Chief investment officer of Gamco Investors, Howard Ward, today said that Apple is planning to reveal its plans for what to do with the enormous amount of cash by next month. Apple needs to respond to growing criticism over what it’s doing with its $137.1 billion in cash and investments, not to mention the $42 billion in earnings investors expect Apple to add in 2013, says Ward.
Save yourself a trip to your computer and invoice from the beach. Photo:
I use Freshbooks on the web all the time to send out invoices and request payment for various writing and freelance jobs I have. It allows me to create invoices, send them, and have people respond to me as if I have a real business with real invoices. It’s pretty slick. Other features include time tracking, project management, estimates, and expense tracking.
Now, there’s an iOS app that lets you do the same things, right from your iPhone.
In what must surely be the official sign that this meme is over, iOS developer Filippo Bigarella has created a tweak that makes jailbroken iPhones do the Harlem Shake.
It’s stupid, but I love it. In fact, I kind of want it on my iPhone just to beat this meme into the ground so badly that no one will ever make a Harlem Shake video again. Filippo says he’s not going to release the tweak (thank goodness), but maybe if you bug him he’ll let you know how to do it.
The iTunes image preview may have gigantic typos, but HiddenApps lets yo do something really incredible without a jailbreak: hide stock iOS apps like Stocks, Newsstand, Passbok, Mail and more.
If you like good coffee and don’t own an Aeropress, you’re missing out – the thing is just $30 and it’ll make better coffee than a stovetop moka pot, and it’s fun to use to boot.
And better still, there’s now a companion app. Developed by Jarrod Glasgow, Aeropress Timer is an iPhone app which combines Aeropress recipes with a countdown timer for the perfect cup, every time.
Siri does a pretty good job right now of figuring out what you are saying to her, but one senior iOS architect over at Honda R&D has figured out a way for Siri to understand what you think at her. That’s right, Siri has gone psychic.
Often, simple=good. And the Sine Cable Stand from UrbanPrefer is both simple and good. It does two things: works as a cord-wrapper for your iPhone’s power cable, and acts as a handy-dandy stand for your iPhone while it charges.
Even though the iPhone 5S will probably look a lot like the iPhone 5, that doesn’t mean it won’t have some cool new features.
A new rumor claims that the iPhone 5S will have both an NFC chip along with a fingerprint sensor, and that they will work in tandem to authorize easy transactions.
Being in business with Apple can’t be all that bad right now. Despite a report this morning that claimed Apple’s suppliers experienced weak sales in February, there are a few Apple suppliers that are hiring more employees to meet demand.
Both TSMC and Hon Hai are looking to hire 5,000 new employees, which might mean that Apple really is looking to ditch Samsung in favor of TSMC.
Ever wish you could connect all your Thunderbolt accessories to one single box and then just hook that up to your MacBook? No, of course not. Because you don’t have any Thunderbolt accessories. Nobody does, unless they like spending double for a hard drive or have picked up one of Apple’s nice Thunderbolt displays. Which include the dock anyway.
No, what you need is the MacDock, a neat little Apple-TV-like box which connects a wealth of accessories to your vintage MacBook via it’s Mini DisplayPort and USB ports.
If you’re anything like me, you pretty much spend all of your day clicking. Clicking a mouse. Clicking a trackpad. Clicking a keyboard. And yet, despite all of that physical exertion, I’m still somehow a fatass. How can that be? Luckily, some scientists have looked into the problem, and figured out the answer: I’m just not clicking enough.
We’ve seen Philips’ Hue lightbulbs do some pretty cool stuff, but things are about to get crazy. Philips revealed that they have some open APIs and an iOS SDK for the Hue connected lighting system.
The official SDK for Hue means that third-party apps and hardware can pick up where Hue left off and bring new features to the Hue system that Philips can’t bring on its own.
The hardest working nerd and code-wizard on the internet, Brett “I just built this” Terpstra, has added a rather great new feature to his Markdown Service Tools pack for the Mac. Among many other updates, you can now convert Markdown to rich text, in-line.
Last month we heard that even though Apple just posted a record breaking quarter, sales of the iPad were lower than internal expectations.
Backing up claims that Apple is having a down month, Topeka Capital says that they’ve been monitoring Apple’s suppliers and February was a very bad month for companies that help make Apple products.
Case in point, can you imagine any other country in which Domino’s Pizza Japanese president Scott Oelkers would make a commercial in which, over the course of a two minute period, he shills a new iPhone app featuring a virtual anime girlfriend named Hatsune Miku who “exists in a software called Vocaloid which enables you to create songs” that Hatsune Miku then sings.
Not that the Domino’s app does any of this, mind you. It just allows you order pizza online and listen to Vocaloid songs written by the wage-slavers who heat up your pie. You can also, apparently, insert Hitsune Miku into photos of your choosing, the perfect way to simulate the experience of having a cartoom girlfriend who will do whatever you want.
“Have fun with Miku!” trills Scott Oelkers with wild, manic eyes. If you choose to do so, you can download the app here (Japan only).
Apple is edging closer towards a settlement with Brazilian telecommunications firm IGB Eletronica over the “iPhone” trademark. IGB owns the brand Gradiente, which obtained the trademark in 2007 — the same year Apple announced its popular smartphone. The company has been keen to prevent Apple from using it, but it appears it’s now willing to reach a deal.
The National Geographic might have hit on something with its new “Found” service. Almost, anyway. Found is a Tumblr tmblg tumble-blog featuring photos from the 125-year history of the National Geographic magazine.
So far there are just a handful of pictures on the new Tumblr, but go take a look at it from the Tumblr app on your iPad be reminded that somebody already invented a time machine, and called it a camera.
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.