Full category list for displayed posts: AppleTV, Hardware, iOS, iPad, iPad accesories/cases/stands, iPad apps, iPhone, iPhone & iPod Accessories, iPhone Apps, iPod Touch, Reviews
![Griffin Beacon iOS Remote Makes Flipping Channels Fun [Review]](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/IMG_0020.jpg)
One of the absolute worst aspects of my television-watching endeavors has been the confusing use of multiple remotes. I’ve tried universal remotes but there’s always some function I need from DVD remote or DVR that is missing on the universal remote. Stepping up to the plate, the Griffin Beacon ($80) erases the need for five different remotes by providing users with one of the best universal remotes on the market, and interfaces it though iOS.
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There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Apple intends to replace the whole cable TV industry with Internet-delivered subscription television. But the best predictor is the fact that replacing broken content consumption is just what Apple does.
Apple will kill cable TV. Here’s how.
Go here to read the story.
Second-generation Apple TV users across the globe are reporting that they are not able to update their devices to the latest firmware. The complaints can be seen on a sizable thread on Apple’s Support Communities website.
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You’ve no doubt seen this post suggesting that Apple could use its $70 billion in cash to buy the entire mobile phone industry. The idea is worth a chuckle, but buying the phone handset industry is neither desirable nor possible. Apple doesn’t want to sell Nokia phones, and regulators wouldn’t let the company buy, then close, all its competition.
No, instead Apple should use its billions to take over Hollywood.
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Steve Jobs famously once quoted Picasso as saying: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” And by that metric, Apple is a lousy artist.
Apple is stolen from by just about everybody. Microsoft and other companies steal design and interface ideas from Apple’s OS X. Cell phone handset makers steal Apple’s iPhone design elements. The new tablet market is essentially Apple’s iPad plus the tablets that steal ideas from the iPad. Everybody has stolen Apple’s approach to app stores.
There’s a difference between stealing ideas and stealing intellectual property. Stealing winning general approaches to doing things like multi-touch gestures on a tablet device is good. Stealing the code to do that is bad.
Microsoft has long been accused of stealing Apple ideas in the many designs of Windows that have occurred over the years. Windows has tended to be more challenging to use than OS X over the years, and Windows products tend to be less elegant. Because of all this, Apple fans often dismiss Microsoft as a company without innovation.
In fact, the opposite is true. Microsoft’s research wing is an under-appreciated engine of invention, in my opinion. And while Microsoft fails to productize some of its best inventions, it’s also occasionally successful at implementing new ideas in real products.
I’ll go further. Apple and its customers would benefit enormously if Apple were to steal the following five key ideas from Microsoft.
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FireCore LLC has announced the release of an update to the Mac OS X version of Seas0nPass. The new release allows you to perform an untethered jailbreak on Apple’s latest AppleTV running 4.1.1 (the equivalent of iOS 4.2.1). The Windows version of the untethered jailbreak isn’t currently available, but will be at a later date.
According to FireCore, the new version of Seas0nPass is based on the jailbreak created by the Chronic Dev Team and the latest Beta3 version of aTV Flash (black) is compatible with Seas0nPass, GreenPois0n and Pwnage Tool jailbreaks.
You can read more about this on FireCore’s blog and you can download Seas0nPass now for free.
Most tech companies go out of their way to publish product roadmaps, so their customers know what’s coming next. But Apple is not most tech companies. Ask anyone from Steve Jobs to the guy at your local Apple Store, and you’ll hear the same refrain, “we don’t comment on unannounced products.”
It’s this dearth of hard facts on what’s coming next from Cupertino that makes speculation so irresistible. And with the new year now upon us, it’s the perfect time to ponder what Apple may have in store for us in 2011.
Blogger Deon Devine, from Houston, Texas, has sent Cult of Mac some very interesting predictions.
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You got another Apple gadget for Christmas, didn’t you? And you love it, don’t you?
So at what point do you officially declare yourself to be one of those Cupertino Kool-Aid-guzzling, Steve Jobs-worshiping, pathetically devoted Apple fans you used to loathe?
Ten years ago, there were two kinds of people: PC users (a.k.a. “regular people”) and Apple fanboys. At least that’s how it looked from the PC side.
Macs were pretty, but considered by us PC users to be overpriced, underpowered, insufficiently supported by either software or hardware, too hard to customize, optimize or repair and completely devoid of key application areas, such as games.
The world was black and white. You were either a PC or a Mac. Then things got complicated.
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If you’re in the netbook, notebook, PC, hand-held gaming, newspaper or DVD business, Apple wants to eat your liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti — at least according to a huge number of observers who don’t know what the word “cannibalize” means.
For example, Microsoft’s general manager for Windows product management, Gavriella Schuster, said this month that the netbook market is “definitely getting cannibalized” by the iPad.
Wait, “cannibalized”? What does that mean, exactly? And why is everybody saying it?
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![What the Sony/Google TV Remote Coulda, Shoulda Been [Opinion]](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/sony_google_tv_remote.jpg)
Hello readers. Look at this remote. Now at your hands. Now back to the remote. Now back to your hands.
Maybe it’s a joke. Maybe it’s a clever ruse. Maybe it’s a prototype. Maybe it’s clever CGI like they used for Gollum. I have no idea. But the picture here (sourced from Engadget) is supposedly the remote control shipping with Sony’s TVs that have Google TV integrated inside. It is, in a word, a monstrosity (my friend MG said it best, “My God, it’s full of buttons!”).
Here are all the things wrong with it, in a nutshell:
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![Read "Why You’ll Probably Never Own A Mac With An ARM Processor [Feature]"](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/macbookairarm-300x250.jpg "Read \"Why You’ll Probably Never Own A Mac With An ARM Processor [Feature]\"")
![Read "Is This USB Vibrator The New iPod? [Interview]"](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/crave1-300x250.jpg "Read \"Is This USB Vibrator The New iPod? [Interview]\"")
