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.
There’s nothing more played out than amateur music videos about iPhones featuring the chorus line “There’s an app for that,” but in iMan by Luke Escombe in the corporation, it all somehow works.
That the music video is about an anthropomorphic iPhone in love with its owner who teams up with a radioactive cockroach and become her murderous stalker after accidentally being fried in the microwave doesn’t hurt, of course… it’s hard to be clichéd when that is your central premise.
A really fantastic song and really funny music video by Luke Escombe.
Apple is preparing to build another billion dollar data supercenter like the one powering its iCloud in North Carolina. This time, though, it’ll be built right outside of Reno, Nevada. Let’s hope that doesn’t prove to be the biggest little mistake Apple’s ever made.
Never say never: in the past ten years, Apple has entered market after market and revolutionized them. The portable media market. The smartphone market. The tablet market. The connected TV market.
Where will it end? Tim Cook has promised Apple will never release a Toasterfridge, but that’s not to say they might not enter the home appliance market… or at least that’s the conceit of this very funny parody ad by Slacktory.
We all know that despite only selling two different models of the iPhone and iPad each year, Apple owns the lion’s share of profits in the smartphone industry, even when compared to manufacturers who released dozens of different smartphones and tablets every year.
It gets even crazier, though. Look at this wonderful chart by market research firm VisionMobile, comparing shipping volumes, revenues and profits of the mobile industry from Q1 2011 to Q1 2012. In just a year, Apple has pretty much doubled not just the number of smartphones it ships, but the revenue and profit it makes off of them…. even while companies that were, a year ago, struggling to compete have pretty much gone belly up.
This video of Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire demonstrating his company’s new dual-screen AirPlay technology is doing the rounds this morning, and it’s certainly an impressive demo, in which Allaire is able to use his iPad to do one thing while playing video in the background on his Apple TV at the same time. Is this what using a true Apple HDTV will be like?
It’s hardly religious, but Apple tends to drop new developer betas of iOS every two weeks when a major new version is coming up. Today, Apple has started pushing out iOS 6 beta 2 over-the-air to registered developers.
We’ll be digging through iOS 6 Beta 2 today to find out what’s new, but there’s at least one change so far: when you install a new OTA update of iOS 6, the Settings icon apparently animates.
When Apple unveiled the new Retina MacBook Pros, one thing they really highlighted was the fact that, thanks to the new solid-state storage and assymetrical fans, the new MBP is the coolest, quietest MacBook Pro yet. That’s not hard to believe, but given how lap-meltingly hot previous MacBook Pros could get, it doesn’t really tell you how comfortable a new Retina MBP is going to be on your lap during a heavy workload. Heat maps to the rescue!
Before his tragic and untimely death last October, Steve Jobs’s chronic health issues were such a constant concern for investors that they arguably kept the stock price of the company artificially low for years, as Wall Street worried that the company would tank without its charismatic leader at the helm.
Obviously, that hasn’t happened. In fact, since Jobs’s death, Apple’s share price has soared to new highs. As sad as it is to say, in some ways, Jobs’s death finally liberated the stock from the hyperbolic threat of his death, and allowed investors to finally appraise the company as it actually is: the best on Earth, even without Steve, because he made it that way.
But Wall Street never learns. Since Google CEO Larry Page called in sick to last week’s annual meeting, investors are panicking.
The new BookBook case for the iPad 2 & new iPad looks right at home in a library.
Whether squirreling away a pistol, a bottle of Laphroaig or the true secret of the Mummy’s Curse, leathery hollowed-out tomes are a staple hiding place for both the bibliophile and posturing quasi-literate alike. And no wonder: there are few hiding places that are attached with the same sort of pungent and mysterious romanticism as an empty book.
For the last couple years, TwelveSouth has been trying to apply some of that mystery, romanticism and pungence with their line of BookBook cases for Apple devices. The cases, which protect your Apple device or computer in a leather-bound cover that could pass for an old folio if you don’t squint at the title too hard, are undeniably a little precious, but I’ve also found time and time again that they generate a lot of compliments from strangers.
Some of TwelveSouth’s BookBook experiments have been better than others. For example, we really loved the BookBook Case for the MacBook Air, but thought there were a lot of problems with the BookBook for iPad.
TwelveSouth must have been paying attention, because they’ve released an updated version of the BookBook for iPad, and it addresses pretty much all of our criticisms of the first model, finally turning it into a case that you can truly love, even if it does still have a few problems.
Switching from the iPhone to the Galaxy S III? You're crazy. Here's an app to help you switch.
Sometimes, something so traumatic happens to the human body that a person undergoes a complete personality shift. The girl who was, before, a model member of the Christian league gets hit by a car suddenly becomes promiscuous and violent. The good-natured guy who helps everyone has a wrench fall on his skull from fifty feet and becomes a drug-addicted psychopath. And the alpha businessman who is in a car crash goes from trading on Wall Street to rambling incoherently and exposing himself on subway platforms.
It’s sad, but it happens, and Samsung wants people who have been unfortunate enough to undergo such mental trauma ending in a complete personality shift to know that they’ve got a friend in them. That’s the only explanation for the Korean manufacturer’s latest play: an app for the deranged minds who are switching from the iPhone to a Galaxy smartphone.
For all the buzz about the Microsoft Surface, we don’t know really know the most important things about it yet. We don’t know when it’ll be released. We don’t know how much it’ll cost. As nice as the Surface looks, Microsoft didn’t even say if it would come with 3G, let alone with LTE. And according to Bloomberg, the reason they didn’t announce it is because the Surface won’t: it’s WiFi-only.
The word “innovative” has been thrown around a lot in the aftermath of Microsoft’s Surface announcement, but how innovative is the design, anyway? The thickest part of a MacBook Air is the keyboard, which allows you to balance it on your lap to type on it; where as the Microsoft Surface is just an Air flipped upside down, with the thickest part the screen, making it the first thing to go flipping off your lap.
Okay, we admit, this image is a little exaggerated, but it’s funny, and it does raise a good criticism of the Surface: ostensibly, the Surface is a tablet with a keyboard cover that allows it to be used as a notebook, but its form factor makes it impossible to type on unless you’re at a desk or a table.
If your Mac doesn't already have one of these, now's a good time to make the upgrade.
Forget RAM, forget a faster CPU, forget a beefier graphics card. If you are still running a Mac with a spinning, physical hard drive, the best upgrade you can possibly make is to drop a solid-state flash drive into the machine. The immediate effect on perceived performance is stunning: it’s the difference between seeing a spinning beach ball every hour and not seeing one for months at a time.
Unfortunately, for a long time, what has kept most people from making this update to their older Macs has been price. SSDs are more expensive than physical HDDs. That’s still true, by the way, but it’s less so now than it ever has been, making this a perfect time to finally take the plunge.
This looks like a simple trick, but the result is just hypnotic. It looks like Redditor eharp1126 just set up a screen sharing loop between two machines on his MacBook Pro, but the result is positively Escher-like… a long mirrored hallways of Mac infinity.
This week’s TIME Magazine cover story is called “The Cult of Apple in China.” On newsstands tomorrow, it’s an in-depth look at how Apple thrives in China.
The article’s author, Hannah Beech, writes: “The American company is thriving in China, even as other Western tech firms struggle with local competition and communications restrictions imposed by the authoritarian state. Apple products now serve as the ultimate totem of upward mobility in a country with a fast-growing middle class.”
That all sounds rosy, but as Beech makes clear, the future is far for certain as Apple, as the government of China increasingly becomes nationalistic. How long will they allow Apple to profit so handsomely within China without starting to try to take a bigger piece of the pie?
If you were asked to name a company who would finally solve all of your password woes, who would it be? Apple? Google? 1Password? Lastpass?
Good guesses, but no. The company who’s going to end all of your password juggling problems is Detroit carmaker Ford. And they’re going to do it with an iOS app and a Chrome extension that means that just sitting down in front of your Mac with your iPhone in your pocket will be enough to unlock all of your accounts and profiles on the web, instantaneously.
Laptop bags are all well and good, but sometimes, they just can’t fit what you need to carry: groceries on the way home from work, a change of clothes for the gym, a picnic lunch on a nice day or a bag of books you picked up on the way home. And while a well-made laptop bag might be very fashionable on a man, on a lady, it might not be nearly as chic.
One of our favorite bag companies, Waterfield Designs, has just outed a new bag that address both issues: the Outback Tote. And it’s a beauty.
See that five-pin connector on the side of Microsoft's Surface? That's pretty much a MagSafe.
Ever since it first debuted in January 2006, Apple has jealously guarded its MagSafe technology from being poached by the competition. Patented up the wazoo, Apple doesn’t allow knock-offs and goes after companies that try to rip it off, even going so far as to sue companies that make MagSafe compatible accessories that use official recycled MagSafe connectors.
It’s through being so aggressive about its MagSafe IP that, to this day, none of the competition has anything like it. That’s about to change, though: the new Microsoft Surface tablet has a MagSafe-like connector. Prepare for a legal showdown.
The Retina MacBook Pro is the best Mac Apple has ever made. But is it the best Mac for you? Photo: Cult of Mac
The new 2012 15-Inch Retina MacBook Pro marks an evolution of the Mac: it’s the first of presumably the entire Mac line-up to get a Retina display, just like the iPhone and iPad.
Unlike the iPhone or iPad, however, the new Retina MacBook Pro is not aimed at the mass market. This is a professional machine, through and through, and has a price to match, starting at $2,199.
The beauty of the Retina MacBook Pro’s display can’t be overestimated: it’s like living print. Likewise, the Retina MacBook Pro is the most powerful all-in-one professional notebook you can buy off the shelf: it makes every Apple notebook before it look archaic.
It’s a Mac that has been designed by Apple for the first time as they would have it: completely without compromises, using cutting-edge technology that it will take at least a year for the competition to catch-up with.
On the left, a ticket in iOS 6's new app, Passport. On the right, the horrific plane crash from Lost. Both are the same flight.
Watching the new WWDC 2012 developer video “Introducing Passbook, Part 1,” we couldn’t help but notice that about three minutes in, one of the example passes Apple uses to show off Passbook’s functionality is for a ticket on Oceanic Flight 815 from Sydney to Los Angeles.
If that fictional airline sounds familiar, it should: that’s the same airline and flight as the one which kicks off the events in the hit ABC television series, Lost.
Using that ticket in real life would see you stranded on a mysterious, time-shifting tropical island in the middle of nowhere, where you would have to wrestle with rampaging polar bears, sexy ladies, malevolent insect swarms and an enragingly stupid sixth season that basically boils all of the mysteries down to “a wizard did it.”
Without a doubt, Tweetbot is the best Twitter client for the iPhone and iPad, putting to shame Twitter’s official app offering. Many have hoped that Tweetbot developer Tapbot would soon bring the experience to the Mac, and it looks like those hopes are about to come true, as Tweetbot for Mac is already within testing at Tapbot HQ.
Foxconn Chairman and President Terry Gou didn’t get where he is by mouthing off details about secret products he is building to the press, but according to a new report, he’s just confirmed that the iPhone 5 is coming… and it’ll make the Samsung Galaxy S III look like a hunk of junk. If it didn’t already.
As a professional blogger, the only fashion choices I make involve whether to blog from my torn boxers or my filthy briefs, or whether I should accessorize my t-shirt with a mustard or mayonaise blotch.
That said, at heart, I’ve always admired the fancy lads with pants to match who put themselves together with an eye towards fashion, and so I’ve always been a big fan of Cloth, an iPhone app that allows you to put together a database of your best outfits and scroll through them for inspiration, rate them according to how good you look and even share them on Twitter or Facebook with friends.
The only thing Cloth couldn’t do up until now was tell you what to wear… but that’s just changed, thanks to a partnership with Weather Underground that will allow Cloth to automatically suggest outfits appropriate to the weather outside.
They’re not for everyone, but if you like ensconcing your Apple devices in sumptuous leather bound hides as if they were dusty and mysterious tomes just pulled off an ancient library shelf, no one does it better than TwelveSouth with their BookBook series.
TwelveSouth has had a BookBook case for iPad for awhile, but they just gave it an overhaul, slimming it down by 33% and featuring an all-new interior frame that allows you to position the iPad at an angle for typing or watching movies.
The new BookBook for iPad is available now in brown, black and red and costs $80. We’ve got one, and we’ll be posting a review in the coming days.
Yesterday, we reported that according to the speculation of display expert Dr. Raymond Soneira, the new Retina MacBook Pro could conceivably use Sharp IGZO display technology originally meant for the new iPad.
At the time, we were a little skeptical of the claim. Turns out we were right, as the new displays don’t use IGZO at all.
