There are like 50 billion games on the App Store and a lot of them have Game Center integration so you can battle your friends at Angry Birds, or Temple Run or Tic-Tac-Toe or whatever. But if you want to see how much your friends really love you, try playing them in a emoji game of Connect Four. It’s painful and kind of tedious and you have to remember to play with virtual-gravity, but it’s also totally awesome, in a dumb way.
If your iPhone 5 speakers aren’t loud enough when you’re trying to have an impromptu Lady Gaga dance party, you might wanna look into getting a portable speaker that can keep your beats fast and your base down low.
The iAudio 2 portable bluetooth speaker is perfect for Apple Fanboys. It even looks like something Apple would make and comes with a glowing Apple logo on the front, which really means that Apple’s going to slam iAudio with a cease and desist letter pretty soon, so grab it while you still can.
Yes, we know, Apple Maps sucks. You hate it. It’s the biggest screw up the company’s seen since MobileMe. Maybe even worse. But it’s totally fixable, and Apple might not need to do anything more than just open up their wallet and buy one of the most intriguing tech companies right now that is struggling big time – Nokia.
Right now there are three major players in the mobile maps business: Google, Apple, and Nokia. Everyone applauds Google Maps for having the best data and interface, but Nokia has been doing maps for a long time now, and they have access to even more data than Google. They’re also in a financial deathspiral which makes them the perfect company for Apple to acquire to fix their mapping problem.
I want to be able to ditch my wallet so bad, mostly because I have a tendency to lose it or forget it at home. But I never ever leave home without my iPhone, and yeah, Passbook is cool but businesses aren’t really using it yet and I’m impatient. I just want the future to be here right now.
I’ve been really intrigued by Wired’s Christina Bonnington as she’s trying to live a walletless life, and it seems like one of the biggest hurdle right now is knowing where you can ditch your wallet and pay for goods with a service like Square, and where you can’t. Right now it seems like Square is trying harder than anyone to help you ditch your wallet, and they just made things a little easier by creating Square Directory so you can see all the places you can pay for goods with Square Wallet.
It looks like Apple is really interested in doing something involving biosecurity in the future. A few months ago Apple acquired fingerprint sensor maker AuthenTec, and now they just signed a deal with an Australian company that specializes in fingerprint and biometric security that is processed via NFC.
Since the death of Steve Jobs, many have wondered whether Apple’s core senior management team would stick around to continue Apple’s success. Most of Apple’s senior VPs are incredibly wealthy and extremely tired after launching Apple’s hugely successful products over the past decade.
For the most part, Tim Cook has been able to keep everyone on board. Retail VP Ron Johnson decided to leave before Steve’s death, but none of the important VPs have tried to call it quits other than Bob Mansfield who announced his retirement earlier this year. According to insiders, once Mansfield announced his retirements members of his engineering team complained about his replacement, and Tim Cook set out to get Mansfield back by offering an exorbitant salary.
Apple Maps has taken a lot of heat over the last few weeks for its abysmal performance. The data on Apple Maps is pretty terrible, but there’s no denying it’s one of the prettiest maps apps on available. Case in point, take a look at the detail on Apple’s highway icons on their maps verses that found on Google.
Apple’s icons contain details for each particular state, while Google’s is just a bland icon that’s used for every state highway. Now if Apple Maps could just get their data to be as good as Google Maps they might become everyone’s favorite maps app.
Source: Reddit
There really aren’t that many home automation products that blow my mind, but Lockitron has got me drooling. I want to live in the future. A place where my cellphone is the only thing I need to carry with me. I hate carrying keys, and Lockitron just might help me ditch them completely with its simple keyless entry beauty that’s something out of Star Wars or Minority Report or any other sci-fi movie.
Before the touchscreen iPhone was revealed at MacWorld in 2007, Apple had a team of engineers working on a click-wheel phone that was kind of like a mashup of an iPod and a phone. It was never released, but the work that went into it is pretty fascinating.
In an interview with TechCrunch, former Apple engineer and Nest co-founder Matt Rogers talks about what it was like to work on the click-wheel iPhone when no one else at the company even knew Apple was developing a phone.
Steve Jobs’s life was full of lessons on how to be successful, as well as the pitfalls to avoid when pursuing your dream. Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs has had a huge impact on people across the globe, so THNKR sat down with some of the journalists, authors, and tech entrepreneurs to get their thoughts on Steve Jobs one year after his passing.
Steve Jobs: Life & Legacy Reexamined features interviews with Walter Isaacson, Steven Johnson, Guy Winch, Steve Kroft, and many more, including our very own Leander Kahney. You can watch the episode above, or go to BOOKD’s YouTube page to find out more about Steve Jobs’s legacy.
The rumor mill is churning out iPad Mini like a savage beast now. Yesterday we got word on the date of the iPad Mini announcement along with some new mockup pictures, but today we’re finally getting to see some leaked iPad Mini parts that we haven’t seen before.
UkrainianiPhone has some leaked photos of the iPad Mini that show what the black casing will look like. Most mock ups have shown the iPad Mini to have the same grey aluminum back casing as the new iPad, but these new images make the iPad Mini look a lot more like the Nexus 7 because the back panel uses the same iPhone 5 anodized aluminum material.
Take a look:
Steve Jobs was always a deeply private individual. Even though he gave Walter Isaacson access to his life for the official Steve Jobs biography there are a lot of stories about Steve that have never been told. With the anniversary of Steve’s death coming this Friday, October 5th, a collection of untold Steve Jobs stories coming from friends and colleagues has been rounded up by Forbes.
One of the funnier stories in the collection comes from Randy Adams, former Apple and NeXT employee. Adams and Jobs both bought Porsche 911s during the early days of NeXT and parked next to each other at the front of the office to avoid car-door dings. Then one day Steve came rushing in and told Adams he needed to hide his Porsche.
iOS 6 is spreading like wildfire across Apple’s iDevices. Within two days of its release a quarter of all iOS devices had adopted Apple’s newest mobile operating system, and its use continues to grow. Chitika Insights has released their new data on iOS 6 adoption rates and they’ve found that 60% of iPhone users have already installed iOS 6, but only 39% of iPod touch users are on the new iOS.
Imagine powering through your work day, high off the anticipation of a new iPhone 5 waiting for you at home. You keep checking the UPS package tracking to make sure they drop it off and leave it on your back porch because you’re not there to bring it inside.
Pulling up to your house, you can feel your heartbeat pulsing with excitement in your fingertips, so you run to the backyard to retrieve the new love of your life. And there it is. Shredded to pieces by your cute doggy who really, really needed a chew toy. Does AppleCare+ cover dog attacks?
Source: Reddit
We learned this morning that the iPad Mini might be announced on October 17th after invites get sent to the press on October 10th. Everyone has a fairly good idea of what the iPad Mini will look like, but it can never hurt to see a few physical mock-ups for the sake of comparisson.
The latest mock-up photos to hit the Internet show what the iPad Mini will look like in comparison to the new Kindle Fire HD, Nexus 7, and the new iPad. The iPad’s design is noticeably more blocky as it’s missing the tapered edges of the iPad. Check out the photos after the jump.
Last week a number of people noticed that the lens flare on their iPhone 5 is really purple. When you have an off-screen light source the iPhone 5’s lens turns the light into a purplish hue, rather than the bright white color the light would be when it’s on-screen. All lenses have lens flare, and sometimes it’s purple, but the iPhone 5’s seemed to be more pronounced that others.
Apple support has officially responded to the purple lens flare issue and said that it’s totally normal, you’re just holding your iPhone wrong.
Tons of Apple accessory manufacturers make cute little palm rest covers for MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs so the metal of your cherished MacBook doesn’t get all scratched and nasty and damaged. They make your MacBook standout, but Apple thinks you need to stop freaking using them because you’re going to break your display if you keep it up.
In a note published on Apple’s support blog, Apple warned users that using palm rest covers might totally interfere with all of Apple’s fancy engineering that went into making the MacBook Pro with Retina display super thin. The added thickness might mess up your display and crack your screen when you shut your MacBook, leaving you super sad.
Here’s what Apple said about the palm rests –
With iOS 6, Siri gained some new super powers – like the ability to check on sports scores, make restaurant reservations, even find out info on movies. With those new powers she also has some opinions about movies too.
For instance, ask Siri, “What’s Blade Runner about?” and she’ll shoot back by saying “It’s about intelligent assistants wanting to live beyond their termination dates. That doesn’t sound like too much to ask.” She does it for other robot movies too.
Apple’s developer guidelines have always had weird caveats that Apple uses to protect the quality fo their own products first. Their newest strategy is to protect the App Store by putting in place a new guideline that might kill any app that promotes other apps. App recommendation apps, like FreeAppADay, and Daily App Dream might soon find themselves banned from the App Store if Apple begins to enforce the new guideline.
Apple is bound to make an iPad Mini someday soon, and for the last few months the rumors have been saying they’ll be announcing it in October. According to Fortune, Apple is set to mail out iPad Mini invitations on October 10th, which might suggest the actual keynote will be held on October 17th.
We know pretty much nothing about these fancy slippers, other than the fact that they’d be the perfect gift for all your Apple Fanboy friends this Christmas. They’re made by Footsie 101 in London, and it looks like they come in more color varieties than the iPod nano. No word on pricing, but we can’t imagine these will be on sale much longer once Apple finds out.
Source: Instagram
You never meant for this to happen. In your rush to dive into the ocean, you forgot to take your iPhone out of your pocket, and didn’t realize it till you came out of the water. It’s a disaster. You leave your drowned iPhone 4S in a bag of rice for three days, praying to God, Allah, Jehovah, Moses, Shiva, and Oprah Winfrey that some magical power will make it work again. It doesn’t. You blow-dry it. Nada. Every conceivable way to resurrect your iPhone is met with failure and a blank screen.
Because you know the iPhone 5 is coming out in three months you decide not to waste your money and upgrade eligibility. Once you get home you rummage through your desk and find the Galaxy Nexus Samsung sent you three months ago. You sit in your chair staring at it almost hesitant to turn it on. You run your hands along the contours of its plastic grey body, pop in your new SIM card, take a deep breath, and then you dive in. This is it – your new digital home and the beginning of a three month exile into Android.
Apple doesn’t have a rich history of apologizing for their errors, big or small. When AntennaGate shook the web, Apple held a conference but they never said they were sorry. They just told us that antennas suck sometimes but they’ll give us a free bumper to be quiet. In fact, I can’t remember many times at all where Apple came out and publicly admitted a mistake.
Tim Cook’s apology this morning was a great gesture. It was almost a first for the company. Admitting that Apple’s not perfect and made a mistake isn’t easy, but did Tim Cook need to apologize to satisfy Apple customers? Could they have done something else to resolve the situation? We’d love to hear your ideas, so come over to the forums and talk to us about it.
Click here to go to the Cult of Mac Forums and talk about Tim Cook’s apology
For the last month rumors have floated around the web that Apple is been planning to build it’s own Pandora-like music-streaming service. It makes perfect sense to us, but Apple didn’t announce it at the iPhone 5 keynote which had many people wondering if it’s going to actually happen.
A report from the New York Post this morning is claiming that the reason Apple hasn’t launched their music-streaming service is because negotiations with Sony/ATV hit a last minute snag, forcing Apple to scrap the iTunes Streamer announcement from the iPhone 5 keynote.
Earlier this morning Tim Cook published an apology letter to all Apple fans for how horrible Apple Maps have been. Not only did he apologize, but he actually told users that they should try some alternatives while Apple fixes their mapping fiasco.
It’s great that Apple is taking responsibility for their shoddy work, but now that they’ve kicked Google Maps out of iOS 6, what are the best alternative? We took a quick look at the alternative map apps that Tim suggested, to find out which one you should use if you plan to ditch Apple Maps for a while. Here’s what we found out.