Although the vast majority of us now take for granted being able to carry super powerful cameras around in our pockets at all times, there’s still something joyful about taking a photograph and having it instantly print out, creating a physical artifact of a moment.
Over the last few years, Fujifilm’s Instax series of Polaroid-like cameras have managed to capture that joy in a number of ways, but their newest gadget melds the strengths of the Polaroid with the flexibility of an iPhone.
One of the nicer things Apple does every year is its “12 Days Of Gift” promotion, in which iTunes account holders in the Europe (and most recently, the United States) are given twelve digital gifts in the days following Christmas for the considerate price of nothing.
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and Apple has just released its last free offering as part of this year’s “12 Days Of Gift” promotion. Luckily, it’s a good one: a free mini-album by the Rolling Stones themselves!
If you were a kid in the 1970’s or 1980’s, you probably had a Trapper Keeper, a famously popular line of loose-leaf binders and folders featuring velcro flaps and bright, colorful, kitschy designs. Trapper Keepers are still out there, but they’ve lost a lot of their cool kid cachet over the last couple decades… but if you grew up in their heyday, just the site of a Trapper Keeper is enough to bring a smile to your lips.
Over at If Industries, a Seattle-based maker of Etsy gear, they have mocked up an awesome look at what an officially sanctioned Trapper Keeper iPad case would look like, right down to the retro-tastic Back to the Future and Lisa Frank designs. And there’s even an embedded Bluetooth keyboard in each one!
In Spike Jonze’s latest film, Her, a mustachioed Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with a Siri-like “digital assistant,” Her, played by Scarlett Johansson.
You’d think Siri would appreciate having a movie made about her, but instead, kitty’s got claws when it comes to her filmic counterpart: thanks to Apple’s cheeky and surprisingly timely programmers, if you ask Siri “Are you her?” she will respond: “No. Her portrayal of an intelligent agent is beyond artificial”, “No. You know that it’s just a movie, right?” and “No. In my opinion, she gives artifical intelligence a bad name.”
As a Christmas present, hackers over the holidays released two great jailbreaks. For the majority out there running iOS 7, Team Evad3rs released the much heralded Evasi0n jailbreak, while for the holdouts, p0sixninja released a working jailbreak for iOS 6.1.3, 6.1.4 and 6.1.5 called p0sixspwn. It’s the latter jailbreak which has been updated today with support for OS X Snow Leopard, and numeorus bug fixes.
It’s at least six months until Apple reveals iOS 8, and probably nine months until we see the iPhone 6 for the first time, but that hasn’t stopped Eric Vasille of iPhonesoft from imaging what the iPhone 6 and iOS 8 will look like.
Many of us got or received iPhones for Christmas, and I’m guessing you thought you were pretty smart, putting it in a gift bag to disguise the telltale shape. But you’ve got nothing on this guy, who fooled someone into thinking that the iPhone they were actually unwrapping was just a crappy old chair. Check out how they did it, after the jump.
That didn’t take long. Just twenty-four hours after Cult of Mac first reported that a jailbreak for iOS 6.1.3, 6.1.4 and 6.1.5 was incoming, it’s here, allowing even iOS 7 holdouts to get in on the jailbreaking fun.
Love iOS 7, but don’t have a device powerful enough to rock it? Good news — Whited00r, the custom firmware for older iOS Devices that adds many of the features of newer versions of Apple’s mobile operating system — has just been updated to version 7, and it brings a lot of iOS 7’s look and feel along with it.
In iOS 6, the dock was a glass shelf. In iOS 7, it’s far more abstract: a blurry transparent layer over your wallpaper.
Some people love it, some people hate it. If you’re one of the latter, and you have already jailbroken your iOS 7 device, you’re in for a treat: a new jailbreak tweak lets you adjust the transparency and blurriness of the iOS 7 dock to your heart’s content.
Google+ was not the immediate Facebook-killer that Google wanted it to be, perhaps, but slowly and surely the search giant has been making its social networking service more and more useful to average folk.
That trend continues with the release of Google+ Auto Backup, a new app that will automatically upload images from your computer to Google+, thus storing them in the cloud.
We’re still at least six months away from the debut of iOS 8, but designer Sam Beckett has come along already with a very enticing look at one hot feature that could be in store for all of us: interactive notifications. And boy, do they look rad.
Tweetbot is probably our favorite Twitter client for iOS, especially after Tweetbot 3 gave the app a major makeover for iOS 7.
It’s also one of our favorite Mac Twitter clients, but it tends to hover a bit behind Tweetbot for iPhone when it comes to features. A new update, however, narrows the gap a little bit, introducing a number of useful bug fixes. Don’t expect a major aesthetic overhaul, though.
In the Mac space, Dutch designer Martin Hajek is the crown prince of concepts, having done some of the most realistic and jawdropping renders we’ve ever seen for the iWatch, Mac Pro, iPhone 6 and more.
One product concept we thought Hajek bit the pooch on a little, though, was his idea of what an Apple HDTV would look like. His concept was black, chamfered and gorgeous… but also looked like Martin Hajek had never used a television in his life. But here comes Hajek’s Apple HDTV, Mach II… and this is an Apple television set I would buy.
When the iOS 7 jailbreak from Team Evad3rs was first released, it was buggy as all get-out, largely because it had been released without giving the larger jailbreak community any heads-up. Even Saurik, the keeper of the Cydia app store, wasn’t given warning… which means that when the iOS 7 jailbreak went live, MobileSubstrate — the mechanism through which jailbreak tweaks are installed — wasn’t updated for the 64-bit A7 chip, leaving many tweaks broken.
Team Evad3rs quickly updated their jailbreak to fix some bugs and give Saurik the hooks he needed to get MobileSubstrate working, but what if you already jailbroke? Well, you’re in luck: instead of restoring your device and jailbreaking it all over again, you can just download the Evasi0n 7.x untether package version 0.2 off Cydia.
If you’ve been clocking into Cult of Mac over your Christmas holidays, you’re probably already aware that the iOS 7 jailbreak is out thanks to the tireless work of Team Evad3rs. The jailbreak is compatible with iOS versions 7.0 through 7.0.4.
But what if you hate iOS 7? What if you love Scott Forstall and skeuomorphism? What if you’re still rocking iOS 6.1.3 or iOS 6.1.4, the last stable versions of iOS 6, on an A5+ device?
Well, good news: a jailbreak is imminent for the last versions of iOS before Jony Ive rebooted it.
There was a time when one of the few parts of your Mac that you could upgrade was the CPU, but recently, Apple has phased out CPU upgradeability in favor of slimmer form factors with soldered-in silicon chips.
One surprising exception to Apple’s stance against user upgradeability, however, is the 2013 Mac Pro, which is now confirmed to have a processor that can be upgraded by the user.
There are more than a few people who would claim that not much happened with Apple in 2013. After all, they spent the first six months of the year without releasing a single product, didn’t they?
Maybe that’s true, but in actuality, 2013 was one of the most exciting years in the Apple space in recent memory.
Don’t believe us? First of all, check out our round-up of the biggest stories in 2013, and then, take a detailed look at this incredible infographic by Kevin Choi, beautifully showing the most important milestones in Apple’s fiscal 2013, from the introduction of the 128GB iPad to the App Store’s 50th Billionth App Download, and beyond.
We can only show a small snatch of the infographic, due to its hugeness, but you can see the whole thing here on Google Drive.
Jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich is one of the most esteemed in the community, having created the excellent Grabby, Liveclock, and Display Recorder tweaks.
Now, Petrich’s first iOS 7 tweak is here, and it’s an incredible one. Called FlipControlCenter, Petrich’s brand new jailbreak tweak lets you rearrange and customize the layout of iOS 7 Control Center, with all new buttons.
There’s a lot of different metrics out there for gauging the success of personal electronics, some more suspect than others. Many companies, for example, favor units shipped to retailers, where as Apple favors the more realistic metric of units sold.
Perhaps the best metric of all, though, isn’t what is shipped or sold, but what people want Santa to bring them for Christmas. And by this metric, the iPad is king.
Back in 1984, Apple released the first Macintosh home computer, a magnificent piece of vintage computer design that would shape the destiny of the next 25 years of Apple’s corporate history.
What would it have been like to pull a vintage Macintosh 128K out of the box? To first separate the keyboard from its styrofoam lining? To first snap open the hard plastic floppy disc case? To first learn how to use MacWrite using an audio tape?
Over on eBay, one seller has been trying to sell a vintage Macintosh, still in box with complete documentation, equipment and even packaging. In his attempts to sell his prize, he has given us all a treat: a wonderfully thorough and loving unboxing of what it would have been like to open a vintage Macintosh up for the first time.
Since eBay items disappear when the auction ends, we’ve archived these incredible unboxing pics on our servers. Prepare to see a lot of them below.
Yesterday, reacting to the news that Spotify was getting a darker look on the Mac, we despaired that it would ever catch up to the aesthetic appeal of Rdio.
As if they heard our words, Rdio widened the gap a little more today, releasing a new update that contains not only iOS 7-oriented UI improvements, but a notable new feature as well.
First announced last week, Chair Entertainment’s incredible hack-and-slash game Infinity Blade III has received a massive update today, adding 3 new quests, 9 new enemies, new modes, skills, goals, potions, gems, and more to an already feature-packed game.
The new Mac Pro is finally here, and considering the fact that it looks exactly like a trash can, what better way to celebrate its release than to replace your Mac’s current trash icon with Apple’s stealthy, space-age new super computer?
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Apple’s personal virtual assistant Siri is a smart cookie, but she’s veered towards the apocalyptic and apocryphal this morning, predicting the opening of the gates of hell on July 27th.