“Father of the iPod” Tony Fadell’s company Nest has released version 2.0 of its Apple-like thermostat. And like any good Apple update, the Nest 2.0 is thinner, better and good-looking-er.
If you thought you had seen your last Apple Maps parody, think again. Mad Magazine, a purveyor of satire, has joined in on the fun with its latest parody of The New Yorker featuring Apple Maps. It’s starting to look like Mapgate will remain a staple of satire much longer than the once hilarious Antennagate saga.
We had a sneaking suspicion Samsung would add the iPhone 5 to its patent infringement complaint against Apple shortly after the device made its debut. And the Korean electronics giant has now done exactly that, asking Judge Paul Grewal for permission to include the device in its latest countersuit against Apple.
Apple announced their fourth quarter financial call for Q4 2012, scheduling it on October 25th, from 2 pm Pacific time (5 pm Eastern). The results should include the successful launch of the iPhone 5, which sold over 5 million units in the first three days it was on sale in the US. In addition, the iPhone 5 was launched in 22 other countries, with 100 more to come in the months ahead.
Apple has a cash hoard that is worth more than one hundred and ten billion dollars, but that money doesn’t just sit in a bank collecting interest. Apple invests it, using a Nevada-based asset management corporation called Braeburn Capital. And it might just be the world’s largest hedge fund.
I'm sorry, Dave, but I can't do that. Photo: Cult of Mac
Siri has been updated along with the rest of the iOS in the new iteration from Apple. The personal voice assistant can take dictation, help you plan your wardrobe around the weather, keep track of your buddies, inform you on all sorts of sports information, and help you choose the best movie to go see, all using basic spoken English. You can discover more siri tricks to help you get the most out of your device in this article.
Of course, it helps to know what kinds of questions and commands you can actually say to produce the desired results. Here’s five things you can do with Siri the right way, so you can spend less time repeating yourself and more time going to those movies and meeting up with those friends.
While we all know that most consumer electronics are manufactured in places like China, Apple has become the public face of the current practice. While the company continues to rake in huge profits from their iPhone and iPad devices, there has been much finger-pointing in Apple’s direction when unfair and degrading labor practices in manufacturing plants in China, like Foxconn, are brought to the forefront in Western media.
Apple seems pretty aware that it’s fighting this public relations battle on their own. The company’s Labor and Human Rights webpage has just been updated to include data on how many hours per week the 800,000 production workers in their supply chain have to work.
I have to admit, I was intrigued by Passbook when I first heard of it. An app that keeps my airline and movie tickets together with my coupons and customer loyalty cards seems like a good idea. For now, however, Passbook in iOS 6 seems like a placeholder to me, an app with no real purpose in and of itself, a place to link to other apps.
Apple quietly added a little explanation in the form of a paragraph in the iTunes Store page for Passbook apps which shows, at least, that they’re planning on more and that they understand that we all might feel a bit nonplused about one of the bigger features of the new iOS.
I’m not talking about Tim Cook’s apology for iOS 6 Maps. While it’s rare, Apple has apologized before, especially recently: see John Browett’s admission that the company had “messed up” when cutting shifts among Retail Employees, and Apple’s public about-face when pulling out of the EPEAT rating system. One of the things that makes Apple great is they’re not afraid to be as harsh on themselves as they are on the competition when they’ve fucked up.
No, what Apple did today is far more uncharacteristic than an apology. They suggested that you use a third-party app instead of their own.
Not only has Apple apologized for the embarassing state of iOS 6 Maps today, and not only has Tim Cook personally advised users to try competing app products like Bing, Mapquest and Google Maps as they get iOS 6 Maps’ shit together, but Apple is now promoting Maps alternatives at the very top of the iOS App Store listings. This is an unprecedented admission of fault by Apple. It’s mea culpas all the way down.
If there were ever a time for Google to play “good guy” it would be now. Apple has simply been piling up the negative criticism with everything from its ridiculous legal attacks to its latest Mapsgate debacle. While Google has been going down the wrong path by setting itself up to bite back (see Motorola Mobility), I believe now to be the perfect time to turn the other cheek. Specifically with their Maps service.
In addition to posting an extraordinarily classy apology for the iOS 6 Maps fiasco written by CEO Tim Cook, Apple has also gone to the length of pushing online a page explaining how to add a website icon to your home screen in four easy steps, and while the website they use for the example is Apple.com, they clearly mean for you to do this on maps.google.com.
Widgets aren’t new to OS X Mountain Lion, but the way they are presented surely is. If you’re new to the OS X Dashboard, you’re in luck, because adding Widgets is a lot easier than it used to be, and there are a whole lot more of them to choose from.
Notice the screenshot above? That’s what the new Add More Widgets screen looks like. Here’s how to add to the list, until you have more than you can even handle on your Mac, and you need to use that handy-dandy Search field at the top just to find the one you want.
UK-based Future publishing announced earnings over the past year, claiming over $8 million in digital magazine sales, with over 12 million app downloads and five million subscribers. It offers its array of tech and sports themed magazines via Apple’s Newsstand and “container apps,” like Zinio.
The iPhone 5 has a slightly bigger battery than the iPhone 4S, but it’s still not enough to break the bank to charge over the gadget’s lifetime: according to energy efficiency experts Opower, the iPhone 5 should only cost about forty-one cents per year to charge.
In the aggregate, though, that’s a lot of power: enough to power Cedar Rapids, Michigan Iowa.
Schmidt insists Apple and Google are very good friends.
Google chairman Eric Schmidt is currently on a tour of Asia, where he announced the company’s $199 Nexus 7 tablet in Tokyo on Monday. During his announcement, Schmidt found some time to talk about Apple and its patent wars against other companies. Schmidt revealed that while Apple is a “very good partner,” he doesn’t agree with patent wars, and feels they “prevent choice” and innovation.
It can be easy to forget in the crush of the launch of an entirely new product like the iPhone 5, but Apple’s quality control process is one of the most stringent in the world. While we gnash our teeth at pre-scratched units, yellow screens and purplish lens flares, it’s worth keeping everything in perspective: minor aberrations in a pursuit of perfection wrought upon such a collossal scale of mass-production that the mind literally reels to think of it.
Apple doesn’t often lift the curtain, so we haven’t really known what quality control processes it actually uses to get iPhones to our door in as perfect condition as possible. As it turns out, though, the process Apple uses is incredibly thorough and elegant, just what you’d expect.
Amazon has gone to a federal judge to have Apple’s claim of false advertising in a lawsuit against the Seattle-based online retailer. Amazon claims that the trademark lawsuit brought by Apple in March of last year around the term, “app store” is reasonable enough, given the current climate of selling apps on mobile devices.
The iPhone 5 runs on an Apple-designed A6 chip, which has been widely reported as running at 1.0GHz. The software that performed that analysis, Geekbench, was recently updated to an iOS 6-enabled version, and the iPhone 5 was tested again. Turns out that the A6 CPU dual-cores are actually running at 1.3GHz, which is a bit faster than previously thought.
Last quarter, courts around the world had filed judgements that showed Android infringing 11 mostly Apple patents, with a couple of Microsoft patents thrown in for good measure. As of today, according to Florian Meuller of FOSS Patents, there are 17 patent judgements against the Android operating system, four in favor of Microsoft, and a staggering 13 favoring Apple.
These judicial decisions only include final judgements, and do not include those where a judgement was made, but the injunction lifted by another court or judge. They include both courts and the International Trade Commission, a body with quasi-judicial authority in world trade agreements.
Given the recent tragedies that have gripped Apple’s manufacturing arm with the Foxconn riots that have left at least ten individuals dead the week after the iPhone 5 launch, this parody commercial for an “18% rustier, 20% thinner” iShiv designed to “revolutuonize factory riots” by Conan O’Brien is undeniably in bad taste. Whether it’s offensively bad taste or hilariously bad taste is ultimately a matter of opinion.
Personally, I hate to admit it, but I laughed, then felt really terrible about having laughed. What’s happening at Foxconn is no joke, but at the same time, it’s the job of a comedian to push the standards of taste and to riff upon tragedy for a laugh, thus putting that tragedy into deeper relief. What do you think?
A new report suggests that Apple is making deals in the carbon fiber business, possibly ahead of next year’s iPad launch.
Japanese site Macotakara can be a hit or miss source. They were one of the first sites to leak images of what would prove to be the iPhone 5’s new display, but they habe also said that the new iPod nanos would have WiFi and that Apple’s making a Galaxy Note like phablet. So their rumors need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Now Macotakara is reporting that an anonymous source is telling them that Apple is buying huge amounts of carbon fiber. This makes sense, as Apple has shown a lot of interest in carbon fiber in the past, patenting an iPad design made out of the stuff and making key hires with the expertise necessary to mass produce carbon fiber gadgets.
By using carbon fiber for future devices, Apple could create products that weigh significantly less than the aluminum and stainless steel devices they produce today, but be just as sturdy. So it’s obvious Apple’s got a lot to gain by making this switch. The question is when it will happen? In time for next year’s iPad debut, or is carbon fiber still far off in the future?
Apparently, Apple made the decision to dump Google maps for iOS 6 was made more than a year before the contract with Google for their map system expired, says a new post at The Verge that cites “independent sources familiar with the matter.” Further, the choice may have caused Google to start development on it’s own iOS Google Maps app before it was ready to. These same sources say the potential app won’t be ready for several months.
We all knew this was coming. It was only a matter of time before Hitler found out about Apple’s new iOS 6 Maps. As you may have already guessed, der Führer isn’t all that happy with the new service and is quite irate over the fact that his house is listed as a fountain in Austria.
Watch the hilarity unfold as Hitler is informed that a Google Maps app has yet to be approved and his army is officially all out of 30-pin connectors.