News - page 1506

Since the beginning of this year, reports have been saying that Apple is working on a cheaper, ‘budget’ iPhone. In the last several months, we’ve seen part leaks and more info point towards Apple releasing the plastic-enclosed device this fall alongside the flagship iPhone 5S.

Apple has always dropped the price on the previous iPhone model by $100 when a new one comes out, but that business model hasn’t been able to help the company grow in emerging markets around the world. The budget iPhone is expected to cost around $300 unsubsidized, which would unlock a whole new market of potential customers.

There has never been two independent iPhone lineups at once, so introducing a totally separate model would be a big move for Apple. But what if the multi-colored, plastic iPhone everyone expects is just a retooled version of the current iPhone 5?

Yahoo announced today that it’s launching a completely redesigned Fantasy Sports app for iOS and Android, just in time for the all-important fantasy football season looming on the horizon.

The redesigned app now lets you sign up for a league and draft players from your iPhone or iPad. There’s even some mock drafting help built-in to prepare you for that big day where you pull your hair out debating which elite running back won’t have a season-ending injury.

All the fantasy football features will be available for other fantasy sports as well. To get the word out on the relaunch, Yahoo enlisted beef-cake ahtletic-super-freak J.J. Watt to cajole you into trying app. Take a look at the trailer:

The European Commission announced today that it has reached a deal with publisher Penguin regarding the e-book price fixing charges raised by the EU back in 2012.

Like the four other publishers charged with colluding with Apple to fix the price of e-books, Penguin has agreed to ditch Apple’s agency model for e-books that let publishers set prices for e-books while distributors like Apple, Amazon or Barnes & Noble get a cut of the sale.

Logic Pro X  just launched less than 10 days ago, but Apple already has a big patch to update its audio software with some performance enhancements and bug fixes.

The new update fixes issues where downloads were stalling, improves stability when switching audio editors with Flex Pitch enabled, and more.

Here are the full release notes:

Apple was found guilty of e-book price fixing by federal judge Denise Cote earlier this month, and it looks like the total bill for colluding with book publishers for the launch of the iBookstore will be pretty steep.

The five publishers in the case – Hachette, Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster – have already paid out $166 million,  according to figures obtained by GigaOm. Based on the settlement payments publishers have already shelled out, it looks like Apple might have to pay $500 million to the states and class action lawyers in the case.

There are a lot of compelling reasons to buy a refurbished Apple product instead of a new one. Not only are they cheaper and come with the same warranty, but because they’ve been gone over with a fine-tooth comb for problems, there’s an argument to be made that they are even less likely to exhibit problems after purchase.

The only problem? Buying a refurbished Apple can be a crapshoot. You go to the official Apple.com Refurbished page and see if the machine you want is available. If it is, great! If not, you just keep checking back.

A new website by Guillaume Bourdreau makes this process a lot easier, though. It allows you to subscribe to email alerts when any refurbished Apple product you want comes back in stock, and it works even internationally. If you want a lightly used Mac for a rock bottom price, check it out!

Source: Refurbished Stock Checker

Reddit user sa1f posted this fantastic image of an original white MacBook developer kit. What you’re looking at here is less of a prototype than a hardware test unit: all of the hardware of an original MacBook glommed together for testing, but not actually put together yet. A heck of a Frankenstein’s Monster, don’t you think?

Source: Reddit

Verizon Wireless has turned to President Obama as it seeks intervention against an import on the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 that is set to take affect in less than two weeks.

The International Trade Commission ordered the ban back in June after finding that Apple’s older iOS devices infringed a patent owned by Samsung, but Apple is still awaiting a decision on its appeal. The Cupertino company has already asked the ITC to postpone the move, and now Verizon has stepped in to help.

There’s always some scumbag who is willing to try to take advantage of a bad situation. Take Apple’s prolonged outage of the Apple Developer Center, for example. It’s a bad situation for everyone — Apple and developers alike — which is why, of course, someone’s now launched a phishing attack to try to trick people into thinking the Developer Center is back up.

Apple has added a new page to its website in China which urges customers to use official Apple USB adapters with their iOS devices. The move comes after two Chinese iPhone users were electrocuted by third-party chargers this month, which left one dead and the other in a coma for ten days.

Apple may not be snapping up big companies all over the place like Yahoo!, but it is buying lots of shares in one major corporation — itself. Last quarter, the Cupertino company spent $16 billion on 36 million of its own shares, which cost, on average, just over $444 apiece.

DJing used to be something only the pros did. Hardware was (and still can be) incredibly expensive, and the barrier to entry was set high. Only in the last four to five years has a new generation of untrained DJers emerged, and you can trace the movement’s genesis back to a single app.

Algoriddim’s djay is the leading consumer/prosumer app of its kind on the Mac, iPad and iPhone. With millions upon millions of downloads, djay has received a ton of love from its users, the press, and Apple itself. You may have seen it on an Apple commercial once or twice. Steve Jobs highlighted it during the iPad 2 event in 2011.

Today djay 2 has arrived for the iPad and iPhone. Algoriddim has rebuilt the app to include powerful, truly one-of-a-kind features for amateurs and professionals, while maintaining the same fist-pumping, enjoyable experience from the original version.

Ever wondered which episodes of our own CultCast feature conversations about WWDC? Or which episodes of the original The Talk Show have Dan Benjamin and John Gruber discussing a Bond movie?

Then try Poodle.FM, an experimental search engine for podcasts from the folks behind the podcatcher app Instacast.

Unlike pictures, sound is ambient – you can hear it even when you’re not listening “at” it the same way you have to look at something to see it. And this goes for recording, too. While you have to point a camera at a thing to tape it, you can record sound even if the mic is in your pocket.

And this in turn makes possible an app like Heard, which lets you record any sound you hear, even after you hear it.

It’s hard to see why the folks at Barcelona-based Honest&Smile built this crazy contraption into a Moleskine notebook, but that doesn’t make it any less neat — after all, Doc Brown built a time machine into a DeLorean. When closed, it looks like any other overpriced book of blank paper. When opened, it reveals a kind of analog Instagram playground.

If there’s one thing in your office that is likely immune to spills and dirt its the surface of your desk. Likely made from foil-covered MDF, or – if you’re fancy – from polished hardwood or glass or steel, the tough worktop will shrug of stains and liquids without even noticing them.

But if your “workstation” consists of a couple of upturned cardboard boxes, then Satechi’s waterproof faux-leather Desk Mat & Mate may be for you. And while you’re renovating it, it might pay you to read this random orbital sander review, for you could stand a chance of making your worktop more visually-appealing.

The Cocoon Grid-It, every geek’s favorite slightly-too-heavy travel organizer, has now been turned into a bag. It’s called the Slim, and it has enough straps and nooks to keep even a roomful of OCD freaks relaxed and happy.

Every time I’m about to rich Evernote, something like Lightly comes along to stop me. Lightly is an iPhone app from Ignition Soft, who you may know from such awesome iOS apps as Everclip and Everclip HD, and it lets you clip and highlight parts of a webpage, and save them to your Evernote account.

Ashton Kutcher, who plays Steve Jobs in an upcoming biopic called JOBS, has revealed how he passed up the opportunity to meet “the Leonardo da Vinci of our generation” since months before he passed away because he had to work.

During an emotional interview on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Kutcher also speaks about how he felt after Jobs’s death, and how he took the Apple co-founder “for granted.”

That’s right, $50 nabs you the Anker Astro 3, an external battery with three USB ports and 12,000 mAh, which is — in theory — enough juice to completely charge any iPad.

Why the in theory disclaimer? Because although the Astro 3’s 12,000 mAh capacity exceeds the 11,560 mAh capacity of the battery in the two latest iPads (the iPad 2’s battery is about half that of its successors), there’s always some energy loss when transferring energy from one battery to another.

AOC’s new USB-powered, 16-inch LCD display may be a godsend for travelers who occasionally need a little extra MacBook screen real estate.

The AOC screen plugs into a USB 3 port (and only a USB 3 port), and just like any other external monitor can either mirror or augment a MacBook’s screen. The screen’s resolution is 1366×768, which covers an area of 15.6 inches — not quite the resolution of the standard 15″ MBP’s screen, but not that far off.

We were impressed enough with Tile’s unique take on the Bluetooth-enabled tracking device to realize that its little gizmo was going to take off like a Saturn V rocket.

Indeed, Tile has now become the most successful Selfstarter campaign by blowing past Lockitron, who created the open-source crowdfunding alternative after their smartphone-connected door lock was rejected by Kickstarter.

You may know that Starbucks, perhaps the most ubiquitous coffee shop in the US and beyond, gives out free iTunes stuff each week. Sometimes it’s songs, sometimes TV show episodes, and sometimes Apps.

This week, Starbucks is giving away Cyto’s Puzzle Adventure, a cute little regularly $0.99 game that sees you flinging a little cell-like organism around a beautiful, organic-looking playing field to recover his memories.

Room 8, the game’s developer, sent us an email to let us know.

Apple just sent out an email announcing that it has a new System Status page for developers who want to track what’s going on with the still-down Dev Center after it was apparently hacked a couple of days ago.

The email apologizes for the “significant inconvenience” caused by the downtime, and assures developers that it’s been working non-stop to overhaul the systems behind the Dev Center, update server software, and rebuild the entire database now that it’s been compromised.

In addition, they’ve created a one-stop web page with the status of each specific service, noting whether the services in question are yet online or still off.

Today Google unveiled its second-gen Nexus 7 tablet. The 7-inch, ASUS-made device packs a stunning 1,920 x 1,200 display. That translates to 323 pixels per inch, which is up considerably from the first Nexus 7’s 216 ppi. It’s also a higher resolution display than what Apple offers with the iPad mini, the company’s only flagship product that hasn’t been Retina-fied yet.

Google is right when it says that it has the “world’s highest-resolution 7-inch tablet.” The first Nexus 7 beat the iPad mini’s display quality too. So will Apple finally answer with a Retina iPad mini this fall?