Typhoon Haiyan has devestated the Phillipines, and Apple is trying to do something about it: following the perfect storm’s landfall, Apple is now accepting donations to the Red Cross via iTunes.
Steve Jobs was a genius — no doubt about that. Apple was six months from bankruptcy when he took over as CEO in 1997. Under his leadership, Apple became one of the world’s most powerful companies, the most trusted brand, and disrupted entire industries. He didn’t have an easy career. He spent many years in the wilderness, and even when Apple was bouncing back, he didn’t get the credit he deserved. It was only late in his career, after the iPhone became a smash hit, that he started to be lionized as a business genius. And after his death, he was deified.
But was it all Steve Jobs? Is the company doomed without him? What happens when one man gets all the credit? The truth is more complex. Apple wouldn’t be Apple without Steve Jobs, but it wasn’t just him. Jobs didn’t design anything, and he didn’t write any code. The creative work was done by others, though he had a hand in guiding it.
iPhone 5s shipping times have improved this week as Apple slowly catches up with demand for the new device. At the beginning of this week, customers ordering the handset through the Apple online store would have seen shipping estimates of 2-3 weeks, but as of today, they’re down to 1-2 weeks.
Target has today revealed its Black Friday deals for November 28 to November 30, which include some incredible savings on the latest Apple devices. Consumers will be able to pick up a 16GB Wi-Fi iPad Air — usually priced at $499 — for $479 with a free $100 Target gift card.
The 16GB iPad mini (original model) can also be had for $299 with a free $75 gift card.
Most iPad cases we see are rehashes of the same old Smart Cover or Folio designs, but the Case 66 is a genuinely clever new design. It’s an aluminum bumper mixed with a kickstand mixed with a beautiful cloth-lined leather case. Somehow, it manages to fit all of these features in whilst still looking great, and it only costs $50. What?
If you can get over the fact that you’re paying $89 for a strip of paracord with a pair of leather end caps, you are going to love Killspencer’s new camera strap: it’s absolutely gorgeous, and probably weighs less than your iPod nano.
It seems like people really miss Everpix’s great Flashback feature. I have spent far too many hours over the past few days trying to find a way to replace it, but Thomas Verschoren went one better, and rolled his own Flashback. It relies on your photos being stored in Dropbox, and requires you to set an Automator action to run automatically every day using iCal, but it’s pretty simple as Thomas provides all the pieces for you.
It’s finally here, folks — the iPad mini with Retina display is now available to order from the Apple online store. Prices start at $399 for a 16GB Wi-Fi model, which are currently shipping in 1-3 business days. Those equipped with LTE connectivity start at $529, and they’re shipping in 5-10 business days.
Unbound for Mac has finally reached v1.0, and you’re probably going to love it. Point Unbound at a folder on your Mac and it’ll turn any folders inside into beautiful, browsable photos albums. It’s like what iPhoto would be if iPhoto had grown up in an alternate universe where bloated software was a bad thing.
All of Thinksound’s earphones encompass three basic principles: They’re made of wood; they’re given the sort of pro-green marketing and manufacturing attention that would satisfy even the most spirited hippy; and they offer big, warm sound for a relatively small price.
But aside from its requisite earthy wooden elements and green cred, Thinksound’s new supra-aural On1 studio monitors is taking the small company into uncharted territory.
Apple Design Genius, Jony Ive and famed designer Marc Newson have teamed up to create a one-of-a-kind collection of items to be auctioned off for Bono’s Project (RED). Not only have the pair collected a number of objects for the auction that are fantastic in their own right, but they’ve also teamed up to create some truly lustworthy products like the gorgeous Leica M, a super-minimalist aluminum desk and this $60k red Mac Pro.
The auction is set to take place on November 23rd and even though mere mortals like us can only dream of having enough cash to drop 70 large on a “Zvezda” Soviet Cosmonaut Suit – all in the good name of fighting AIDS and Tuberculosis of course – Sotheby’s has published a video of Jony and Marc discussing why they chose the items in their collection.
Short answer, via Jony: “The criteria that we both had was that we both just wanted to own each one really badly.”
Here’s the video:
Apple’s glass and steel mothership isn’t scheduled to land in Cupertino until 2016, but we’ve already seen plenty of renders of what Apple Campus 2 will look like from the outside. We covered all the fine details of Apple Campus 2 in the last issue of Cult of Mac Magazine, but some new renders have been released giving us our first glimpses inside the mothership.
After digging through the latest Apple Campus 2 filings, Kyle Vanhemert at Wired found some unseen renderings that show what it will be like to work at Apple Campus 2, including new details on the underground theater, Transit Center, parking garage, visitors center, pavilion and much more.
Take a look:
Tweetbot 3.1 for iOS just hit the App Store, and it comes packing a whole bunch of new features — some of which a being brought back from its predecessor. You can now view lists as timelines again, set square avatars instead of circular ones, and resize text within the app — plus lots more.
Forget 3-D printing. The future of personal manufacturing is now 2-D printing – when you’re making iPhone keyboards that it. Using nothing but a keyboard printed onto a sheet of regular paper, along with Gyorgyi Kerekes’s new Paper Keyboard app, you can type and play games as if you’d dropped cash money on a real 3-D metal and plastic keyboard.
I haven’t spent time on a construction site for some time, so I don’t know if it’s still true that every builder has a transistor radio. I do know that we had our kitchen remodeled a few months back and the guy our landlord sent to do it had the same kind of plaster and dirt-caked mains-powered radio you have been able to see for decades the world over.
He also seemed to spend a lot of time texting instead of working, so maybe he could have done with one of these iPhone chargers that uses a DeWalt battery pack for power.
Can an iPhone 5s film itself being burned alive?
The answer, it turns out, is no, but that didn’t stop the wasteful doofuses at TechRax lit an iPhone 5s on fire with a combination of gasoline and Axe body spray anyway. They set the iPhone to record, lit it aflame, then dunked it in a bucket of water to cool it off. Incredibly, they then seemed disappointed they could not retrieve the video from the iPhone 5s — perhaps dropping it in a bucket of water had something to do with that? — so they then start smashing it with a hammer.
Ladies and gentlemen, all hail the gadget dork’s moronic, mindlessly destructive id!
Everpix users can now achieve some emotional closure to help with the stress caused by the shutdown of everyone’s favorite online photo-wrangling service. You’ll be getting an e-mail soon (or already) with a link to let you get a raw (but not RAW) dump of your stored images.
BitTorrent Sync is one of the best Dropbox alternatives out there. Drawing upon the power of BitTorrent, BitTorrent Sync allows you to keep folders synced between multiple Macs easily, but without storing them in the cloud or having to pay for things like storage.
If you’re a BitTorrent Sync user — and you really should at least consider being one — great news. BitTorrent Sync just got an iPad app.
What do you think of Siri? Laughable gimmick, or revolutionary interface of the future? Your answer to that question may well determine how excited you get about this: the engineer who oversaw Siri is now at Samsung, building their own Internet of Things API.
A judge has advised Samsung to prepare its defense after determining that the South Korean company probably violated a court order by leaking confidential Apple documents.
Apple provided Samsung with copies of its patent agreements with Nokia, Ericsson, Sharp, and Philips as part of the massive patent battle between the two that started last summer, but it seems the company ignored the protective order that said the information could only be used in the context of that case.
ThisLife is a new(ly resurrected) online photo-storage service from Shutterfly, the photo-book-printing people. It’s similar to other services like Picturelife and the now-dead Everpix, letting you pull in your photos from other popular photo sites like Flickr and Instagram. But it comes with one unique feature: face recognition.
Good news for lovers of extremely light, slim and functional iPad cases: Lioncase’s Folio Shield has been updated to fit the extremely light, slim and functional iPad Air. Regular readers will recall that the Lioncase cases are some of my favorite iPad cases of all.
Twitterrific 5 for iOS has received a nice new update that adds a number of new features and user interface improvements. In addition to a redesigned profile layout, there’s a new pull-to-refresh animation, and users now have the ability to view profile banners by tapping on them.
Before I got lazy and did everything in Snapseed and Instagram, Filterstorm was one of my favorite iOS apps, and now it’s back, bigger, faster and, uh, neuer than before. Developer Tai Shimizu started over and came up with a whole new take on his powerful photo-editing app, which is appropriately called Filterstorm Neue.
Apple is currently developing multiple iPhone models with larger screens and curved displays for release later in 2014, according to a new report from Bloomberg. While reports from other publications have previously said that Apple is working on larger screen sizes, this is the first report that says Apple is working on curved glass displays for the iPhone.
Not only are new display designs in the works, but the company is developing “enhanced sensors that can detect different levels of pressure,” according to the report.