John Brownlee - page 25

Over the years, I’ve seen rumor after rumor that Apple would eventually abandon Intel chips in favor of ARM chips. And time after time, I’ve refuted those arguments, saying that a Mac running ARM processors is not likely to happen anytime soon.

But maybe I’m wrong. Former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée — himself a longtime skeptic of Apple’s transition to ARM chips for its desktop and laptop computers — says he’s recently been convinced, and even believes that Apple could release ARM-based Macs as soon as 2016.

When you hit the road, you take your iPhone charger. If you’re hitting the road for a long time, you might also take a portable battery along with it.

So redundant. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way for you to roll up your charger and your portable battery pack into a single device? Now, thanks to Nomad, there is, and it’s so ingenious, I can’t believe that Apple hasn’t done this themselves.

On the Mac, 1Password is a perfect Swiss Army Knife of tools for the forgetful and lazy, guaranteeing that they never have type in a password, address field, or credit card number into an online form ever again.

But on iOS, 1Password has been a more convoluted thing. Lacking deep integration with other apps, 1Password for iOS has never been as good as it’s Mac counterpart. But with iOS 8, that’s about to change, thanks to a 1Password app extension that any third-party app can use.

For years now, the Modbook has been giving Apple fans the devices that Cupertino won’t. Before the first iPad came out, Apple delivered the Modbook, a white plastic Macbook transformed into a tablet. They then followed it with the Modbook Pro, which gave the same treatment to the 13-inch MacBook Pro.

With hybrid tablet/laptops like the Surface hitting the market, Modbook’s once again getting ready to give Apple die hard what they want. The Modbook Pro X is coming, and it promises to be a convertible MacBook Pro that is also a tablet when it wants to be.

You may know FreedomPop as the guys who will turn your iPod touch into a free iPhone, but if you have an iPad, the carrier is now willing to do the same thing, giving any Sprint-compatible iPad free talking, texting and data.

Are you an Amazon Prime member? If you’re willing to settle for slower shipping, you may be able to trade prompt delivery for sweet, sweet digital credits.

Popcorn Time is Hollywood’s worst nightmare: a Netflix for torrents that streams the hottest movies right to your Mac or PC.

Now, it’s become even more nightmarish for the industry. It will now stream torrented movies directly to the Apple TV.

For at least the last year, rumor has had it that Facebook would soon require anyone who wished to message a friend through its official iPhone app to install a tertiary app, Facebook Messenger, instead.

Up until now, Facebook has held off on that threat. But as the social networking giant tries to spread its services across an entire ecosystem of apps, it looks like the House that Zuckerberg built might finally make good.

Can’t get enough of NPR? Literally? Have we got an app for you. It’s called NPR One, and it’s an infinite stream of personalized radio stories that will keep you going all day long.

If you’re like me, you hate OS X’s Dock. While a useful UI innovation on Apple’s part, the dock takes up a surprising amount of screen real estate on what, in the end, adds up to a superfluous amount of visual fluff.

You can hide your dock, sure, but isn’t there a better alternative to dock? As it turns out, there is… and thanks to a cheap Mac app, that alternative is the Menu Bar.

Over the weekend, we saw some incredible trailers come out of Comic Con 2014, including the new Sin City and The Hobbit: Battle Of The Five Armies trailer.

But if you ask me, the best trailer to come out of Comic Con was easily the trailer to the new Mad Max movie. Starring Tom Hardy as the titular character, Fury Road‘s trailer is so incredible… well, you just have to see it for yourself.

Ever wonder how badly graphics and gaming performance gets compromised in the hottest apps on older hardware? As it turns out, not very badly at all. Maybe that’s why iOS has become a major gaming platform.

Popcorn Time is a fantastic — albeit questionably legal — Mac app that allows you to treat BitTorrent like Netflix, searching for movies and TV shows on sites like The Pirate Bay that you want to watch and then streaming them directly to your computer.

It’s a great app, but it has at least one glaring problem: You can’t stream a movie over Popcorn Time directly to your Apple TV using AirPlay. Luckily, thanks to a new Mac app, you can.

Earlier this week, forensic data scientist Jonathan Zdziarski made a bold claim: iOS may be vulnerable to government snooping by design. According to Zdziarski, iOS had multiple backdoors installed that made any device running the OS “almost always at risk of spilling all data,” which in turn made for some “tasty attack points for .gov and criminals.”

Apple, of course, denied having ever worked with the government to install any backdoors. But that didn’t change the fact that these unsecured services do exist, and worse, have gone entirely undocumented. But thankfully, Apple has rectified at least that last problem, penning a new support document that explains what each of Zdziarski’s snoopsome services actually does.

Released earlier this year, Blizzard’s Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft manages to do what many would have thought impossible: out MtG Magic: The Gathering.

An astonishingly addictive collectible card game, Hearthstone‘s only failing, if you could call it that, is it was for all intents and purposes multiplayer-only. But today, Blizzard has rectified that by releasing its highly anticipated Curse of Naxxramas expansion for the game on both Mac and iPad.

Best of all? It’s free. Or, at least, the first taste is.

If you have a MacBook Air from mid-2011, you may have noticed intermittent issues where your laptop has a harder time waking up from sleep mode than it normally would have done, and when it does, the fans might loudly blast as if the whole laptop were on fire.

Although rare, these issues have been afflicting customers for at least the last couple of years. But it seems like Apple has finally figured out what’s wrong, as a new update today specifically for mid-2011 MacBook Air owners fixes the longstanding issues.

Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is pretty much everything wrong with mobile development, in a nutshell. A freemium game that invites users to waste ungodly amounts of money on stupid in-app purchases, the game is on track to make $200 million this year alone.

But it does have its fans. For example. the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Office Of Water, which sent out a tweet Monday night telling everyone that it had reached the status of “C-List Celebrity” in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.

Is iOS spying on you for Apple?

According to forensic scientist Jonathan Zdziarski, quite possibly: Several undocumented services run regularly in the background on over 600 million iOS devices, which could be sending data to Apple.

When Steve Jobs was still alive, he seemed adamant that the size of the iPhone’s screen was perfect, since it was the maximum width a screen could be and be comfortable to hold while typing one-handed.

With the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 on the horizon, though, it appears that Apple no longer agrees. But why? Why are smartphone screens getting bigger anyway?

We’ve heard a lot of rumors about the upcoming iPhone 6. But which ones are true? With the release of Apple’s latest and greatest smartphones just three months away, we can start synthesizing the likelihood of which rumors will pan out (and which won’t).

This gorgeous infographic exploding the iPhone 6 into its various components does a great job of showing where the consensus is right now.

Are you bummed that don’t have anyone to sext with, or that the sexting has dried up in your relationship?

Don’t worry. Thanks to a new game, you can sext just as easily as picking up your iPhone and sending a text to a bot.

Back before the popular starship sim roguelike FTL had come to the iPad, France’s Mi Clos Studio released a charming little game called Out There that scratched a lot of the same itches. Like a randomized choose-your-own-adventure novel with resource management, Out There allowed you to explore alien universes, learn extraterrestrial languages, fight an evil alien civilization, and more.

Not everyone loved the game, saying that victory in Out There was too random, but I always had a lot of fondness for it. It had an incredible sense of atmosphere, thanks to wonderful art and music. I’m delighted to hear, then, that Out There isn’t just getting a sizable update… it’s clso oming to the Mac.

IBM and Apple’s new enterprise partnership is already being called one of the “most important and powerful tech partnerships ever.”

But outside of selling more iPads, iPhones and Macs in business, what else could Apple get out of the deal, which was announced Tuesday? According to a new report, Watson — IBM’s Jeopardy-winning A.I. capable of understanding natural language.

The Flappy Bird phenomenon will never die. Although the game has been pulled from the App Store, the addictive little Bird has spawned a million clones, and been ported to all manner of devices, including Android and Windows Phone smartphones, as well as the Mac.

But what you’re about to see might just be the ultimate Flappy Bird port. It’s Flappy Bird running on a vintage Apple IIc, at an astonishing 60 frames per second.

Ever since the first iPhone was jailbroken, hacker and developer Jay Freeman, aka Saurik, has maintained the Cydia Store as a way for jailbreakers to download, buy and sell their tweaks.

Run consistently since February 2008, there have been more than a few challengers over the years — Cydia alternatives developed by third parties who promise to “better monetize” the jailbreak community — but Cydia continues to be the de facto repository for jailbreak tweaks.

But Freeman says we can’t take Cydia for granted. In fact, he’s thought about picking up his toys and going home.