With a quick thumbing of Command+Tab, the built-in OS X Application Switcher is a great way to navigate apps for when your hands are just too busy to leave the keyboard.
One annoyance, though, is that no matter what, Finder is always listed in the Application Swticher, which you may not want to constantly have to be navigating against to go from, say, your e-mail and iTunes. Luckily, for advanced users, removing it from the Application Switcher for good is only a terminal command away.
At the Goldman Sachs keynote today, Tim Cook was asked a question about the Apple TV that was extremely revealing in regards to why Apple keeps calling it a “hobby device”… and why it might soon lead to the so-called Apple iTV.
Asked about the unprecedented growth of iPad in its first seven full quarters, Apple CEO explained at today’s Goldman Sachs keynote why he thinks the iPad has proven so popular, and been such a breakway success.
Speaking at today’s Goldman Sachs keynote, Apple CEO Tim Cook began by bluntly addressing charges of worker abuse in Apple’s supply chain: Apple will not rest until every worker is guaranteed a fair, safe working environment without discrimination and at a competitive salary. Any suppliers who don’t take care of their workers will be fired.
When we were at CES this year, Intel and other PC makers were absolutely insane about ultrabooks, the new ultra-slim, ultra-portable form factor that they thought was going to save them from Apple’s one-two punch of the iPad and MacBook Air.
We were skeptical ultrabooks could make a dent against the Air, and looks like we were right: JPMorgan analyst Mike Moskowitz has just sent out a new note to clients, downplaying the impact of ultrabooks on the MacBook Air’s success. Ultrabooks, he says, are a dud.
OS X Lion’s new Launchpad feature isn’t exactly known for its customizability. The whole point is to give Mac noobs more familiar with iOS than OS X a way to effortlessly interact with their Mac, with little drama or tweaking. One of the few things in Launchpad you can tweak, however, is the way your desktop background is displayed on it. By default, Launchpad defaults to blurring it, but if you want to deblur it (or even turn it into a nearly black-and-wite), it’s just a short keystroke combo away.
Have you ever wanted one of those custom, Pantone-colored MacBook, but don’t want to pay the guys over at Colorware an $800 premium to make your device look like Jonny Ive and Punky Brewster’s illicit love sprog?
Well, the good news is that you can actually do it yourself in your own kitchen. The bad news is that for most of us, the process is so complicated and so likely to end in user error that while you’ll still save over Colorware’s $800 premium, you’ll still have to spend a few hundred bucks replacing your machine.
No one would ever argue that the MacBook Air is a fatty. At just 0.68 inches at its thickest point, the MacBook Air is thinner all-around than most axe blades, which will surely come in handy in a zombie apocalypse to come.
But how thin is 0.68 inches, really? Here’s a test you can show your friends to wow them. Open up your MacBook Air, then hold it up to the sun. The MacBook Air is so thin you can actually see sunlight shining through the screen through the Apple logo in back.
Try it for yourself, it really works (and it’s quite eerie). Thanks to Redditor Flemming Madsen for the great image and tip!
Yup, it’s finally happened: buoyed by the imminent launch of the iPad 3, Apple (AAPL) stock has just hit a historic high of over $500.00 a share, and now is worth a $466.29 Billion, over $70 billion more than the world’s second most valuable company, Exxon Mobil.
That’s amazing, but there’s still plenty of room to grow, believe it or not. In fact, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes that Apple could go as high as $1000 per share, at which point, every man, woman and child on this Earth will be an Apple employee, grown to order in special chemical vats in Brazil and China, but designed, as ever, in Cupertino, California.
Steve Jobs was obsessed with making the Mac run silently, even going so far as to tell Mac hardware designers to make the internal fans kick-in at a much higher temperature than contemporary PCs. It seems strange, then, that in this zen quest for quietness, the first thing that happens when you turn a Mac on is here a loud bootup chime. If you’d like to get rid of that chime and boot-up as silently as a submarine running deep, it’s easy, thanks to this cute little app.
Ever since the redesigned MacBook Air first debuted back in late 2010, the rumor mill has strongly indicated that Apple would redesign its MacBook Pro line of laptops to suit, ditching their bulkier chassises, optical drives and slow, spinning hard drives for Air-like slimness and ubiquitous SSDs. But when is it actually going to happen?
It looks like it might finally happen in 2012, with a report now claiming that Apple “plans to exit 2012 having completed a top-to bottom revamp of its notebooks lineup that will see new MacBook Pros adopt the same design traits [as the] MacBook Air.”
The iOS version of Namco’s classic 3D swords-and-sorcery fighter Soul Calibur has been in the App Store for about a month now (and recently got an update guaranteeing 60FPS gameplay on all A5 devices), but if you want the true Apple Soul Calibur experience, you should check out the latest sequel for the consoles, Soul Calibur V. Only there can you create a character that looks exactly like Steve Jobs, then make him bludgeon sexy miniskirt babes, whip-tailed lizard men, and cyborg nights to death with a literal Apple. Awesome.
[via MacMagazine.br]
We’ve heard a lot about how the iPad 3 will finally get a 2048×1536 Retina Display, but it’s easy to forget exactly how many pixels that is. The scientific answer is “a gajillion.” Heck, when the Retina Display iPad 3 ships, it will actually pack more pixels than everything short of Apple’s 27-inch iMac!
Over at my old haunt Boing Boing, my favorite Elfquest-obsessed Pittsburghian Brit Rob Beschizza grabbed a great slice of 70s prime time music and used it as the background track for an exciting YouTube video smashing together every Apple product ever in just 30 seconds of Flash.
My favorite part, though, is that Rob didn’t stop there: he then also did it for NeXT (using The Neverending Story theme as the soundtrack). A considerably slower paced video, to be sure. You can see it after the jump.
Once again, Apple has found itself the most valuable company on Earth, attaining a market capitalization of about $456 billion today, beating ExxonMobil’s market cap of just $402 Billion. Yawn.
More interesting, however, is that Apple’s combined value is more than Google and Microsoft put together, who are worth $198.9 billion and $256.7 billion, respectively.
As we watch Apple race to be the world’s first trillion dollar company, I wonder what we’ll all be measuring its value against next. Silicon Valley? The United States? The Moon? The secret to immortality?
Who is this muttonchopped Steve Jobs and crime-fighting cyborg partner, The Amazing Mac Man? More importantly, where can I get one of those Apple-branded codpieces?!?
[via MIC Gadget]
Back in 1991, according to a recently released FBI file on Apple’s iconic founder, Steve Jobs was considered for a sensitive position in the Bush Administration.
The file is quite long, and we’re reading through it now. But one thing that the file immediately makes clear is that even the FBI knew about Steve Jobs’s patented reality distortion field! In fact, it’s directly referenced in their file on more than one occasion.
According to Japanese blog Macotakara, this is the iPad 3’s new Retina Displayl: a Sharp XQGA panel running at a resolution of 2048×1536. Yup. Looks about right. We believe it.
Most reports up until now have had the iPad 3’s speedier A6 processor pegged as a quad-core affair, just like some of the more advanced Honeycomb competition, but according to a new source, the iPad 3’s processor will still be a dual-core CPU. But why would Apple skimp when the competition’s got them beat?
Caught up in a maelstrom of controversy over revelations that Path has been uploading iOS users’ address books to their own servers, Path CEO David Morin has spoken out about what’s going to happen now.
It’s all good news. Not only is Path taking full responsibility, and apologizing whole-heartedly for the violation, they’ve also pushed live a new update to the Path app that makes uploading your address book opt-in. But will other developers follow Path’s lead?
Over at The Loop, Jim Dalrymple posted a picture of what Samsung’s new 5.3-inch smartphone, the Galaxy Note, looks like next to the iPhone 4S.
While we were over there, guffawing with the rest of you, we happened to note this comment from Joel Glovier, who claims:
Everybody knows this is trick photography, right? The hand on the right is a bit closer to the camera than the hand on the left, as evidenced by the larger shadow of the right hand, and it’s distance away from the hand.
We thought we could put this defense to rest, because at CES, we here at Cult of Mac did a side-by-side comparison shot of the Galaxy Note compared to the iPhone 4S, and — nope — this isn’t trick photography. It really is that big. In fact, we quipped it was an Apple Newton rip-off!
Or as Han Solo might say, “That’s no moon…” But it’s the size of one!
Social networking app Path hit the headlines yesterday after it turned out the company was taking users’ entire address books and uploading them to their servers.
It’s a big privacy violation, but Path’s hardly the only one doing this. In fact, computer engineering professor Mark Chang has just discovered that Hipster, the popular photo-filter postcards app, does the exact same thing as Path: sucks up your contacts and squirts them into their servers.
Ask a lot of people who don’t use iPhones like to dismiss Apple’s impact on the smartphone industry. Hey, we had PDA-like smartphones with touchscreens before the iPhone, so what’s the big deal?
Such logic is patently absurd, but as it often does, a picture says a thousand words about how a thousand shitty devices did things before the iPhone came around, and how the makers of these crappy phones do things now that the iPhone is the gold standard of smartphone design.
Think that’s pathetic? Check out how tablets changed after the iPad too. Unreal!
[image by Josh Heifferich, via AppAdvice]
My parents never let me play with them as a kid because they were afraid I’d get shot by a trigger-happy cop, which is perhaps why, to this day, I get a little giddy when I hear or read the words “LAZER TAG,” and feel myself ethereally tugged away — John Carter like — to a distant world where I am a member of the Lazer Team, policing the galaxy for perps who can be non-violently terminated by aiming my ray gun at the conveniently placed sensors strapped to their back, head and torso.
So when I saw that Hasbro has just announced the next update of their Lazer Tag guns — and that these sets actually use an iPhone or iPod touch as an augmented reality display and HUD — I immediately got excited, then disappointed as I remembered my parents wouldn’t let me have one. But wait! I’m an adult now, and as an adult, I can wave around as many plastic toy guns as I want! Hooray!
UPDATE: This article was written in 2012 and some of its predictions didn’t pan out. For a much more recent look at this subject, read 5 reasons Apple should dump Intel processors [Opinion].
Ever since Apple launched the new MacBook Air, analysts and Mac fans alike have gone wild speculating that Cupertino might dump Intel and use custom-made, ARM-based chips in their laptop line instead. Yesterday, more fuel was thrown on the fire when it was revealed that an Apple intern worked on porting OS X to ARM devices back in 2010. Even Intel has said it would be “remiss” of them to dismiss the possibility that ARM might steal their Apple business. On the surface of things, it looks like ARM might make its way to our MacBooks soon.
Is ARM really a threat to Intel? Yes, absolutely, and especially as we transition into Apple’s Post-PC world. But there is next to no chance Apple will replace Intel chips for ARM-based ones any time in the next five years. In fact, there’s a good chance the exact opposite could be true, and Intel chips will be powering our iPhones and iPads by then. Here’s why.