Greg In The Desert

According to USA Today Apple is in negations with Verizon. AT&T’s contract with Apple to carry the iPhone expires in 2010.

The New York-based telecom entered into “high-level” discussions with Apple management a few months ago, when CEO Steve Jobs was overseeing day-to-day business, these sources say. They declined to be named because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly.

People tell me all the time how much they want the iPhone but won’t switch to AT&T because of the superior coverage of Verizon. That Verizon is sucking up to Apple to get the iPhone wouldn’t surprise me.

Before releasing the iPhone, I think Apple looked into starting their own wireless company. Having no idea how successful the iPhone would be and how much a undertaking starting a wireless phone company would be, they decided they needed to focus their efforts onto the hardware and partner with a wireless company. If the iPhone was a hit, they would work on being their own wireless company later.

Apple will eventually want to have control of the wirless network. They will either start their own or buy out AT&T. Why not stick with the world stanardard of wireless phone networks GSM, which AT&T uses and not Verizon.

I don’t think a deal with Verizon and Apple will happen. I also didn’t think Apple would switch to Intel processors.

Smarthome is having a monthly sweepstake and giving away $500 worth of Insteon hardware. The sweepstake is from 1 April to 1 July and drawings are once a month.

Your giving up your email for their newsletter.

The dark side may not be our friends in Seattle, but it may turn out to be this little chip made by Intel. The chip in question (best way to get to it is to click on this link, then find the real link on the page) “builds trust into every computing transaction.”

Cory Doctorow went apeshit over this today after discovering that there is support for the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) in the MacOS X that works on Intel based computers. As far as I can tell, it seems the only thing this does is ensure that this version of MacOS X doesn’t run on anything other than the developer hardware (as opposed to running on a plain jane Intel box).

This by itself isn’t that “bad”, however there is concern that this sort of integration could be used to limit everything you do on your computer (say DRM). Having every transaction on my computer under someone else’s control scares the crap out of me, and it’s even worse to consider that Apple may be the first to make this work.