John Brownlee - page 50

An iPhone dock is a pleasant thing to have on one’s desk. It keeps things nice and tidy, while making it easy to holster your iPhone and juice it up without mucking around with wires.

There is one way in which tethering your iPhone via cable directly to your computer is superior, though. It’s easier to actually use your iPhone that way instead of gorilla-arming it.

That’s the brilliance of the Saidoka: it’s an iPhone dock that lets you easily tap our text messages, answer calls, and even play games, all while your iPhone is charging and syncing.

The most you can charge for an app on the iOS App Store is $999.99. In the early days of the App Store, a number of novelty apps came out, trying to make a quick buck by convincing gullible plutocrats to part with their money in the form of a $1,000 app download. The most notable example is I Am Rich, an iPhone app that literally did nothing except proclaim your affluence.

These days, though, the $999.99 club is made up of legitimate apps. Well, mostly.

If you bought an iMac between late 2011 and mid 2012 and your graphics have been acting up, you’re not alone… and Apple just might fix your iMac for free.

Hey, did you see Jobs this weekend? If so, you probably saw it alone, in a theater completely empty except for yourself, a single loquacious cricket, and a theater usher sleeping one off. Why? Because Jobs absolutely tanked this weekend.

Can’t wait to see what Apple has in store for us with the iPad 5? Here’s what it will likely look like… face down!

Following reports that it was looking to open a new research and development center in Taiwan, Apple is now going on a massive hiring binge in China for talented engineers, having recently put up openings for over 300 new employees in Taiwan on the professional social networking site LinkedIn.

If I told you that Apple had a monopoly over all of the apps sold through the iTunes App Store, what would you say? Would you stammer for a little bit, eyes boggling, trying to understand how an injustice like this could happen in our tightly regulated markets? Or would you say, “No kidding, Sherlock. The App Store is their exclusive proprietary platform. It’s a walled garden,” and then, perhaps to emphasize what an idiot you think I am, slowly twirling one finger around your ear while using another to rapidly flick your lower lip up and down while googling your eyes?

I can’t blame you; I’d probably do the latter myself. Yet would you believe that an antitrust complaint was filed against Apple because there aren’t third-party app stores allowed on the iOS platform? Of course someone did. The case has been dismissed by a U.S. District judge, but not because it was a stupid complaint, but because the plaintiffs made a procedural mistake.

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities is one of the few analysts who routinely predicts Apple’s moves correctly. Yesterday, Kuo sent out a research note to investors that was filled with details about the iPhone 5S, including Kuo’s belief that we will see a gold-colored iPhone 5S available with 128GB of storage.

Do you love animated GIFs? Hey, who doesn’t? We certainly do, and as it turns out, Flipboard does too. The personally curated magazine for iOS has just introduced a new update that allows you to check out animated GIFs, right within the app.

Will the iPad mini have a Retina display this year or won’t it? The rumor cycle back and forth concerning the smaller iPad’s high-res aspirations have become frustrating to follow for anyone who has been hoping Apple will correct the sole point of criticism about its 7.9-inch offering in time for Christmas.

If you’ve had your fingers crossed (or parts beyond), good news. IHS iSuppli, one of the companies that really knows what is going on in Apple’s supply chain, says displays suitable for the Retina iPad mini are “on track” for a fall launch.

A couple months ago, a series of benchmarks for the new Mac Pro popped up on Geekbench, showing off what Apple’s new machine could do. And just what could it do? Not much more than the current top-of-the-line 2012 Mac Pro, disappointing many who thought even the old Mac Pro was a dog at launch.

However, there’s a caveat. The hardware was prototype. The machine was running OS X Mavericks, which had just released its first beta. And the version of Geekbench being run against the new Mac Pro was 32-bit, and therefore not designed to fully exploit the Mac Pro’s 64-bit architecture. Is the real Mac Pro really going to be so disappointing?

No. It’s going to be blazing fast.

Cord cutting is something a lot of people threaten to do, but pretty much only ever talk about. People really like the idea of eliminating their cable bills and simply connecting their TV to the web, but the reality is there’s too much on TV you can’t easily get if you cut the cord, like HBO, and for most people, the technology involved is still a difficult hurdle.

But if there’s anything that’s going to get you to cut the cord? According to a new report, it’s an Apple TV.

Remember how just a few months ago, Foxconn profits were slumping because — as the anti-Apple brigade hysterically shrieked — the iPhone 5 was a dud, and the iPhone’s meteoric rise in popularity was finally done?

Yeah, well, Foxconn just posted a 41 percent year-over-year increase in profit, driven by strong iPhone sales.

Kickstarters are like wonderful, vivid dreams that you’re never quite sure are real, and constantly terrified that you’re suddenly going to wake up from, with nothing to show for it. That’s why I usually don’t write them up: even if a Kickstarter is fully funded, you’re never sure if it’s going to come to market as planned, or not be a steaming pile when it does.

I’m making an exception for the AccessIO, though. It corrects a major design issue I’ve had with the iMac pretty much forever: it’s impossible to reach its ports. AccessIO brings your iMac USB and headphone jack to the front of the device, where they belong.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster might be a bit of a laughing stock when it comes to the so-called Apple HDTV, but he’s still one of the go-to soothsayers for investors looking for an early heads-up on what Apple might do next. In a new report, Munster is making a rather strange claim: he says that Apple’s low-budget iPhone 5C will ship without Siri.

iTunes is having an absolutely bonkers sale right now on its movie selection: you can buy every single one of the eight films in the Harry Potter series for just $59.99. The regular price is over $125. And that’s just where the deals get started: chances are, if you’ve got a favorite film series, iTunes is selling it in a bundle right now, at a crazy low price.

Although it was hard to believe first, it’s looking increasingly likely that Apple’s forthcoming foray into the mid-range market, the iPhone 5C, will come in that cheap, colorful plastic casing we’ve seen leaking out of China time and time again over the past few weeks.

More proof for the pudding? We’ve seen the physical casing of the iPhone 5C before, but it never had any guts. Now, we’re starting to see other parts, and they match. Case in point? Volume buttons, in red, green, yellow and blue.

Although the new fingerprint sensor gets all the attention, another big draw of the forthcoming iPhone 5S is the rumored camera improvements. We’ve heard that we’re at least looking at a megapixel jump to 12MP, but dual-LED flash is also rumored to be in the cards, and when it comes to the latter, it looks like we may have just received our confirmation.

The big headlining feature of the iPhone 5S is believed to be the fingerprint sensor underneath the home button, which could necessitate a new, icon-less sapphire home button. But could problems with the new technology make for a muted iPhone 5S launch?

At first, the iPhone came in just one color, like a Model-T: black. By the time the iPhone 3G came out, though, the iPhone settled into a two-tone color scheme: classic black, and equally classic white.

But this seems like the year that Apple experiments with color. Not only is it widely accepted that Apple will release a colorful budget iPhone this year, probably called the iPhone 5C, but it looks like Apple might add one more color to the classic iPhone line-up: gold.

2013 is, so far, what might be considered a year of regrouping for Apple. The company has seen huge success in the PC, smartphone and tablet markets, but it’s also pushed those about as far as they can go: Incremental improvements, not revolutions, are what we can expect for the Mac, iPhone and iPad from here on out. Meanwhile, the next big thing — the iWatch, the iTV, whatever — is still on the horizon.

To outsiders, it looks like Apple has stalled. Far from it. You only need to look at the changes Apple is making with iOS 7 to see that Cupertino isn’t standing still, and the company has signalled that it is committed to the future of OS X for at least the next 10 years. That said, all the products Apple is set to announce next month — the iPhone 5S, the iPhone 5C, the iPad mini 2 and the iPad 5 — are just sequels to what it’s already done.

People are getting impatient for the next major Apple revolution. And it’s not just outsiders. A new report suggests that Apple’s own board of directors is “deeply concerned” about Cupertino’s perceived slackening in the pace of innovation.

With a new story concerning the extraordinary lengths the U.S. Government is seemingly taking to spy on its citizens’ digital lives hitting the news every day now, President Obama met Apple CEO Tim Cook and a number of other tech executives to discuss government surveillance.

We’ve known for a long, long time that the fifth-generation iPad would borrow the iPad mini’s design cues and have thinner bezels on the side for a more streamlined form factor. Heck, iLounge’s Jeremy Horowitz said as much as early as January of this year, claiming that the iPad 5 would be “a lot smaller than one would guess is possible” with “virtually no left or right bezels.”

For months now, we’ve seen parts leak out of Asia confirming that report, including cases, rear shells, and more. Today, we have leaked images of the front panel and digitizer. And yup! Look, Ma! No bezels.

We’re probably about a month and a half away from the debut of the next iPhone, which means it’s about the time when we historically see deals on the latest model hitting the big boxes as they look to clear inventory. And right on cue, here comes Best Buy, with an aggressive offer on the iPhone. But there are bigger discounts than just that, including some sweet deals on select MacBook Pros.

For Americans, iTunes in the Cloud has freed a lot of us from the tyranny of having to constantly switch movies and music on and off our devices. As long as we purchased a movie or song on iTunes (or, alternatively, subscribe to iTunes Match), we can stream it from the Cloud.

Unfortunately, Apple’s been taking a creeping approach to rolling out iTunes in the Cloud internationally. For at least two European countries, though, rollout has just started: Austria and Switzerland can now stream movies they bought from iTunes from the Cloud.