John Brownlee - page 42

Want to make your Apple TV look like an SNES, Gamecube, NES, or even a big waffle? These decals have you covered.

Remember Apple Tracker, the web app that checked Apple’s inventory in order to help you find new iPhones and iPads in your area? Apple killed it off ahead of the iPad mini Retina launch , but now it’s back… just not on the original site.

Do you remember how last week, the iPad mini with Retina Display was said to have been delayed to November because of LCD burn-in issues with Sharp’s IGZO display panels? It appears the rumor was true, because the iPad mini does have image retention issues.

Every time Apple releases a new version of iOS, there’s a good chance they have broken existing jailbreak techniques with it. If a public jailbreak has already been released, it means your jailbreak has gone away; if a public jailbreak hasn’t yet been released, an update can kill an exploit that will delay a public jailbreak by months.

Yesterday, Apple released iOS 7.0.4, but did they break the possibility of an iOS 7 jailbreak? Are you safe to update?

The holiday shopping season will be starting a little earlier this year for Apple, as sources are now claiming that Apple will keep several of its U.S. Apple Stores open on Thanksgiving Day.

What store sells the most iPhones every year? If you named, oh, the 5th Avenue Cube, or the Grand Central location, you’d be wrong, asserts ABC News. Instead, they identify an obscure Apple Store in a shopping mall in Delaware as being the likely contender for selling the most iPhones every year. What wizardry is this?

Those frustrated that Nintendo still stubbornly refuses to release an official Legend of Zelda game for iOS should pluck-up, because the next best thing is here. Heavily inspired by one of the best Zelda games, The Wind Waker, a console-quality Zelda like has just hit the Apple Store called Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas. And this is a game you want to get.

If you want an iPad mini with Retina Display today, there’s only one way to get one: reserve it for in-store pick-up. That’s how I got my 128GB iPad mini with Retina Display on day one of availability while my colleagues Charlie Sorrel and Killian Bell were sitting at home, waiting five to ten days for delivery like a couple of suckers.

If you’d like to make the hunt for an iPad mini in your area easier, a new web-based tracking tool has been released that makes the process less tedious. But act now, because Apple has shown itself to be willing to kill these trackers before, although it’s possible this one will escape unscathed.

Android may have greater market penetration than ever before, but it also has more defectors than ever. According to new data, in fact, more Android users are migrating to the iPhone than ever before.

It’s hard to think of two analysts as different frome one another as Gene Munster and KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. While Munster has foolishly prattled on, predicting an Apple HDTV set every single year for at least five years without it coming true, Ming-Chi Kuo draws upon proven supply-chain sources across the Far East to make predictions about upcoming Apple products with almost unerring accuracy. When Munster opens his mouth, everyone laughs; when Kuo opens his, everyone listens.

So it’s odd to be writing a story in which Ming-Chi Kuo and Gene Munster’s predictions are lining up for a change, but it’s an odd world. In a recent note, Kuo argues that not only will an A7-powered Apple TV will be coming next year, but Apple will enter the living room with a proper HDTV set in 2015.

“It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy! Let’s go exploring!”

If you’re a comic lover, the world of iBooks just got a little bit more magical, as Bill Watterson’s classic comic strip about a boy and his stuffed tiger has come to Apple’s e-book store.

Apple’s never been a particularly vocal advocate of open source, but thanks to a collaboration between two vintage computer museums, you can now delve into the sweet, sweet code of Apple’s first operating system.

With the new Mac Pro, Apple has proven its serious about bringing at least some manufacturing back to the States. The next step, though, is chips, and a new report says that Apple is bringing chip fabrication of its A-series chips stateside at a new $6 billion facility in upstate New York. And Samsung is said to be involved.

Got a problem with your Mac that makes you call an AppleCare representative over the phone? You no longer have to use mere words to try to explain what’s wrong. Apple has now updated its support site, allowing users to initiate screen-sharing with the AppleCare rep on the other side of the line.

Calling it an “honor, a privielege and truly from my heart to Steve,” Apple VP and kahuna beach moondog Eddy Cue accepted a posthumous award on Steve Jobs’s behalf last night, as the Apple founder was inducted into the Bay Area Business Hall of Fame. And Cue had a pretty cool anecdote to tell about Steve.

Typhoon Haiyan has devestated the Phillipines, and Apple is trying to do something about it: following the perfect storm’s landfall, Apple is now accepting donations to the Red Cross via iTunes.

Can an iPhone 5s film itself being burned alive?

The answer, it turns out, is no, but that didn’t stop the wasteful doofuses at TechRax lit an iPhone 5s on fire with a combination of gasoline and Axe body spray anyway. They set the iPhone to record, lit it aflame, then dunked it in a bucket of water to cool it off. Incredibly, they then seemed disappointed they could not retrieve the video from the iPhone 5s — perhaps dropping it in a bucket of water had something to do with that? — so they then start smashing it with a hammer.

Ladies and gentlemen, all hail the gadget dork’s moronic, mindlessly destructive id!

BitTorrent Sync is one of the best Dropbox alternatives out there. Drawing upon the power of BitTorrent, BitTorrent Sync allows you to keep folders synced between multiple Macs easily, but without storing them in the cloud or having to pay for things like storage.

If you’re a BitTorrent Sync user — and you really should at least consider being one — great news. BitTorrent Sync just got an iPad app.

What do you think of Siri? Laughable gimmick, or revolutionary interface of the future? Your answer to that question may well determine how excited you get about this: the engineer who oversaw Siri is now at Samsung, building their own Internet of Things API.

Last month, Facebook released an update that allowed iPhone users to edit posts and comments and even preview all of their changes. It was a small, but welcome update. Unfortunately, it was also exclusive to the iPhone, but now users of Facebook for iPad can avail themselves of the same trick.

When Apple launched the iPhone 5 last year, it was the most aggressive launch Apple had ever attempted, requiring entire armies of workers to aggressively line-manufacture their most advanced, difficult-to-make iPhone yet. But what was it like to be one of those workers? Businessweek has published a fantastic, haunting investigative report on one Nepalese worker, who almost starved to death after his stint as an iPhone tester.

What’s causing the Retina iPad mini to launch so late in the year, and why is demand expected to be so limited at launch? Display yield issues tend to be viewed as the culprit, but what exactly is happening? According to a new rumor, LCD burn-in is to blame.

Tiny Tower, Nimble Bit’s effortlessly charming 8-bit tower sim from 2011, has come to a galaxy far, far away with Star Wars: Tiny Death Star, a tongue-in-cheek game set in the Star Wars universe that, for some reason, features characters like Yoda, R2-D2, Jabba the Hutt, and Boba Fett, all living in the Death Star forever. Pretty sure that’s not canon, but who cares? This game is super cute.

I’ve always loved Lego’s series of video games. They aren’t exactly deep examples of game design, but they get charm and quick pick-up-and-play, all-ages fun down pat. I’m delighted to see, then, that just in time for the next Hobbit movie, Warner Bros. and Lego have unveiled Lego Lord Of The Rings for iOS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrJ4LNZrIkM

I’m a genuine believer that even if you have an iPad, there’s room for an e-ink Kindle in your life if you love to read. No one is questioning the design or hardware superiority of the iPad, but the truth is, it’s the distinction between a general use device and a specialized device. An iPad may game, check email, play video, and more, but a Kindle is perfectly suited to the one task it’s meant for — reading books — in a way that the iPad never really can be.

It’s hard for me to really get too bent out of shape about Amazon’s newest ad for the Kindle Paperwhite (a fantastic e-reader), showing users trying to read books on the iPad and Kindle in bright outdoor light. The iPad is criticized for the constant glare bouncing off the screen, while the Kindle is praised for being easy-on-the-eyes.

That’s all true. The iPad kind of sucks at outdoor reading compared to the Kindle. But in the dark, it can do so much more.