Apple TV - page 126

One of the absolute worst aspects of my television-watching endeavors has been the confusing use of multiple remotes. I’ve tried universal remotes but there’s always some function I need from DVD remote or DVR that is missing on the universal remote. Stepping up to the plate, the Griffin Beacon ($80) erases the need for five different remotes by providing users with one of the best universal remotes on the market, and interfaces it though iOS.

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Apple intends to replace the whole cable TV industry with Internet-delivered subscription television. But the best predictor is the fact that replacing broken content consumption is just what Apple does.

Apple will kill cable TV. Here’s how.

Go here to read the story.

For the past several hours, the Apple Store has been down, but unlike when we usually say that, Apple’s seemingly not doing just maintenance… instead, store.apple.com seems to have totally crashed.

Making things stranger, the Apple Online Store fell over on a Wednesday, as opposed to the traditional Tuesday maintenance period. Some users have reported in the last hour the usual ‘We’re Updating The Store” message… so could a new product be imminent?

Following this morning’s story that reveals Apple’s plans to launch a movie streaming service called iTunes Replay, one analyst believes that Apple has something more spectacular up its sleeve — a service that will take on Netflix.

You’ll soon be able to use a Bluetooth keyboard with the Apple TV, and there’s a good chance that devices like the iPad and iPhone will also serve as remotes for the set-top box in the near future.

Bluetooth support has been uncovered in the latest Apple TV model, and iOS 5 will also have this Bluetooth support when it’s released this Fall. Apple is clearly positioning the Apple TV as an all-in-one place for entertainment in the living room, and this Bluetooth discovery hints that the Apple TV will soon become a place for your favorite App Store apps.

Rather than focusing its efforts on its diminishing smartphone business, it seems RIM may be planning to launch a device that will rival the Apple TV, packed with PlayBook hardware.

Second-generation Apple TV users across the globe are reporting that they are not able to update their devices to the latest firmware. The complaints can be seen on a sizable thread on Apple’s Support Communities website.

You’ve no doubt seen this post suggesting that Apple could use its $70 billion in cash to buy the entire mobile phone industry. The idea is worth a chuckle, but buying the phone handset industry is neither desirable nor possible. Apple doesn’t want to sell Nokia phones, and regulators wouldn’t let the company buy, then close, all its competition.

No, instead Apple should use its billions to take over Hollywood.

Firemint wowed us all when it updated Real Racing 2 to support 1080p video output via the iPad’s AV Adapter. It comes as no surprise to us, then, that when iOS 5 goes live later this year, this popular racing sim will be the first title to offer dual-screen gaming over AirPlay on your HDTV.

Without a Retina Display, your iPad 2 can’t play true high-def video natively without downsizing… but come iOS 5, it’ll be able to output it like a champ. Cool, but what we’re really excited about is what this means for the next Apple TV and iPhone 4S: 1080p.

As much as I love my Apple TV, I’m still rather irked that Apple is yet to offer a Netflix substitute for its U.K. users. It now seems that Apple has snubbed those of us across the pond once again with its iTunes cloud services, which apparently won’t be making their way to the U.K. anytime soon.

While tablets might be a revolution for everyone else, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings thinks they’re a bore. Where it’s really at? The Apple TV.

Can a $99 second-gen Apple TV operate under heavy load as a web server? With the death of the venerable XServ line, one hosting company is going to try to find out.

A new iPhone application called Web Browser for Apple TV aims to… well… bring a web browser to your Apple TV.

Got a second-generation Apple TV? Get it while it’s hot: a new update has just hit Apple’s update servers.

Everyone who owns an Apple TV loves AirPlay – it’s a fantastic way of streaming your moves and music straight to your TV that was previously a luxury only iOS and iTunes users could enjoy. However, thanks to the doubleTwist software, users can now send content to the Apple TV from their Android smartphones.

The doubleTwist software for Mac & PC advertises itself as “the iTunes for Android” and allows you to wirelessly sync your iTunes playlists, photos and videos to your Android phone with the accompanying Android application. Its most recent update introduced the ability to stream all of this content to the Apple TV over AirPlay.

Apple is reportedly working closely with Verizon Wireless to introduce over-the-air software updates to the iPhone with its iOS 5 firmware. Starting this fall, iPhone users will be able to update their iOS software wirelessly, without having to plug the device into iTunes, or involve a computer altogether. It’s a luxury Google Android and Palm webOS users have been enjoying for some time, and Apple’s finally bringing it to iOS.

Multiple sources for 9to5Mac have revealed the feature will debut with iOS 5 and will support subsequent iOS releases. Apparently, Apple already has the technology, but doesn’t want to release it to the masses all at once. It will therefore be available only to Verizon customers initially.

Steve Jobs famously once quoted Picasso as saying: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” And by that metric, Apple is a lousy artist.

Apple is stolen from by just about everybody. Microsoft and other companies steal design and interface ideas from Apple’s OS X. Cell phone handset makers steal Apple’s iPhone design elements. The new tablet market is essentially Apple’s iPad plus the tablets that steal ideas from the iPad. Everybody has stolen Apple’s approach to app stores.

There’s a difference between stealing ideas and stealing intellectual property. Stealing winning general approaches to doing things like multi-touch gestures on a tablet device is good. Stealing the code to do that is bad.

Microsoft has long been accused of stealing Apple ideas in the many designs of Windows that have occurred over the years. Windows has tended to be more challenging to use than OS X over the years, and Windows products tend to be less elegant. Because of all this, Apple fans often dismiss Microsoft as a company without innovation.

In fact, the opposite is true. Microsoft’s research wing is an under-appreciated engine of invention, in my opinion. And while Microsoft fails to productize some of its best inventions, it’s also occasionally successful at implementing new ideas in real products.

I’ll go further. Apple and its customers would benefit enormously if Apple were to steal the following five key ideas from Microsoft.

FireCore LLC has announced the release of an update to the Mac OS X version of Seas0nPass. The new release allows you to perform an untethered jailbreak on Apple’s latest AppleTV running 4.1.1 (the equivalent of iOS 4.2.1). The Windows version of the untethered jailbreak isn’t currently available, but will be at a later date.

According to FireCore, the new version of Seas0nPass is based on the jailbreak created by the Chronic Dev Team and the latest Beta3 version of aTV Flash (black) is compatible with Seas0nPass, GreenPois0n and Pwnage Tool jailbreaks.

You can read more about this on FireCore’s blog and you can download Seas0nPass now for free.

Most tech companies go out of their way to publish product roadmaps, so their customers know what’s coming next. But Apple is not most tech companies. Ask anyone from Steve Jobs to the guy at your local Apple Store, and you’ll hear the same refrain, “we don’t comment on unannounced products.”

It’s this dearth of hard facts on what’s coming next from Cupertino that makes speculation so irresistible. And with the new year now upon us, it’s the perfect time to ponder what Apple may have in store for us in 2011.

Blogger Deon Devine, from Houston, Texas, has sent Cult of Mac some very interesting predictions.

You got another Apple gadget for Christmas, didn’t you? And you love it, don’t you?

So at what point do you officially declare yourself to be one of those Cupertino Kool-Aid-guzzling, Steve Jobs-worshiping, pathetically devoted Apple fans you used to loathe?

Ten years ago, there were two kinds of people: PC users (a.k.a. “regular people”) and Apple fanboys. At least that’s how it looked from the PC side.

Macs were pretty, but considered by us PC users to be overpriced, underpowered, insufficiently supported by either software or hardware, too hard to customize, optimize or repair and completely devoid of key application areas, such as games.

The world was black and white. You were either a PC or a Mac. Then things got complicated.

FireCore, makers of aTV Flash, a popular commercially available hack for the original Apple TV have announced a Mac OS X only public beta for the next generation Apple TV hack.

The new hack, aTV Flash (black), only works with Apple’s second generation Apple TV running iOS 4.0. That’s unfortunate since most of us have already updated to iOS 4.1, but an update to support that version of iOS is coming soon. This renders the beta completely useless for most of us, myself included, making the release of this public beta a bit awkward and ill-timed.

If you’re in the netbook, notebook, PC, hand-held gaming, newspaper or DVD business, Apple wants to eat your liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti — at least according to a huge number of observers who don’t know what the word “cannibalize” means.

For example, Microsoft’s general manager for Windows product management, Gavriella Schuster, said this month that the netbook market is “definitely getting cannibalized” by the iPad.

Wait, “cannibalized”? What does that mean, exactly? And why is everybody saying it?

Apple’s just seen fit to tighten up the Terms and Conditions applying to iTunes rentals… and in doing so have finally closed a loophole that allowed rented television shows to be transferred between the iPad and other iOS devices.

Jailbreak developer p0sixninja recently tweeted an image link that revealed a nicely jailbroken Apple TV. The jailbreak showed the injection of a new menu option which was like the ones used in hacks for the previous version of the Apple TV.

There is a lot more to do before this one will see prime time since the iOS based Apple TV generation two doesn’t even include an app launcher at this time.  It will be interesting to find out what Apple’s plans are for the new Apple TV. Perhaps a hint might leak out today during Apple’s special event.

This jailbreak isn’t publicly available yet so don’t get all excited just yet. Oh heck, go ahead be excited Apple TV fans. This looks like fun!