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How low will Apple go?
First, Apple CEO Tim Cook was forced to grovel and kowtow to the Chinese Communist Party over their obviously false and politically motivated claims about Apple’s warranty.
Now, Apple is being publicly insulted and used by Facebook.
There is no way Steve Jobs would have put up with this kind of humiliating abuse.
Here’s what’s going on.
The iPhone and iPad are magical devices because of one thing: the well-designed hardware and software works in conjunction to make everything just work. The iOS operating system is a thing of beauty, not least of which because there is so much to explore and learn about.
As a touch-based platform, iOS uses gestures like swipes and taps to let you control things with intuitive ease. However, there are bound to be less well-known gestural commands in such a complex set of software. Here are five of the better ones.
The worst thing that could possibly happen to Apple has now happened: The company has run afoul of the authoritarian government of China.
Gatekeepers of the world’s largest and one of the fastest growing markets for every product Apple makes, the Chinese Communist Party-controlled government has decided to stop and reverse Apple’s growth in the country.
Here’s what’s going on.
It’s handsome, in a functional kind of way.
Here’s a little something that might get you formatted-text nerds excited: Rich Notes, yet another new text-editing app, lets you write on the iPad in rich text. That is, you can italicize and embolden your words right there on the page. Yes, this works with some other apps, but Rich Notes lets you use keyboard shortcuts to do it. If you have an external keyboard hooked up, CMD-B and CMD-I will do just what they do in every desktop app.
Rich notes comes from the developer DenVog, who also makes the excellent Index Card app for iPhone and iPad. It’s due to launch on February 20th. Let’s take a look:
We learned this week that Google, Samsung and LG are all planning smartwatches.
Sony, Pebble, Cookoo, I’m Smart, MetaWatch and Martian already have pretty sophisticated smartwatches available, all of which interoperate with the iPhone.
You can be sure that 100 Chinese companies will make inexpensive smartwatches that support either the iPhone or Android or both.
And, of course, Apple is rumored to be working on a curved-glass “iWatch.”
Here’s why I believe Apple’s smartwatch will have a market advantage.
Chinese actor and singer Peter Ho criticized Apple on China’s Twitter-like Weibo service this week.
But don’t blame Ho. He was apparently just following orders. But orders from whom? And why?
Or rather, “have someone drive you home.”
After being vilified so much for contributing to dangerous roads (along with all other smartphones, of course), the iPhone will soon turn Samaritan, and maybe help to make the roads a little safer. That’s thanks to the new Breathometer, “the world’s first smartphone breathalyzer.”
Apple was caught last year selling Apple Certified refurbished hardware on eBay using the pseudonym Refurbished-Outlet. Allegedly.
The prices and details of these products were generally the same as refurbished products sold on the apple.com site. The products come with a one-year warranty and mobile devices contain a new battery.
But this week it emerged that Apple is lowering the prices on eBay, sometimes by quite a bit. For example, Apple normally charges $999 for a refurbed MacBook Air with 128 GB. But that same system with the same Apple inspection and one-year warranty went on sale in the eBay store for $899. Prices on other hardware products were slashed similarly.
(In addition, we learned, the company as been apparently working with “power sellers” on eBay to sell Apple hardware. For example, until they ran out of the 500 units put up for sale of 13-inch MacBook Pros selling for $999. These are new devices, not refurbished, and Apple is probably using the “channel” to clear out inventory.)
It seems to me that Apple is working behind the scenes to experiment with different models for selling refurbished and excess inventory. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple was also trying other channels for doing the same thing that we don’t know about. And I also wouldn’t be surprised if refurbished gadgets vanished from the Apple site altogether, and for those items to be sold in the darker alleys of the Internet (like eBay) exclusively instead.
But I think there’s a ginormous opportunity here for embracing “used” in a big way — and it’s something only Apple could pull off.
![Logitech’s Easy-Share Keyboard Is So Good, We Reviewed It Twice [Reviews]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/1362753845.jpg)
This is the last keyboard you’ll ever need.
This review is slightly unusual: We already published a review of the same device a couple of weeks ago: the Logitech Easy-Switch keyboard. I liked the look of it so much that — on Killian’s recommendation — I went out and bought one of my own. Or rather, I bought one, returned one and searched the internet high and low for another one.
So why the “duplicate” review? Because I use a keyboard in a different way than Killian. Where he sits at the dining room table surrounded by iDevices and Macs, I work not only in different rooms but in bars (cafes), on buses, wherever I might be. So I figured I’d write a very different review.
Interested?
Hubbl’s Passbook page (left), and Cult of Mac’s channel in the Hubbl app. You’ve added our feed, right?
If you’ve been catching our Daily Freebie posts, you’ve no doubt snagged some of the fantastic free apps out there — or been alert enough to snag an amazing deal when this or that killer app goes free for a short time. But there are other tools that help make sure you don’t miss out on all those great free apps. Hubbl is one of those tools and we’ve mentioned it in the past — but now it’s got a cool new trick that we’ve never seen before.
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