This week, Apple lost its appeal on the antitrust case that the federal government and several state attorneys general filed on it concerning price fixing on ebooks. And now that that’s out of the way, it’s time for the company to pay up.
The green states in the map below were listed as plaintiffs on the class-action lawsuit, which means that if you live in one of them and have bought anything from iBooks, you may be entitled to a cut of the settlement.
More than four years after its debut, Windows Phone still has a native app problem. Microsoft has now accepted that’s not going to change anytime soon, so in an effort to attract new users to its platform, it’s going to allow them to run Android and iOS apps… sort of.
Amazon has made ordering stuff online ridiculously easy with its huge warehouses shipping online orders to Prime members in an instant. Apparently ordering stuff online is just too damn hard though, so today Amazon announced it’s newest creation: Dash buttons.
The new Wi-Fi connected buttons can be placed throughout your home, allowing you to replenish supplies of your favorite products with just the push of a button. Once pressed, Amazon creates an order and sends an alert to your phone so you can cancel if the kids are spamming for more mac and cheese.
Amazon already delivers your toilet paper. Now it wants to deliver your plumber.
The online retail giant debuted a new service today called Home Services. It’s designed to take the simplistic Amazon ordering approach and apply it to real-world service needs, like fixing your home computer, cleaning the gutter or teaching aerial yoga lessons.
Amazon is preparing a new app service for Android. It’s called Unlocked, and think of it as free Amazon Prime for apps. But there’s a catch. Apps that are given freely can also be taken away again.
Amazon is in the business of making it as easy as possible to spend money in their online store. It should surprise no one, then, that Amazon is already developing an Apple Watch app, which will let customers search for products and purchase them with a single click, all from a user’s wrist.
I can’t wait to read Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader. The upcoming biography, by veteran reporters Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, promises to be the definitive telling of Steve Jobs’ life.
The writers scored interviews with major players including Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Eddy Cue, Pixar’s John Lasseter, Disney CEO Bob Iger and Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. The result is a book loaded with interesting anecdotes and insights about the former Apple CEO.
I haven’t yet read the whole thing (it comes out March 24), but while pre-ordering my copy on Amazon, I could initially access a significant portion of the biography through the site’s “Look Inside the Book” feature. (Amazon later blocked out far more of the book’s contents.)
From what I’ve seen, some of the stories are pretty sensational — providing new details into the close relationship between Jobs and Cook, revealing Jobs’ secret plan to buy Yahoo!, and much more.
Want a few of the highlights? Check them out below.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is redefining high tea.
Drones are taking to the skies in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to deliver tea to a test group of 450 shoppers using Alibaba’s website Taobao. The three-day trial of drone delivery service in the Chinese cities ends Friday as Alibaba continues to push its might across the globe.
Apple’s retail stores are one of Cupertino’s crown jewels, and the envy of pretty much every tech company out there. A new rumor suggests that online retail giant Amazon might soon be looking to replicate Apple’s success with its own line of brick-and-mortar stores. But how will they get them? By buying up old Radio Shack stores and rebranding them.
Who says iOS has all the apps? According to new data, Google isn’t just kicking butt when it comes to market share, but also mobile apps as well. The search giant’s Play Store now offers a great selection of titles than the App Store, but Apple fans will argue that quality is more important than quantity.
Developed by former Apple engineers, Duet Display is the first iPad app that lets you use the tablet as a secondary display for your Mac via a Lightning cable. Other apps have tried streaming over WiFi to turn the iPad into an extended display, but then you usually have to deal with bad lag and poor frame rate.
Because you connect the iPad via a 30-pin or Lightning cable, Duet Display claims to be capable of powering a Retina display at 60 frames per second with zero lag.
Its developers claim that the app works with all iOS devices on iOS 6 and up along with all Macs capable of running OS X 10.9. I wasn’t able to test it because my Mac is running the 10.10.2 Yosemite beta, which is currently super buggy.
Duet Display sounds like a great tool for making use of an old iPad you may have lying around the house. Support for older iOS 5.1.1 devices is being worked on for a future update in the App Store.
Available on: iPad
Price: $9.99 (requires free Mac installer)
Download: App Store
Apple was found guilty last year of colluding with publishers to raise ebook prices, but now that the antitrust case is being heard by the Second U.S. Court of Appeals, two out of the three appellate judges are starting to see things Apple’s way.
The appeals case kicked off this morning with Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart attempting to compare Apple to a driver taking a narcotics dealer to a drug pick up. The analogy was supposed to make the point that if Apple knew publishers were conspiring to fix ebook prices, it was just as guilty as them for facilitating the conspiracy. However, Fortune reports that Judge Denis Jacobs laughed off the analogy, pointing out that drug trafficking is one of the few “industries in which the law does not look with favor or new entrants.”
The comment drew a chorus of laughs in the courtroom, but Judge Jacob’s concerns went even further, as the the judge questioned whether the government should have even brought the case to court.
Yesterday, Amazon announced that they would begin streaming Amazon Prime movies in 4K Ultra HD, free of charge. This follows an announcement by Netflix in March that they would allow subscribers to stream 4K shows in Ultra HD for a small additional charge every month.
Of course, neither the iPhone, iPad, or the Apple TV support 4K video… but the new iMacs with Retina Display do. Yet despite this, Netflix and Amazon don’t actually stream 4K video to the Retina iMac. The best you can get is plain old 1080p.
What’s the deal? The same as it ever is. DRM.
It’s been over two and a half years since Apple TV was updated, and while Apple’s been happy resting on its laurels, its biggest competitors are passing it by.
Google’s Chromecast is now more popular than Apple TV, reports Parks Associates, which says streaming media players become more popular than ever in the first three quarters of 2014, as 10 percent of U.S. households bought at least one new streaming device.
When it comes to Black Friday shopping online, no one does it bigger than Amazon. Starting today, Amazon’s Black Friday hub will be featuring new deals literally every 10 minutes, which is probably too much for the feeble human brain to handle.
There will be limited-time Lightning Deals, Deals of the Day, and a slew of discounts for everything from 4K TVs to Rubik’s cubes. And of course Amazon Prime customers will be treated like royalty with free shipping and the ability to get deals before everyone else.
Amazon will roll out a new, standalone video streaming service next year that won’t be bundled with a $99 Prime subscription, according to sources familiar with its plans. The retail giant hopes to take on rivals like Netflix and Hulu and undercut their prices in an effort to attract customers.
Back in May, Apple’s iPad regained its illustrious titles as the top tablet according to the J.D. Power’s U.S. Tablet Satisfaction survey.
Fast forward five months, and Apple’s lost the title… to Amazon, of all companies. Is this even real life?
Amazon added Apple Pay support today for its Amazon.com Rewards Visa.
Since Chase, the Amazon rewards card issuer, was an Apple Pay launch partner, some speculated that Amazon intentionally opted out of Apple’s mobile payments system. But Amazon quickly confirmed this week that it was working on adding support for its credit card in the near future. Now it’s followed through.
During its earnings call yesterday Amazon gave some clues about just how spectacularly its Fire Phone business is tanking — making it seem one of the worst tech ideas since the RMS Titanic shipped without lifeboats.
How bad are we talking? At the end of its disappointing third-quarter the company still has a massive $83 million worth of unsold inventory sitting around.
It’s now taking a $170 million charge “primarily related to Fire phone inventory valuation and supplier commitment costs.”
Nobody would ever call Amazon’s Fire Phone a hit, but even the company’s most loyal shoppers are apparently avoiding the phone like the plague.
A new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners says that while the Amazon Prime subscription service continues to attract new members, the Fire Phone “has achieved virtually zero market share.”
Is Apple vs. Amazon the next “thermonuclear” tech war?
Perhaps not quite yet, but with Amazon moving into smartphones, and Apple choosing to stock the books Amazon refuses to, competition is certainly heating up. That may go some way toward explaining Apple’s acquisition of BookLamp, a startup described as the “Pandora for books,” which offers personalized book recommendations.
Jeff Bezos may be ready to roast the Galaxy and iPhone with his much-discussed Amazon Fire Phone, but judging from the first round of reviews, the handset is more of a damp squib than a firestarter.
Ahead of the smartphone’s launch tomorrow, and with the embargo lifted on the early review unit handsets, we’ve finally got an idea of how Bezos’ intriguing pet project has panned out.
And, unfortunately, “panned” seems to be the right word to describe it.
Today Amazon took the wraps off its Kindle Unlimited subscription, an all-you-can-read plan that was uncovered earlier this week. For $9.99 per month you get access to 600,000 Kindle titles, including “thousands” of audiobooks from Audible.
Everything is available though Amazon’s Kindle apps, including iOS and the Mac.
Long-time rivals Apple and IBM partnered up this week to work together on enterprise software, but what does this mean for Siri? If Apple’s trusty voice assistant gets together with IBM’s extremely intelligent A.I. Watson, it could be a beautiful “relationship.”
Watch today’s Cult of Mac news roundup to hear all the latest news and rumors about this potential Apple-IBM hookup, possible trouble in the iPhone 6 sapphire glass pipeline, a toaster that burns your selfies into bread and the rest of the week’s biggest stories.
Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.
Apple and Google may reign supreme as the top two tech companies in the U.S., but when it comes to attractiveness, Amazon and Microsoft employees are absolutely slaying them.
After crunching the numbers from its social-networking app for professionals, Hinge found that employees from Amazon are the most sought-after on network, topping both Google, Facebook and Microsoft, with Apple’s young professionals coming in dead last.