Apple Inc. - page 58

Senator John McCain just laid out his case against Apple in Washington D.C. in a Senate hearing about Apple’s tax rates, and he’s out for blood.

According to McCain, although 95% of Apple’s research and development happens in the USA, they funnel most of their profits through overseas entities that are not tax residents in any country in the world.

Ireland is a big target for McCain here. Ireland has long had liberal tax policies in an attempt to attract foreign companies, but McCain says that Apple paid less than $10 million in taxes on $22 billion in earnings in Ireland, a tax rate of less than 1.20th of 1%.

Turkey’s tablet loving Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been going on a tour of the U.S.  in pursuit of the greatest tablet marker in the world to arm his students with. The prime minister visited Silicon Valley on May 18th to be briefed by the world’s best technology companies on their latest endeavors.

Erdoğan is looking to buy 10.6 million iPads for his country’s education new education project Faith. So far, Erdoğan was first greeted by Microsoft CEO, Steve Balmer, and then he paid visits to both Apple, Google.

Regarding his visit to the U.S., Erdoğan said:

Looking for an easy way to capture 360 degree video on your iPhone 4/4S when you’re out experiencing the world? Well…look no further.

Cult of Mac is offering the Dot – a product that raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter and is now in full force changing the way you see the world…one video camera at a time. We’ve got the Dot for only $27.99 for a limited time.

(Note: This promotion is available only to Continental USA customers – including shipping – and all sales are final.)

Capturing video on the iPhone is a regular use case, and now thanks to the Dot from Kogeto you can take amazingly awesome 360 degree video with the click of a button. It’s that simple. Not only is the video quality great, but the interactive 360 views are unreal.

Here are the highlights of the Dot:

Apple doesn’t like OLED displays. Across the board, Apple uses LCD IPS displays in its devices, which have better color accuracy than OLED. Theoretically, though, OLED is better than LCD when it comes to power consumption, though… which is why a new report is floating the possibility that Apple might switch to OLED for the iWatch… and that Foxconn is already building test runs.

Samsung has a problem. It controled 33.1% of the global smartphone marketshare last quarter — Apple was only 17.9% — yet that’s almost entirely in the low-end of the market.

What’s keeping Samsung from conquering the high-end of the market, where all the profit is and which Apple continues to dominate? Software: there is a wide-spread impression amongst consumers that Samsung’s apps just aren’t as good as Apple’s.

That’s a problem Samsung is eager to solve. That’s why they are ponying up $800,000 to developers willing to make great, Galaxy-specific apps.

When Siri was updated along with iOS 6, we showed you a bunch of ways to use Apple’s personal digital assistant the right way, like using punctuation and finding out the weather.

Yet time marches ever onward, and we’ve compiled yet another five tips and tricks to help you master Siri, whether you’re looking to create a secure password or just pass the time with a few laughs. Enjoy! Discover even more secret siri commands to improve your Siri experience here.

Earlier this week, Google beat Apple to the punch by launching a streaming subscription music service before Cuperino could unveil its own offering, iRadio.

How did Google managed to do it? Apple has all the music industry clout, so how could Google swing a deal first? Because Google Play Music All Access is essentially a clone of services like Rdio and Spotify, and the contract terms of services like that are easy to copy.

Apple’s iRadio? It’s a wholly different beast.

Android and iOS managed to grab a whopping 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013, with a total of 199.5 million units sold worldwide. There are no prizes for guessing which of the two platforms grabbed the most market share.

Apple’s current flagship store in San Francisco is in something of a cramped location, so Apple wants to move it three blocks away, to Union Square.

Well, we can’t say we’re too surprised with this one following this week’s leak, but it’s great to see Google Play game services has been officially confirmed at Google I/O this morning. The service will rival services like Game Center on iOS, and features will include cloud-based game syncing, online multiplayer, and more.

At its BlackBerry Live event in Orlando, Florida, BlackBerry just announced that its popular BlackBerry Messenger service is going cross-platform. This summer, BBM will finally be available on Android and iOS — and it will be completely free.

Apple has confirmed it will seek to add Samsung’s new Galaxy S4 to its ongoing patent-infringement lawsuit against the Korean electronics giant.

In a statement filed in the U.S. District Court in California on Monday, Apple said it has analyzed the Galaxy S4 and “concluded that it is an infringing device and accordingly intends to move for leave to add the Galaxy S4 as an infringing product.”

Nearly three in every four smartphones sold during the first quarter of 2013 were running Android, according to the latest statistics from the analysts at Gartner. Google’s operating system grabbed a whopping 74% of the market share during the three-month period, while Apple’s iOS came in second with 18.2%.

Companies choosing to build Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and Symbian powered devices might want to look away now.

Nokia has this morning announced its new Lumia 925, a Windows Phone smartphone with an aluminum frame that hopes to step up Nokia’s fight against Apple and Samsung. But does the Lumia 925 really have what it takes to compete with the iPhone 5, the Galaxy S4, the HTC One, and other high-end smartphones?

We’ve put together a spec-by-spec comparison to help you decide whether Nokia’s new flagship is worth the switch to Windows Phone.

Nokia has today announced the Lumia 925, a new Windows Phone flagship that will be hoping to steal market share away from Apple and Samsung in 2013. The device boasts an aluminum frame and offers an 8.7-megapixel rear-facing PureView camera — both of which are firsts for Nokia’s Windows Phone devices.

Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch is one of the most advanced mobile devices on the market and you owe it to yourself to make sure you are using it to its full capabilities.

That’s why Cult of Mac Deals is excited to bring you this lifetime membership to iOS Centric for only $49 because now you can be up-to-date on all iOS secrets for the rest of your life!

Todd McLellan is an artist whose forte is taking things apart and arranging them neatly, peeling back the layers of an everday object and allowing you to see the shocking mechanical complexity within. He’s like one part Andy Warhol, one part .

This is McLellan’s dissection of a Macintosh Classic, every single piece separated from one another and neatly laid out for your examination. It’s part of his Things Come Apart series, in which “fifty design classics—arranged first by size and then by intricacy—are beautifully displayed, piece by piece, exploding in midair and dissected in real-time, frame-by-frame video stills.” You can see more of McLellan’s work here.

In addition, McLellan has a book coming out at the end of the month called Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living. The cover art for the book is actually the striking image above. If you want it, you can preorder it online from Amazon.

Source: Todd McLellan

Apple’s new Passbook app and system is really a nascent technology, but it’s here on your iPhone, so why not figure out how to use it, right? Below are five tips and tricks to help you get the most out of this futuristic, if not-yet-mature technology from our favorite technology company.

Yeah, we get it: Passbook is awesome. It’s also woefully under-populated with only a handful or three of official apps.

But look, Passbook files aren’t even that special. They’re just specially formatted computer files with a .pkpass extension. What’s neat about that is that anyone can create one of these files, and then send them to you in email, or have you download them from the web. That way, you can take advantage of Passbook system without being limited to the official Passbook apps on your iPhone.

Here’s how.

Google has been forced to hand over Android source code documents sought by Apple in an ongoing patent-infringement lawsuit against Samsung.

The search giant initially argued that it was not required to give up the documents and that it would be too burdensome to collect them, but U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal in San Jose, California, has given the company two days to give them up.

Android doesn’t look like it’s about to lose any of its market share to competing platforms any time soon. During the first quarter of 2013, Google’s platform powered a whipping 59.9% of all smart mobile devices sold as total shipments hit 308.7 million units.

Apple’s iOS, on the other hand, was installed on just 19.3% of devices — despite the success of its iPhones and iPads.

A trademark lawsuit brought against Apple in regards to its use of the term “iBooks” was dismissed today in federal court. Black Tower Press sued Apple in 2011, saying that it owned a trademark acquired in 2006 and 2007. The lawsuit also noted that Apple had a trademark for the term “iBook,” which describes one of the distinctive plastic laptop Mac computers sold between 1999 and 2006, but that the current term was being used to describe a delivery method for electronic books beginning in 2010.

The judge did not agree, dismissing the case in a 71-page ruling.

This morning we covered a report from Reuters that said Pegatron, one of Apple’s supply chain partners in China, is increasing its work force by 40% in anticipation of producing a budget iPhone in the coming months. The news was based on Pegatron’s investors conference yesterday and anonymous supply chain sources adding the iPhone ‘mini’ bit to Reuters.

Bloomberg decided to slant Pegatron’s comments and cite “falling iPad mini demand” as the reason for the company’s forecasted 25%-30% drop in revenue during the second 2013 quarter. Never mind the fact that the drop was expected for the entire consumer electronics division of Pegatron; it’s still the iPad’s mini fault.

Mainstream publications love to take hits at Apple whenever they can, but this specific instance has turned out to be an example of Bloomberg putting words in Pegatron’s mouth.

Want to get an iPhone or iPad App on the App Store, but don’t want to take the extensive process to learn how to code it? Have you considered outsourcing it, but don’t want to fork over the $5,000 to build it?

Then this is the course for you. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for the low price of $79 – but only for a limited time.

There’s been a lot of hullyboo about skeuomorphism in the Mac and iOS community right now. Ever since the debut of iOS, Apple’s software has become increasingly ornamented with unnecessary textures and details that many people consider tacky, such as the fake Corinthian leather in Calendar or the green felt background in Game Center. This style of design is called skeuomorphism, and outed ex-Apple VP Scott Forstall was one of Cupertino’s main proponent for its wide spread use in iOS and OS X.

All signs point to Jonny Ive getting away with a lot of skeuomorphic details in iOS 7, adopting instead a more modern, ‘flat’ design.

The way people talk, though, it’s like skeuomorphism is a unique problem of the digital age. It’s not. In fact, the ancient Greeks had a problem with skeuomorphism too. So before you revile Scott Forstall for using it too much, keep in mind, it’s a design technique as old as civilization.