Apple Inc. - page 63

If you paid a couple thousand dollars for your Mac, but you’re currently not taking advantage of its hidden features, then you’ve wasted a lot of money. Your Mac has a ton of useful capabilities – don’t let those features go to waste. Especially when they’re going to directly benefit your life by saving hundreds of hours over the course of a year.

Have you ever found yourself doing tedious work copy and pasting, moving files around, or boring data entry stuff? Most likely, that’s a “yes”, isn’t it? Everyone comes across these daily tasks and sometimes this repetitive grunt-work can take up 2 to 3 hours of your precious time. Your Mac can slice that time in half if you know the proper techniques.

You deserve to work faster because the potential with your Mac is right at your fingertips. Let The Mac Productivity Course (featuring over 18 lectures and 1.5 hrs of content) turn you into a Mac dojo master for only $29!

Last year it seemed as though everyone was certain Amazon would follow up the success of the Kindle Fire with an Amazon branded smartphone to take on the iPhone. Instead, Jeff Bezos unleashed the Kindle Fire HD on the world.

The rumor mill is back with more Amazon smartphone rumors, as a new report claims Amazon is getting close to finishing its smartphone that will launch later this year.

The tiny Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus has fallen on some hard times lately.

The bleak financial prospects facing Cyprus has resulted in the govenment having to come up with capital control measures to prevent runs on banks, and keep investors from taking money out of the country. Worse, depositors in Cypriot banks who have more than 100,000 euros in the bank could soon see 40% of their funds converted into bank shares, while those with less than 100,000 euros will not lose any funds – but face limits on what funds they can access.

It’s all looking bleak, and the Cypriot situation has all of the Euro zone panicking. What should Cyprus do? According to one commentator, let Apple buy them.

I’m a sucker for wood paneling my Apple products, and so I’m absolutely going to have to do this: the guys over at RAWBKNY (whom we’ve written about before) are now selling laser-etched replacement keys for the MacBook Pro.

They look great, and Michael over at RAWBKNY says that while they are only designed for the non-Retina MacBook Pro right now, he’s tweaking it so it should work on the Retina MacBook Pro and MacBook Airs soon.

We’ve got a review unit on the way to see how well these work, but be warned: replacing every key on your MacBook is likely to be a time consuming process. $40 will get you a set.

Source: RAWBKNY

Wow, this is incredible. Redditor Kepgnar works in the tech department of a charter school. Every month, one of the departments has to put together a message for the school’s official announcement chalkboard.

Here’s what Kepgnar came up with: a meticulously drawn “Think Different.” logo with an actually working QR code which, when scanned, leads to the YouTube version of the original commercial narrated by Steve Jobs.

How’d Kepgnar do the QR code? They designed it, then projected it onto the chalkboard and traced it. Talk about thinking differently.

Source: Reddit

Over at Asymco, Horace Dediu has compared Apple’s retail economy versus Amazon, and while the results aren’t anything we haven’t seen before — Amazon has annual revenue about twice the size of Apple’s retail revenue, but makes only 10% of Apple’s same operating income on that revenue — it’s informative to see it laid out so clearly. Check it out.

Source: Asymco

Your Mac is a finely tuned, intricate machine. Just like a car, every aspect of your Mac plays a crucial role in its overall performance. This Cult of Mac Deals offer is for an app that will help keep your Mac running in tip-top shape. That’s because we’re featuring xScan – the same software many professionals use to diagnose technical issues with Mac operating systems.

xScan has been specifically designed to help you monitor the behavior and health of your Mac in a simple and straightforward manner. Consider it lifetime health insurance for your Mac – and Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $10.

For some reason, ComScore just hasn’t gotten around to adding mobile users to its measurements on how much traffic websites get until today. Now that mobile traffic is being accounted for, Apple has quickly gone from the 11th most popular website in the world to 8th.

ComScore just released its latest rankings for websites and Apple benefited the most from the addition of mobile audience scoring by adding 54% more unique viewers to its score.

Apple is beginning to close the gap on Samsung over shipments of smart connected devices, which includes computers, smartphones, and tablets. The Cupertino company grabbed 20.3% of the market by the end of 2012, according to IDC, while Samsung just about had the edge with a 21.2% share.

Have you ever wanted to build your own iOS apps but have no coding experience whatsoever?

That’s not a problem with this easy-to-follow video course – a course that you can take on your iPad, meaning you’ve got access both anytime and anywhere. In this course you’ll learn how to create apps using the same tools and techniques used to make the top apps in the App Store. And you’ll be able to learn this thanks to Udemy and Cult of Mac Deals for only $29!

T-Mobile is set to hold a press conference tomorrow about its new, contract-free wireless plans, and it so happens that the carrier recently entered an agreement with Apple to officially sell the iPhone in 2013. Since the iPhone 5 hasn’t been made available on the network yet, T-Mobile has been waiting for the right time to showcase the device.

According to a new report, the iPhone will be front and center at T-Mobile’s press event tomorrow.

Did you know that Google’s former head of Android worked at Apple for a few years in the early 90s? Andy Rubin was a manufacturing engineer at Apple from 1989-1992. He still has his old business card, and it looks awesome with the retro Apple logo and unofficial title, “Bad Example.”

Since he moved away from Android to work on other stuff at Google, Rubin has been posting a lot more to Facebook, like the scanned version of the above card. It will be interesting to see what “moonshot” projects he works on next.

Source: Facebook

Via: Business Insider

The Chinese Communist Party is continuing to attack Apple in the press, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. After China Central Television (CCT) ran its big hit piece, the government’s newspaper has also decided to throw dirt on Apple now. The first criticisms revolved around Apple’s product warranty practices, while the second volley of propaganda calls out Apple’s lack of interaction with the Chinese media.

A couple of weeks ago, we reported that Steve Jobs was about to become a manga star, thanks to a new project by Mari Yamazaki (the author of, apparently, a “time travel public bath manga” called Thermae Romae) based upon Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs.

Now a preview of the first chapter of the bio has hit the web, seemingly focusing on the initial meetng between Jobs and Isaacson.

We’ve got the first pages after the jump. If you want to read the whole thing, the first chapter will be published in full in Japan in the April issue of Kiss.

Apple has purchased a small startup called WiFiSLAM, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. The two-year-old company specializes in indoor mapping, which is something Google has already been doing with Google Maps for some time.

Since Apple debuted its own mapping technology in iOS 6, it’s been working to bring its service up to par with Google Maps. WiFiSLAM’s expertise could very well be used to improve Apple Maps, and the acquisition also bodes well for another Apple service, Passbook.

Want to harness the power and flexibility of Apple’s Mountain Lion Server? Whether you are setting it up for a school, home network or business, with this Cult of Mac Deals offer you will learn the most effective way to use everything Apple’s Mountain Lion server has to offer.

For only $39 you can take home more than 9 hours of actionable content and over 110 lectures of informative instruction.

There’s been a lot of buzzing lately about Samsung’s hot new Galaxy S4 phone and its gimmicky cutting-edge new features. But bizarre air gestures aside, we’ll tell you which of its features we’d love to see Apple “borrow” for iPhone 6 on our all-new CultCast.

Plus, a new Steve Jobs movie you’ll actually want to see; and, is it possible for Apple for make a device more perfect than the iPad mini?

All that and more on this episode of the CultCast! Subscribe nowon iTunes to download our new episodes, or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s newly updated Podcasts App.

Or, you know, just hit play below.

Over at Asymco, noted Apple analyst Horace Dediu takes a moment to look at the iTunes App Store from the perspective of a “break even” model, a perspective that Apple has only recently started to discuss as perhaps more than breaking-even. Dediu notes that with the quintupling of growth of the overall beast that is iTunes (including music, video, and iOS app software), an analysis of Apple’s business practices as well as the App Store’s economy of scale suggests that Apple is doing quite a bit better than “breaking even.”

Apple and HP have been rated best for customer experience in a study of 10,000 consumers in the United States carried out by Temkin Group. Apple took the top spot in the computer sector with a rating of 64%, while HP took second place with a rating of 62%.

At the other end of the spectrum sat Sony and Lenovo, which were the lowest-rated computer makers.

If you love Woz (and who doesn’t?) we’ve got an extra special Friday treat for you.

Vince Patton emailed us, linking us to an incredible YouTube account filled with vintage videos of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak talking to the Denver Apple Pi computer club back in 1984, in which Woz talks about being put on probation for computer abuse, hacking a video-on-demand box for free movies at a hotel, and how Steve Jobs coerced him to quit his cushy job at HP to make a go for Apple.

Back in February, the Australian parliament demanded explanations from Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft over the prices charged for their products down under, with some goods costing as much as 70% more than they do in the United States. Apple has today responded to the inquiry, but don’t expect the Cupertino company to be reducing its prices anytime soon.

Apple bans apps from the App Store all the time, for a variety of reasons. Most of the time, it’s because they think the app is pornographic, even if it totally isn’t, although occasionally, it’s because developers have hidden some functionality in an app that violates Apple’s EULA.

One thing we’re not used to seeing Apple ban apps for, though, is the mere fact that the app’s subject matter has made Cupertino uncomfortable… but that is seemingly what happened with Sweatshop HD, a game created by a BAFTA-winning studio that aims to raise awareness about where our products come from.

LG will compete with Apple, Google, and Samsung with a smartwatch of its own that is expected to run Google’s Android operating system. The company is also said to be working on another wearable computing device that will reportedly rival Google Glass.

The Google Glass project has been in the news a fair bit in recent months, but it seems Google may have another wearable gadget in development that’s been flying under the radar. The Financial Times reports that just like Apple and Samsung, the search giant is working on its own smartwatch that will act as an extension to the smartphone.

Following a seemingly endless series of hacks that have afflicted cloud service providers like Evernote and Dropbox, Apple has just introduce two-step verification for your Apple ID, which makes you enter a code (sent to a single trusted device) every time you make changes to your account or make a new iTunes or App Store purchase from a new device.