John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
At this point, we know that, yet again, T-Mobile hasn’t managed to work itself out a deal when it comes to the iPhone 5 when it launches later this month. That means yet again, T-Mobile will be the odd carrier out: the only one of the major four without an iPhone.
T-Mobile’s at a competitive disadvantage, and they are doing everything they can to address that They’ve started telling their sales staff to start selling against the iPhone. And now they’re going to start marketing to individuals with unlocked iPhones jumping carriers, even going so far as to set up “bring your own iPhone” demonstration stations in store.
This is getting interesting. Hot on the heels of hacking group Antisec leaking 1M+ Apple IDs they said they downloaded from a hacked FBI laptop, the FBI itself is now saying they had nothing to dow with it.
Here’s the FBI’s statement, as given to All Things D:
The FBI is aware of published reports alleging that an FBI laptop was compromised and private data regarding Apple UDIDs was exposed. At this time there is no evidence indicating that an FBI laptop was compromised or that the FBI either sought or obtained this data.
Strange. If that data didn’t come from the FBI, then, who did it come from?
There’s no mention of the next iPhone in the note, but German carrier T-Mobile has been sending out these tiny nanoSIMs for “the latest generation of smartphones” launching shortly. And since the next iPhone, which many believe will launch on September 21st, is widely thought to be the first smartphone to boast the new nanoSIM standard, it’s pretty obvious T-Mobile’s trying to put this SIM in place for the iPhone 5.
Bet we’ll start seeing these same SIM cards popping up at AT&T soon enough.
Do you remember the GooPhone i5? It sounded like something you’d buy at a joke shop that would spurt some odious fluid down the inner cochlea of an unsuspecting victim who held it up to his ear, but it was actually a wonderfully brazen knock-off of the upcoming sixth-generation iPhone.
And hilariously, this pre-emptive copycat is already threatening to sue Apple over the iPhone 5, claiming to have patented the design.
You have to wonder if they felt a storm coming, as today, the hacking group AntiSec has released more than 12 million UDIDs that they managed to recover from an infilitrated FBI laptop. And your device ID — along with everything you did with the iPhone, iPod touch or iPad associated with it — might just be one of them.
After nearly a decade, my iTunes library weighs in at almost ninety-four gigabytes. A lot of serious music nerds would sneeze derisively at that, but it still represents over 13,000 songs that would take me, from start to finish, a full 48 days to listen to back to back.
I’d be lying if I said most of these had been acquired legally. Most of these albums were acquired on Bittorrent in my twenties. Many more were ripped from CDs lent to me by friends and family, or slurped up from Usenet to satisfy my obscure yet surface-thin musical fixations. Some were purchased through iTunes or other sources online, but truthfully, if you stripped everything out of my iTunes library that I’d acquired legally, I’d probably have a digital music library that could fit on a first generation iPod.
Over the course of the last two years, though, something interesting has happened. I’ve grown a conscience. These days, all of the music I listen to is listened to legally. But iTunes not only has no part in it. In fact, for the past two years, my iTunes library has just been collecting dust: a graveyard to the music piracy of my youth.
I’m ashamed of it. I want to try to explain things. Both why I started pirating music, why I stopped, and how, in fits and starts, being a music pirate helped transform me into someone who cared enough about music to buy it.
When the new iPhone is released with an all-new, totally redesigned 9-pin dock connector, even with an adapter, it’s going to throw the entire third-party iPhone accessory market into chaos. And unfortunately, it looks like Apple’s giving accessory makers no time to prepare with an early peek at the 9-pin connector. When the next iPhone debuts, it will take months for compatible accessories to be released. Sink or swim time.
This is fantastic. The guys over at Macrumors have put together a fantastic and very Apple-like video, expounding upon the virtues of the next iPhone’s larger 4-inch display. More apps, bigger homescreen, no more letterboxing in movies and widescreen gaming are the primary qualities promoted here. It’s fine work, and it really has me excited to see how Apple’s going to demonstrate this same capability come September 12th.
At this point, despite Tim Cook’s claim that Apple is “doubling down on secrecy”, we’ve seen pretty much everything there is to see when it comes to the new iPhone. If we Apple fans were peeping toms, the iPhone 5 would be like spying on a girl we have a date with Friday night and, instead of seeing her merely undress, witnessing her actually take off her skin and dance around her bedroom as a skeleton.
There’s not much more to see, but the boys over at Nowhereelse.fr — who have just been on fire this year when it comes to iPhone 5 parts — have posted some more shots of the next iPhone, including some very good comparison shots putting into perspective just how frickin’ thin this phone is compared to what came before. It’s a wafer!
I like the Apple Store as much as any Apple fan, but I wouldn’t want to live and work there.
You can’t say the same thing for David Wu, though. “Call me mad. Call me crazy. But I woke up one day around three months or more ago and decided to completely renovate my home study.”
So what’d he do? He made his home office a virtual recreation of an Apple Store, not only including a replica of Apple’s distinctive Fetzer Wooden Maple desks (with working drawers), a replica Apple Store sign with built-in, Apple TV-driven LED display and even a couple shelves full of boxed Apple products.
I’ll go ahead and call David Wu crazy. Here’s to the crazy ones. Read more about how he did it at his blog. More pictures of David’s sick set-up below, but make sure to go to Wu’s personal site for the rest.
If you think it’s just Apple’s stolen intellectual property that Samsung is in the habit of using, you might want to think again. Kun Hee Lee, Samsung’s billionaire CEO, drives himself around in one of the world’s rarest Ferraris, the 330 LMB… a $15 million automobile that is, in all likelihood, stolen goods.
In a laughable post over at LawPundit, Andis Kaulins makes an argument that Apple’s landmark $1 billion win against Samsung for patent infringement is at least partially bogus.
Why? Because Apple’s patent for bounce-back scrolling isn’t an original idea, but was, in fact, stolen from Pong, a game first released back in 1972. There are just a few problems with this idea…
The good news is that HTC’s next 10-inch tablet won’t look like an iPad. Instead, it will look nearly identical to a unibody iMac instead, right down to its OS X style dock and lopsided, 16:9 aspect ratio design.
Facebook’s on a roll lately. Just a week after they released their hyper fast speed update to the native Facebook app, the world’s biggest social network has also given some improvements to the lesser-used Facebook Camera, adding notifications, likes, improved photo management, comments and other UI improvements. It’s actually a pretty usable app now!
What is a Goophone? It sounds absolutely filthy, but the Goophone i5 is the first of what will undoubtedly be many flagrant Chinese rip-offs of the upcoming design of the new sixth-generation iPhone, set to be unveiled next month. Expect to see a lot more of these going forward, but credit where credit’s due: these Chinese counterfeiters certainly have their acts together if they can steal the design of a phone that isn’t even out yet.
Back in my shameful Windows PC years, Trillian was my go-to instant messaging app: the software of choice if you wanted to juggle a bunch of different IM accounts without having a half dozen apps open.
When I moved to Mac, I quickly moved over to Adium and never looked back, but Trillian’s been making waves on the Apple side of things lately. First, they ported over Trillian to the Mac, and then they released a native iPhone version.
Now version 2.0 of Trillian for iOS here, and it brings a much clammored for feature: native iPad support. And it looks great.
Yesterday, we reported on a theory that a small square chip in the next iPhone could be a secret NFC chip. But today, Anandtech is making a much more convincing case that it’s not.
It's looking increasingly likely the iPad mini will get its own launch event in October.
Take the back-of-the-envelope scribblings of a tech blogger with the appropriate degree of skepticism, but according to this breakdown of what the build-of-materials (BOM) cost of the upcoming iPad mini could be, Apple will sell their 7.85-inch tablet for $299 when it debuts later this year… and still make over $100 in profit on each unit sold.
This weekend saw Palo Alto, California once again hosting its annual Festival of the Arts. The festival is known, amongst other things, for its yearly Italian Street Painting Expo, in which over sixty street artists take to the pavement to make elaborate paintings in chalk.
This year, to honor Palo Alto’s most famous adopted son, street artist Lawrence Viariseo did this amazing technicolor Steve Jobs portrait. Steve looks, perhaps, a little bit leonine in the painting, but that just makes it better: Apple’s founder always did have a thing for lions.
Check out the Vlariseo drawing the portrait below, courtesy of Flickr user Tim Roper. It’s a thing of beauty.
Every morning, I scrape myself off of the bottom of my hangover’s hobnailed boot and try to make it down to the gym. About two-out-of-five times, I’ll oogily succeed and manage to douse myself in the pool until I’ve either done fifty laps or turned the water fifty proof, whichever comes first.
If only there was a way to be better motivated, I’ll often think to myself. Which is why I’m intrigued by a partnership between GymPack and RunKeeper, that will not only award me real money when I successfully drag my carcass to the gym, and actually penalize me money when I don’t.
Here’s an interesting theory from Macotakara, riffing on photos highlighted by Apple.pro last week: the square chip seen at the top of the next iPhone, to the right of the built-in iSight camera, could be an NFC chip. In fact, it looks exactly the same size as one.
Show us what's in your gadget bag and win an awesome new bag to replace it!
Here at Cult of Mac, we love showing off what’s in our gadget bags. It’s like a ritual: first to meticulously pack your bag with all the gear you could possibly need to get through the day, but then to empty it out, arrange it neatly and present it for the scrutiny and admiration of your fellow computer geeks.
We love seeing what’s in people’s gadget bags, so we’re throwing a contest in partnership with one of our favorite bag makers, Waterfield Designs: show us what’s in your current gadget bag and if you impress us, you could win one of three amazing new gadget bags and sleeves for your Mac, iPhone and iPad!
Here’s how to enter Cult of Mac’s “What’s In My Gadget Bag?” contest!
Straight Talk is the real deal: fantastic coverage, blazing fast 3G speeds and no monthly contract.
Since I’m so excited, we’re going to front load this review: if you don’t want to sign a contract to have an iPhone, Straight Talk is the best prepaid carrier you can possibly choose in the United States. And even if you have no problem with signing a two year contract with one of the big three, you should seriously consider Straight Talk: you get the same quality of coverage and network speeds as if you signed up with AT&T for hundreds of dollars less.
