The Apple TV, Cupertino’s “hobby” of a set-top box, is often used to test out new fabrication process for the A-series chips that go into iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. The last Apple TV ran a 32nm A5 processor built by Samsung with a single-core disabled, which eventually ended up (in a dual-core capacity) in the iPad mini.
Apple hasn’t announced the iPhone 5S yet, but Chinese clone specialist GooPhone has already created a cheap knockoff of it. And it has done a pretty incredible job. As you’ll see in the video below, the “i5S” looks identical to the real thing, and you probably wouldn’t even know it was a clone. That is, until you started using it.
Browsers on iOS run with a major disadvantage to Mobile Safari. Not only are they obliged to use Apple’s built-in WebKit rendering engine, but they have to use a slower version of Apple’s speedy Nitro JavaScript engine. The result? If you use any third-party browser on your iPhone or iPad, it will run slower than Safari… at least without a jailbreak.
It’s unfair, but various companies have still made excellent browsers for iOS, including Google Chrome and Opera. Mozilla, though, will not follow these company’s lead, having said at this weekend’s SXSW conference in Austin that Firefox won’t be coming to iOS any time soon.
As the story goes, before the iPhone was even a glimmer in Steve Jobs’s eye, Jonny Ive came to him with a prototype for a tablet based on some new touchscreen technology he was working on. Steve Jobs took one look at it, and said it was the future, but “let’s make a phone with it first.” And that’s how the iPhone was born.
Now, an early prototype of a very iPad-ish iPhone prototype from 2005 has turned up, and it’s a marvelous beast, filled with USB, Ethernet and even serial ports.
Anyglove is a gel which turns any glove into a touch-screen-friendly glove. Buy a bottle, drip-drip-drip some drops onto the fingers and thumbs of your favorite gloves and voila! (or “viola!” or “walla!” as they say in internet forums) you can now operate a capacitive screen.
Apple works hard to ensure that inappropriate content doesn’t end up in the wrong hands, and it has strict ratings and approval processes for content distributed through the App Store, the iBookstore, and the iTunes Store. But it would seem the Cupertino company isn’t quite as careful with its social media accounts.
On Sunday night, Apple’s official iBookstore account on Twitter retweeted a lewd message that would certainly get a 17+ rating from the company.
Apple was caught last year selling Apple Certified refurbished hardware on eBay using the pseudonym Refurbished-Outlet. Allegedly.
The prices and details of these products were generally the same as refurbished products sold on the apple.com site. The products come with a one-year warranty and mobile devices contain a new battery.
But this week it emerged that Apple is lowering the prices on eBay, sometimes by quite a bit. For example, Apple normally charges $999 for a refurbed MacBook Air with 128 GB. But that same system with the same Apple inspection and one-year warranty went on sale in the eBay store for $899. Prices on other hardware products were slashed similarly.
(In addition, we learned, the company as been apparently working with “power sellers” on eBay to sell Apple hardware. For example, until they ran out of the 500 units put up for sale of 13-inch MacBook Pros selling for $999. These are new devices, not refurbished, and Apple is probably using the “channel” to clear out inventory.)
It seems to me that Apple is working behind the scenes to experiment with different models for selling refurbished and excess inventory. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple was also trying other channels for doing the same thing that we don’t know about. And I also wouldn’t be surprised if refurbished gadgets vanished from the Apple site altogether, and for those items to be sold in the darker alleys of the Internet (like eBay) exclusively instead.
But I think there’s a ginormous opportunity here for embracing “used” in a big way — and it’s something only Apple could pull off.
This week’s must-have apps roundup features three awesome new games that’ll keep you entertained this weekend, plus three new apps that’ll transform your photographs and help you explore the world around you. We have the latest releases from Sega and Google, the awesome 8 Ball Pool from Miniclip, and more.
There are a lot of silly apps out there that want to send you notifications whenever someone you know is nearby, or if you’re in the area of something cool.
There’s a new app for iPhone though called Now, that wants to take a different approach to local discover: it’s only going to alert you when your friends are doing really cool stuff nearby.
It seems like Angry Birds has been out forever. It’s probably one of the first iOS games that you decided to bust out your credit card for, and it was totally worth it, right? Well if you only had the patience to wait three years, then you could have scooped up Angry Birds for free.
Under no circumstance does Apple want to part with its company secrets. Even when it’s been ordered to do so by a U.S. Judge.
Apple must show in detail how it’s complying with a court order to turn over evidence related to its privacy lawsuit, because U.S. Judge Grewal says he can no longer rely on what Apple tells him in the case.
The Philips Hue LED lightbulbs were one of our favorite new gadgets of 2012. You can use your iPhone to turn the bulbs on, change colors, and create different themes.
Utilizing the power of Philips Hue, an iOS developer has made a crazy new app called Ambify which changes the color of your bulbs in tune with the music you’re listening to. It’s either the most fun thing to happen to your music since iTunes Visualizer, or the best way to self-induce a seizure. Or both.
It’s no secret that the best place to buy a MacBook or iMac is from the online Apple Store’s refurbished section. You get the same products, with the same warranty, for a few hundred bucks cheaper than buying it brand new.
But what you probably didn’t know is that Apple has a secret eBay store which sells the same refurbished items you can get from the online Apple Store, except they’re even cheaper.
Last week we had a lot of fun coming up with our vision for the next Mac operating system, OS X Lion-O. We then turned to our amazing readers and asked you guys to dream up the the perfect mascot for the next version of OS X.
We had a ton of readers submit their entries to our new Flickr Group, and the results were amazing. We’ve selected five winners who will get a free copy of Photoshop Touch for iPhone or iPad, along with our grand prize winner, who will get a free copy of OS X 10.9 when it comes out.
Did you know you can search your iPhone’s notes using Siri? Neither did I. But according to Dave Caolo at 52 Tiger, you can not only get Siri to flip through your notes for you, you can even find notes from a particular day.
Here’s a great tweak if you’ve jailbroken: QuickShoot allows you to take quick pictures right from your iOS homescreen just by tapping the app icon. You can’t frame a shot or anything, but it does allow you to quickly (and secretly!) snap a picture of someone without anyone being the wiser: not the subject, not the person looking over your shoulder. And you can even change settings for Flash Mode, Camera Device, and HDR in the settings. Totally rad, and totally free.
Hubbl's Passbook page (left), and Cult of Mac's channel in the Hubbl app. You've added our feed, right?
If you’ve been catching our Daily Freebie posts, you’ve no doubt snagged some of the fantastic free apps out there — or been alert enough to snag an amazing deal when this or that killer app goes free for a short time. But there are other tools that help make sure you don’t miss out on all those great free apps. Hubbl is one of those tools and we’ve mentioned it in the past — but now it’s got a cool new trick that we’ve never seen before.
Any of you out there familiar with the Muji CD player? It is/was a cute little box which you’d hang on the wall, press a CD onto and enjoy the tinny sound of tiny speakers spitting high-grade digital files into your ears.
Now you can — like any civilized person — ditch the spinning disk and just enjoy the music. Muji has now launched a Bluetooth speaker that looks a lot like the old CD box.
Remember Blux Camera? Back in October of last year, I described it as “the camera app Rick Deckard would use.” I stand by that, only now Blux has gotten a little remote companion which makes it even more Blade-Runnerier to use.
App Cubby’s popular Launch Center Pro has received its first major update since hitting the App Store last June. In addition to a number of new actions, the version 1.1 update also adds better Text Expander support, a reorganized action composer, and plenty of bug fixes and enhancements.
China Times is reporting this morning that Apple is going to save costs on a budget iPhone for emerging markets by using a 28nm Snapdragon SoC which has Bluetooth, WiFi and 3G all on the same chip, but wouldn’t support LTE.
This week on The CultCast—finally—it’s time to talk iPhone 5S and iPad 5! We’ll tell you why April and August might be bringing you the tasty new iDevices, and if they’ll be drastically different than the models we’ve already got.
Then, is Apple is a innovation lull? Ex-Apple CEO John Scully thinks so. We’ll tell you what we think is really going on.
Subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes to download our newest episode, or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s free Podcasts App.
Gorgeous. Etsy shop owner Peter Morris has rejuvenated an old Atari 2600 by turning it into an iPhone speaker dock, replete with 6 equalizer settings, an FM radio and a 3.5mm input jack. It’s one of a kind, but if you get in quick, you can buy it for the pricy-but-still-tempting sum of about $230.
Oh Lord, the end is clearly, nearly nigh. Why? Because Kickstarter is now hosting a project to make aluminum notebook covers. No, not covers for your notebook computer. Covers for your hardcover paper notebook. The pull quote at the top of the pitch page says it all:
5052 Aluminum-Magnesium Alloy notebook & journal covers to keep your corners and pages straight.
In-Flight Wi-Fi service, Gogo, released some numbers today on their blog, showing that Apple devices are still the most popular way passengers are accessing the internet via the service while flying above 10,000 feet.
Tablets and smartphones, according to Gogo, make up 67 percent of the devices used to connect to the Wi-Fi service on airplanes. Tablets themselves are the most popular, with 35 percent, closely followed by 33 percent of folks using laptops and 32 percent using smartphones for their mile-high internet surfing sessions.
It gets even more interesting when you break down which tablets and smartphones are being used.
