I know what you bike nuts are thinking. You’re jealous of all the hue-controlled lighting available to the stay-at-home folks, and you want a little bit of that color-changing action for your ride. Well, the folks at Helios have heard you, and are just about to launch a couple of crazy handlebars with built-in LEDs. And that’s not all they do. Oh no…
The iPhone 5 is the best mobile phone ever made, in my opinion. And the iOS platform has the best mobile apps.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t add up to the best phone experience anymore.
What Apple lacks is the best experience with using Internet-based services. And Apple will fall much further behind on June 26.
Here’s what Apple needs to change in order to offer the best overall mobile phone experience.
Automatic, the California-based startup that turns the iPhone into your own driving assistant, had planned to start shipping preorders this month. Unfortunately, the $70 car dongle + iPhone app won’t be shipping until the end of August now. Automatic needs more time to finish its app before drivers around the country start using it on the road.
This week on The CultCast: Apple Chief Tim Cook brings his Southern charm to Washington, hints at an iHologram; we break down the Apple tax debacle and say why their overseas billions are too legit to quit; and Xbox One vs. Apple TV, should Apple be worried?
All that and more on this week’s CultCast. Stream or download new and past episodes on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing now on iTunes, or hit play below and let the good times roll.
Show notes up next.
Apple has just posted a new pre-release developer seed for upcoming OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.4, Build 12E55.
In the notes accompanying the seed release, which includes Combo (comprehensive) and Delta (just changes) update installers, Apple notes the same focus areas as the last few seeds: Wi-Fi, Graphics Drivers, and Safari. This seed, though, also has Windows File Sharing, a new addition to the list since the last seed, build 12E47, which was released at the beginning of this month.
Could this rapid release schedule mean that 10.8.4 is getting closer to actual release to consumers? As this is the sixth developer release of 10.8.4, and 10.8.3 went through 13 different seeds, the answer may be a qualified no, as Apple tends to iterate on its dot releases fairly often and consistently.
Source: Apple Developer Center
If history is indeed destined to repeat itself, Intel’s next-gen Haswell processors will power the 2013 gamut of Macs. Every year Apple typically puts the newest Intel silicon in its desktop and laptop models, and this year should be no exception. When Haswell desktop lineup specs leaked in December 2012, we got a peak at what will likely power the 2013 iMac.
Intel has now said that Haswell chips will offer 50% more battery life for laptops than Ivy Bridge. The main focus of designing Haswell was to lower power consumption for laptops and tablets while also doubling graphics performance. Sounds great. Maybe we’ll see something with Haswell announced at WWDC!
Source: Computerworld
God games tend to be pretty similar: build a little city, tell the inhabitants what to do, and watch them do it. Not in this game, though.
Skyward Collapse is a fantastic mashup of a 4X strategy game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) with a god-game (Spore, Black & White, Civilization). Your task is to create and populate a floating continent called Liminith. You get to create gods, creatures, and artifacts from Norse and Greek myth, and keep them from killing each other off until you’re summoned home by The Master. This will definitely be harder than it sounds.
PC makers have been copying the Mac for years, but every now and then you just have to shake your head yet again. HP has unveiled two laptops that blatantly rip off Apple’s designs. It’s so painfully obvious that it makes you wonder if HP wants customers to be fooled into thinking they’re buying from Apple.
The FDA has gone after Biosense, a health startup that makes uCheck, an automated urine analyzer sold directly to end customers. You pee on a strip then use the uChek iPhone app to take a picture and analyze the contents of your urine for health info like glucose. Biosense claims that it can help detect up to 25 diseases, like diabetes, pre-clampsia, and urinary tract infection.
A letter has been sent to Biosense from FDA about its home kit + iPhone app product asking why Biosense hasn’t gotten uCheck officially sanctioned by the government.
Apple is having some trouble with its signature store on 5th Avenue in NYC. The company rebuilt the glass cube above the store so it will have less seams, but ever since the renovation was finished Apple has had not one, but two leaks.
A rain storm hit New York City yesterday, and just like two weeks ago, the roof of the 5th Ave store began to bulge with large deposits of water that then leaked and flooded the lower level. To make matters worse, the roof of the Apple Store in SoHo sprung a leak too.
One Apple Store customer got the entire scene on video this time. You can watch the 5th Ave Geniuses scramble to solve the flooding after the jump:
When rumors of the iWatch first surfaced, most insiders pegged its launch date for somewhere around the end of 2013 and everyone got super excited that our wrists are going to get blinged out by Apple really soon. However, lately we’ve been hearing that that might not be the case, and we won’t be able to slap Apple’s magical wrist watch on until 2014.
The unreleased iWatch isn’t the only timepiece Apple’s ever made though, so if you’re really desperate to get a watch made by Apple you totally can, but it might cost you more than your iPhone.
Here are 11 of the coolest retro Apple iWatches you can buy right now. We’ll start with the cheap stuff and work our way down:
AT&T’s GoPhone prepaid service has never been friendly to the iPhone. In fact, AT&T has tried to keep iPhones off it for years, hoping that iPhone users will pay for bigger data contracts instead. It looks like AT&T is starting to feel some pressure from T-Mobile and other prepaid networks though, because starting today you’ll be able to use an iPhone on the GoPhone network.
After preventing data access for iPhones for years, AT&T is enabling iPhone support to GoPhone, along with 4G HSPA+ and LTE access, and Visual Voicemail.
WWDC tickets sold out unbelievably quickly this year. We knew it was highly unlikely they’d be available for as long as the two hours it took them to sell out last year, but we also weren’t expecting them all to disappear in under two minutes.
But did Apple really sell out of WWDC tickets that fast?
The Cupertino company has since been calling developers to offer them a place at its event this June, and that’s led some to question whether all tickets were really sold or whether Apple’s too embarrassed to admit that its servers couldn’t cope with the demand they received when tickets went on sale.
Apple might unveil a new iPad mini at WWDC, but if the rumors are true that it might not have a Retina display, then you might want to consider getting a first gen iPad mini.
The Online Apple Store just dropped the price on all refurbished iPad mini and iPad 4 models today. The price drops aren’t huge (although a lot of models are not $100 cheaper than a brand new unit), but it’s a better deal than buying one brand new and you get the same warranty.
Here are the new prices:
Martin Hajek’s oft-shown iWatch model has been dusted off yet again, this time to show how the iWatch could act as a second-screen compass for Apple Maps running on an iPhone. Got to say, first obviously compelling use for an iWatch that I’ve seen yet.
Source: Flickr
By Silicon Valley standards, Apple doesn’t lobby much in Washington. Last year, they spent a little under $2 million on lobbying, a drop in the bucket to Google’s $18 million spent.
But scrutiny of Apple in Washington is starting to heat up, especially the company’s accounting methods. That’s why Apple is looking to double its lobbying spending this year to close to $4 million.
Apple has stopped advertising 24-hour dispatch for products sold through some international online stores. Many of the Cupertino company’s popular products offered 24-hour dispatch providing they were in stock, but in some markets that’s now been increased to 1-2 business days.
Steve Jobs received a lot of criticism for not giving away more of the cash he made from Apple and his other ventures, but thanks to wife Laurene Powell Jobs, the Jobs family contributes more than you might think. In fact, they’ve been giving money away for more then two decades, they just happen to be very good at keeping it under wraps.
As originally pitched, iBooks looked as though it was going to dramatically shake up the way we read books: adding multimedia elements that would markedly separate it from the low-fi offering Amazon currently gives. Sadly it seems that iBooks have been somewhat forgotten in recent years. As Amazon moves into more areas that compete with Apple, it would be great to see Apple work to re-imagine a format that has stayed the same for years.
Innocent until proven guilty? Not for Cupertino. Apple’s e-book antitrust trial starts on June 3rd, but the U.S. District Judge in charge of the case is already openly expressing her belief that Apple engaged in a conspiracy.
Verizon Cloud, a new backup service that first came to Android last month, is now available on iOS. The app allows you to backup your photos and videos to the cloud, and access contacts, documents, and music that you’ve stored in the cloud using your PC.
Best Buy is set to knock $50 off the iPhone for a four-week promotion that starts this Sunday, AllThingsD reports. The discount will apply to the iPhone 4, the iPhone 4S, and the iPhone 5 when bought with a two-year contract on AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon.
Let’s play a game:
You wake up. You’re outside, laying on hard ground. The sky above is blue, with fast moving clouds. You have no memory of falling asleep anywhere but in your own bed, and you have no idea where you are.
You look for hints. The road is dark gray asphalt. The lines running along its center are white and broken into long strips. The dirt off the shoulder is a reddish brown. A car passes. The model looks familiar but the license plate is blurred, offering no clues.
You stand and find yourself uninjured. Where the hell are you? You walk east, keeping the sun out of your eyes as the shadows lengthen, and eventually you spot a road sign. It’s in Spanish. That narrows it down to around 22 countries where Spanish is used.
Remember those cool glass filters that act like a real-life Instagram for your real-life camera? They’re finally ready for pre-order, kinda.
Remember when the iPhone launched, and people complained that the non-removable battery was a “deal-breaker”? And then the very same thing happened to the MacBook in the form of the Air, and the very same people whined the same whine?
Happy days indeed. Now we know better: we can indeed carry spare batteries for our iPhones, only they’re external and don’t require that we power down the phone just to swap them.
And the batteries in our MacBook last way longer thanks to the fact that they are squished into every internal nook and cranny of the computer’s case instead of having to be an easy-to-remove rectangle. Not that anyone ever needed to swap a battery into a computer anyway. Well, except those dullards who would stare at a single Excel spreadsheet for the entire duration of a six-hour plane ride, and they all own PCs anyway.
Which is to say, in a very roundabout way, that Eagle has made available yet another external battery pack. And this one is orange.
Probably the biggest problem you have in your modern life is finding a place to store your earbuds when you’re not using them. Unless, of course, your life isn’t a shallow, empty parody of existence used by a gadget blogger to make a lame point.
That said, tangled cables are a pain. Probably not enough of a pain for me to stick a special case to the back of my iPhone and actually use it, but I’m just plain lazy. For those of you who care, there’s the Sound Pocket, a rear shell with a small compartment on the back for your Apple EarPods.