Nope, it’s not just you: iMessage and FaceTime are experiencing issues this morning, with loads of users on Twitter (and, for that matter, my girlfriend) reporting problems. Yesterday, iMessage and Facetime also reported a number of issues. Jeez, Apple, get it together.
Source: Apple
Brian White of Topeka Capital Markets has been making some zany predictions lately, perhaps best exemplified by his recent claim that Apple’s forthcoming HDTV will be controlled using a Green Lantern like power ring called the iRing.
Almost as if to apologize for releasing a report written so clearly after an all-night bender, White is now making a more sensible prediction that falls in line with other reports: that his sources in the Asian supply chain have told him the iPhone 5S’s killer feature will be a fingerprint scanner.
In the 1984 rite-of-passage classic The Karate Kid, Daniel LaRusso is taught agility and patience by his sensei, Keisuke Miyagi, by catching flies with chopsticks.
What kind of agility do you think it would take, then, to steal an iPhone using chopsticks? From a passing bicyclist, no less?
The Chinese gentleman above apparently pulled off the incredible feat in downtown Zhengzhou. A journalist happened to snap his nimble pickpocketing in action, which led to Wang turning himself in.
Via: Kotaku
We’ve heard tell that Twitter would soon be launching a music-discovery app, but it now appears that we might see it as early as today.
Nuff said.
Source: Twitter
When Apple hired former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch — yes, the same guy who watched and lamely whined while Apple basically killed Flash by declaring it a wholly unnecessary and archaic web technology that had no place in the mobile age of computing — there was a lot of head scratching. What would Kevin Lynch be doing at Apple?
Well, here’s one theory: he’s heading a team made up largely of former iPod employees, and he’s working on the iWatch.
Yes, we all know that Apple’s iOS devices have A4, or A5, or A6 processors in them… but what are they? These are all types of systems-on-a-chip, or SoC for short, and they are more than just processors: they are the equivalent of someone putting almost an entire PC desktop on a single chip the size of an infant’s fingernail.
Like a psychic, the bread and butter of most analysts is to make wild predictions to their clients and then, when they don’t come true, pretend like those predictions were never made to begin with. When that fails, another ploys analysts, like psychics, sometimes use is overly vague predictions that could literally be fulfilled by anything.
Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty’s latest bit of soothsaying falls into the latter cam: she claims that after meeting with Apple management recently, she feels quite certain that Apple could release a “killer app” this year. Only one, Katy?
No one wants to own a Blackberry. That’s the takeaway from a new poll which asks people which device they’d never be caught dead using. There aren’t many people who wouldn’t be caught dead buying an iPhone, though.
Foursquare has just updated its popular iOS app to version 6.0, and as a point-oh release, it radically ups the ante when it comes to exploring the cityscape around you and finding you cool stuff in your area.
We’ve all heard the rumors that Apple will move away from Samsung and find another fab to make all of their sexy, super-fast A-series processors, but today, The Korea Times is reporting it as a done deal, saying that Apple has shut Samsung out entirely from the design of their A7 processors. Who are they going with instead? The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC for short.
Can this cockpit hold the vasty plains of Cupertino? The Lyon Opera is about to find out. Coming in 2014 to the famous French opera house is Steve Five, an operatic mash-up of Shakespeare’s 1599 play Henry V and, wait for it, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography.
Another publisher is feigning surprise about Apple’s App Store policies today, claiming that Cupertino has “banned” an upcoming issue of a digital combic book from being sold in any iOS app due to “two postage stamp-sized images of gay sex.”
The Big Jambox is pretty much the rockingest portable Bluetooth speaker you can get, but at $299, it’s not cheap. If you don’t mind a couple of minor aesthetic blemishes, though, you can now get a Big Jambox for about the price of the regular Jambox: around $158.
The deal is being made over at All4Cellular, which is offering the Big Jambox speaker (refurbished) for about half off in Graphite Hex and White Wave colors. They might come with a few dents and scratches, but they’ll sound just the same and come fully covered with a 90 day warranty.
We’ve previously reviewed the Big Jambox and loved it, with one caveat: it’s best when you’re cranking everything up to 11.
Source: All4Cellular
Google Chrome is the best third-party browser for iOS, and it just received a healthy update that features a number of new improvements that makes it even more of a crime that Apple won’t let any other browser but Safari act as default browser under iOS.
Panic makes some of Cult of Mac’s favorite apps for the Mac. Transmit, Coda, Unison… they’re all classics of Mac app design, and recently, Panic has made the leap into iOS apps with Diet Coda and Prompt.
Now, rumor has it that Panic is about to release a brand new app for the iPad…. and it looks like it’s going to be a super-sexy dashboard app.
It’s hard to believe that the man behind the glass-eyed animatronic freak show of Chuck E. Cheese is the same person who founded Atari, and that both these men are the same person who discovered that diamond-in-the-rough, Steve Jobs. But it’s true: Nolan Bushnell incarnates all of his men. And in his most recent book, Finding The Next Steve Jobs, Bushnell talks about his experience finding Steve.
Remember Amazon AutoRip?
It was a cool service Amazon launched earlier in the year which did something pretty cool: if you bought an AutoRip-compatible CD at any point since 1998, it’ll automatically show up in your Amazon Cloud Player, which can be accessed either online or through the free iTunes app
Pretty neat, and now, AutoRip is even neater: it now works with vinyl records you’ve purchased too. For example, I bought a copy of the excellent album Stranger by Balmorhea on vinyl a couple months ago, and it’s now in my Cloud Player.
This is pretty neat. Vinyl is already one of the more savvy ways to buy music, not just because of the improved sound quality and presentation over digital or CD, but because when you buy a vinyl album, you often get the digital version for free as a download anyway. With AutoRip now working with vinyl, buying a record is an even more compelling way to consume music.
Remember how word came down the pipeline the other day that Spotify wanted to start a video streaming service? Guess who just beat them to the punch? That’s right, Rdio — the better of the subscription music streaming services in the United States — and their new service is called, coincidentally enough, Vdio.
I really like Nikolai Lamm’s concepts for imaginary, rumored, (and possibly forthcoming) Apple products, and this transparent concept for a cheaper budget iPhone is no exception. I love how it merges the 2012 iPod touch’s candy colored backshell with the iMac G3’s transparent casing.
I think there’s little to no chance Apple would actually make an iPhone that looks like this — in the mind of Jonny Ive, transparent gadgets are so 1998, I bet — but heck, I’d buy a phone like this.
Source: Myvouchercodes.co.uk
Looking for a Retina iPad? Here’s a killer deal: Best Buy is having a clearance of up to 30% off third-gen iPads, meaning you can now buy a 16GB Retina iPad for less money than it costs to buy the entry-level iPad mini.
One would think that the self-evident answer to the question posited in this post’s headline would be “No,” followed by a pregnant pause, a licking of the lips and then followed it up with the words “You idiot.”
And, in fact, that probably is the answer. But if Apple’s not working on a robot, then why the heck is Apple hiring one of the country’s foremost robotics experts, John Morrell?
Alan Kay is a bit of a legend at Apple. A computing pioneer, Alan Kay’s lab at Xerox PARC led Steve Jobs to commercialize the concept of a graphical user interface and a computer mouse, and Alan Kay’s philosophy that “people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware” is one of Apple’s core principles.
But Kay doesn’t think much of Apple these days, and in fact, seems to think the company has always been broken.
If you ever had hopes of cashing in your iTunes library to make ends meet, think again: a federal judge has declared reselling your MP3s online, saying the first sale doctrine is not applicable.
Reeder has long been our favorite newsreading app on the iPhone and iPad, but with Google Reader set to be discontinued on June 30th, the future of Reeder has been up in the air. Google Reader is the engine that drives Reeder, but with no clear alternative right now, it’s not exactly sure what Reeder’s new engine will be come July 1st.
So Reeder’s doing the right thing and not making people pay quite as much for an app with a seemingly uncertain future. Developer Silvio Rizzi are making the app free on both iPad and Mac, and they are halting development on the app until July 1st to wait until the dust settles and a clear Google Reader replacement emerges.
Unfortunately, Rizzi’s largesse only goes so far: the iPhone version still costs $2.99. I think it’s a price worth paying for the only iPhone feedreader in my view worth a damn, and with Reeder set to add Feedbin support sometime soon, my guess is that it will continue to be a strong app going forward.
Source: Reeder