Sure, with those sleek, lean lines it looks great naked. But once you take it outside your house, it’s a good idea to have some protection, an easy way to prop it up and carry it. And speakers!
Here’s a hand-picked selection of all the iPad accessories Cult of Mac reviewed this year — but only the best ones. These add-ons all received the highest rating, or a full four stars, from our gadget-weary team of reviewers. Shine on!
Screen protector
Screen protectors are the best way to keep your device’s display in great condition, but applying them is a pain in the butt. It’s hard enough ensuring they go down straight, but you also have to worry about trapping dirt, dust, and bubbles beneath them. But not with the Tru-Fit. Inside the packaging is the Tru-Fit Film Applicator, which is essentially a plastic frame the shape of your iPad. You place the film inside the frame, then clean your iPad’s display using the included microfiber cloth.
Unlike other screen protectors, the Tru-Fit also comes with a sticky sheet that you can use on your front of your iPad’s display to ensure you’ve removed any dust and debris, and to prevent anything from settling on it while you’re getting the protector ready. It’s durable, anti-glare and has a terrific grip. Available for the iPad Air, iPad 2/3/4 and iPad Mini.
The Acase for iPad mini is a beautiful case. Its high-quality leather design provides an elegant look while providing your device with protection from head to toe — for only $40. It fits like a glove, and the iPad mini is held securely inside with a leather flap that slips in behind the device.
The build quality is excellent; the stitching is strong and neat, and I have no worries about it falling apart after months of heavy use. Acase has clearly used the best materials and built this thing to last. Reviews editor Charlie Sorrel recommends the “vintage brown” version of the case, which has a soft matte leather finish, over the black and chestnut brown versions. The vintage one gains character with a bit of wear, the other two probably won’t.
If you’re looking for excellent protection for all iPad models (plus most iPhones, too), check out Loop Attachment’s Mummy Case, which swathes your device in oops-proof rubber. What sets it apart from the cheap silicone cases on eBay for a few dollars: a special coating that not only makes it super soft and smooth, but also keeps out dirt and grime.
Reviewer Killian Bell says: “I’ll happily hand my iPad to my kids while it’s in the Mummy Case, safe in the knowledge that if they drop it on the kitchen floor, it’s not going to get damaged.” The Mummy covers a large portion of your iPad’s front bezel, which provides some protection for its display. It should be more than enough to prevent it from getting damaged if it lands flat on its face, but for added peace of mind, you can combine the Mummy with a Smart Cover.
If putting together those Lego sets hasn’t left you completely exhausted, the HiRise is the docking station for you.
Twelve South’s HiRise for iPhone and iPad mini, is a combination dock and stand that looks great, is made of solid materials, fits both an iPad and an iPhone at the same time, works with cases, and best of all, will almost definitely work with all future iterations of iPhone and iPad that have a Lightning connector.
It also works with most cases, so you don’t have to dance the on-off fumble every time you need a charge. One caveat: putting it together. While beautifully packaged, the HiRise comes disassembled, like something you’d buy from IKEA. The screws didn’t want to fit, the hexwrenches were so small that they hurt my fingers to use, and even after I put the HiRise together, the two arms were very slightly crooked from one another.
“Once the HiRise is put together, I don’t have a single complaint about it. But I never want to put one together again,” says reviewer John Brownlee.
Bring the noise: UE Boom by Ultimate Ears/Logitech.
Your iPad can double as a music maker — if you grab a decent speaker. To get some serious sound from your device, check out the UE Boom by Ultimate Ears/Logitech.
“Where this intensity comes in handy is outside,” says reviewer Rob LeFebvre. “I’ve used the UE Boom in my yard, on my bike, and in my car and it’s loud and lovely in every location. I was able to provide music for a smaller outdoor BBQ just the other day with only the Boom as our speaker of choice.”
The fact that up to eight Bluetooth devices can pair with the UE Boom at one time is yet another killer feature, as it let several of the BBQ guests play their favorite tunes through the device, without ever having to re-pair between users. I let my iPhone 5, iPad mini, and Macbook Air all pair with the UE Boom so I can send audio from any one of these devices at a moment’s notice, without having to re-pair or mess with configurations.
It’s not the cheapest of speakers – coming in at a pricey $171 – but it may be the only one you’ll ever need.
The Logitech Bluetooth Easy-Switch Keyboard K811 was so nice we reviewed it twice. Both Killian and Charlie found it the best keyboard they’d ever used – whether it was for stay-at-home or cafe-airport-train use. It’s lightweight, reliable, has a great feel.
And it works across iDevices, so you can connect it to whatever you need to type with while on the go. Charlie says, “Buy it. There’s almost no way you’ll be disappointed. Quite the opposite in fact: you’ll look forward to using it.”
I’ve been a fan of Apple products from way back. As I left for college, my dad bought an Apple IIGS for the home. All I remember was a ton of boxes and a computer that came with big, fat manuals.
When I got my first Mac, it was a Performa 638CD. It was a beige box contained in (I think) white boxes. It wasn’t very exciting.
Then, back in 2008, I bought the very first model iPhone, the one with a silver back and a black plastic area on the bottom to let the signal in. The box was delightful.
Everything was sensual, from the solid rigidity of the glossy cardboard box to the way each piece nestled gently, safely, inside its own separate section. The iPhone was the first thing I saw when I opened the box.
This first iPhone iteration was a brand new object of desire. I’d never seen such a device, let alone the kind of phone that would all but become ubiquitous over the next five years. If the choirs of angels didn’t sing when I lifted the rectangle of glass and plastic from its carefully molded resting place inside the packaging, but they should have.
Underneath the iPhone were three separate sections: one for the headphones, one for the iPhone dock and a final one for the charging brick. Under those glorious white accessories was the 30-pin connecting USB cable.
What an achievement of design, this box. The packaging alone proved that Apple was making this iPhone for people like me. This wasn’t just messing around; this device was worth some seriously put together casing.
When I was the tech guy for a small non-profit in Alaska a few years back, we used to order new Macbooks every few years to replace the ones that were obsolete or end of life. We’d purchase a dozen or more, depending on the budget.
Opening the boxes to set the MacBooks up became a ritual: I knew exactly what I would find in each box. Every piece had its special place inside the package, which itself had a foam piece glued to the inner top of the flip-up lid to help cushion the MacBook from any inadvertent harm when being transported in the retail carton. There was a handle built in to each container, and everything just, well, fit.
That’s the thing about every product Apple designs these days: the stuff each device comes in is as much an object of attention as the actual iPhone or Mac that it comes in.
It says to purchasers: “Yes, your device is special. It is made just for you (in California).”
It’s yet one more thing that Apple gets right: the box that brings your new miracle of technology into your life makes you feel good even before you use the device itself.
So as you open that shiny new iOS or Mac that came from under the tree in brightly wrapped paper, pause a moment to notice the attention to detail heaped upon the lowly packaging.
You’ll feel good, and be glad you did. Happy Holidays!
If you’re fortunate enough to receive a new Mac this Holiday season, in addition to graciously thanking whoever gave it to you, you should make some time to take care of a few basic preliminary matters, which will end up saving you time and money in the long-run.
Unboxing. Unbox your Mac while being careful not to rip, tear, destroy, or discard any of the box or accompanying materials. There are a number of reasons why this is a good idea, but here are two of the biggest ones.
First, if something ends up being wrong with your Mac – whether it’s defective or an incorrect model – you’re going to need its original packaging (provided you’re still within Apple’s return policy period). Note here that although Apple’s return policy normally permits returns for up to fourteen days after purchase Apple has extended the deadline for returns on purchases made during the holiday season. This year, any purchases made between November 1, 2013 and December 25, 2013 can be returned through January 8, 2014.
Second, let’s think long-term here. Macs retain their value like no other consumer electronics products and, therefore, there’s a good chance that you may want to resell your Mac at some point in the future. Having your Mac’s original packaging materials always helps make the product look more attractive to potential buyers and will certainly help you sell it faster and for a better price.
Initial Inspection. Conduct a basic inspection of your new Mac. Have a good look at its exterior. Is there any damage? It doesn’t matter how slight because exterior damage may be evidence of a greater issue or defect. Make sure there aren’t any scratches on its body, chips or cracks in its screen, or any other evidence of damage or mishandling.
If your Mac is even slightly damaged you should take advantage of Apple’s extended holiday return policy and exchange it for a new one.
In my experience, Apple permits the return of damaged Macs provided the damage is reported very shortly after purchase. The longer you wait, however, the more likely an Apple representative will assume you caused the damage.
There are at least two reasons why you should do this: first, if your Mac turns out to be defective you’re going to have to take it to Apple for repair. If your Mac has undocumented damage an Apple Genius or repair technician may refuse to honor its One-Year limited Warranty or AppleCare (if you purchased AppleCare) because of the damage. It’s going to be their word against yours and – whether or not you eventually convince Apple honor the warranty or AppleCare – that’s not an argument you ever want to have to make. If Apple doesn’t honor your Mac’s warranty or AppleCare you’re stuck paying for the repair out of pocket.
Second, damage will always reduce the resale value of your Mac. If you ever do decide to resell your Mac you may have a more difficult time getting a good price, or even finding a buyer, if it’s damaged.
Check for Defects. Apple makes great products, but defects are a sad reality of any manufacturing process. You should put your Mac through at least an elementary vetting process where you inspect it for potential defects. Defects are different from physical damage. Unlike physical damage, which is not covered by Apple’s standard One-Year Limited Warranty or standard AppleCare (not to be confused with AppleCare+, which does provide limited coverage for accidental damage on iPhones) defects are fully covered and, therefore, there’s less of a sense of urgency here. That said, without going into all of the reasons, it’s always better to get defects handled sooner than later.
Chances are your Mac will not be defective, but do your due diligence just in case. When I’m checking my Macs for defects, I like to break it down by the various hardware components that make it up and I go through them one-by-one – asking myself whether each component behaves as advertised. For example, does the screen have an unacceptably high number of dead pixels; is my Mac able to connect to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices; does the battery hold a proper charge; etc.?
If something seems to be awry with any part of my Mac – something is visibly broken or a component is just not performing as I think it should – I research the specific symptoms online and make a decision about whether or not I should take it in for further inspection, repair, or replacement.
Save the Date. If, after carefully unpacking and inspecting your new Mac, you’re happy with its condition then it’s time to set a few extremely important reminders. Mark your calendar or, better yet, set an alarm on your Mac’s iCal to notify you of the key dates in your Mac’s life. Determine the relevant dates by going to Apple’s Warranty Status page. This page will tell you when your One-Year Limited Warranty and/or AppleCare (if you purchased AppleCare) are set to expire. Once you have determined these dates, you should proceed to set the appropriate alarms.
First, set one to go off on January 6, 2014. If your Mac was purchased during this holiday season then this is two days before you will have to decide whether or not to return your Mac to Apple. Second, set an alarm for two weeks before your Mac’s One-Year Limited Warranty expires. When it goes off, take some time to give your Mac a thorough inspection for any defects that may have manifested during the first year of its life. Third, if you purchased AppleCare or have any other operative dates (third-party insurance, credit card purchase protection, etc.) set an alarm to go off one to two weeks before those expire and conduct the same type of inspection when the time comes.
Stay Informed & Never Stop Learning. If you’ve followed the our advice, you’ve taken several of the most essential steps towards protecting yourself from the some of the most common issues owners of Apple products experience. Enjoy your new Mac, but also remember that it’s an expensive piece of equipment and worth owning responsibly. It’s up to you to stay informed about the particular model of Mac you now own as well as Apple products in general.
It’s the season for new iPhones and iPads. If you’re buying a new device you may be wondering how to best protect it from the risk of defect or damage. Aside from using a case, you may also be thinking about purchasing a supplemental protection plan.
There’s a reason why many consumer rights advocates agree that protection plans are a bad deal for consumers. The plans are expensive and only a small fraction of people that buy them actually end up using them. With that said, some people find value in the peace of mind and ease of repair that protection plans offer.
If you do decide extra protection is right for you then weigh your options carefully. Protection plans aren’t cheap and their terms and conditions vary widely from one plan to another. Buying an overly-expensive plan or assuming that a plan offers coverage where it doesn’t can be a frustrating and costly mistake.
So, how do your options stack up? Let’s look at a few of them with a focus towards plans most suitable for the new iPhone 5S. Hopefully this article will give you some ideas about the types of things you can look out for when you’re shopping for protection plans. You’ll find a table summarizing the protection plans at the end of this article.
Apple’s One-Year Limited Warranty
While not technically a protection plan, Apple’s One-Year Limited Warranty is your first line of defense. It comes included with every new or refurbished Mac including the iPhone and iPad regardless of where you purchase it. For example, if you buy a new iPhone 5S from your local T-Mobile store it’s still covered by Apple’s One-Year Limited Warranty. The warranty covers your device from manufacturing and design defects, but it does not protect it from theft, loss, or accidental damage. As the name suggests, it gives you coverage for one year. If you find a defect within that first year, Apple will repair or replace your device, free of charge. There is no signup fee; there is no deductible.
If defects are your main concern, then remember that Apple’s One-Year Limited Warranty provides very good protection at no extra cost to you. If, however, you are genuinely concerned about loss, theft, accidental, damage or extended warranty coverage beyond the first year then maybe a protection plan is right for you.
Apple’s One-Year Limited Warranty at a glance.
AppleCare+
Despite recent price changes, AppleCare+ is still the Cadillac of protection plans in terms of convenience and service. AppleCare+ offers extended warranty coverage and protection from accidental damage from handling (known as “ADH”). AppleCare+ is only available for the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and iPod Classic and for those devices AppleCare+ is your only AppleCare option (i.e. you cannot purchase standard AppleCare for those devices).
The plan’s convenience and service quality are its standout features. First, Apple is your one-stop-shop for everything you need. You can buy AppleCare+ along with your device, or any time within 30 days after purchase. When doing the latter, Apple does require you to have your device inspected either in-person at an Apple Store or through remote diagnostic by calling (800) 275-2273. Servicing your device under AppleCare+ is also extremely convenient. You can choose from the many service options Apple offers: carry-in to an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider (“AASP”), mail-in service, do-it-yourself service (“DIY”), etc. Carry-in service often results same-day service, which is as good as it gets.
Second, you should expect parts and labor under AppleCare+ to be of the highest quality because Apple, the original manufacturer, is doing the work. It’s one thing to say Apple has a great track record in this regard, which it does, but Apple also backs it up on paper. The AppleCare+ policy states that when repairing your device Apple will use new parts or parts that are equivalent to new in performance and reliability.
AppleCare+ does have its drawbacks. It has always been one of the more expensive protection plans and upcoming changes to AppleCare policies and procedures may, someday, render it a less attractive option. The recent increase to the ADH service fee has made it even more expensive. AppleCare+ for the iPhone will now cost you $99 up front and $79 per ADH incident (limited to two ADH incidents). AppleCare+ for the iPad will now cost you $99 up front and $49 per ADH incident (limited to two ADH incidents).
While this may sound like a great idea, remember that Apple’s current procedure for carry-in service for many devices is to simply give you a new device. The current process usually takes a matter of minutes, which is one of the plan’s best features. If these proposed changes become a reality, then you may be forced to wait while a technician performs the repair work. Time will tell whether this negatively impacts the quality of service, but it will most certainly increase the amount of time you need to wait for a repair.
AppleCare+ at a glance.
Third-Party Protection Plans
If you’re looking for coverage or pricing options that are different from AppleCare+, then third-party protection plans may be a good alternative. Third-party protection plans give you diverse options in terms of cost, coverage, and service.
However, the diversity in these plans is a double-edged sword because they vary widely depending on who is offering the plan, what you’re protecting, and specific protection options (e.g. two-year vs. three-year terms, deductible-free plans, etc.). To make things more difficult, important information is often buried deep in contract legalese.
The devil is in the details: read the fine print and evaluate your choices carefully in terms of pricing, coverage, and service. For simplicity’s sake, let’s compare SquareTrade’s iPhone 5S protection plans to AppleCare+ for the iPhone 5S (prices and plan options as of September 2013).
Pricing differs both in terms of the signup fee and ADH service fee. SquareTrade’s iPhone protection plans cost between $124 for up to two years of coverage and $154 for up to three years of coverage. AppleCare+ costs $99 for two years of coverage. SquareTrade does offer special promotional pricing from time to time. AppleCare prices generally do not change. For repairs, SquareTrade’s plan costs $50 per ADH incident for the iPhone 5S whereas AppleCare+ costs $79 per ADH incident.
Term of coverage is also different. AppleCare+ provides two years of extended warranty support plus two incidents of ADH. There are no other limits on support or service. SquareTrade gives you up to two or three years of extended warranty support (depending on the plan you buy) plus up to four incidents of ADH, but limits the life of the protection plan to the value of the protected device. Note the emphasis placed on “up to” when describing SquareTrade’s plan. Once SquareTrade performs repair or replacement services that, in aggregate, add up to the value of your insured device the plan is terminated and your device is no longer covered.
These differences in coverage term can impact you in unexpected ways. For example, consider how the different coverage terms play out in situations involving warranty-type defect repair (i.e. defects typically covered by warranty). If your iPhone is still under its One-Year Limited Warranty Apple will service it under that, no questions asked.
If your iPhone is no longer covered by its one-year warranty Apple will service your iPhone under AppleCare+ (assuming you purchased AppleCare+). Under AppleCare+ Apple will repair or replace your defective device with no limitations just as it did under the warranty period. Warranty-type service does not carry a deductible, it do not count as an ADH incident, and there are no limitations on number of defect repairs.
Under SquareTrade’s protection plan, SquareTrade will refer you to Apple if your iPhone is still covered by its one-year warranty. If your iPhone is not covered by its warranty, then SquareTrade will have you mail it to them so they can do the repairs. There is no deductible for warranty-type service under SquareTrade’s plans either, butthe cost of repairs will be deducted from the life of your protection plan.
For example, let’s say SquareTrade values your iPhone at $549 and during the second year of ownership a manufacturing defect in the iPhone’s screen renders it inoperable. SquareTrade will service your iPhone, but it will deduct the value of the repair from your protection plan contract. If SquareTrade values the repair at $230 then you will have $319 left of coverage ($549 – $230 = $319) under the protection plan. Should misfortune strike again, you had better hope the cost of repair doesn’t exceed $319. Under AppleCare+ the warranty service will not impact your remaining ADH coverage in any way.
Finally, the service is very different. You can expect both the process and quality of repair services to vary dramatically between third-party protection plans. No matter how you look at it, there is more red tape involved under third-party protection plans than there is under AppleCare+.
The quality of repair services also varies. As mentioned above, AppleCare+ guarantees a high standard: replacement parts are guaranteed to be new or equivalent to new in performance and reliability. Not all third-party protection programs make specific guarantees about labor or replacement parts. Many of these plans guarantee only re-manufactured parts, refurbished parts, parts of merchantable quality, or are silent on the subject altogether. SquareTrade guarantees new or refurbished parts. The quality of repair parts and/or workmanship may matter to you and, if it does, you should take time to understand how different protection plans will repair your device.
SquareTrade’s protection plan at a glance (focused on iPhone 5S).
Carrier Insurance Plans
Mobile carrier insurance plans are just third-party protection plans offered directly by your mobile carrier (usually through an affiliated insurance company). Many of the same caveats with mobile carrier insurance plans also apply to other third-party protection plans – read the fine print.
Two of the biggest advantages of mobile carrier insurance plans are their low up-front cost and extensive coverage. First, mobile insurance plans typically do not charge a hefty signup fee. For example, AT&T’s Mobile Insurance Plan for the iPhone 5S costs $6.99 per month for the duration of AT&T’s standard two-year mobile services contract. If spending $99 or more up front on a protection plan isn’t in your budget right now, then perhaps a low monthly fee would work better for you.
Second, mobile insurance plans typically offer far more coverage in terms of types of loss and amount of coverage than you might get with AppleCare+ or third-party protection plans. AT&T’s Mobile Insurance Plan protects your device from “loss,” which it defines as accidental loss, theft, ADH, or warranty-type failure outside of coverage period of the original manufacturers warranty. AppleCare+ and SquareTrade do not cover lost or stolen devices. AT&T’s Mobile Insurance Plan guarantees protection from two loss incidents per twelve-month period, for a total of four loss incidents over the life of your contract. The coverage value for each incident is capped at $1500, which is more than enough to cover an iPhone 5s (although each loss incident also carries a hefty deductible). AppleCare+ and SquareTrade have more stringent limits due to ADH allotments or limitations on value of service (discussed earlier).
The biggest disadvantages of mobile carrier insurance plans are that they’re extremely expensive in the long term and they suffer from many of the same process and service quality headaches common to third-party protection plans.
Process and quality of service considerations are similar to other third-party protection plans. AT&T’s Mobile Insurance has a claims filing process, which imposes certain duties that you need to understand. For example, if your loss incident involves any violation of law or loss of possession (e.g. your iPhone 5S was stolen) you are required to promptly notify local law enforcement and obtain proof of that notification. If you have ever had to report stolen property to the authorities, you know that it is not often a very convenient or streamlined process…
AT&T’s Mobile Insurance Plan at a glance (iPhone 5S).
Credit Card Purchase Protection
Credit card purchase protection programs offer a superb way to mitigate risk without paying out-of-pocket for a protection plan. A number of different companies offer cards (credit and debit) that include automatic purchase protection.
Credit card purchase protection programs give you additional but limited return, extended warranty, ADH, loss and theft protection for anything you buy using the card. There are no enrollment conditions; there are no signup fees; there are no deductibles. Although many cards that offer purchase protection charge annual fees there are plenty that do not. For example, the AMEX Blue Cash Everyday card has no annual fee and includes purchase protection as one of its benefits.
Credit card protection programs typically offer extensive coverage from ADH, loss, or theft for up to 90 days after purchase and extend the terms of any manufacturer’s warranty by a year or more beyond expiration. For example, AMEX’s purchase protection program will extend Apple’s One-Year Limited Warranty by one year after it expires. Moreover, AMEX’s purchase protection program also extends manufacturer service plans by up to one year (i.e. AppleCare+ because Apple is the manufacturer).
The biggest drawbacks to credit card protection programs are their limited coverage, varying terms and conditions, and lack of convenience compared to more comprehensive protection plans such as AppleCare+ or SquareTrade. Coverage from loss, theft, or ADH lasts only for a short time; after 90 days you’re on your own.
Stickers by Dharma Comics given out at the first Compassion and Tech Conference.
Marc Brackett wants to put a Mood Meter on every smartphone. That way, in addition to helping us get through our daily lives, iPhones can make us more attuned to why and when we feel cheerful, tired or annoyed.
The director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence has been working with a team from HopeLab on an app with a simple interface where users rate their energy and pleasantness using four colors and a five-point scale.
If you’re at all like New Yorker Brackett, you’ll frequently find yourself in the red. And that’s a not necessarily a bad thing.
“I like being angry. It drives me to change education policy,” Brackett said. His presentation substituted a scheduled one about empathy and video games.
Despite the pinch hit, his talk resonated strongly with participants and echoed several of the ideas presented in the projects presented in a later competition.
“I have come to understand that students who are more emotionally confident tend to be strong language learners,” Angela Weikel, Spanish teacher and world languages department chair of San Domenico School in Marin County told Cult of Mac. “So if I can bolster students’ self-esteem through scientific strategies, they are more likely to enjoy learning Spanish and will connect with the culture.” She says she plans to implement Brackett’s ideas to help students’ develop a richer vocabulary and become more aware of their feelings.
Speaking with Brackett afterwards, I wondered whether my own first reaction — which usually involves some gradation of annoyed (irritated, peeved, irated) would move into another realm through diligent tracking. “Not really, but that’s all right. To a certain extent if you can name it, you can tame it. But compassion for all of your states is a better goal.”
Brackett recounted his own struggle with mood states, realizing he doesn’t like to be in the yellow (high energy, high pleasantness) after experimenting with it in a Crossfit class.
“I’m not pumped like the trainer, or the rest of the guys. I’m never going to be like that. I’m a red or blue kind of guy.”
The app (digital mood ring 2.o?) is expected to be available for public consumption by April 2014, if not sooner, in Android and iOS versions. It’ll face competition from dozens of mood tracking apps on the market – ranging from MoodyMe to The National Center for Telehealth & Technology’s T2 Mood Tracker.
While many of the ideas presented during the conference weren’t new — at least if you’ve been to a few meet-ups or tech accelerator showcases in the Bay Area — it comes at a time when the tech boom is seen as an antagonisticforce rather than a one that helps change society change for the better.
When Your iPhone Becomes A Compassion Trainer
You’re going about your business on a regular workday when a text message pops up on your iPhone from an anonymous number: “Stop texting me you jerk!”
How would you answer?
If you participated in a study from the University of Michigan about empathy, there are higher chances you might text something back like “Sorry you’re having a bad day! I think you’ve got the wrong number.”
Sara Konrath, an assistant research professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, says the results of the study that used texting prompts to “train” people in compassion were not conclusive, but the follow-up done six months after the conclusion of the study with the potentially hackle-raising text shows that our phones may help smooth out the rougher edges of our personalities.
“Men in particular less likely to agree that aggression was a good thing,” Konrath said. “It increases pro-social behavior, but not necessarily empathy.”
As part of the texting research, part of the John Templeton Foundation’s Character Project, participants thumbed their way through exercises designed to test for empathy reactions. Six times a day, they reported mood, feelings of connectedness, the number of people interacted with since the last text message and several other factors. Some were prompted to text messages that were empathy boosters (“send a nice text to someone close, try to make them feel loved”) while others were asked to reflect on someone they had trouble getting along with.
Konrath says that while empathy is heritable to an extent, she likens it to a muscle we can all work on strengthening. Conference goers found the results intriguing. “I can imagine structuring peer review around this concept and helping my students approach each other’s work more constructively, with greater focus on how they can become compassionate responders,” said Alyssa J. O’Brien a lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford.
Next up for Konrath? Trying to compare face-to-face empathy with text messages and possibly work on an app. Because we’re all different IRL.
My App Is More Altruistic Than Yours!
During the second half of the one-day conference, apps in the empathy space killed each other with kindness in a friendly competition. (Several of the speakers gave a nod to the other presenters and their ideas, opening the doors for collaboration once the gloves were off.) The 10 finalists each got a chance to tell judges and conference goers, who could vote by text message, why their idea would extend the reach of compassion with tech.
More Mood Tracking: personal mindfulness training with contest finalist Dara.
High school senior Sam Reiss was a shoe-in for first place, with a project that brings pen pals to the generation that grew up with Skype. Dubbed X-Change the World, its goals include “enhancing the cultural and global spectrum of youth throughout the world, improving the level of conversational English of our participants and building cross-cultural bridges that lead to greater global curiosity and compassion.”
The platform pairs students from the U.S. with teens in countries including Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Tanzania and Kenya in a virtual classroom. The project, which already won second place in a national youth service challenge, walked off with the $10,000 prize. Two other projects won $5,000 each plus a consultation with a a growth capital fund exec and a chance to meet the Dalai Lama. They included a taxi game called Compassion in Motion and wellness tracker SeekChange, which includes Siri-like component called Dara to track your moods and activities.
Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 30 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again waded through the iTunes store to compile a list of the best new movies, albums and books to come out this week.
Enjoy!
Best Albums
Childish Gambino – Because The Internet
It’s been a few weeks since anyone’s released a rap album worth getting excited about, but Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino, breaks the cold streak this week with his second album, Because the Internet. The album is soaked with bouncy energetic beats as Gambino ruminations on celebrity and fame spread throughout the 19 tracks.
The album is slim on super-star appearances which is all the better, leaving Glover plenty of opportunity to show off his colorful wordplay and rhyming, proving Childish Gambino is the best rapper you’ve never heard even though you’ve probably seen his face.
Honestly, Kells deserves this spot just for his recent resurgence with appearances on Lady Gaga’s “Do What U Want” and Beiber’s “PYD” alone. The 46 year-old crooner has been on a serious tear in 2013 with his 13th album, Black Panties being the ultimate night cap.
Has Kelly relaxed into playing a caricature of himself? Possibly. Black Panties ditches the soul-fused tones of his last two albums in favor of Kelly’s signature raunch. If you were expecting R’s album to be about anything other than what’s inside those panties, hah, what were you thinkin’? And while sex and pornography parade through every track, there’s still an air of indignation for newcomers throughout the record as Kells sets out to show why he will always be our generation’s most prominent sex master.
Childish Gambino and R. Kelly both dropped 19 tracks on their new albums this week, which seems like a ton of extra goodies in this era of singles and EPs, but then E-40 comes to the table and drops 45 tracks on his new album The Block Brochure pts 4, 5, & 6. Who in their right mind does that?
All that music doesn’t that E-40’s latest effort is full of fluff. Far from it. The legendary rapper still lets it fly with the best of them musing about life Northern California in one of the best rap albums this fall with appearances by T.I., 2 Chainz, Gucci Mane, Chris Brown, Juicy J, Young Dro and many more.
After cementing himself as everyone’s favorite shirtless actor, Matthew McConaughey has undergone one of the most interesting acting renaissances over the last few years thanks to great character roles in movies like Bernie, The Paperboy, and Killer Joe. I just watched his latest movie, Dallas Buyers Club, last week and was blown away how far Matty’s come as a serious actor.
You’ll have to wait a couple more months before Dallas Buyers Club hits iTunes, but in the meantime, check out his critically acclaimed role in Mud where McConaughey plays a fugitive drifter on the Mississippi River who enlists the help of two young boys to reconnect with his estranged girlfriend. Apple even dropped the rental price on Mud down to $0.99 for the week so you can catch his memorable performance on the cheap.
I don’t have any kids and after watching Prisoners, I’m not sure I ever really want any. I mean, sure kids are sweet and cute and great but then what happens when someone snatches up your child and the cops are powerless to do anything?
That’s pretty much what happens to Hugh Jackman in Prisoners as his six-year old daughter comes up missing. The only lead in her disappearance is a dingy RV that was parked on their street earlier, but after the police fail to connect its driver with the crime the investigators are forced to let him go, leading Jackman to take matters into his own hands.
As far as I’m concerned, there is no better way to get yourself into the Christmas spirit than curling up on the couch and watching Elf. Even though the movie came out over a decade ago, it’s hard to think of any actor giving a better Christmas performance than Will Ferrell as Buddy the Elf.
Despite being a human, Buddy was raised by elves in the North Pole after crawling into Santa’s gift bag as a baby. Now a full-grown adult, Buddy sets off for New York City to find his biological father while spreading Christmas cheer to all the cotton-headed ninny muggins along the way.
Parents, or anyone who’s a fan of children literature and fables, will probably enjoy this first English translation of Sun-mi Hwang’s fable The Who Dreamed She Could Fly.
The story is about a hen named Sprout who would really hates laying eggs on command. One morning, Sprout gets a view out the barn doors of the other animals grazing the grounds at their leisure and realizes how much she wants to be free. An escape plan is hatched and Sprout seeks out into the wild on her own.
Fans of Charlotte’s Web will enjoy the layers of the themes as well as the array of animal characters in this little window into Korea.
This slot was originally going to go to some book about gold and the history of why we value it. I don’t really know much about gold so it sounds interesting. Then my editor was raving about Morrissey’s autobiography and I thought, screw it, I know less about Morrissey than I do about gold and he’s way cooler.
As vocalist of The Smiths, Steven Patrick Morrissey rose to fame in the U.K. in 80s before taking off on a highly successful solo career and becoming one of the most iconic stars of our time. Some have called him one of the most influential artists ever while Pitchfork says he’s merely “one of the most singular figures in Western popular culture from the last twenty years.” His autobiography covers his entire life from birth to present and truly is one of the most fascinating biographies you’ll read this winter.
The Chelsea Hotel has become an American icon of art and counterculture ever since it was founded by a visionary French architect in 1884. Over the years a countless number of celebrities and arts have cohabited and created there, including Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Andy Warhol and Sid Vicious, making the Chelsea one of the most important artists’ communities in the world.
Now with the future of the hotel teetering between two futures, author Sherril Tippins new book, Inside The Dream Palace, takes readers behind the scenes at the Chelsea to deliver an entertaining history of the hotel and its famous guests as well as diving into the mystery of why and how did this hotel become the largest and longest-lived artists’ community in the known world?
This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple Store Genius who answers all your questions about working at an Apple Store. Our genius must remain anonymous, but other than “Who are you, anyway?” ask anything you want about what goes on behind that slick store facade.
This week our Genius answers some of the most common questions Geniuses get about how to fix iPhone email problems, as well as what to do when your free iCloud storage becomes too full. Also, if you’ve upgraded to iOS 7 recently you may have noticed your iPhone rebooting at random. Our genius will tell you whether it’s a hardware or software issue and how to troubleshoot it before taking you iPhone to the genius bar.
Got a question you want the inside scoop on? Send us your questions and the answers will be published first in Cult of Mac’s Magazine on Newsstand. Send your questions to newsATcultofmac.com with “genius” in the subject line.
Q: My iPhone keeps restarting randomly. Is it a hardware issue, or is there anything I can do to fix it?
Most of the time an iPhone restarting randomly is a software issue. App updates that have bugs can cause this to happen, especially new iOS 7 apps that haven’t worked their bugs out. Or it can even be an operating system issue.
The first step to a solution would be to notice when it usually happens. If it happens during the use of a particular app, you might try removing the app and reinstalling it from the App Store. If it is one of the apps included in iOS or you have tried removing apps and your iPhone continues to restart unexpectedly you should restore your iPhone using iTunes. Make sure to do a backup before proceeding with the restore as it will remove all the content and restore the factory settings.
If after restoring the backup you still encounter the restarting issue you may need to set the phone up as a new device, as the issue may be stored in your backup.
Personally, I have found my iPhone performs much better when I have restored it and set it up as new. This is a good way to clean up your iPhone if you want a fresh start. If it is still restarting randomly, it may need to be replaced so make a reservation at the Genius Bar for service.
Q: I keep getting notifications that my iPhone hasn’t been backed up to iCloud because there is not enough storage. What should I do?
This is probably one of the more commonly asked question in the Apple Store. If you have iCloud backups turned on for your iPhone, it will regularly save your camera roll, accounts, documents and settings.
The free iCloud storage space is 5 GB which is pretty small if you’re trying to store all your photos and documents in the cloud. The warning pops up whenever backups require more space than your storage plan size.
If you look in the Settings app on your iPhone you can view your iCloud backup and storage settings in the iCloud settings.
Here you can view your iCloud storage size. Click into the to “Manage Storage” option to display your backups and see the size of each backup. You can select each one to see how much space is required for the next backup. You can also delete an old backup from inside the backup info at the very bottom of the page.
You might also want to consider whether to upgrade your iCloud storage. Apple makes it easy to upgrade storage right from the backup settings by clicking change storage plan and choosing a storage plan up to 55 GB for $100 a year thats charge annually to your iTunes account.
If you don’t want to upgrade, trimming your backups below your allotted storage plan will get you back up and running. If you want to ditch the service altogether, just disable iCloud backups in the iCloud settings and have fun with iTunes — unless you like living life on the edge without a backup.
Q: My Mail.app suddenly stopped being able to send and receive emails. What should I check?
In most cases, at least cases in the store, mail accounts quit working due to incorrect passwords, however there are other possibilities as well.
Here are a couple steps to follow to get your account working again. While trying these steps, first make sure to confirm you have a good Wi-Fi or 3G/4G connection on your iOS device to ensure a connection to your mail servers.
1. Verify you have the correct password. If you have changed the password recently, you will have to update it in your settings. Go to the Mail, Contacts, Calendars page in the Settings App and update your password for the account login. If your account requires SMTP password authentication, you’ll have to also update the password in your outgoing settings. If it still doesn’t work, try logging on the web to make sure you aren’t trying the wrong password.
2. Verify you have the correct settings for you email provider by going to your web mail. Most providers have an easy-to-follow guide on how to setup their email accounts with iOS devices.
3. If that still doesn’t work, sometimes Account Settings data can get corrupted over time. Try removing the account and adding it back on.
These three steps usually get people back up and running.
If you’ve ever hesitated over whether to “like” the status update about your cousin’s fractured leg or dearly departed pug, you get that technology can be awkward at times.
Yet thanks to our iPhones, we carry around a device that allows us to help find the way, locate a first responder, donate to disaster victims and reach-out-and-touch someone in a thousand ways that boy scouts of yesteryear could only dream about.
Do you need a ride? A place to sleep? Want my leftovers? Even in more pedestrian situations, we’re helping each other more thanks to our phones – as you might remember from our issue focused on how apps are breaking down social barriers.
Maybe your gran told you to never talk to strangers, but now you’re couch surfing, carpooling and maybe even getting free food from them thanks to apps. And you have no intention of going back to those dark “stranger danger” days.
Yet, the connection between acting compassionately and technology isn’t so apparent. Every time we zone out playing games during that tedious daily commute, let an iPad babysit our kids, send a scathing tweet or shut off someone’s Facebook statuses, we are going in another direction. Definitely not the kind of direction that earns you a merit badge.
So much so, that tech and compassion might strike you as an “oxymoron,” as Sona Mehring the CEO at Caring Bridge told a recent audience of about 350 educators and tech experts, telling the story of the nonprofit she started in 1997 to help two friends with a premature baby keep friends and family in the know.
She wasn’t preaching to the converted at Stanford’s inaugural Technology and Compassion Conference. Rather, she was connecting the dots for a crowd of about 350 — many of them educators — who were either initially as skeptical as she was or unsure where the good could be found in devices that are more frequently in the news for bringing out the worst in people.
After all, the benefits hyped from “killer apps” are rarely their saintly virtues.
But it seems an arbitrary distinction: when talking broadly about technology, it’s not inherently good or bad. Like any other tool, it depends on what you do with it. Use your hammer for Habitat for Humanity, it’s all good. Hit your co-worker with it bang-bang Maxwell style, and the hammer of justice will come find you.
As heavy technology users — or developers — we have a new mission. It’s to spread this idea that even if the old news adage if “it bleeds it leads” still holds up in pixels, tech is not inherently cold, inhumane, or even evil.
Read on for more about how companies and nonprofits are working to expand the reach of tech with heart and soul.
Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?
Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a way out, the coolest app name ever, and some intimidating cakes.
Here you go:
Official 100 Pushups — Health & Fitness — Free
Recently, I realized that I didn’t even want to look at myself without a shirt on. So I downloaded the new official 100 Pushups app, and it claims it can do something about this whole … situation I have going on here. It’s a six-week program with three sessions per week, and it will send you reminders so you don’t “forget” to exercise. First you show it how many pushups you can do, and then it assigns you to a Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced program. Somehow, I’m not so out of shape that I didn’t qualify for the Advanced tier.
Sometimes the name of an app is a woeful understatement.
Cake Ideas doesn’t contain “ideas” so much as the most complicated baking projects I’ve ever seen. Some of the recipes contained within include lists of things you must pick up at a hardware store because the cakes in question are so badass that they have freaking skeletons. It won’t show you how to make all of them — instructions for the one shaped like a wedding gown would probably melt your phone — but if you’re planning a wedding or just like looking at fancy cakes, prepare to be impressed.
If you’re like me, you never go into a new building without knowing how to leave as quickly and safely as possible. I usually apply this skill at parties, which is why I don’t get invited to very many of them. But Emergency Exit wants to use that same thinking to get people out of airports, casinos and other public buildings in case the worst happens. It uses Indoor Google Maps and your own location to show you all the ways you can get out, including those on other floors. The app already includes 100+ sites in 12 countries and the developer plans to keep adding more.
If you need to know how how many inches are in a meter or talk to your non-American friends about the weather, Verticon can help you out. It’s a quick conversion tool that you can use to easily calculate equivalent values for weight, speed, length, time, temperature, and pressure, and it all happens inside a super clean and uncluttered interface. You just pick your units and enter a number for the starting figure, and it spits out the converted number at the bottom. You can also switch between the two with a single tap.
Plus, its name sounds like a Bond villain’s evil supercomputer or a new kind of Transformer, and that’s just straight awesome.
I have reason to believe that some of the people reading this have some shopping to do. And if you’re looking for a way to organize what you need to buy, Shops! is here to help. It’ll let you set up individual lists for different stores, and then you can check them off as you pick them up. And if you’re feeling especially tech-crazy, you could even use it alongside BestRoute Free to make every part of the trip as efficient as it can be.
Other than that part where you have to park and be around all those people. We don’t have an app to make that suck less, yet.
I don’t get around much anymore. After moving back to San Francisco from Milan a couple of years ago, most of my jaunts are to and from the Cult of Mac offices in the Mission, which is exactly 3.8 miles from my house. I know the precise distance thanks to Google Maps, which I consult in oracle-like fashion on my computer (and iPhone) since it tends to accurately predict how much misery the trip will involve at any particular time.
At first, determined to take public transportation, I downloaded NextBus, the transit app tasked with telling riders when, you know, the next bus will trundle along to the corner stop. It worked well, until it didn’t (NextBus: 13 minutes. 10 minutes later, it’s 19 minutes. Then it’s 13 minutes again) and the capriciousness of it pushed me into buying a secondhand Vespa. Now I simply calculate whether it’s worth slaloming in traffic or sliding down the less-trafficked hills to get to work.
Starved for adventure, when the chance came to go to Hong Kong, I loaded up my iPhone with paid guidebooks, magazines, maps and a dictionary or two. (When I first hit the States, my phone was a Nokia whose sole killer application – and it was pretty great – were those pre-loaded maps.) I even went a little app-happy, causing my Visa card to trip the “possible fraud” alert due to iTunes purchases.
What did I actually use on the trip? None of the stuff I paid for. Evernote (free version) held all the tips from people about navigating the fragrant harbor — including the address for Shoeman Lau, where I got some beautiful kicks — and every single branch of Din Tai Fung for a daily dumpling fix.
The free, English version of the Metro app is geared towards tourists and proved key for trip planning, maps and general sightseeing. Google Maps helped locate places for restoration during the most strenuous shopping trips. Hootsuite (also the free version) let me communicate with my travel partners when we got separated through direct messages over Twitter. And the free restyled version of the Associated Press app was about all I had time for in terms of reading material.
If you’re like me, you hate buying stuff that you don’t use — and can’t even pass along to someone who might be interested in a Cantonese-English dictionary thanks to those DRM shackles.
In view of the upcoming holidays — and maybe a beach or ski vacation to recover from all that enforced family time? — we sounded out dozens of people who travel extensively for a living to find out what they cannot live with out on their iPhones as they navigate domestic and international trips.
This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple Store Genius who answers all your questions about working at an Apple Store. Our genius must remain anonymous, but other than “Who are you, anyway?” ask anything you want about what goes on behind that slick store facade.
This week our Genius dishes on how to get your iPhone or MacBook fixed by Apple when you’re outside the country you purchased it in. Also, you may have noticed your battery life dipping a bit since upgrading to the iOS 7, our Genius will take you through the steps to troubleshoot your battery issue and eek out every extra minute of juice possible.
Got a question you want the inside scoop on? Send us your questions and the answers will be published first in Cult of Mac’s Magazine on Newsstand. Send your questions to newsATcultofmac.com with “genius” in the subject line.
I bought a MacBook Pro in Hong Kong to use here in the Philippines. The display suddenly blanks one day, and, seriously, it hasn’t met water yet. There are no Apple Stores here and I have an upcoming trip to Canada. Can I bring it to an Apple Store there? What can I expect?
Definitely, take it in. The MacBook Pro comes with a one-year international warranty. Apple’s support page online lists the contact info for each country so check beforehand to see what your options are in that country as they vary from country to country. If you are visiting near an Apple Store make an appointment and take it in.
They will want to scan your MacBook’s hardware and run some diagnostics to find the cause of the issue. Make sure to backup your data before as with any service appointment. If they find a hardware failure they may have to keep the Mac for a couple days for repair. Make sure to plan your trip for an appropriate amount of time.
I got an iPhone in Japan and sadly, I’ve left Japan but I found out that the phone can’t be unlocked even if I jailbreak it. Now that its home button doesn’t work, can I bring it to an Apple Store elsewhere for possible repair or replacement? If it’s still under one year, I’m guessing that it’ll be free, but how much will it cost if it weren’t under warranty anymore? (Let’s say I’ll bring it to the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco, for example.)
The iPhone does not have an international warranty and the warranty varies by country. For this reason, if your iPhone is in need of service, you might have to take it to the country of origin. Remember that iPhones are also different across the world as cellular technology varies. Different countries have different parts and replacement models based on what is sold in that country. Prices for replacements and repair options vary, too.
If you want international coverage for an iPhone, AppleCare+ Service Agreements are international, although certain models might have to be shipped. If you took it to the Apple Store in San Francisco, they might troubleshoot and diagnose the iPhone for you, but they’d tell you that you have to take it to the country of origin for service unless you have AppleCare+.
My iPhone’s battery life seems to have fallen off a cliff lately, what are some things I can do to make it last longer?
The main causes for short battery life, in my experience, are the display, cellular usage, and location services. You can customize your settings for the latter in the Settings > Privacy > Location Services menu and turn off the services for unnecessary apps or disable the services completely. There a lot of system services that can be disabled at the very bottom of the menu. Also, try keeping your brightness in the 50% range and use auto-brightness if desired to keep the display from consuming your battery.
Your cellular usage can also be customized in the Settings > Cellular menu. Turn off cellular data for high consuming apps or disable it completely. You can save a little more by turning off Wi-Fi or Bluetooth when not in use if you don’t have an iDevice with Bluetooth 4.0. Turning on Reduce Motion in the Accessibly Settings along with using static backgrounds as opposed to the dynamic backgrounds may help on models without the M7 coprocessor.
If things still don’t seem to be working right, bring the iPhone to the Genius Bar. We can test the iPhone battery as well as run software diagnostics with a battery usage analysis that graphs battery percentage in the last two weeks. Details on each hour of processing can be accessed to see what apps or services consumed the battery, such as brightness or cellular data and even what most used apps. It’s great to be able to say a battery tested perfect and your Facebook addiction is the cause. In other cases, when everything looks great you might have to dig deeper. Sometimes software issues can cause battery life issues and a restore may be necessary while other times you might just need to manage your Mail’s push and fetch settings.
Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 30 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again waded through the iTunes store to compile a list of the best new movies, albums and books to come out this week.
Enjoy!
Best Albums:
Disclosure – “Settle”
2013 is quickly winding down, which means other than a river of holiday albums, most of the good stuff is already out for the year. One album that you might have missed that’s definitely worth a listen is “Settle”from the U.K. sibling duo of Guy and Howard Lawrence. The entire album is full of irresistible dance grooves and catchy synth hooks, perfect to mix in during your company’s annual Christmas party once things get really drab.
Speaking of dance music, Britney Spears hasn’t been like really relevant in almost a decade, but she’s got a new album out and ya know what? It’s not bad if you just like pop, but it’s great if you like dancing. “Britney Jean” is Spears’ eighth studio album and probably the best thing she’s released since “Circus,” thanks to a loaded deck of glittery pop bangers that feature stars such as will.i.am, T.I., and her sister Jamie Lynn, who’s got her own debut album coming out, too.
We never feature any country artists in the magazine, mostly because George Strait and Garth Brooks’ best years are long gone and who else is there? Oh, how about Jake Owen? His new album “Days of Gold” has a nice mix of modern country jams like “Beachin” and “Life of the Party” but he also shows off a bit of old school country charm in “Ghost Town” and “What We Ain’t Got.”
George Washington’s Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved The American Revolution
by Brian Kilmeade & Don Yaeger
Thanksgiving is over and I’m just barely crawling out of my turkey comatose, but what better way to be a little bit more thankful for the U-S-of-A than learning about the crazy spy games our illustrious founding fathers used to beat the British during the Revolutionary War?
“George Washington’s Secret Six” plunges readers into the highly sophisticated and deeply secretive intelligence network George Washington organized to infiltrate New York and learn the British’s secret war plans. The Secret Six’s identities were so secret that one spy wasn’t uncovered until the 1900s, while another kept his identity secret from Washington the entire time.
The book details how General Washington rallied from his hasty retreat from New York in August 1776 and used his top-secret group called The Culper Spy Ring to gain the upper hand on the British, making for one of the most interesting Revolutionary War stories you’ve never heard about.
Mike Tyson is a weird dude. He’s gone from being the youngest heavyweight champion ever, to biting opponents ears off in the ring. The guy fought his way out of the poor streets of Brooklyn to become the most ferocious warrior the ring has ever seen, only to lose millions of dollars during the height of his fame leading to years of hard partying and criminal proceedings.
“Undisputed Truth” isn’t just a great autobiography about one of the most iconic boxers of our time, but it’s a raw and honest portrait of what makes Mike Tyson tick. Tyson dishes on what it was like to be a brilliant fighter compromised by reckless behavior as well as how he fought his way back to find success in acting with performances in movies like the “Hangover” films, his one-man stage show, and the relationships he’s built with his family.
The Walking Dead TV show on AMC is about to go into its dreaded mid-season break but if you’re looking for more zombie action to enjoy during the holidays, check out the latest issue of “The Walking Dead” graphic novel. Volume 19: March To War is a collection of issues #109-114 that portray the lives of community leaders Rick, Ezekiel, Gregory and Negan as they approach an truly epic battle that promises to completely change the world of The Walking Dead. If you thought the show was an emotional thrill ride, just wait til you peek inside the gory pages of “March To War.”
Everybody loves a good heist movie, but its so much more thrilling when the stakes of getting thrown in jail for life are actually real. “Smash & Grab” is a documentary about a real life crew of professional jewel thieves called The Pink Panthers who have been responsible for some of the most audacious robberies around the world over the last decade.
Director Havana Marking makes use of incredible security footage and in-depth interviews with police and even some anonymous Panthers about some of the clever techniques the gang used in some of their incredible heists, showing that you don’t always have to go the expensive “Oceans 11” route just to steal gigantic diamonds.
Families should find a lot of enjoyment in the latest Percy Jackson movie over the Christmas Break. “Sea of Monsters” follows Percy Jackson – the half-human son of Poseidon – on his quest to prove that he’s not just a “one-quest wonder” after saving Olympia and the rest of civilization in the last flick.
Fans of the book series might be a bit disappointed in the screen adaptation of “Sea of Monsters,” but if you’re a fan of Greek mythology or just need a good family-friendly action movie with a bunch of monsters in it, you’ll enjoy watching Percy and his demigod friends save the world again on their quest to find the fabled Golden Fleece.
After taking out Frank D’Amico in the first movie, self-made superhero Kick-Ass is trying to return to life as normal with his new foul-mouthed assassin friend Hit Girl, but pretty soon the world of superheroes pulls them into a new deadly challenge.
Red Mist – son of the deceased Mr. D’Amico – has gained control of his family’s wealth after accidentally killing his mother, so he decides to reinvent himself as the aptly name “Motherfucker.” Armed with new arsenal of deadly toys, The Motherfucker becomes the leader of a gang of super-villains sworn to take out Kick-Ass. To defeat the evil villains Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl find some new friends of their own in Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey) and Night Bitch. Needless to say the film is stocked full of colorful language and catastrophic levels of violence that are sure to delight you in completely inappropriate but oh-so-funny ways.
Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?
Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a map of the moon, a big green button, and a diary for your dog.
Here you go:
Dog Diary — Lifestyle — Free
Dog Diary is an app that helps you keep track of all the people and events in your canine friend’s life. You can store important, pet-related contacts, expenses and photos. You can also create entries for multiple animals to keep everything organized. It’s an address book, a photo album and a bookkeeping program all in one. You can also track measurements like body temperature, provided you’re not shy about pulling out your phone as soon as the vet pulls out the thermometer.
I’m still waiting for an app that will walk the little guy for me once it gets snowy out, but we might need a robot for that.
Owners of Sony products might want to check out its new mobile support app, which will hopefully save you from having to click around a website looking for the right troubleshooting or contact page.
It contains links to forums, troubleshooting, documentation, and support areas, and it will take you directly to the page you need in Safari and it covers information for TVs, computers, cameras, software and a bunch of other things. You can also get Sony news updates and press releases, if that’s your thing, but the app’s main value is preventing users from falling into bottomless Net-holes.
If you’re looking for a quick, easy-to-use reference guide for that giant rock in the sky, Moon Chart is a pretty good one. It’ll show you the phase and point out what scientists have named all those holes and fiddly bits and it’s all indexed. So if you have a bet with your buddy as to where Flammarion is in relation to Sinus Medii, this app will help you settle that weird, random thing I just made up.
I’m a fan of apps that are basically just a giant button that does one thing easily, so TimeStamp really appeals to me. It’s a productivity tracker that independent contractors can use for invoicing purposes. It may also be of interest to people trying to figure out where their time goes. It’s just a big green button that you touch to stop and start, and when you’re done timing whatever it is, you can just drop your results into the appropriate category on the second tab.
My browse-to-watch Netflix ratio is something like 5 to 1. That’s unsettling.
The worst gift I ever gave was the time that I presented my father with a doormat for Christmas.
In my defense, he was impossible to buy for and I had already tried everything. Robes. Records. Books. In total desperation on Christmas Eve, I noticed that his doormat was all frayed and coming apart. This struck me as a genius idea. Practical. Useful. Not one more piece of junk cluttering up his life. It seems to me that gift giving is too often about buying more stuff for people who don’t need it; here was an opportunity to give him something he would use every day and actually needed.
It seemed like an inspired purchase until he opened it up. There was the family reunited on Christmas morning, staring at a crappy doormat. Dad was unimpressed. Then my brothers started cracking up. It quickly became a family joke: my gift to him was the worst Christmas gift of all time. It was too late to resurrect my reputation for that year and many years after, despite all my thoughtful presents.
I didn’t start out as a bad gift giver. When we were kids, my brothers and I used to spend a lot of time making stuff for our parents. We went through an Origami phase that folded in the thoughtful with the handmade: I remember laboring over a box for my mom to keep her jewelry in, for example. And of course, my parents would make a big fuss over our handiwork, like parents do. Then, as you grow up, you end up being lazier about choosing presents. You lose touch with your parents and sometimes the other people in your life. You don’t know what they’re interested in or really need.
Gift giving can become a meaningless routine — the worst gifts to my mind are the really generic ones. Like a tie rack or electric wine bottle opener. You know, basically anything for sale in the SkyMall designed to placate that loved one you forgot about while traveling. These are the inexcusable gadgets that don’t work better than the no-tech versions, plus the batteries die, they require space on the counter, etc. And, let’s face it: you cannot really improve on a corkscrew. (How many wine bottles do you open on a daily basis, anyway?) That’s the kind of default gift you fall back on because it costs a little more, it’s designed as a “gift item,” and when you don’t know what else to get someone, you buy it.
Enter the 2013 Cult of Mac Gift Guide. We’ve picked out the stuff that is genuinely useful, that will add some value to your iDevices and those of your loved ones. Charlie Sorrel, our reviews editor, is captaining the effort. All year round, he wades through thousands of press releases and has a great eye for striking gadget paydirt with things you really want and need to own. Plus you can bet that he’s seen every iPhone handlebar accessory and pedalled them all out, too, with an eye to keeping your wallet half full, which never hurts.
What’s on my list? This year, my mom got her very first iPhone. (A gold one!) So I’ll be looking out for something useful for her; she’s a typical retiree who takes a lot of pictures but is used to be taking them with a regular camera.
Spoiler alert: she definitely won’t receiving an iDoormat.
Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?
Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include an app for quick notes, food television, and an app to help you visually keep track of your life.
Sometimes, you have to write something really quickly on the go. Like, say, if you were supposed to find an app to write up for your daily post on a tech blog.
Actually, never mind that example. It’s crazy and would never happen. But if it did, Writedown might be a good fit. It’s a quick and easy document creation tool that cuts out all the distractions (other than ads, in this Lite version). You just type your thing in a clean interface, and then you can export it to a text, e-mail, social media, or share it with AirDrop.
It’s bare bones, quick, and easy to use. Not that I’m using it right now.
Now that we’ve gotten that pesky Halloween thing out of the way with all its gross movies and candy and fun, we can get down to the serious business of planning “The Holidays.” And if you’re need appropriate programming on your phone or iPad right now, EndlessTV’s “Seasons” app might be what you need. It features quick-loading, topical shows (mostly about food) that you can swipe through at your leisure.
I learned how to make a pumpkin pie from an actual pumpkin and I don’t even know what I’m going to do with that knowledge.
When you need to track stuff you need to do, it’s essential to have an app that can handle tasks and to-do items as well as a robust calendaring system. Time Planner does just that, and does it very well. It also adds a colorful palette, a nicely organized way of creating tasks and reminders, and a list of categories that really helps you focus in on what each task is about.
Choose to add a task to Home, Work, Rest, Lifestyle, and other categories to color the tasks with a visual cue. When you start looking at your schedule for the day, you’ll have a colorful reminder of the things you’ll need to focus on, perhaps noticing that you spend too much time at work, and not enough on restful activities.
You can have Time Planner remind you of stuff you need to do by day, time, or location, which is pretty much what all to-do apps should have these days.
Like live music? Got an iOS device full of music? Songkick Concerts looks like the app for you, then, as it trawls your music library to find concerts in your area. Be the first one to grab tickets to hot events, all based on your own music preferences. Sounds good, right?
If you’re traveling to a new city, never fear, as you can use Songkick Concerts to search your destination for upcoming concerts from those very same artists. Want to see Kanye West in Madison Square Garden? I mean, who wouldn’t? Use this app to find out when and where he’s playing, and tap through to buy tickets right within the app itself.
Of course, you’ll want to use Songkick Concerts to bargain shop as well, since it lets you compare venues and prices for all the artists you must obviously want to go see, since they’re in your music library.
Rather than slogging through a lake of reviews to find something you’re just going to put down after 30 minutes, Cult of Mac has once again waded through the iTunes store to compile a list of the best new movies, albums and books to come out this week.
Enjoy!
Best Movies
“The World’s End”
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost reteam with director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) in this entertaining thrill ride that pits a band of misfits against some sort of cosmic interstellar powers hellbent of global domination. Twenty years after their first epic pub crawl attempt, the “five musketeers” reunite in their hometown to complete the ultimate challenge – one night, five friends, twelve bars – a boozy quest on which only the strongest will survive.
After Simon Pegg’s character cons his Musketeers friends into coming to the pub crawl a bizarre series of encounters with the out-of-this-world locals, they realize their inebriated battle to reach the final pub, The World’s End, may be the least of the troubles. They’ve having the time of their lives, ready to take on the world… but tonight they may have to save it
In the year 2159, the world is divided in two. There are the wealthy folks who reside on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest of us, crammed into a giant favela known as Earth. Jodie Foster plays yet another hardass woman in killer suits – Secretary Delacourt – who will stop at nothing to make sure the happy, luxurious lifestyles of the citizens of Elysium stay happy and luxurious. That of course riles the peasants of Earth who are trying to get in to this extra-terrestrial paradise by any means possible. Matt Damon jumps into the lead role of Max who agrees to on a life-threatening mission that will hopefully bring equality to everyone. Viva La DAMON!
Super villain Felonious Gru is back, this time as an adoring father to his adopted girls in the 3D-sequel to the worldwide blockbuster. Here, partnered with secret agent Lucy Wilde (voiced by SNL veteran Kristen Wiig), Gru, along with the wildly unpredictable Minions (surprise: also up for their own film, expected to debut in 2015), must figure out how to keep his cover while also dealing with the everyday duties of a doting father. The film ends with a world made safe and wedding bells.
“Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture”
by Dana Goodyear
A new American cuisine is forming where animals never before considered (or long since forgotten) are emerging as delicacies. What used to scrap is now the centerpiece of a meal.
Dana Goodyear’s anticipated debut, “Anything That Moves,” is a rollicking, fork-fuelled adventure and behind-the-scenes look at the way we eat. Goodyear breaks bread with insect-eaters and blood drinkers as well as chefs who make food out of roadside leaves and wood, and others who serve endangered species and Schedule I drugs—a cast of characters, in other words, who flirt with danger, taboo, and disgust in pursuit of the sublime. Behind them is an intricate network of scavengers, dealers, and pitchmen responsible for introducing the rare and exotic into the marketplace. “Anything That Moves” is a revelatory look into the raucous, strange, fascinatingly complex world of contemporary American food culture, and the places where the extreme is bleeding into the mainstream.
“Dallas 1963”
by Bill Minutaglio & Steven L. Davis
Not a year goes by without 50 new books on John F. Kennedy hitting bookshelves, but following the recent 50th anniversary of his assassination, it’s worthwhile to take a closer look at the socio-political climate around Dallas during the months and weeks leading up to Kennedy’s fateful drive through the city on November 22nd, 1963.
Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis explore the dark forces at work that led many people to warn President Kennedy to avoid Dallas on his fateful trip to Texas. “Dallas 1963” presents a clear, cinematic and revelatory look at the tragedy that transformed America. Countless authors have attempted to explain the assassination, but this is the first book that tries to explain Dallas.
Minutaglio and Davis lead us through intimate glimpses of the Kennedy family and the political workings of the Kennedy White House, to the obsessed men in Dallas responsible for climate of hatred that led many to blame the city for the president’s death. The authors provide an accurate understanding of what happened in the weeks and months leading to John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
“A Reader’s Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year”
by Tom Nissley
“A Reader’s Book of Days” features bite-size accounts of events in the lives of great authors for every day of the year. One day features Marcel Proust starting on his monumental “In Search of Lost Time” and another has Virginia Woolf scribbling in the margin of her own writing, “Is it nonsense, or is it brilliance?” Fictional events that take place within beloved books are also included, from the birth of Harry Potter’s enemy Draco Malfoy to the date of the infamous blood-soaked prom in Stephen King’s “Carrie.”
It includes the more usual compilations of the days on which famous authors were born and died; plus lists of recommended reading for every month of the year as well as snippets from book reviews as they appeared across literary history; and throughout there are wry illustrations by acclaimed artist Joanna Neborsky.
“A Reader’s Book of Days” is filled with memorable and surprising tales from the lives and works of Martin Amis, Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Roberto Bolaño, the Brontë sisters, Junot Díaz, Philip K. Dick, Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Keats, Hilary Mantel, Haruki Murakami, Flannery O’Connor, Orhan Pamuk, George Plimpton, Marilynne Robinson, W. G. Sebald, Dr. Seuss, Zadie Smith, Susan Sontag, Hunter S. Thompson, Leo Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace, and many more with nearly 2,000 stories total.
Music picks this week aren’t all that hot, thanks, but for those looking for some old music in a new form, Universal Music has rounded up some of its hottest artists for a compilation album to help those in the Philippines affected by the recent typhoon.
All proceeds from each sale of “Song for the Philippines” will be donated to the Philippine Red Cross. As the Philippines recovers and rebuilds in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan’s devastation, some of music’s biggest names are brought together on this benefit album. Including songs from The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Beyoncé, Adele, U2, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Lorde, and Imagine Dragons. If you’re looking for a new grip of great singles – minus Linkn Park – and do a little bit of good at the same time, here’s your digital product of the week to purchase.
Jony Ive just wrapped up his big RED auction with Marc Newson and Bono this week that raised over $46 million for Project RED to fight AIDS and Tuberculosis. If you’re like me and couldn’t afford to drop $1,805,000 on Jony’s fancy Leica M8 but need another excuse to contribute to the cause you could pick up the new Dance (RED) Save Lives album.
All proceeds from the sale of the album and singles featured in it are donated to the Global Fund. The sequel to the 2012 compilation of high-energy dance anthems follows the same brilliant model as the first album, bringing together the biggest names in EDM, hip-hop, and pop to build awareness about the global fight against AIDS. Once again, the roster of talent is stunning – everyone from megaclub acts like Calvin Harris, deadmau5, and Major Lazer to up-and-coming artists like Munich electro quintet Claire and sultry L.A. thumping remake of Bob Marley’s “Sun Is Shining.” Exuberant production, big hooks, and anthemic choruses make this an exhilarating ride.
Normally I wouldn’t be one to promote teenie bopper girl bands, but the holidays put me in mind of the things I’m grateful for. One of those things is that we’re NOT still part of the U.K., so it seems only fitting to celebrate their latest musical plague export that has enthralled girls across the home of the brave – One Direction.
With the brilliant transition from individual X Factor contestants to charismatic arena-filling heartthrobs, One Direction has emerged as the boy band of the millennium next two or three years. The band’s deliriously catchy mix of glossy pop hocks, classic rock guitar riffs, and pulsing electronic beats made 2012’s “Take Me Home” a global sensation. The quintet of Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, and Louis Tomlinson offered a first taste of the highly anticipated follow album “Midnight Memories” with the aptly titled single, “Best Song Ever” and deliriously catchy, sing-along singles like “Story of My Life.”
This absurdly hot bag is the cool equivalent of those nylon executive laptop cases that are so lame you can’t even call them dorky. It has the usual attache-case features inside, with pockets to keep everything in place when you open it, along with a splash of fashionable color.
Outside is an aluminum band which protects the case and doubles as a handle, and the whole thing is wrapped in lovely nappa leather. If your significant other absolutely has to use a briefcase, you should make it at least as cool as this one.
iPad cases never felt so good. No, I mean that literally. They never “felt” so good. Get it? It’s because these Gräf & Lanz iPad sleeves are made from felted wool, and… Never mind.
I won’t bother with a description other than to say that they’re felt and come in lots of nice bright colors. Instead I ‘ll tell you something about felt so you can regale the lucky recipient with your impressive knowledge on Christmas morning:
Felt is made by a process called wet felting where the natural wool fibres, stimulated by friction and lubricated by moisture (usually soapy water)…
That line came straight from Wikipedia, and proves that the Wikipedia authors do have hot blood running through their brains after all.
The Field Bag is a notebook and iPad bag from Pad&Quill, and is designed and made with as much care as the company’s everlasting bookbindery iCases. The leather even comes with a 25-year warranty.
Inside the waxed canvas outer are plentiful pockets, enough to hold cable sand chargers along with MacBooks and iPads. And the vertical shape means that it will hand comfortably at your side.
You’ll have to love the giftee though, as the Field Bag will cost you $329.
This gadget really is handy for the frequent traveller. Plug it into the mains and you have a two-port USB charger, but that’s just the beginning. The little dongle also plugs into just about any socket in the world, and will wrangle networks wireless and wired alike. It can work as a router, as a repeater (boost a signal in a big hotel suite), an access point (make a network so your devices can talk to each other), or as a client, turning an Ethernet-only device into a wireless device.
You could pay $45 for any of these features alone, but all together the price is a steal. I’m probably going to buy one for myself — at least that way I have a chance of getting something I want this year.
Got a friend who likes to hide their CRT TV in a giant faux-wooden cabinet at the end of their bed? Or that buys those speakers that hang on the wall and look like paintings on canvas? Then you should buy them a Cartella case for their Retina MacBook Pro, which comes from the fine and upstanding folks at Pad&Quill.
Not only will it turn their 21st-century gadget into a centuries-old book, it does it with protection (a baltic birch frame), style (a leather bookbindery cover) and some measure of practicality (you can use the MacBook while it’s in the case without impeding airflow).
Not that your luddite friend/family member will care about such modern niceties. Maybe you should just ignore him and buy this for yourself instead.
Here’s the perfect gift for your annoying uncle who bought MacBook Air when he really should have bought an iMac. You know the guy: he has his little 13-inch Air perched on the desk with tubes and wires running to it like it was a in a hospital emergency room after being found unconscious at home with a vacuum cleaner pipe… [That’s enough –ed]
Ahem. Back to your uncle, whose poor MacBook is tied to the desk by external hard drives, thunderbolt accessories, an external display, an Ethernet dongle and probably a powered USB hub to keep it all going. What he needs is the Landing Zone dock, an amazing piece of plastic and steel which leaves the MacBook free to come and go.
The units are fitted to specific models (make sure you buy the right one) and clamp onto the back of the Mac like a facehugging alien onto a, uh, face. It inserts itself into all available ports, and can be ejected with a single lever. Meanwhile, you can hook up all your peripherals and even the power cable to the dock and leave them permanently connected.
Having an ultra portable MacBook with enough battery power to work all day and then watch a few adult videos in the hotel afterwards? Priceless. Having just 128GB on which to store your business-trip entertainment? Lame, with a capital “lay.”
Which is why you should buy your husband/lover a MiniDrive, a tiny sliver of plastic that acts like the iPhone’s SIM card tray, only instead of a SIM it carries a microSD card. And instead of working with an iPhone it slides into the redundant SD card slot on the side of a MacBook Air.
It’s a semi-permanent solution, the idea being that you add a high-capacity (up to 64GB) microSD card and enjoy the extra storage. Speed depends on the speed of the card you buy (the SanDisk Ultras are a good bet), but for the odd porno you should be good.
“Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution” by Fred Vogelstein Category: Book Price: $19.81 hardcover
Back in early 2008, “Dogfight” author Fred Vogelstein wrote an article for Wired that still ranks as one of my favorites of recent years. Called “The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry” Vogelstein told — with characteristic aplomb — the story of how the iPhone rose from top secret research project to industry-changing device. (Cult of Mac talked to Vogelstein about the iPhone wars in our interview.)
No doubt that article, along with Vogelstein’s other pieces of reportage over the past several years, made him long for a larger canvas upon which to tell not just the story of 21st-century Apple, but also its complex changing relationship with Google: a rivalry that Steve Jobs once predicted would end in nothing less than (hopefully metaphorical) “thermonuclear war.”
Vogelstein clearly recognizes the importance of this feud and observes that Apple vs. Google (or, more specifically, Apple vs. Android) is in this regard the latest era-defining tech rivalry: the successor to previous clashes of the titans including Apple vs. Microsoft in the 1980s, and Microsoft vs. Netscape was in the 90s. Like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Google and Apple started out as friends and allies, and one of the strands this book tugs on is the degree of collusion which existing between both companies as they pared down the competition, before eventually turning on each other.
“Vogelstein clearly recognizes the importance of this feud”
As companies, the differences between Apple and Google are both legion and fascinating. Although both grow out of the same libertarian Silicon Valley impulse, their mission statement and subsequent outlook on the world is very different. Apple, Vogelstein posits, has prospered because of its Jobsian focus on form and function; a company built by marketers. Google, on the other hand, is a company in thrall of engineers, whose “zaniness and embrace of chaos” makes it the ideological opposite of the ordered, secretive Apple.
With Apple as a Fordist company making physical products, and Google as an informational one specializing in search, if they were modest companies Google and Apple need never clash. But of course they aren’t, and their eventual collision is made inevitable by both companies’ ultimate mission statement of expanding to fill the role of operating systems of our lives — a one-stop tech shop of the type most recently explored in Dave Eggers’ latest novel “The Circle.”
It is the lack of this larger story — about what Apple and Google say about the modern digital world — that I felt most wanting in parts of “Dogfight.” Vogelstein tells the company vs. company narrative compellingly, but having introduced Apple and Google’s personalities — and then illustrated them with plenty of anecdotal tidbits, many taken from testimony given in the 2012 Samsung vs. Apple patent trial — he doesn’t always do enough to push the implications as far as he might. The disappointment of this is made all the more tangible by virtue of the fact that these “big picture” demands are exactly the thing that Wired (where Vogelstein presently works) typically does so well.
“There can be few who will fail to be gripped by the author’s ability to take potentially dry information and present it in the manner of a fast-moving cinematic narrative”
Whatever criticisms can occasionally be leveled at it, one thing that absolutely can’t be said about is that Wired fails to appreciate technology’s grand narrative — with every minuscule or infinitesimal advance lauded as part of an overall march toward a utopia staffed by machines of loving grace.
As companies that embrace their role as purveyors of digital ideology (Google’s promise to not be evil, compared with Apple’s stated desire to think different), both Apple and Google could be used as the vessels through which to explore the modern digital age; serving as a cliff notes primer on the big tech issues of the day — as well as its major players. At its best, “Dogfight” hints at this idea; stringing together the basis for a compelling argument as to why the smartphone and tablet should be “an inflection point, such as the moment when the PC was invented, when the Internet browser took hold, when Google reinvented web search, and when Facebook created the social network.”
That it doesn’t do this consistently most likely has as much to do with the book’s timing (coming very much in the midst of proceedings, before enough time has elapsed to draw overarching conclusions) as it does with Vogelstein’s (considerable) talents as a tech writer.
But if this is what “Dogfight” sometimes fails to do, what does it succeed at? Long-time Wired readers will know what to expect here. Although there are parts of the book where reader interest flags — such as a history of patent infringement suites that reads like an unnecessary excerpt from a first-year legal textbook — there can be few who will fail to be gripped by the author’s ability to take potentially dry information and present it in the manner of a fast-moving cinematic narrative à la “The Social Network.” These “character moments” and fun pieces of behind-the-scenes trivia proliferate. It hardly takes me to point out that Vogelstein has a great eye for detail — and he pulls out fun factoids from well-trodden ground, such as the fact that the iPhone building was labeled “Fight Club” on account of Apple’s secrecy and the fact that the first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club.
Ultimately, if there is a challenge to the book it might simply be the familiar one in today’s age of digital overload of too much available information. “The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry” was published in 2008; less than a year after the iPhone made it to market. At the time, not only was the smartphone war a hot new topic, but there was still a slew of new details about its back story unfamiliar to most readers.
Steve Jobs promised to go “thermonuclear war” on Google
To paraphrase Dinah Washington, “what a diff’rence several years make.” Since then we have had Walter Isaacson’s well received (and widely read) Steve Jobs biography, as well as Steven Levy’s “In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives” — to name just two of the volumes written about Apple and Google and the changing nature of digital media in general. As Vogelstein will know from his years of solid tech reporting, latecomers entering an entrenched marketplace can have difficulty cementing themselves, regardless of the quality of what they have on offer.
If you’re a regular consumer of tech news, or even one who glances, perhaps, just once a week at Cult of Mac or Cult of Android and has done with it (shame on you!), you’re still likely to know a lot of what is reported here. Because of Apple’s secrecy it is their side of the story (as opposed to Google’s) that likely holds the most tantalizing revelations and unsurprisingly this is the side that Vogelstein didn’t have ready access to, as he acknowledges in his afterword.
That’s not to say that you won’t get some value out of “Dogfight,” but it is likely the kind of “completist” value you might get from finding a deleted scene to a familiar film as opposed to uncovering a whole new narrative you didn’t know existed.
If you’re a tech newbie, on the other hand and are looking for a swift read that sums up the Google vs. Apple story in as to-the-minute detail as possible — and don’t want to pick up two books (Isaacson and Levy) which are now two years old — this book comes recommended. If you enjoy Vogelstein’s writing and want something that reads like an expanded Wired article (no bad thing in itself) this may be the book for you.
Just be aware that while it tells the story of battles, no one has yet won this particular war.
Product Name: Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution The Good: Vogelstein can spin a compelling narrative out of potentially dry news events The Bad: Much of the information will already be well known to readers The Verdict A lively, if occasionally lacking, summary of the Google vs. Apple clash Buy from:Amazon.com
[rating=good]
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This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple Store Genius who answers all your questions about working at an Apple Store. Our genius must remain anonymous, but other than “Who are you, anyway?” ask anything you want about what goes on behind that slick store facade.
This week our Genius dishes on how whether working at the Apple Store could get you a gig working in Cupertino as well as Apple’s motivations for never offering big sales on its iDevices and Macs. Then our Genius will take you on a tour of the secret little features at the Apple Store you might not have noticed on your last visit.
Got a question you want the inside scoop on? Send us your questions and the answers will be published first in Cult of Mac’s Magazine on Newsstand. Send your questions to newsATcultofmac.com with “genius” in the subject line.
Will working at the Apple Store help me land my dream job of working for Apple in Cupertino?
Probably not. Apple Retail is an entirely separate division of Apple Corporate. Growth within the retail store happens, although rare. I have met a couple of managers who have gone from specialist to genius and then on to leadership roles. However, most managerial and other leadership positions are filled by candidates with leadership experience at other retailers. They may know how to command a team of workers and how to talk to customers, but they often lack familiarity with the ins and outs of Apple’s retail procedures on a low level. Transferring from a retail position to a corporate position is unheard of, as far as I know.
The reason might not be because Apple holds their retail team in low esteem. Apple seems to take pride in its talented workforce, although the pay doesn’t always match that pride. Those who work in the retail store often work there because they have experience in retail and lack the needed education or experience for corporate positions. An Apple store employee with a qualifying education just might have an edge on another candidate with the same qualifications but who knows how the stores operate.
Even on Black Friday, Apple is a scrooge. Why doesn’t the Apple Store ever have big sales?
In the past, Apple’s Black Friday deals have been modest, to say the least. Why would a company that struggles to manufacture enough products just to keep up with the demand discount these phenomenal full price products that seem to sell themselves? They don’t need “door busters” to bring people into their stores but if a meager discount can bring in just a few more, why not?
Apple Stores sell more during the last quarter than any other. Any large discounts would take away from their already stellar holiday revenue.
If your wallet is hurting this season, check out your options in the Online Apple Store in the refurbished and clearance section. These deals are often much better than any offered on Black Friday and still have the full Apple warranty.
Otherwise, you’re more likely to find a better deal at another retailer. If you’re set on buying from Apple and want to avoid lines, I recommend purchasing your stuff online and avoiding the craziness altogether. Try personal pickup to get your product from your closest Apple Store without waiting in lines if you’re worried about getting a $2,000 Mac stolen from your porch.
What are some hidden “features” of the Apple Store that most customers don’t know about/notice?
Apple Stores are designed to be more and more efficient every day. Next time you visit a store, take a look around to see some of the hidden features that help the wood-and-steel adorned stores sell as many iDevices as possible. It’s easy to spot our portable Point of Sale (POS) systems which consist of an encased iPod with dedicated apps that allow us to scan products and swipe cards.
What you might not see is the cash drawers at the end of the display tables. With one click these drawers pop open wirelessly for cash transactions. Our special iPods, called EasyPays, can also print receipts to the hidden printers underneath the product tables.
The tote bags that are given to carry out purchases can also be found here. The tables also house security alarms that are triggered if a device is removed from the table. Inside, there’s also a network and power hubs for the display products. You can usually find a couple of card terminals around the store that are used in case of EasyPay issues.
If you’re at the Genius Bar, in the training or setup area and need a quick charge, check under the tables – or bar depending on the store – to find hidden power outlets and ethernet ports for wired network connections, cables not included.
You can also request any inventory from any EasyPay. Requested inventory is brought out, often in under a minute, after a chime is played in the back to notify our inventory specialists to bring the product out to the specified user.
Employees at the Genius Bar can now make a similar request to bring out your device for pickup after repair from the iPads they use to process all service and repairs. Behind the Genius Bar there’s a whole range of hidden drawers to store the various cables and peripherals needed to diagnose and troubleshoot Macs. The setup tables have a similar drawer in the side of their tables that store the tools and cables to transfer contacts to new iphones.
Sure, those old computational machines are making some collectors serious new money. But love of Apple doesn’t always translate into hard cash.
Over the years, we’ve covered a lot of cool things to do with your obsolete – but still near and dear! — Apple gear.
Here are some of our favorites.
Art
The museum-worthy design of Apple devices has inspired a number of artists over the years. The smashed iPhones above and below by Ryan McIntosh were part of an art exhibit about Apple called “Programmed” that debuted in Brooklyn. The curators hoped to invite “discussion on recycling, the history of these items..” and to get people thinking about “the fetishizing of these electronics that are then discarded.”
If paint is more your medium, check out the work of Satta van Dahl, whose colorful portraits of Steve Jobs and Woz on early Macs are truly iconic.
“After Ansel Adams and Edward Weston” by Ryan McIntosh.
iPad Stand
Repurposing your old computer to hold a new device is one of the best ways to keep the people you live with off your back for collecting too much stuff. If you’re ready to tackle one of these projects some long, dreary weekend, more details on how-to here.
Pet Bed
Take the innards out of your old iMac, add some cushioning and voila’: a stylish yet cozy home for your cat or doggy.
CC-licensed, thanks monicaewagner on Flickr.
iMac Base as Desk Lamp
Creator Nicolas didn’t tell hardmac exactly how he did it, but did say it was easy:
“I decided to recycle my old iMac G4. With some spare parts, one can easily transform it into a nice lamp fully articulated thanks to the famous arm.”
Another illuminating idea courtesy Apple.
Macquarium
This is nearly as classic a DIY project as the computers it uses to house the fishes. If you’re ready to swim with the big boys, try the how-to in low-end Mac.
iMac G4 as Clock
Though the 2002 iLamps were declared “obsolete” by Apple in 2009, the re-purposed stainless steel base plate of this iMac G4 makes a nice wall clock. It’s the handiwork of a Japanese Apple fan, who published a step-by-step DIY project.
Have you ever looked around your garage or spare bedroom and thought: “There’s enough Apple stuff here to start a museum?”
That’s pretty much what happened to Adam Rosen, who runs the Vintage Mac Museum, a private collection of all working machines, out of his Boston-area home. (Take a peek at his prized pieces in the gallery in this edition.)
The certified Apple consultant and Cult of Mac contributor on all things vintage gave us the skinny on what to do with your burgeoning collection: what to toss, what to hunt for on eBay and what to beg your significant other to let you keep.
Cult of Mac: Since 2009 when the Apple 1s started resurfacing the prices have gone from under $20,000 between private collectors to over $300,000 at Christie’s – any thoughts on whether this is having any effects on the general market for Apple collectibles?
Adam Rosen: Apple 1 prices have been unreal, they’ve sold as high as $670k! This has definitely had an effect on the size of the market for Apple collectibles, expanding it significantly. The effect on value is more variable.
For rare items and prototypes, value has definitely gone up. If you have a prototype clear case Macintosh SE, yeah, that’s gonna interest people. But there were a lot of Apple IIs and Macs manufactured. With so many more people aware of the prices of rare Apple systems the market gets flooded with common models. A Mac Plus today is only worth about $100, even if it’s been in the attic for 20 years.
CoM: A few years back, you said the size of a collection depends on what the person you live with will tolerate – does that still stand? Is there stuff you’ve decided to sell or give away that you were previously holding on to?
AR: That definitely still stands. I’ve been contacted more than once by fellow collectors whose significant other has decided that it is Time for Things to Go, and they are willing to offer me a good deal!
I’m currently single – which lessens pressure from others to shed possessions – but it’s still necessary to purge occasionally in order to reclaim living space.
CoM: You have also said that the original 128K Macintosh is always desirable, does that still stand?
AR: That is still true, and the value has increased. A working 128k Mac is currently worth $750-1,000, one with an original box and packaging can command double that. Vintage Mac prices spiked after Steve Jobs passed away, they’ve come down since but the first model will always be desirable.
CoM: If taking up space with old computers is a problem – what smaller collectibles are worth having?
AR: Funny you should ask that, as my collection has expanded I’ve become more interested in smaller promotional and marketing items. They cost less and look nice next to other equipment. Few are investment worthy yet, but collectively they have some value.
Original Apple marketing schwag is always desirable – posters, pins, buttons. Store display banners are prized, though these can be large. “Think Different” posters are nice but still fairly common – buy a set and hold on to those. Items signed by Steve Jobs are highly valuable; things by Woz not as much, since he has signed so much. Apple clothing, manuals and stationary don’t really command much value.
CoM: What’s the most prized piece in your collection and why? How has that changed over the years?
AR: This has definitely changed over the years. I have a Mac Plus where the back and one side have been replaced with plexiglass to show off an internal hard drive upgrade. This isn’t a translucent prototype, more like a working “cutaway drawing” of the Macintosh. It’s a very unique piece.
I recently bought a 128k Mac with original packaging, I’ve wanted one of those for some time. It’s a must-have for any serious Mac collector.
I’m also a big fan of the Picasso-style artwork. Last year I bought one of those lighted Macintosh logo dealer signs which Apple supplied for the Mac’s introduction. These are gorgeous, I love turning it on and looking at the light reflect inside the engraved glass.
CoM: Any thoughts or advice on finding or buying prototypes? That last Christie’s auction also had that clear cased SE, for example…
AR: eBay is probably the most likely place to find prototypes, it’s the biggest worldwide marketplace. Craigslist can also be a good place to find old tech, especially in the larger cities. Of course, knowing people who once worked at Apple never hurts!
Prototypes of products nobody cared about may not be worth anything. For example, nobody is looking for a developmental Apple III system. But if you can find an unshipped Apple tablet prototype from the 1980s or 90s, grab it.
By the time things show up at Christie’s you know you’re not going to be getting a bargain! I don’t know how much that clear SE actually sold for, I think the last bid I saw was $5,000. That’s still a lot more than a standard SE, which sells in the $100 range.
Price info from auction houses; view sources here.
The very first computer Apple ever made has all the hallmarks of a valuable collectible: scarcity, novelty and impracticality.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak cobbled together about 200 of them in a Los Altos garage in the late 70s. (That garage is now slated to become an historical destination.) The Apple 1 cost $666.66 and the pioneers of home computing who bought it had to add their own case, keyboard, video display and power supply to actually use it.
Those machines seemed to be largely forgotten on the larger resale market until 2009, when the economic squeeze made collectors realize those humble-looking relics could morph into serious cash.
The auction escalation for these machines began slowly, with a tech journalist telling the seller of the first one of the bunch to crop up on eBay that “I don’t think your computer is valuable enough to spark much general media interest,” but that a small following of avid collectors would be enough to start a “bidding war.”
Not exactly: that first machine earned its owner $18,000, about $2,000 over the top sum the journalist thought it might fetch. Not bad, but not enough to pay off your mortgage, like the ones selling for around $300,000 just a few years later.
Very few of these iconic homespun machines work – those that can still crunch the cassette interface are worth a lot more, so are those that come with the collateral, including the original box and typed letters on binder paper from a young man who signed himself Steven Jobs. (Watch Wendell Sander, Apple employee no. 16, fire up his Apple 1 for a memory dump using an iPod in our video.)
Since that first auction, media interest has soared. And so have the prices. Once the large auction houses got involved, the prices levitated to a record $671,000 for a working Apple 1 this year.
“I do feel that some of the recent auction prices attained for the Apple 1 are absurd,” Dag Spicer, senior curator of the Computer History Museum told Cult of Mac. The Mountain View, California home to calculating curios holds over 100,000 items, most of them donated, including two Apple 1s. “The death of Steve Jobs and Apple’s ascendancy as the world’s most valuable company has something to do with it.”
There are a few signs that the trend won’t keep climbing. The New York Times reported that an Apple 1 on the auction block in London failed to meet its $75,000 reserve price and another one sold for $375,000 instead of the $500,000 Christie’s expected. The most recent auction in Germany closed without a single bid — though the Apple 1 fetched about $330,000 after the last gavel sounded.
The friendly atmosphere – and the amateur collector-friendly prices – stopped when the auction houses realized that there was plenty of new money to be had with old circuits.
“Auction houses exist to maximize profit for the seller (and thus themselves as they get a hefty commission),” Spicer said. “The effect this has is (in my opinion) to inflate the monetary value of objects. Auction houses live on what early 20th-century circus barkers called ‘ballyhoo’ — they whip up emotions with arresting curatorial text and glossy catalogs in order to create a sense of magic and uniqueness about an object. And, of course, the auction process itself, in which passionate, well-heeled buyers compete against each other, itself serves to raise prices.”
Still, if you want to dig into garage and estate sales seeking a mother lode in a motherboard, you might want to keep Mike Willegal’s site bookmarked. Willegal tends an online registry that has positively ID’d 48 Apple 1s and warns that reproductions are getting harder to tell from the originals. Willegal says owners may be in good faith but cautions: “If you are in the market for an original Apple 1, be extremely careful about what you are investing in.”
And it pays to watch prices, Computer History Museum’s Spicer says: “I have seen an Apple 1 selling for $75K in the last year… so to that buyer who spent 500,000 Euro on one…well, ooops! Lesson: Do your homework!”
Think you got enough Apple stuff? Cult of Mac’s resident vintage expert Adam Rosen has collected so many Apple products over the last three decades, he converted part of his house into a museum to showcase them all. (Read on to see what he thinks you should keep or toss, too.)
Assembling your own collection of Mac gear isn’t easy, but the Vintage Mac Museum has managed to get its hands on some really neat – and odd – items, like a cutaway Mac Plus, a rare black Mac and more Apple memorabilia than any sane person should own.
Here’s a look at incredible assortment of Apple products at the Vintage Mac Museum:
PowerBooks and Picasso
Courtesy @Adam Rosen, Vintage Mac Museum.
The rare items wall, including a clear-sided Mac Plus, old PowerBooks, and a Macintosh Picasso dealer sign. Mona Switcher Ellen Feiss gazes down from above.
Mac Plus Cutaway
Here’s a Mac Plus where the back and one side have been replaced with plexiglass to show off a hard drive upgrade. This is like a working “cutaway drawing” of the Macintosh.
Courtesy @Adam Rosen, Vintage Mac Museum.
Apple TV (Black Mac)
Courtesy @Adam Rosen, Vintage Mac Museum.
A rare black Mac, combining a color Mac with a TV tuner and video input. This is a good example of a market dud that makes a desirable collectable. A LaserWriter IINT lurks below.
Macintosh Portable (Luggable)
Courtesy @Adam Rosen, Vintage Mac Museum.
The first portable Macintosh was known as the “Mac Luggable,” weighing in at 15 pounds with included lead-acid battery. And you thought your laptop was heavy!
Apple Lisa
Courtesy @Adam Rosen, Vintage Mac Museum.
The Lisa predated the Macintosh and introduced the world to the GUI. The Newton predated the iPhone and introduced the world to the PDA. And beige and green go well together, colorwise…
iMac Corner
Courtesy @Adam Rosen, Vintage Mac Museum.
The iMac corner. Three iMac DV models run early versions of Mac OS X – Cheetah 10.0, Puma 10.1, and Jaguar 10.2. An Airport Extreme base station hovers above.
Mac IIci
Courtesy @Adam Rosen, Vintage Mac Museum.
The Mac IIci was one of the most popular 68k Macintosh models. The 13-inch Apple RGB display doubled as space heater for small rooms. Mini Steve Jobs is an added bonus.
PowerMac G4 Cube
The PowerMac G4 Cube was the father of the Mac Mini, and grandfather to the upcoming Mac Pro. Beneath that, boxed Macintosh software from System 7 to Snow Leopard.
Macintosh 128K prototype with Twiggy floppy disk drive (photo: Adam Goolevitch)
Old computers tend to lead sedentary lives. Parked in shelves and closets, maybe touched by the occasional dusting; the lucky ones still run old games from time to time. But sometimes one becomes a sensation.
The Twiggy Macintosh is a prototype Macintosh 128k that used a 5.25-inch disk drive. Long thought lost to history, two of these primordial Macinti were recently resurrected and returned to life in full working glory. Their rebirth brought about a rare reunion of the original Macintosh design team. And one of them recently repaid the effort by fetching about $40,000 at an auction.
They are — without a doubt — the oldest working Macs in the world.
Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?
Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include guides to this day in history, redecorating and cooking steaks.
Here you go:
On A Day Like This — Reference — $0.99
On A Day Like This is a brand-new app that fills you in on significant events for any day you choose. You just swipe in the date you want, and you can flip through events, births, deaths, and holidays and observances. It’s a simple, clean, easy-to-use app that contains a lot of interesting and potentially useful information.
For example, did you know that November 14 is the day that scientists discovered 90377 Sedna, an object that is orbits the sun at three times the distance of Neptune? Slip that into conversation at work and see what happens.
In the past, whenever I’ve wanted to change the furniture layout in a room, I’ve broken out the graph paper and made a tiny scale mockup of the space and everything in it. HousePlan is a new app that is designed specifically to keep things like that from happening. First, you place the walls, windows, and doors, and then you can figure out where the furniture goes before you actually have to lift anything. It’s quick and easy to use and the best part is that you don’t have to wonder if that piece of paper you just threw away is a scrap or your chifferobe.
How do you know when a steak is done? You have the finger and thumb trick, the weirder face test, the less elegant “cut it open and look at it” test, or a meat thermometer.
Those wanting a more high-tech way to handle meat cookery might want to try SteakMate, a new app that provides custom timers for your grilling needs. You enter in the cut, thickness, cooking method and desired doneness, and it tells you what to do, including when to flip and how long to let it rest. It can even track multiple steaks simultaneously.
Plus, it’s way cleaner and less awkward than touching the steak and then your face.
You know how it goes: You’re sitting there at work and you know you should take a break before your hands fall off, but you have all this stuff to do and you’ll get to it after you do this one last thing, but then you don’t. And then you get carpal tunnel syndrome. Like, immediately.
Enter 1-Minute Desk Workout. It will remind you to take hand and back breaks every hour and it’ll walk you through 60 seconds of exercises while it’s at it. It’s kinda like your mom telling you to stop playing video games and go outside. But for your cubicle.
Green-lifestyle blog Eve of Reduction saw your landfill at Whole Foods the other day and thinks it looks tired and kinda flabby. It wants to help, so it has a thing you might want to check out.
Upcycling is a free app full of instructions and suggestions for repurposing and repairing out-of-use items. It’ll show you how to reupholster a chair, what you can do with used paint cans, and show you cool things other people have done with their would-be junk. It’s all arranged and indexed conveniently within the app, and even if you don’t do anything in there, it’s still interesting to browse through.
