Apple Inc. - page 69

If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of running Windows on your Mac, you’ve probably asked yourself which is the right virtualization software for you: Parallels Desktop for Mac or VMware Fusion. Both have their vigorous defenders, but which one gives the best performance?

The guys over at MacTech have put together an incredibly throrough series of benchmarking tests, comprised of over three thousand tests. The result? A 9,200 word piece they are calling a treatise that — at least in my view — conclusively crowns Parallels as the king of virtualization software.

Digitimes, every Mac lover’s least reputable rumor site, is now saying that Apple has cut its iPad display orders by 50%. You probably shouldn’t read too much into it, though, from the mouth of Tim Cook himself.

What if the history books have it wrong? What if the tool is the master of its maker? Did Mac create Man?

Project Genesis, a short film about a world populated only by old Apple computers, has arrived. The computers have issues. And they have spoken:

We have always looked at our world with a single point of view: with resignation, limiting ourselves to survive. We were wrong! From this moment on, everything changes: new unexpected ways open up in front of us, the world we knew now becomes more accessible, simple, within everyone’s range.

With “Project Genesis” we open the door to our dreams: now we only have to start living, as we truly mean it

Cue the spotlights. Cue the fanfare. Today on Cult of Mac, we present the International Premiere of this groundbreaking short film by Italian director Alessio Fava. It was worth the wait:

Last summer, Apple won the biggest patent lawsuit in history against Samsung. After a long and tedious hearing, a California court ruled that Samsung had infringed on seven of Apple’s design patents. The jury for the trial decided that Samsung had willfully infringed five of the patents, which basically means that Samsung knew what it was doing when it tried to steal Apple’s mojo.

Samsung challenged the verdict, and Judge Lucy Koh has now ruled that Apple’s patents weren’t willfully infringed upon. This will save Samsung from having to pay Apple up to triple in damages on top of the $1+ billion it already owes.

This doesn’t mean that the case is over. There are still plenty of appeals to be made, and “Apple will presumably move at some point for an award of ongoing royalties for future use of its patents by Samsung,” according to FOSS Patents.

Source: FOSS Patents

For some reason, Apple released a 128GB iPad this morning. And a lot of people are scratching their heads over it.

It’s not that a 128GB iPad is an unwelcome thing, of course. More storage for apps, movies and music is always a good thing… except, if it’s just a matter of soldering in a couple of 64GB NAND modules instead of a couple of 32GB NAND modules, why the heck didn’t Apple release a 128GB iPad when they refreshed the iPad in October?

In other words, why now? Why announce it today, on a sleepy Tuesday morning at the tail-end of January? And who is this thing for, anyway?

I’ve got a theory.

Apple has officially announced a 128GB version of the fourth-generation iPad, coming in both WiFi and WiFi+ Cellular models. They’ll be available next week on Tuesday, February 5th, in black or white, and cost $799 for the WiFi model and $929 for the WiFi + Cellular model.

In the official press release, Apple’s not trying too hard to emphasize this as anything more than what it is: a doubling of storage capacity on the high-end. The timing, though, is curious, coming just a couple months before a (presumed) March or April iPad event; this perhaps implies that a fifth-gen iPad isn’t incoming until later in the year.

It’s curious that Apple has taken so long to release an iOS device with 128GB of storage, when the flash modules Apple has needed to do it have existed for years. Is a 128GB iPhone on the table next?

We all know dealing with PDF files can be a pain. We’ve all had a PDF file that we’ve wanted to modify in some form or another and found ourselves only to be left with no real way to do it. But thanks to iPhone Hacks and PDFPen, those days are over.

PDFpen is your simple solution to making all of your PDF dreams come true. It offers a powerful editing capability – one that is unmatched at this price! With this Cult of Mac Deals offer, you can get PDFpen for only $30 (50% off) you can get this stellar piece of software that will become an integral part of your document workflow.

You’ve probably seen quite a few headlines today about Twitter’s new Vine iPhone app displaying pornography. Vine went live in the App Store last week, and the video sharing service has garnered quite a bit of attention due to its parent company, Twitter.

Vine was made an Editors’ Choice by Apple in the App Store, but the app has been de-promoted following all the porn hubbub. Apple has yet to give an official comment on the issue or pull Vine from the App Store completely.

What does all this mean for Vine, and more importantly, the App Store’s policies on porn?

We already knew that iOS 6.1 would likely result in a quick untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 5, iPad mini, iPad 3rd and 4th gen and pretty much every other device, but now jailbreak veteran MuscleNerd is pretty much confirming it, claiming that iOS 6.1 is “safe” for jailbreakers to update too and teasing that an official jailbreak for iOS 6.1 might be coming as soon as Super Bowl Sunday from his new hacking team, the Evad3rs.

Here’s hoping! If the jailbreak does come down the pipe on Sunday, stay tuned for our jailbreak superguide, walking you through the process.

Source: Twitter

Following a last minute Friday release of developer beta 5, Apple has officially released the final iOS 6.1 for all compatible devices… which, of course, opens the door to the imminent iOS 6.1 Jailbreak.

The headlining new feature of iOS 6.1 is that it adds LTE support to 36 iPhone carriers and 23 iPad carriers around the world. You can also purchase movie tickets through Siri now, and the Apple TV gets new Bluetooth functionality, iTunes 11’s Up Next functionality, and iTunes in the Cloud support. There’s also a host of new bug fixes.

Most excitingly? The official release of iOS 6.1 heralds the long delayed availability of an untethered iOS 6 jailbreak for all devices short of the Apple TV 3.

iOS 6.1 final is the same as iOS 6.1 Beta 5, so if you downloaded that over the weekend, you won’t have to install anything more. Press release and direct download links are after the jump.

The City of Shanghai has just confirmed via the Municipal Commission of Commerce that Apple will be opening a research and development center this summer.

This is fantastic. The block-based building game Minecraft has been used to recreate pretty much everything under the sun, from the U.S.S. Enterprise to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, but for the Apple fan, this is the best one yet: a complete recreation of Apple’s Infinite Loop campus put together by Reddit user Sam Schwab for his Discrete Mathematics class.

Cult of Mac Deals offers up killer deals each and every week, and this past week has been no exception. While you can find all of our deals going on over at the Cult of Mac Deals page right now, we’ve got three in particular from the past week that we’d like showcase for you.

The iTunes library on your Mac can get a bit unwieldy at times, right? It can become disorganized, with duplicate tracks, multiple spellings for one artist, and a bunch of other oddities that can keep it from being in the bast shape possible. There’s nothing worse than having to go through a messy iTunes library – and that’s where this Cult of Mac Deals offer comes in.

Leawo Tunes Cleaner for Mac is the intelligent iTunes cleanup tool that will allow you to transform your iTunes to perfection with only a couple of clicks. And for a limited time you can get it for just $5 – 83% off the regular price!

Samsung has gone before the Seoul Central District Court to ask to see Apple’s iOS source code. The goal of seeing the source code is to confirm whether Apple’s iOS 6 infringes on any of Samsung’s software patents. Yes, this is the same Samsung that Apple won $1 billion+ in damages against for patent infringement in U.S. court last year.

Since the innards of iOS are full of valuable company secrets, Apple has of course declined Samsung’s request, “calling it ridiculous.”

It’s hard to forget the day that Apple surpassed Exxon Mobil to become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. But a lot has happened to Apple’s stock since August of 2011. AAPL has ridden a chaotic roller coaster on the stock market. After announcing a record holiday quarter Wednesday with $54.5 billion in revenue and $13.1 billion in profits, AAPL dropped more than 10%. That’s more than $50 billion in market cap gone in a day. Poof.

Apple’s stock isn’t doing so hot, and after over a year in second place, today marks the day that Exxon Mobil dethroned Apple on Wall Street.

And that’s ok. This doesn’t mean that the company is doomed.

Earlier this month, Melinda Gates told an interviewer in the U.K. that “of course” her kids asked for iPods for Christmas, but the Gates won’t give their children Apple products because “the wealth from our family came from Microsoft so why would we invest in a competitor?”

This isn’t the first time Melinda Gates has piped up on the subject of giving her children Apple products. Two years ago, Melinda Gates took part in another interview in which she said that she had “gotten [the] argument” that her children should be allowed to have an iPod. She said that her response was to say, “You may have a Zune.”

Today, the FOX Business Network did an interview with Bill Gates, in which he says his children have never asked for an Apple product in their lives. Ever! Someone’s lying.

You should probably check if your cash is still in your wallet… ’cause according to Apple’s recent earnings call, they just made all the money. We put some perspective on just how huge Apple’s Q1 cash hoard was on our all-new CultCast, then expertly deconstruct Tim Cook’s cryptic words about new and unannounced products.

But wait, there’s more! From iOS 7, to bigger-screen iPhones, to our favorite Mac apps, we answer your Facebook questions in our newest segment, CultCast Q&A.

Get a fun weekly dose of all things Apple! Subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes, or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s free Podcasts App.

Samsung vice president JK Shin has confirmed that the company will be announcing the Galaxy Note 8.0 at Mobile World Congress next month, but you don’t need to wait until then to see what it’ll look like. Thanks to these pictures of the device out in the wild, we can see that the iPad mini competitor looks a lot like a giant Galaxy S III, with a traditional button setup that’s unlike other Galaxy tablets.

Apple has just announced the numbers for what has proven to be another record quarter, yet compared to the numbers Cupertino was showing a year ago, Wall Street is worried that Apple’s growth may have finally stalled. Are they nuts?

To help you make sense of Cupertino’s incredible growth, here’s a breakdown in easy-to-read chart form of everything from the growth of Apple’s revenues, profit and cash hoards, to the rise and fall of Cupertino’s various product empires.

We even have a comparison of how Apple did this quarter compared to how Wall Street prediced Apple would do. Usually, Apple does better than analyst predictions, but this time, they did worse. What does it mean?

Apple has just announced it’s best quarter EVER, but the stock is taking a pounding on Wall Street.

Apple announced earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2013: $54.5 billion and a net profit of $13.1 billion. But the stock is down more than 4% in after-hours trading because Wall Street is worried that Apple’s phenomenal growth is slowing. Don’t you love how a record-breaking quarter is still considered an “ouch?”

Apple was expected to report decent numbers despite the public’s perception that Apple’s streak of runaway sales of iPhones and iPads is plateauing. AAPL has been falling due to a number of factors, including analysts’ low predictions for the next March 2013 quarter. Apple is printing money, but not fast enough for Wall Street.

There have also been reports that Apple has cut back supply orders for the iPhone due to weakening demand, but iPhone sales are still up from 30 million last quarter.

Here are some of the key points from Apple’s Q1:

There’s nothing worse for your productivity – or your sanity – than trying to find that elusive document you need right at that moment. This Cult of Mac Deals offer will set you up so that you never come across this again – thanks to iDocument. And you’ll get this document organization tool for just $25…but only for a limited time!

Pebble was at CES earlier this month to announce that its much-anticipated smartwatch had entered mass production and was ready to begin shipping today, January 23. The company has now begun notifying some early backers that their order is on its way, but the vast majority will have to wait a little while longer. The device has been hit by supply issues that have somewhat scuppered its rollout, and the first batch is said to include just 500 units.

Meanwhile, the Pebble app for iOS is delayed, too.

In just the last fifteen years, a lot has changed for Apple. The company has transformed itself from a dying corporation teetering on the brink of bankruptcy into the most powerful technology company in the world, a giant that has revolutionized pretty much every aspect of technology.

Given the extraordinary changes that have happened to Apple in the last fifteen years, you’d think that the Apple.com homepage would have gone through a lot of changes too. But it hasn’t. Why not?

Going back through fifteen years of Apple.com homepages, it is clear that for Apple, their website is just another product, just like an iPhone or iPod. When Apple wants to make a new product, they first find the ideal form they think that object should be, and then endlessly iterate upon it over successive generations to bring the function of that form into sharper relief.

Apple’s website is no different. Here’s how Apple has refined it over the years.

Samsung has surpassed Apple as the world’s biggest buyer of semiconductors, according to Gartner. The Korean company’s hugely popular smartphones, such as the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II, led to a 29% surge in chip purchases in 2012, taking its semiconductor spending past that of any other company.