After facing a lot of scrutiny for the past few years over working conditions at factories in China, Apple has made a lot of progress on cleaning up their manufacturing partners’ facilities. Pay has been increased. Forced overtime and child labor aren’t as frequent. And we haven’t heard of any massive brawls in a while.
Following Apple’s lead, HP has decided to get its act together in China as well by reducing the number of underage student laborers at its facilities in China.
Many analysts believe Apple needs to think of new ways to improve its chances of beating Samsung in the ongoing battle for smartphone market share, and according to new research from King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, one approach could be to make the iPhone “more user friendly” to international users who don’t speak English.
Yesterday, there was a bit of a hub-bub about Apple’s enormous $137 billion cash hoard, after David Einhorn, the head of Greenlight Capital, sued Apple over a plan to discard preferred stock and pressed Apple to give a significant chunk of the cash hoard directly to investors. It was such a big deal that Apple felt as if it were forced to respond.
Is there a good reason for Apple to be keeping $137 billion in the bank? Yup, and if you want to know why, all you have to do is look at Dell.
Ad impressions reached a record high during the fourth quarter of 2012, according to data from Opera’s latest State of Mobile Advertising report, with revenue to publishers more than twice that of any previous quarter throughout the year. The figures show that Android continues to increase its share of the market, but it’s got a long way to go before it topples iOS, which boasts a whopping 41.91% share.
Hot out the oven, a new iOS 6.1 jailbreak is ready to set free your iPhone! On our newest CultCast (episode 58), we’ll tell you why you should and shouldn’t jailbreak your precious iDevice, and the story of how a team of geniuses hacked into the brain of iOS to make it possible.
Then, what’s next for Mac Pro; the apps and gear you need to live an iPad-only life; and our favorite apps and tech on an all-new Faves ‘N Raves!
Eager to listen but not sure how? Easy! Subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes, or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s free Podcasts App.
Time to get CULTY YAAA’LLL. Show notes ahead.
Don’t ever say that the people who work in the Apple Store aren’t actually geniuses. Apple Store employees in the Altamonte Mall in Seminole County, Florida managed to sleuth out a couple of identity thieves who were trying to buy iPhones with stolen IDs.
How’d these Sherlocks do it? They were tipped off by several subtle clues on the IDs themselves, including the fact that they were not made of the correct material, and featured a comical number of misspellings that could only be worse if they wrote down the name of the state as “Flrodia.”
A recent hire by Apple might suggest that Apple is interested in finally following the likes of Samsung and LG and release an iPhone with an Organic LED, or OLED, display.
EA’s Origin platform has today made its public debut on the Mac, proving gamers with a Steam alternative that currently boasts 48 downloadable titles from EA and third-party developers like Sega and Warner Brothers. Its initial catalog includes Batman: Arkham City, Star Wars, The Sims 3, LEGO Harry Potter, Dragon Age 2 and many more — plus any expansion packs.
Springtomize 2 from Filippo Bigarella is one of the easiest and most effective ways to customize your iOS device after jailbreaking; it’s so good that we recently chose it as one of the best tweaks to install after jailbreaking with evasi0n. And now its even better, thanks to its latest update — which introduces support for the iPhone 5’s larger display, and fixes a whole host of bugs.
Boy, things are really heating up in the minimalist heck-with-all-this-crap-I-only-want-to-carry-one-thing space. Earlier this week, Distil Union unveiled Wally, basically a strip of leather that clings tenaciously to the back of your iPhone, with a small cavity you can fill with cards or cash.
But the $35 Crossover, created over at crowdsource-design site Quirky, looks like it might be even more minimalist than Wally — it’s just two silicone straps that grip the edges of your iPhone. And it comes in all kinds of colors to boot.
According to a source that posted on a Chinese microblogging site, the iPhone 5S and iPhone 6 have been spotted at Apple suppliers in China. Both models could release in 2013, said the source, named Old Yao on the site.
The source also notes that the iPhone 5S looks a lot like the iPhone 5, while the five-inch iPhone 6 is even lighter and thinner than that.
It’s good to take all rumors with a big grain of salt or two, of course, but this one is both exciting and plausible, even without any photos.
Source: Sina Tech
I grew up on a farm, and it wasn’t exactly a riot — so I’m surprised anyone would want to simulate farm-life for fun. Then again, we never had a 10-ton Lamborghini tractor. And if we did, I probably wouldn’t have been allowed near it.
Anyway, that’s exactly the sort of thing you can tool around in with Farming Simulator 2013, the latest in a long line of Farming Simulator titles, which just hit the Mac App Store today.
Steve Wozniak says the darnest things. Even though he’s the co-founder of Apple, and was one of Steve Jobs’ best friends, he’s not afraid to say what’s on his mind when he’s thinking something negative about Apple.
In a recent interview with the German newspaper Wirtschafts Woche, Woz says that even though Apple’s fans are very loyal, the iPhone is starting to fall behind the competition.
Apple has been treading lightly with Wall Street in recent months. The company’s stock has continued to nosedive despite reporting record earnings for the last quarter. Many investors have been urging Apple to do something with its $137 billion cash hoard. Shareholders want a return on their investments.
Greenlight Capital, a prominent and influential Apple investor, has called Apple out for its proposal to eliminate preferred stock. Apple started paying a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share last year, but investors want something more substantial. Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn believes that “preferred shares would be a way to reward investors without putting the company at risk.”
Apple has officially responded with a press release:
Using Skype to subvert your monthly voice minutes is great when the service. Every now and then you get a dropped call because of crappy Wifi or cellular reception though and then you have to go back in and make the call all over.
A new update for Skype just hit the App Store today, and it makes calls a lot better. Rather than having to redial a number when a call is dropped, Skype 4.5 for iPhone will automatically reconnect your call regardless of whether you’re on Wifi or cellular data.
We can talk all day about whether or not Wall Street is made up of a gibbering bunch of mad men based upon their recent decision to start selling off Apple shares in droves after hearing that Apple had just reported another record quarter. Some think that’s proof of stupidity or a conspiracy; some think that Wall Street just buys against future growth, and Apple has peaked; and some just think that Wall Street doesn’t think tech stocks can last.
Whatever the rationale for Wall Street’s panic, this chart puts it in perspective: Apple’s “disappointing” quarter was still more profitable than the profits recorded by even other super-profitable companies. Really makes the sell-off look stupid, doesn’t it? If Wall Street isn’t abandoning Exxon in droves, they shouldn’t be abandoning Apple.
Source: Statista
Ever need to quickly send a file over to your iPad from your Mac. Or from your iPad to your Mac? Or between iOS devices? Then you need Instashare, an app which also has the distinction of completing the hat-trick of Insta-apps on your iDevice (Instapaper and Instagram being the other two).
Remember bookmarks? It’s how we used to save sites to go back to later. In theory anyway. Browser bookmark search was pretty terrible, and you had to remember the name of the site to find it again. So we mostly just used Google to search for a site every time we wanted to go there.
And then came Del.icio.us.
We’ve already enthused at length about Mailbox, Orchestra’s incredible new e-mail app for the iPhone, but if you want to see it in action or don’t have the time to read our full review, we’ve got you covered. Here’s a quick five minute walkthrough of Mailbox in action.
Lioncase’s NYHK (New York Hong Kong) case for the iPad is a leather celebration of monosyllabic place names. It is also one of the lightest and slimmest cases around, and it is the one that the Lady still chooses despite the flood of test cases (pun intended) which sweep through our home.
Now the lightweight case has been expanded to fit the MacBook Pro Retina 15-inch. GONE! is the brittle iPad-holding shell (the one weak point of the original), and NEW! is the button-fastening clasp.
The problem with inboxes isn’t just that the mail piles up in them. Without constant vigilance, inboxes fester.
That message you meant to get back to gets buried in a pile of PR pitches, or deal mailers, or unsolicited spam, until the prospect of doing something as simple as writing back to an email from a week ago becomes as onerous a task as snorkeling in a sewage tank. In a day and age where walking away from a computer for just a few hours can result in dozens of emails piling up, all of which have different priorities, email has undergone a horrible mutagenic transformation in the minds of most users: from a supremely useful communication tool to a digital black hole where information, once trapped, inescapably leaves the universe forever.
The idea behind Orchestra’s new iOS emailing app, Mailbox, is simple. As we know, inboxes fester without constant vigilance… so why not make remaining vigilant as easy and satisfying as ticking off items on a to-do list? That’s what Mailbox is in a nut shell: an app that takes the GTD ethos and gesture-based interface of an app like Clear and applies it to your inbox.
How well does it work? So well that we’re comfortable saying that if you get any volume of email, Mailbox is worth throwing any other iOS email client in the trash.
It’s finally here! Mailbox — the incredible new e-mail client from Orchesta, that is one part Sparrow and one part Clear — has finally dropped on the iTunes App Store after months of buzz. And boy, is it worth it.
This is a rather specialized iPhone case, but if you’re, say, an interior designer or even just a fan of the color scheme of the end-of-level doors on first-person shooters, you’re going to love it.
The case comes from Incipio, and it turns your iPhone into a virtual tape measure.
Stitcher Radio for iOS has today been updated to add a nifty new “Topic Search” feature that helps listeners discover trending topics across more than 15,000 shows. The update also brings better episode management, improved Voiceover mode, performance improvements, and more.
Fantastical and 1Password, two essential applications for any Mac OS X user, have both had their price tags slashed by 50% for a limited time. Fantastical is now down from $19.99 to $9.99, while 1Password is down from $49.99 to $24.99. They’re both available to purchase from the Mac App Store now.