Apple wants to keep a tight grip on its supply chain, but it’s caught in a bidding war over a key component supplier for the iPhone.
Renesas Electronics has been in talks with Apple about Cupertino taking over a unit of the Japanese company that makes all the iPhone’s display chips. Apple has been interested in the purchase, but it’s now set to lose to a higher bid from Synaptics, a screenmaker that already works with Apple and its competitors.
Apple’s first keynote of the year is scheduled to take place this coming Monday at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. And like clockwork, banners and signage for the event have started going up at the conference’s venue, Moscone West.
We’re less than a week away from WWDC and while Apple’s official app is slim on clues for the event, the company just revealed it will stream its entire keynote to Macs and iPhones so you can learn about all the new goodies, even if you didn’t get a golden ticket.
Wil Wheaton gets his own show starting Tuesday, May 27, in which the uber-nerd best known for his portrayal of Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Gordie in Stand By Me gets to wax rhapsodic about his favorite subject: geek culture.
Wheaton is no stranger to celebrity nor the science fiction genre, calling himself one of the Star Wars generation. “Science Fiction had the ability to be meaningful and socially relevant,” he says in a video interview on SyFy, “but in a way that flew under the radar of people not looking for that sort of commentary.”
His new show will have Wheaton in his fully nerd-hero persona, talking about what fantasy, science fiction, and horror genre movies, TV shows, and culture gets right (and ranting about what it gets wrong).
Here’s a teaser trailer to whet your appetite, below.
If I had to whittle down what I love about the LEGO Batman games (and really LEGO games in general) it’s that they can go places with their licensed characters that more serious game franchises can’t.
That’s the case with the just-announced Batman 3, which will be making its way to major consoles, handhelds, PC (and hopefully Mac) this fall.
The game will continue on from the events of DC Superheroes. Subtitled “Beyond Gotham” it follows Batman as he goes on a sci-fi-inspired intergalactic adventure, attempting to thwart the villainous plans of Brainiac who aims to destroy Earth by… miniaturizing cities from around the cosmos with the aid of the Lantern Rings.
It’s that time of year when Apple finalizes its supply chain plans for the next generation iPhone, and if you believe new reports coming out of Taiwan Foxconn is getting the biggest piece of the pie.
While this isn’t exactly earth shattering news, it’s still a bit surprising (and, for at least one company, disappointing) given that Apple has been shifting more and more manufacturing work to rival company Pegatron in recent times. Pegatron has been consistently stealing work by undercutting Foxconn’s prices — although these latest rumors state that Apple may have elected to remain with its long-time manufacturing partner for the bulk of work on the iPhone 6.
Having a day out or a night in with friends who all want to DJ a song or two? The magnificent new Nyne Bass pairs with mobile devices faster than you can say NFC-Bluetooth and lets everyone share their songs instantly — and clear. And loud.
The Bass is aptly named, with tons of low end balanced by rich overall sound. And you don’t need to have company, of course — the Nyne Bass makes an excellent home audio system to have in the kitchen, bedroom or living room. Or garden. Paired to your device using Bluetooth and with an impressive 10-hour battery, you can pick it up by its clever carrying handle and port it around anywhere.
Thanks to its amazing products, Apple already runs your social life, your work life and your downtime. But what if the Cupertino company designed products for the rest of your world? Over the years, there’s been much speculation about the company branching out – especially the Jetsons-like iWatch that will sync all our data and make sure the burrito is at the perfect temp when we get home.
Here are a few items we wish Sir Jony Ive would turn his hand to — because we’d like to take a dip, drop trou, drink and drive with that sweet Apple logo. Maybe just not in that order.
What would you like to see Apple’s design team dream up? Let us know in the comments below.
Imagine a world in which an Apple portable called Pippin rules the video game industry. Nintendo and Sony are nothing more than petrified corpses after a surprise attack from Cupertino vaporizes their platforms with a portable device so simple, so magical, that Michael Spindler would have let John Sculley waterboard him with Pepsi to make it a reality.
That’s the world imagined by Mike Donovan, a New York City designer who draws faux prototypes of everything from retro iPads to iPhones based on the iMac G3. His retrotastic mockup of the gaming gadget that never was, which he shared exclusively with Cult of Mac, takes the concept of Apple’s failed Pippin video game platform to its logical, period-appropriate extension.
“We’re inundated with new tech choices at almost every turn but there is something so alluring about the fun and simplicity of those early ’80s and ’90s gadgets,” Donovan told Cult of Mac. “Plus, who doesn’t love a good throwback?”
Free public domain audiobooks app Audiobooks (kind of like Audible for the poor-dible) has just received a notable upgrade.
Coinciding with the app’s fifth anniversary, Audiobooks 6.0 features a redesigned interface — improving significantly on the iOS 7 overhaul which arrived last September. The improved interfaces adds book covers for easier searching, along with a better library and file management system.
The upgrade also sees the addition of around 1,600 new audiobooks to the app’s free catalog, along with the addition of podcast support.
I don’t need to tell the readers of a blog called Cult of Mac that Steve Jobs could be brilliant. Nor, if you’ve read much about Jobs’ life, do you likely need to be informed that he could sometimes be a little unhinged — whether that meant berating co-workers, or bursting into tears because the design for a forthcoming product didn’t totally live up to his expectations.
A good case can, in fact, be made for the fact that these two qualities went hand-in-hand: that treating the creation of a personal computer or a smartphone as if life depended on it was what made, and still makes, Apple products great.
Taking this idea into consideration, a new plan by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications seeks to find the country’s next great technology mogul who is just a bit “hen” — the Japanese word for odd, weird, or crazy.
If you’ve previously felt left out by the lack of Touch ID on non-iPhone 5s devices, have no fear: according to well-resepected KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo the fingerprint sensor will be featured as a standard in all new Apple devices– including the iPhone 6, iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3.
A number of Mac and iOS users from across Australia have had their Macs, iPhones and iPads remotely locked by hackers — and money demanded if they want to be able to continue using the devices.
Affected users have taken to Apple’s support forum, along with social media, to discuss the issue.
Facebook’s Chat Heads first debuted back in April, 2013 as a central UI element in the new Facebook for Android, the Facebook app on iOS, and the laughably ill-received ‘Facebook phone,’ the HTC First. Just like it sounds, a Chat Head is a bubble-like chat indicator that hovers over everything else until you read the message and then dismiss it by dragging it to the trash.
Some people love Chat Heads as a whimsical alternative to the omnipresent UI indicator. Some people despite it as the perfect example of design excess: a disruptive nagging ‘feature’ that forces a user to go through a tedious interaction every time a message is received in order to dismiss it. However you feel about Chat Heads, though, you can now have them on your iPhone’s default Messaging app… if you have a jailbroken device, that is.
With so many security scares lately, it’s the perfect opportunity to make sure that your Mac security is as beefed up as possible.
That’s why it’s good timing — both for Google and for us — that the search giant has just released a very useful tool which makes it easy to upload suspicious files for scanning with the popular Google-owned VirusTotal service.
For many of us, our iPhones are already the most-used remote controls in our entire house. But come June’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple’s ready to make that official. A new report says the company is planning a platform that would turn its iOS devices, including the iPhone, into universal remotes for the internet of things inside your house. Think of it as Made for iHome.
Apple has made a slight but also important update to the way the App Store handles apps that have been refunded by developers to customers.
While you used to be able to request a refund for a paid app and continue getting updates, that is no longer the case. Once a refund has been granted, the customer is unable to get support for the app or download it again.
As warmer weather hits even San Francisco, we’re pooling our beer money for a robot bartender. And some wasabi-flavored toothpicks. Our ever-expanding crew could use some of these modular Modos bookshelves and stools, too. There are so many things on Kickstarter that we want — jeans, maps, comic books — that we’re sharing our wish list with you.
Even cranky futurist Jaron Lanier supports Kickstarter — it “turns consumers into a priori funders of innovation” and we’re pretty sure that translates into robotic cocktails for everyone.
Scientific calculator app Archimedes has received its first significant update in quite a while.
Adding the expected iOS 7-compatible design tweaks, the app also adds a number of useful improvements. The first of these relates to Archimedes’ plotting function. Curves now feature fluid navigation and crisp rendering, and are adjusted in real-time as their associated formulas are edited.
In Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, there is a scene in which a tribe of early hominids, having encountered an extraterrestrial Monolith for the first time, are suddenly evolved to the next stage of human consciousness, and are capable of using tools for the first time.
This video of children from the ages of 6 to 13 trying to figure out how to work a vintage Apple II is like the opposite of that. And it shows just how inexplicable computing was to pretty much everyone before Steve Jobs released the original Mac in 1984.
Ever since Apple first unveiled the iPad, we’ve been hearing rumors about Apple switching to ARM-based Macs. Now, the rumor is back again, with a French website claiming that Apple is actively developing 64-bit, quad-core Mac variants with ARM-based chips. But we’re just as skeptical as we’ve ever been.
If you thought that round two of Apple vs. Samsung was the end, you are sadly mistaken.
Although Apple recently won $119 million in a second victory against Samsung in patent court, that modest figure is nowhere near enough to make Apple back down. Not only is Apple seeking a retrial, but it wants to ban past and potentially future Samsung phones from being sold.
Apple’s two latest ads in its expanding ‘Your Verse’ campaign tout the iPad as a content creation tool and instrumental part of the creative process. Calling them merely “ads” doesn’t actually do them justice, as they are much fuller stories than 30-second TV spots on Apple’s website.
Called “Orchestrating Sound” and “Exploring Without Limits,” the first narrative is a profile of renowned composer Esa-Pekka Salonen and how he uses the iPad to make symphonies. The second addition follows the deaf travel blogger Chérie King and how she uses the iPad on all of her trips around the world.
This week: two awesome Apple artifacts hit the auction block; Oompa-loompas leak pics of a super-sized iPad; forget headphones, the Beats acquisition could be all about video; Woz sets the FCC straight on net neutrality; iPad is where the Gov-er-na-tuh stores his shirtless selfies; a popular travel app you should definitely download, like, right now; and, is Apple building out their own content delivery network?
Heartily guffaw your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin!
Our thanks to Smile Software for supporting this episode! If you haven’t tried TextExpander from Smile software, you’re missing out on one of the most useful apps available for the Mac. TextExpander saves you time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently-used text and pictures, and it’s an application Erfon uses every single day. Try it out yourself for free at smilesoftware.com/cultcast.
Click on for the show notes.
I started writing stories this year – short fiction and a couple of novellas so far – and I’ve found I need to make a lot of notes. The iPhone is pretty great for this, as you’d expect, but not always: Sometimes it’s just not appropriate to tap away on a cellphone, and sometimes you might want to make little drawings, or maybe you just find it easier and faster to pull out a paper notebook or index card.
The biggest advantage of iPhone notes is that they are sync-able and searchable. Paper is neither. But using a combo of apps, old-school paper hacks and an easy-to-maintain “workflow”, I came up with a simple note-taking system that keeps paper and pixels together, both equally searchable, sync-able and usable.