Apple/IPhone Recap — 1 Million IPhones Sold, MacBook SATA Caps Removed

The last couple of days have been packed with Apple news, both good and bad.  On Friday, the new iPhone 3G S debuted and prepared to invade the pockets of users across the nation.  Monday brought word that many customers had been met with activation problems and Apple was issuing them gift cards to compensate.

Now more details about the launch have been released by Apple.  The Cupertino giant reported that it sold 1 million iPhones during the launch weekend, easily eclipsing the modest 100,000 launch weekend sales of the Palm Pre, the only other multi-touch smart phone on the market.

In a statement, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, reportedly recovering from a liver transplant and eyeing  a return to Apple elates, “With over 50,000 applications available from Apple’s revolutionary App Store, iPhone momentum is stronger than ever.”

In other iPhone-related news, the smart phone is about to be tossed a bone — a Gamebone to be more precise.  The new controller will be among the first peripherals to be available for the iPhone 3G and 3G S.  The new OS v3.0 for the iPhone allowed such magic by freeing up pins for Firewire communication.

The new controller, looking something like an old-school Super Nintendo pad, may be able to communicate in different ways with the iPhone.  It is unclear whether users connect via Bluetooth, or by plugging in to the 30-pin connection.  The retailer has said it will provide a stand for using the phone with Bluetooth mode.  While some will find the utility of such a device questionable, at least the manufacturer is being public-friendly, encouraging users to suggest a retail price for the device on their website.

Lastly, to wrap up this Apple wrap-up, the MacBook Pros have been uncrippled and now offer support for full 3.0 Gbps SATA transfer speeds.  The firmware on the recently released laptops had been set to limit the speed to 1.5 Gbps, negating some of the speed advantage of flash drives.  The new firmware, MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7 (EFI is Apple’s version of BIOS) unbreaks SATA on the Pros.  To install the update you must be running OS X version 10.5.7 (which the new Pros should be) and have 3.35MB of free disk space.