Increasingly thwarted by customs, Chinese and Hong Kong iPad smugglers are taking to the comic books to learn some new tricks for getting their wares to customers: smugglers are now firing crossbows across raging rivers and ziplining across with smuggled iPhones and iPads strapped to their backs!
A button-cute 10 year old girl may have just set a new prestigious record. It’s not for the largest number of consecutive jump rope skips, or for chewing a piece of gum for the longest time, or even for collecting the most Facebook friends. It’s for identifying a zero-day exploit in a number of iOS and Android games! Isn’t that cute?
Remember the report that Apple was preparing its own Netflix-killer called iTunes Replay for launch in the next few weeks? Well, don’t hold your breath… it’s not coming anytime soon and, as usual, you can blame a reclacitrant Hollywood for having to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.
We have theorized before that Apple was holding back its much rumored iOS 5’s Nuance speech integration as a feature to be revealed at the iPhone 5 launch event, and it looks like we may have been right, as a couple of new screenshots have popped up showing just how speech recognition will be integrated with the operating syste,.
Many of us first encountered Apple Computers in schools, but Apple’s once dominant position in the educational market has seemed to fade over the last decade. Now Apple’s setting out to do something about it, as they’ve just released a brand new sub-$1000 iMac aimed for schools and institutions.
If the rumors are anything to go by, the next iPhone will be unveiled sometime in the next month. We don’t know anything for sure about the iPhone 5 yet, but it seems likely at this point that the iPhone 5 will have an A5 chip, a larger display, a thinner design and (possibly) a capacitive home button for gestures.
That tells us a lot about what the iPhone 5 might be like, but not a lot about what it looks like. So for your perusal this weekend, we’ve put together a gallery of ten of the best iPhone 5 concept designs out there. Let us know which one is your favorite in the comments.
Casey Putsch has done something so incredible that even Bruce Wayne would approve: he’s not only designed and built a turbine-powered Batmobile, but he slapped an iPad on the dash to help him with navigating through the streets of Gotham.
There’s loads of reasons not to install Flash on your Mac, from extending your battery life to keeping your system running like greased lightning. If those reasons aren’t good enough for you, though, here’s another one: a new Trojan for Mac is going around that poses as FlashPlayer, and if you’re not careful, installing Flash on a new Mac is all that it could take to infect your system.
AT&T is informing jailbreak tetherers on grandfathered unlimited data plans that either they stop tether or sign up for 2GB tethering plan. If you don’t abide, AT&T will sign you up for a 2GB tethering plan and kill your grandfathered unlimited data plan for good.
A thorny wicket. It’s probably not fair to congest AT&T’s networks by sucking up data from your iPhone to play World of Warcraft on your MacBook Pro without, you know, paying for it, but if you’re intent on doing so, there may be a way to avoid AT&T’s scrutiny, keep tethering through your jailbroken iPhonei, and keep your unlimited data plan, all at the same time.
Acer founder Stan Shih has opened his mouth and said something extraordinarily stupid: the ultrabook and tablet form factors are nothing but a stupid fad with no future. Someone should tell Apple that, so they can stop selling iPads and MacBook Airs to a throng of millions of excited customers.
Remember MacDefender? It was the first really big piece of malware to hit the Mac operating system, and was a huge problem for Apple’s tech support teams… such a huge problem, in fact, that Apple introduced a self-updating anti-malware database into OS X, which basically killed MacDefender and its variants off.
MacDefender worked by tricking users into believing that they’d been infected by malware (which they in fact had — MacDefender’s own — even though it was trivial to remove the infection) then tried to bilk them out of their credit card numbers for bogus anti-malware software.
MacDefender died off pretty quickly after Apple updated Snow Leopard to fight it, but the perps behind the software went unidentified. Now, it looks like they’ve been caught, raided and busted.
Responding to their customers’ garish ineptitude in trying to outprice the $999 MacBook Air, Intel has decided to do notebook makers’ work for them and put together a reference bill of materials on how to build cheap ultrabooks capable of competing Apple’s superslim ultraportable.
On the right, the iPhone 4’s proximity light sensor. On the right? The same part in the iPhone 5. We’re getting pretty close to launch, boys and girls, but what does a part like this tell us about what the iPhone 5 will look like?
I’ll be honest here, I really want HP to do well in the tablet space Theoretically, HP has many of the same advantages with webOS as Apple has with iOS: the two companies totally control both their software and their hardware… a potentially huge advantage over the competition. Plus, webOS is genuinely an awesome, exciting platform, and if it ever gets off the ground properly, iOS will benefit from some real competition.
That said, their first tablet, the TouchPad, was very much a beta product. Featuring a bulky design and a serious derth of tablet-optimized apps, not many people chose a TouchPad over the iPad. No wonder, then, that HP’s had to slice $100 off its asking price.
Been holding out on buying Lion until you can get it on officially sanctioned physical media? According to 9to5Mac, Lion USB recover media is now available for fulfillment… an it’ll even be handed out free to those of us who aren’t able to use Lion’s built-in recovery tools to restore their hosed Macs.
Apple’s no stranger to lawsuits, but this one’s a bit bizarre: a New York photographer is suing Cupertino for using one of her copyrighted photos in an iPhone advertisement. But does she have a case?
Remember a time when people still talked about an Apple tax with a straight face? It’s been laughable for years, but with the debut of the iPad, became a self-evident joke: if Apple overprices their hardware, why the heck can’t the competition make an equally specced, sub-$500 tablet?
The disparity between what Apple can make and sell a product for and what the competition can has only grown more pronounced since the debut of the $999 MacBook Air.
It’s such a big disparity that Intel has launched what it calls the UltraBook initiative to help laptop makers release capable MacBook Air competitors… but even with Intel’s help, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that any first-gen UltraBooks will be able to beat the MacBook Air in price.
According to Digitimes:
The sources pointed out that Intel’s ultrabook concept is not a brand new innovation, but a design to allow first-tier notebook players to quickly catch up with Apple’s advances in the ultra-thin segment and help the notebook industry recover from the impact of tablet PCs. The sources pointed out that the new MacBook Airs are priced at about US$999-1,599 with rather strong demand in the US; however, designing an ultrabook based on Intel’s technical suggestions will still be unable to reduce the machine’s price level to lower than the MacBook Air’s unless Intel is willing to reduce its prices, which already account for one-third of the total cost. If Intel does reduce its prices there is a chance for vendors to provide pricing below US$1,000.
So the so-called Apple Tax, in the case of the MacBook Air, is actually an Apple Discount: they’ll sell you a $1299 top-of-the-line ultraportable with unparalleled build construction for $300 cheaper.
Expect this disparity to only get worse as time goes on: Apple’s using its cash hoard to build up a portfolio of future products that the reactionary competition can’t even hope to touch.
Believe the rumors that we’ll be seeing a Retina Display iPad 2 HD in October of this year? Don’t believe those rumors, but still think Apple’s bound to put a Retina Display in the iPad 3?
It might be time to think again: it’s looking unlikely that Retina Display panels suitable for the iPad will be produced in sufficient quantities until the iPad 4.
This video by the self-declared Final Cut King probably goes on a bit too long, but some of the imagery I could see Apple, in a more whimsical mood, adopting to emphasize just how light, portable and wafer-thin the MacBook Air actually is to people who have never picked one up… although I think it’s more likely that one of Apple’s competitors will just steal this idea to advertise their so-called Ultrabooks.
We’ve seen a lot of iPhone accessories here at Cult of Mac, but it’s rare that one leaves us absolutely speechless. Yet when I consider the Hand iPhone Case by Rakuten, my eyes bulge a little, my mouth goes dry, my tongue seems to swell and all I can do is mouth the consonants “W….T…..F……” to myself.
As you can see, the Hand iPhone Case is a disembodied hand… lopped off with an axe, cloned from latex and grafted onto the back of your iPhone, like a human ear growing on the back of a mouse. And hey, if that’s not utterly weird and creepy enough for you? You can pick up a version that pastes a child’s severed hand on the back of your iPhone instead of an adult’s, no additional charge!
We’ve heard this one before, way back in June, but now the Guardian’s saying that the iPhone 5 is now really, honestly and truly being tested by carriers… and they’ve got a Mission Impossible style description of the procedures Apple is using to keep the iPhone 5 safe to prove it!
iSuppli went and did the math: how does Apple get away with using half as much memory in its iPads compared to the competition yet still manage to just mop the floor with Samsung, Motorola and RIM in performance?
The secret sauce? The fact that Apple designs both the hardware and the software.
Finally! After a false start earlier this morning, Skype has finally rolled out their long waited for native iPad app.
Despite Apple’s best efforts, you can make a bootable install disk of Mac OS X Lion… but it’s not for the faint-hearted, or those who aren’t tech inclined.
Luckily, there’s an even easier way to make a bootable OS X Lion disk now. It’s called Lion DiskMaker, and it turns making your own installable Lion USB key drive into a one-click affair.
Earlier this year, a little Swedish company called C3 Technologies took CES by storm, demonstrating their incredible iOS and Android apps that leveraged formerly top secret missile targeting technology to create ultra-realistic 3D maps.
Fast forward seven months, and C3 Technologies’ website is a ghost town, and C3’s parent company, Saab, has sold off it’s 57.8% stake in the company in a deal that is worth over $157 million dollars.
So who bought them? Our best guess: Apple.