Alex Heath - page 49

Apple CEO Tim Cook is scheduled to appear before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee tomorrow as part of a probe into tax evasion strategies among American corporations. Apple released its official testimony for the hearing earlier today, noting that is is one of the biggest taxpayers in the country.

Among the witnesses tomorrow will be Apple executives, Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, and members of the Treasury Department. “The subcommittee will spotlight Apple’s extensive tax-avoidance strategies,” according to Levin.

How loyal are you to Apple? New research shows that Apple has the most loyal and devoted customer base in the computer business.

Forrester recently conducted a survey to determine how loyal the average computer owner is to a given company. While 85% of worldwide customers don’t claim loyalty to a certain brand (defined in the above chart as “Free Radicals”), the remaining 15% have a strong allegiance to Apple.

Since it was revealed that FaceTime over Cellular was coming to iOS 6 last summer, AT&T has been gradually rolling out the feature to different segments of its subscriber base.

At first, you had to be on a “Mobile Share” plan, and then it was opened up to LTE iOS devices on a traditional tiered plan. Back in January, AT&T gave everyone access except subscribers with grandfathered unlimited plans.

Now FaceTime over Cellular on AT&T will be available to all iOS device owners, including those with unlimited data, by next month.

Alongside Yahoo’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr today, the social network also released a big update to its iOS app.

Every year Apple holds its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California. It’s the only time out of the year that third-party App Store developers can meet with Apple engineers face-to-face. For the indie dev making apps out of his home office, WWDC is Mecca. Besides the knowledge that can be gained, the conference holds tremendous networking value for many who make their livings from selling apps on the iPhone and Mac.

WWDC 2013 sold out in under two minutes this year, and about 5,000 developers will be descending upon the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the week-long conference in June. Some new information shows how WWDC attracts quite the international audience.

Have you used the hot new app “Bang With Friends?” No, don’t answer that. Keep your dignity in tact. You can guess what it does.

Apple has suddenly pulled Bang With Friends from the App Store after it went live last week. The app doesn’t contain any explicit content, but it’s obviously not meant for your kid to check out while searching for the latest Angry Birds game.

No word yet on why BWF has been pulled, but the service’s website says that it’s “working with Apple to get back into the App Store shortly.”

Source: Valleywag

Via: CNET

Limelight is a new iPhone app for collecting movies and sharing them with friends. Released earlier this week by indie dev studio 9:42 AM, Limelight is pitched as a “new way to browse and organize your movie library.”

Inspired by Delicious Library on the Mac, Limelight borrows from similar digital bookshelf apps and adds a unique social element.

We’ve shown you plenty of iTV/Apple TV concepts in the past. There are a lot of ideas to improve the TV experience out there, and Apple is working on a solution (if you put some level of faith in the rumor mill, that is).

How would you interact with an Apple TV that replaced your cable box? The above concept video suggests an interface that is controlled entirely with an iOS device. Gestures would be used to swipe through channels and navigate menus. You could use Siri to control the experience and ask questions, which is something that Apple has apparently been experimenting with for years.

These kinds of concepts tend to serve the purpose of getting people thinking, not laying out some detailed model that Apple absolutely needs to follow. There are parts of this video that are well executed, and parts that aren’t. The biggest thing that stands out is the total reliance on software. There’s nothing about the above concept that suggests Apple needing to build a physical television.

Via: iDownloadBlog

When Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, he left behind a wife and four children. His widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, has stayed hidden from the public sphere for years, but now she is starting to receive more recognition as an influential philanthropist.

She is passionate about a host of social issues, including education and immigration policy. As the world’s ninth richest woman, her platform to effect society has only grown larger in the wake of Jobs’s death.

eBay has released a pretty big update for its iPhone and iPad app. If you’ve used eBay on iOS before, you know that it’s not the greatest experience in the world. Today’s update hopefully makes it better.

Besides a visual redesign, eBay has added several nice features, including multiple item checkout, quicker registration, bug fixes, and more.

For years there have been rumors saying that Intel will make mobile processors for the iPhone, and we’ve explained why that won’t happen multiple times. It’s just too late for Intel in a world that is dominated by ARM.

The CEO of Intel stepped down today, and he has revealed a juicy factoid: Apple approached Intel to provide processors for the original iPhone some six years ago, and Intel said no.

A new piece of Mac malware has been discovered. The virus installs itself as “macs.app” and silently takes screenshots to then upload to shady servers. It doesn’t appear to be very widespread at the moment.

The malware was uncovered on an African activist’s Mac at the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual event dedicated to “exploring how best to challenge authoritarianism and promote free and open societies.”

Since the beginning of February, Mophie has gone from having zero iPhone 5 battery cases to having three. Today the popular case maker announced yet another battery case tailored for the iPhone 5, the Juice Pack Plus. The case costs $120, and it contains more juice than its predecessors.

Apple has fallen under plenty of scrutiny for storing a majority of its $100+ billion cash horde overseas to avoid paying U.S. corporate taxes, the highest tax rate in the world. Now Apple CEO Tim Cook has been summoned to speak at a Senate hearing next week as part of an investigation into the offshore tax practices of U.S businesses.

Last week we told you that Verizon would be selling the iPhone 5 for 50% off later this month. The promotion has now begun, and the iPhone 5 is being offered for $99 with a carrier contract instead of the normal $199 retail price.

But there’s a catch that severely limits eligibility.

People love to sue Apple whenever they can, and now a Florida woman is seeking $5+ million in damages because her iPhone 4’s power button doesn’t work. The class action lawsuit is intended to fight for the iPhone 4 users who have reported defective on/off buttons over the past several years.

The charity auction to score a coffee date in Cupertino with Apple CEO Tim Cook has closed, and the winning bid ended up being $610,00. Yes, that’s more than a half million dollars for an hour of Cook’s time. The estimated price was originally $50,000.

After 86 bids that quickly sent the auction into the stratosphere, an anonymous bidder known only as “a********s” swooped in today and won with the closing bid.

If there’s one part of iOS that Apple needs to be paying more attention to, it’s the lockscreen. Case in point: jailbreak developers and concept designers are coming up with some really innovate ideas for making use of the first screen we all see when we check our iPhones.

Axis, a new jailbreak tweak that began as a simple concept some months ago, is another great example of doing more with the lockscreen. Apps can be assigned to the bottom of the screen and quickly opened with a swipe gesture.

When you die as a billionaire who created one of the most influential companies in modern history, people automatically assume that you were pretty smart. And smarts mean good grades in school, right? That’s what your teachers want you to believe.

Mr. Stephen Paul Jobs was a genius, but not at getting As on his report card.<!–more–>

It’s common knowledge that Jobs was a college dropout. He left Reed College after only six months and ended up getting a job as a low-level technician at Atari. He would then go on to create the Mac with Steve Wozniak, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Atlantic did some digging through Jobs’s recently released FBI file and found a great nugget of history: his high school GPA. During his years at Homestead High School (1968-1972), Jobs averaged a 2.65 GPA, meaning he got mostly Cs and Bs. So he wasn’t a bad student, but definitely not the scholar you would expect from a future industry titan.

Source: The Atlantic

Image: AP

iOS 7 concepts are a dime a dozen these days. Everyone is coming up with short video walkthroughs of what they think the next version of Apple’s mobile operating system will look like.

Rumors say that Apple is making iOS 7 “flatter” and less skeuomorphic (no pool table felt in Game Center, for example). That has led a lot of concept creators to what I think are, frankly, some overdone conclusions. Yesterday on Twitter I made the comment that, “My gut somehow tells me that all of these iOS 7 concepts are horribly wrong.” I haven’t seen a single iOS 7 concept that actually looks believable, well… until now.

Apple’s plans for an ‘iRadio’ streaming service are still being stalled by reluctant music labels, according to a report today from the Financial Times. Last month it was reported that Universal was about to partner with Apple, and the deal has allegedly been sealed between the two companies since then. Now Sony is demanding more money before it signs on.

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.

Apple is counting down to 50 billion app downloads in the App Store, and the ticker is currently front and center on the company’s website. Some taglines rotate under the countdown, like “With 50 billion bricks, you could build 12 Great Walls of China.” Each tagline is associated with an iPad app Apple is highlighting.

The countdown is identical to when the iTunes Store hit 25 billion song downloads back in February. This time around, the lucky person to download the 50 billionth app will receive a $10,000 iTunes Store gift card from Apple. The next 50 app downloaders will each receive $500 gift cards.

What are you waiting for? Get downloading!

Source: Apple

Before the 100+-million-user-giant that is Instagram, Hipstamtic was all the rage. No really, like totally. It was one of the first iPhone apps that helped popularize the retro filter look before Instagram stole the show.

Hipstamtic still exists believe it or not, and later this week it will be re-branded as “Oggl,” a paid, subscription-based photo sharing network for the iPhone.

Over at The New York Times, Bits columnist Nick Bilton has a gripe to pick with Apple. He doesn’t like the fact that push notifications keep pouring in during a voice call on the iPhone. “Even when the device is placed on mute, it vibrates when a notification comes in, rattling your skull for a never-ending second,” says Bilton.

I had never actually thought about this annoyance until I read Bilton’s piece. And coincidentally, it actually happened to me while I was on the phone earlier today. I remember quickly pulling my iPhone away from my face in shock at the vibration and loud noise in my ear.

This seems like something that should be fixed. What say you? Should Apple say hasta la vista to notifications during phone calls in iOS 7? Let us know in the comments below!