In the news

Early this morning, Apple and the carriers started to take online pre-orders for the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.  (You’ll be able to buy them in stores starting one week from today, September 19th.)  I have a business plan with AT&T so I cannot buy an iPhone through Apple, but I went to the AT&T website at 2:01 am Central time and purchased an iPhone 6 (128 GB, space gray).  I hope that some of my friends buy an iPhone 6 Plus because I’m very curious to see what it is like to use an iPhone with a screen that large, but I’m pretty confident that the iPhone 6 is the best size for me.  I’m not yet sure when I will receive the iPhone that I ordered — hopefully it will be on September 19 or very soon after that (the website currently says that that my estimated shipping date is 9/17 to 9/18) — but once I have kicked the tires on it, I’ll post my review here on iPhone J.D.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• When I wrote about the 2014 ABA legal tech survey last month, I mentioned some of the most popular legal-specific apps but I didn’t rank them.  Boston attorney Robert Ambrogi notes the percentages in this post, noting for example that the Fastcase app was the most mentioned legal-specific app in the survey.
• There were a huge number of articles posted this week about the upcoming Apple Watch.  If you want to read a good one, I recommend this one by David Pogue of Yahoo Tech, which is based on his personal experience with a prototype and an interview with Apple.
• I had assumed that Apple’s new wearable device would be called the iWatch, not the Apple Watch.  Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac notes that in an interview with ABC, Apple Tim Cook actually called it the “iWatch” at one point.  Was that just a slip of the tongue because he was thinking of the iPhone, or is that a hint that Apple had at one point planned to call the device the iWatch and that name was still in Cook’s mind?  I suspect that at some point the future, someone will write about the history of the Apple Watch and we’ll find out.
• By the way, if you are curious about the origin of the “i” in iPhone, I wrote about that in this post back in 2009.
• The iPhone 6 comes with a new default wallpaper showing a picture of the Milky Way over some mountains.  I just assumed that it was a complete fake created in Photoshop, but it is a real photograph taken by Norwegian photographer Espen Haagensen (although Apple did modify it for the iPhone).  Michael Steeber of 9to5Mac talked to Haagensen and provides details on how the photo was taken and how it ended up on the new iPhones. 
• Whitson Gordon of LifeHacker reports that it appears that 5 million Gmail usernames and passwords may have been leaked on a Russian Bitcoin forum.  Lovely.
• Nathaniel Popper of the New York Times wrote an interesting article about how Apple worked with banks when developing the new Apple Pay system.
• This week, Pete Souza, the official White House photographer, tweeted a photo of President Obama’s desk.  I suppose it isn’t that different from my own desk — some papers at the back, and an iPad right at the front.  I just don’t have that fancy presidential coaster.  Or the nuclear codes.  But otherwise it’s basically the same.
• And finally, after watching Apple’s Jonathan Ive in a video introducing the Apple Watch, I enjoyed watching IKEA’s parody of an Ive video in this video for the enw IKEA catalogue: