, repeatedly asking "are you ashamed." Fitting in with the internet theme of the proceedings, Lantos invoked Godwin's... [continue]

We were just kicking back to watch our new Mac mini-based PVR announced at last month's MacWorld Expo, until we realized that it doesn't exist. This isn't meant as just an accusation of ThinkSecret.com's "sources," just a cautionary tale: there's the truth, there's what rumor sites confirm will happen, and every once in a while, they're the same thing. The rumor that started circulating last week is that Apple's new for-real-no-really-it's-happening-this-time-we-swear video iPod is... [continue]

Our first exposure to the work of director Takashi Miike was the film Audition. At the time, we were content for that to be our last exposure to Miike's work, because as soon as we saw what Asami had been keeping in that burlap bag in her apartment, we spent the rest of the movie with one hand over our eyes and the other hand on the fast forward button. We acknowledge that it's... [continue]

Remember that totally awesome scene in Return of the King where the Witch King was leaving Cirith Ungol with the Orc army and Frodo started freaking out and then that big shaft of light shot out of the building as the people of Minas Tirith looked on with a dread that something great and terrible was coming? Replace Minas Morgul with the Moscone Center, the Witch King with Kevin Smith, and put a "d"... [continue]

Here in the labs, we're not above passing along a bit of Corporate Advertising as if it were genuine tech news. So we'll tell you that Apple is running a Billion Songs Countdown promotion for its iTunes Music Store. Every 100,000th song downloaded gets a free iPod nano and a gift certificate, and the recipient of the billionth download gets an iMac, a $10,000 gift certificate to the iTMS, and ten (10) 60GB iPods.... [continue]

Look! Up in the sky! It's... well, just a bunch of fog, apparently. People have been spending a lot of time looking to the tech world for heroes and personal saviors, only to have those illusions shattered when they realize all they're getting are software, search engines, and MP3 players. Leander Kahney of Wired News got some flak for his commentary about the relative merits of Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates. He says that... [continue]