There are a number of reasons I like writing for Cult of Mac, but one of the most important reasons is the great readers, like you, we have visiting our site. Granted every so often you can be pretty vocal about the tiniest detail, but when you come through with some good comments they should not be ignored. Therefore when I found two comments about shopping at Apple in my first post about Apple Technology Will Make You A Savvy Black Friday Shopper — I just had to share them.
Microsoft’s official Office for the Mac blog has announced a list of places where you can buy Office for Mac 2011 at discounted prices during Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend. The prices are pretty good during the US Thanksgiving holiday weekend at various retailers, but Amazon has the best price of all.
Best Buy and MacMall (US): $20 off Home & Student 1-pack for $99 (regularly $119 ERP) and $20 off Home & Student Family Pack for $129 (regularly $149 ERP).
Amazon (US): $40 off the Home & Student 1-pack for $79 (regularly $119 ERP) and Home & Student Family Pack for $109 (regularly $149 ERP).
OfficeforMac.com (US): $20 off Home & Student Family Pack for $129 (regularly $149 ERP).
Office for Mac 2011 has gotten favorable reviews and performs better than previous versions. If you are interested in upgrading from an older version Thanksgiving weekend will probably be your best opportunity to get a good deal.
Apple has just released another gold master candidate of its long-awaited iOS 4.2 firmware to developers. This version is iOS 4.2.1, and we assume it quashes the Wi-Fi bug that’s recently been affecting the iPad.
MacRumorsreports that Apple has instructed developers not to resubmit their applications under the new build, suggesting that only minor fixes are included in this update.
Unfortunately it’s not the iOS 4.2 news many of us have been anticipating, however, it’s nice to see Apple are fixing these bugs before they release the firmware to the public.
Developers can get their hands on iOS 4.2.1 via the iOS Dev Centre.
If you had twenty seven billion dollars, what would your dream be? I’d probably get myself some of those ab implants I’ve had my eye on, and perhaps pay for an oiled massage or two from Amanda Seyfriend and Anne Hathaway that they would be contractually obliged to apply without using their hands.
Billionaire Eike Batista has a radically dream, though: he wants to steal Apple manufacturing from China and bring it to his home country of Brazil.
Traditionally Black Friday takes place on the Friday immediately following Thanksgiving — November 26th this year. It is the official start of the holiday season when retailers generally open up very early and offer deep discounts on items geared towards drawing you into their stores. They hope you’ll buy more through impulse buying.
However, in recent years things are changing so start looking for deals – now. The holiday shopping season seems to start earlier every year, but actually practically after Halloween in the US. Best Buy, Target and Walmart are already offering pre-Black Friday deals on their websites and many other retailers are too.
If you are looking for the best Black Friday deals you’re in luck because you have Apple technology to help you find them. You need to use that technology to your advantage so you don’t miss out on some good deals. I will help you get started with this first post — a technology overview for all you avid shoppers out there.
Later this week and next week I’ll follow-up with more specific information on applying these technologies which I’ll summarize here. I hope all this information will turn you into a savvy Black Friday shopper.
There’s a reason Amazon’s responding to Apple’s Beatles iTunes coup by slashing pricing on Fab Four CDs instead of undercutting the iTunes price in their own music service, Amazon MP3: Apple’s secured the online exclusive to Beatles tracks until sometime in 2011.
The competition is scrambling to keep up with Apple after they finally succeeded in landing the Beatles catalogue for iTunes: in the hour since the announcement, Amazon has already dropped the price of at least two Beatles offerings to undercut Apple’s own prices on the same albums.
As predicted, Apple’s big iTunes announcement today wasn’t iTunes in the cloud, or streaming, or a subscription fee… it’s John, Paul, Ringo and George. After ten years, the Beatles and their music catalogue have finally hit iTunes.
Although it’s not been announced on Apple.com as of writing, the Beatles’ presence on the iTunes Store now commands most of the upper fold. The entire catalog seems to be available, along with a link to the band’s page, the Beatles Box set and more. You’re even getting a decent deal on the Beatles Box Set: it cost $250 when it was released last year, and currently costs $154.99 on Amazon at a heavily discounted price. Apple’s price? Just $150 for every Beatles song ever recorded.
The sudden resolution of Apple’s decades-long standoff with Apple Records, first for the Apple trademark and then for the Beatles catalog, has happened swiftly. One thing’s for sure: however Steve got Apple Records and EMI to agree to iTunes’ terms, it’s going to make one hell of a read when the story finally comes to light.
Although many of us already own the Beatles’ catalog — I have the full collection of the recent remasters already converted to lossless MP3s — and while many will be apathetic to this news, this is a big win for Apple, as the record labels release their death grip on one of the last digital music holdouts.
CDs and records aren’t the future of music anymore: iTunes is, and the labels have finally been forced to give up one of their last aces-in-the-holes in order to stay relevant.
According to both federal prosecutors and Cupertino itself, former Apple manager Paul Shin Devine was crooked, accepting almost $1 million in kickbacks from accessory makers in exchange for insider knowledge gleaned from his position as Senior Operations Manager of the iPod division.
On his part, Devine says he’s not guilty, but that claim certainly seems disingenuous: not only is he facing 23 counts of money laundering and wire fraud, but when investigators raided his home they discovered over $150,000 in cash squirreled away in shoeboxes.
Now prosecutors are saying that Devine has more, and they want him to open his safety deposit boxes to see if he’s withholding even more money from them.
The case has already had a devastating effect on Devine and his family: although he is currently out on bail, but he was only able to secure the money necessary for release by allowing his mother to put her house up on lien. I really hope he ends up being innocent of the charges: it’s one thing to rip off Apple, but another thing entirely to let your mother risk homelessness to protect you from justice.
Thanks to an issue with light leaking onto the camera sensor, Apple has delayed the white iPhone 4 until at least March of next year… a nine month delay which probably harbingers the cancellation of that device.
It’s a delay that has bitten some customers harder than others: in fact, some customers have been so desperate to have a white iPhone 4 that they have converted them to white themselves as an aftermarket mod.
Don’t even think about buying or selling an iPhone 4 modded to white on eBay, though: Apple’s coming down hard on “fake” and “counterfeit” white iPhone 4s, banning them from sale on the world’s most popular online auctioning site.
Worried about Apple’s recent deprecation of Java under OS X, ending Apple’s own line of custom Java packages? Don’t be: Apple and Oracle have just announced that they will be partnering to bring the OpenJDK project to OS X, guaranteeing the continued support of Java on OS X.
Essentially, what the OpenJDK announcement seems to be outlining is a way for Cupertino to pass the torch of Java development under OS X to Oracle. Apple will continue to support Java SE 6 under Snow Leopard and the forthcoming OS X 10.7 Lion, but once Java SE 7 comes out, Java will instead be Oracle’s responsibility to both build and distribute.
We reported on Friday that a nasty WiFi bug causing random drops in the gold master build of iOS 4.2 was likely to delay release of the update from anywhere between a few days to the end of the month.
It looks like that report was right: Apple has just dropped a second GM build of iOS 4.2 for the iPad, updating the GM from 8C134 to 8C134b.
Where this puts the official release of iOS 4.2 is anyone’s guess. We’ve previously heard rumors to expect iOS 4.2 to drop tomorrow, but some sources are placing the official release date as far away as November 24th.
Ultimately, what it will all come down to is how much testing Apple thinks the new GM will require for a fix to a single WiFi bug. Taking all bets!
In the meantime, you can download the second GM for developers here.
Apple has released an update for iTunes today which brings the software up to version 10.1. This update introduces support for AirPlay and the iOS 4.2 firmware for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.
With iTunes 10.1, you can now wirelessly stream videos straight from iTunes on your computer to the latest AppleTV. The update also provides a number of important stability and performance improvements.
Apple’s decided not to bundle OS X with Flash anymore, and could this chart make the reasons for that any clearer? 42% of the security updates in Mac OS X 10.6.5 were dedicated to fixing problems with Flash. Add in the fact that on the new MacBook Air, merely stripping Flash from the default OS X install adds two hours to the battery life, and the message is clear: Flash is a product of garish incompetence and staggering ineptitude, and the quicker it dies, the better.
We personally love it, but not everyone thinks the new AppleTV is much of an improvement over the old model, which featured local storage, legacy outputs, was fairly easily upgradeable and was easily hackable with great media center software like the Boxee Box.
If you’re one of those nostalgists and think the AppleTV took a step back when it became a streaming media only affair, good news: Apple’s dropped the price of the 160GB first-gen AppleTV from just $50 more than the new model.
Of course, buy that and you’ll miss out on the inevitable fun that everyone is going to start having once jailbreak developers start really mastering the capabilities of the new iOS-driven AppleTV, but heck, there’s always room for both in your entertainment center.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is a hands-on kind of guy, but usually, that hands-on approach tends to pop up as dashed-off emails from his iPhone in response to customer queries than telephonic reach-outs.
That’s not to say the latter can’t happen, though: A Seattle-based iPad developer was recently called by His Steveness himself after his app was rejected for using private APIs.
According to Apple, the new A4-powered AppleTV has been a modest success, selling over 250,000 units by mid-October, but despite this, it’s not listed in Amazon.com’s list of the top 100 electronics…. and some people smell a conspiracy.
Earlier in the week, it was reported that Apple might have acquired Wi-Gear, a company that makes the iMuff line of wireless Bluetooth headphones.
The evidence seemed pretty good for a secret buyout. Not only did Wi-Gear’s home page feature a somewhat unceremonious message about the company ceasing operations and being unable to respond to any press inquiries, but Wi-Gear co-founder moved to Apple as an iOS Bluetooth Engineer.
Unfortunately, like many good rumors, the evidence didn’t add up to the truth of things. Asked about a buyout by Macworld, Wi-Gear CEO Mark Pundsack said: “I wish!”
If a new patent spotted by the USPTO archeologists over at Patently Apple is believed, Lion might boasts a new way to navigate menus that would make Mac OS X more suitable to touch input than ever before.
Apple’s official line of headphones and earbuds have always been pretty lackluster in my eyes, but a secret acquisition might mean that Cupertino is planning on changing all of that: according to reports, Apple might have quietly purchased a small Bluetooth wireless headphone designer a couple of months ago, and are hard at work in their labs on a new pair of totally wireless cans.
Ever played Lazer Tag? If Apple has its druthers, next time you play it, it won’t be with big ray guns and fluorescent sensors, but with your iPhone.
Apple’s gaming plans are described in a newly discovered patent dated April 2009 for “Interactive Gaming with Co-Located, Networked Direction and Location Aware Devices.”
The nitty gritty’s a lot cooler than that dry legalese description, though: what Apple is describing here is away to take advantage of an iPhone’s gyroscope, accelerometer and GPS to turn your handset into an aimable device that can talk to other iPhones that it is pointed at.
If you’re a network administrator in love with the svelte, stackable design of Apple’s Xserve line, you’d better stock up: Apple has announced that they will be discontinuing the Xserve line starting January 31st, 2011.
With an effete wave of his hand, Steve Jobs could have you and everyone you cared about bludgeoned to death in the night by turtleneck-wearing goons armed with iPhone-stuffed socks, but that’s not enough to make him crack the top ten in Forbes’ list of most powerful people on the planet.
Nonetheless, the strongly spoken Apple CEO has managed to go up quite a few notches on the list, buoyed by Apple’s successes in the mobile arena. He climbed from the 57th spot last year to number 17 this year.
In June 2008, on a flight home from Europe to San Francisco, I was given a fascinating demo of some jaw-dropping technology.
I was sitting next Inon Beracha, CEO of Israeli company PrimeSense, which had developed a low-cost chip and software to do 3D machine vision.
The system used a pair of cameras and an infrared sensor to highlight people and track their movements.
On his laptop, Beracha showed me videos of people waving their hands in the air to control Wii-like games. He showed people controlling TV programming menus by gesturing their hands in the air. And, most impressive of all, someone flipping through a photo slide show like they were Tom Cruise in Minority Report. It was so slick, I asked him if it was CGI. It was real, he said, and so cheap, the technology could eventually be found everywhere in the home, office and car.
Of course, PrimeSense’s system is at the heart of Microsoft’s new Kinect game controller, which is getting rave reviews and looks set to be a monster hit. It’s a “crazy, magical, omigosh rush,” says the New York Times‘ David Pogue.
Ars Technica stumbled upon an interesting tidbit while reviewing their 11-inch MacBook Air. They found a compelling reason for Apple to not install Adobe Flash on the MacBook Air and it wasn’t just because they wanted to make sure users always had the latest version of Flash.
