I remember the headlines about a smoking, defective iPhone last fall. As it turns out, a large screw was left floating around inside of the phone during an unauthorized repair and punctured the battery. In other words, don’t try to repair your iPhone yourself.

Besides the fact that an iMac just looks good on an inexpensive birch effect VIKA AMON table top, IKEA and Apple have been doing things their own way in retail in Asymco’s Horace Dediu and Dirk Schmidt provided a lengthy comparison (via The Brooks Review):

Apple offers a place where people can discover and get answers about technology without the pressure of making a purchase. The job is to simplify that which is complex for a price premium.

IKEA offers a place where people can get exactly what they need exactly when they need it. The only downside is that “some assembly is required”. In a way, their job is to introduce some complexity in exchange for convenience and a discount.

I agree, but I also find IKEA to be a place where you can browse without any sort of pressure (although their staff seems plenty helpful, much like those at Apple Stores), and sometimes waste time just looking at all the different items.

I think this was the next logical step for The Daily, much like Flipboard was iPad-only and then moved to the iPhone, too. The free articles should get some new people interested, and it would be nice to see this carried over to the iPad version:

The Daily is free to download, and you can read a selection of articles from the app for free every day. To get complete access to our award-winning content including articles, photos, videos, and infographics, subscribe for only $1.99/month or $19.99/year. Subscribers to the The Daily on tablets get the iPhone app for free! Simply login to the mobile app using the same registration as The Daily’s tablet app, and your subscription will sync automatically.

Jeremy Horwitz of iLounge:

…Approximate measurements are 125mm by 58.5mm by 7.4mm—a 10mm jump in height, nearly 2mm reduction in thickness, and virtually identical width. According to our source, Apple will make one major change to the rear casing, adding a metal panel to the central back of the new iPhone. This panel will be flat, not curved, and metal, not ceramic…The change in height will include a lengthening of the prior 3.5” screen to roughly 4” on the diagonal. As the new iPhone won’t widen, this appears to confirm that Apple will change the new iPhone’s aspect ratio for the first time since the original iPhone was introduced in 2007, adding additional pixels to the top and bottom of the screen…

Apple will also introduce its new Dock Connector on the new iPhone. The new port will be a little larger than the bottom speaker or microphone hole on the iPhone 4/4S. It’s believed to have fewer pins than the prior 30-pin Dock Connector, perhaps only 16, and the shape of the hole is apparently closer to a pill shape than the prior rounded rectangle…

I don’t get too crazy about Apple-related rumors these days, but this seems a bit too far out there (although iLounge is fairly reliable). Still, a lot of people thought the “found” iPhone 4 prototype was a bit too weird.

If you’re as sick of tech patent lawsuits as we are, it seems there may be hope, as Apple and Samsung are being encouraged to simplify some things on their own:

Judge Lucy Koh has ordered Apple and Samsung to scale back the number of claims in their patent infringement lawsuits, and warned both sides that failing to do so could delay their trial until some time in 2013. As of now, their patent infringement trial is scheduled for July 30 of this year.

With some 37 products listed in the lawsuits, along with 16 patents, five trademarks and an antitrust claim, Judge Koh told both companies that a jury shouldn’t have to deal with this, according to Computerworld.

“I think that’s cruel and unusual punishment to a jury, so I’m not willing to do it,” she said. “If you’re going to trial in July, this is not going to be acceptable.”

I watched the whole thing and it does come off as a bit weird and cheesy, probably due to the sales-orientation, but you can’t deny that there was a lot of work put into the production of it. It was nice to see a rather young Steve Jobs hamming it up for a few seconds on the camera and plenty of old-school tech references, like the Apple ///, the LightWriter, and even the “32nd” (I suspect due to the Mac’s 32-bit nature). Plus, who can’t help being amused at IBM being labeled as the enemy?