News - page 1629

The Cave is a brand new adventure game from legendary developer, Ron Gilbert (Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion) and award-winning Double Fine Productions (Psychonauts, Brütal Legend). Choose a team of three from an available seven differently-equipped and skilled adventurers to descend into the dark, mysterious, and promisingly twisted depths of The Cave, now out on Steam for Mac and PC for a gloriously affordable $14.99.

Securifi’s new Almond+ router, a touch-screen router — really the touch-screen router, since the only other router available with a touch screen is the earlier version of the Almond, released mid last year and still available on Amazon for $80 — went live today on Kickstarter. It’s already lassoed over $90,000 in backing as this post goes live, with a goal of $250,000; that’s a third of its funding goal, just within its first day on Kickstarter.

Apple just posted one of their most successful financial quarters ever. A bunch of records were broken for iPad sales, iPhone sales, net revenue, and net profit.

Sorting through the pile of information and numbers Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer just gave us can make your head spin, so we’ve broken it down for you. Here are the most important numbers you need to know from today’s earnings call:

2 million Apple TVs were bought in the last quarter, up 60% since this time last year.

During Apple’s earnings call today, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster asked Tim Cook about future Apple TV plans yet again. Munster has been beating the Apple HDTV drum for years now, and Tim Cook has been skirting questions for just as long. Something is definitely brewing.

Apple commented today on its poor Mac sales from this past holiday quarter. The company sold only 4.1 million Macs, missing Wall Street’s expectations and the previous quarter’s sales. Overall Mac sales are actually down 16% since this time last year. Ouch.

Tim Cook blamed the new iMac that Apple introduced in October 2012 for the poor performance. Supplies for the iMac were constrained overseas all quarter, and Apple didn’t start actually shipping orders until December. Shipping times have yet to reach normal estimates as Apple continues to catch up with demand.

The new iMac has an ultra-thin design and completely new display that is really difficult to make. Apple’s own innovation can occasionally be a thorn in its side.

During Apple’s Q1 2013 earnings call, CEO Tim Cook addressed recent reports regarding iPhone order supply cuts overseas. Publications like The Wall Street Journal recently claimed that Apple has significantly slowed iPhone production, causing rampant speculation that demand has been weakening. Apple’s stock has slid since the rumors started picking up steam earlier this month.

Today Cook threw cold water on the idea of Apple cutting its own orders.

Apple has just announced the numbers for what has proven to be another record quarter, yet compared to the numbers Cupertino was showing a year ago, Wall Street is worried that Apple’s growth may have finally stalled. Are they nuts?

To help you make sense of Cupertino’s incredible growth, here’s a breakdown in easy-to-read chart form of everything from the growth of Apple’s revenues, profit and cash hoards, to the rise and fall of Cupertino’s various product empires.

We even have a comparison of how Apple did this quarter compared to how Wall Street prediced Apple would do. Usually, Apple does better than analyst predictions, but this time, they did worse. What does it mean?

Apple has just announced it’s best quarter EVER, but the stock is taking a pounding on Wall Street.

Apple announced earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2013: $54.5 billion and a net profit of $13.1 billion. But the stock is down more than 4% in after-hours trading because Wall Street is worried that Apple’s phenomenal growth is slowing. Don’t you love how a record-breaking quarter is still considered an “ouch?”

Apple was expected to report decent numbers despite the public’s perception that Apple’s streak of runaway sales of iPhones and iPads is plateauing. AAPL has been falling due to a number of factors, including analysts’ low predictions for the next March 2013 quarter. Apple is printing money, but not fast enough for Wall Street.

There have also been reports that Apple has cut back supply orders for the iPhone due to weakening demand, but iPhone sales are still up from 30 million last quarter.

Here are some of the key points from Apple’s Q1:

What do you get when you combine a highly anticipated iPhone app with a fascinating link to a senior executive at the most valuable company on earth? You get Mailbox and Adam Cue, a software engineer working on the hyped email app that’s going public soon. Cue works at Orchestra, the app development company behind Mailbox. You may recognize Adam’s last name because it also happens to be the last name of Eddy Cue, a longtime Apple senior executive who now oversees all of the company’s internet services, including email.

While this doesn’t mean that Apple will acquire Orchestra’s Mailbox app, it’s interesting to note the connection between the two companies.

Apple Maps has been the butt of an exhausting number of bad jokes. People in Australia have been stranded in the outback thanks to Scott Forstall’s mishap.

For most of us, glitches in Apple Maps are just a minor inconvenience and you can just switch over to Google Maps when you have a problem. But for one restaurant in Portland, Oregon, Apple Maps has cost them about $50,000 worth of business since it was released in September.

Curious (and completely unresearched) fact: Bike geeks are often photography nerds, too. And so it makes perfect sense that Chrome — the messenger bag company — should put out a camera bag. So if you have been looking for an overprotective, heavy camera backpack with a U-Lock holster, the Niko Camera Pack could be for you.

Samsung’s got a flagship smartphone coming down their pipeline. It’ll probably be called the Galaxy S IV. It will probably be launched in April. It will have all kinds of great and ridiculous features that I’m sure Android fans will love. But it will also have a screen that knocks the socks off Apple’s Retina display.

There have been rumors for a while now that Samsung wants to add a display to the Galaxy S IV that’s much more pixel dense than the iPhone’s Retina display. According to the latest reports, the Galaxy S IV’s display will have a pixel density of 440ppi, which sounds like overkill, but it’s actually something Apple needs to consider adding, too.

When it comes to iOS devices, Apple’s long adhered to a (slightly modified) adage of Henry Ford: “You can have it any color, as long as it’s white or black.”

With the 2012 iPod touch refresh, though, Apple showed for the first time they were willing to start making iOS devices in different colors. From there, it was only a matter of time that the inevitable rumors started circling that the iPhone 5S would come in a swatch of different colors.

This concept by Alexander Kormishin imagines what an iPhone 5S in color would look like, but we think he’s got it all wrong. Here’s why.

Pebble was at CES earlier this month to announce that its much-anticipated smartwatch had entered mass production and was ready to begin shipping today, January 23. The company has now begun notifying some early backers that their order is on its way, but the vast majority will have to wait a little while longer. The device has been hit by supply issues that have somewhat scuppered its rollout, and the first batch is said to include just 500 units.

Meanwhile, the Pebble app for iOS is delayed, too.

In just the last fifteen years, a lot has changed for Apple. The company has transformed itself from a dying corporation teetering on the brink of bankruptcy into the most powerful technology company in the world, a giant that has revolutionized pretty much every aspect of technology.

Given the extraordinary changes that have happened to Apple in the last fifteen years, you’d think that the Apple.com homepage would have gone through a lot of changes too. But it hasn’t. Why not?

Going back through fifteen years of Apple.com homepages, it is clear that for Apple, their website is just another product, just like an iPhone or iPod. When Apple wants to make a new product, they first find the ideal form they think that object should be, and then endlessly iterate upon it over successive generations to bring the function of that form into sharper relief.

Apple’s website is no different. Here’s how Apple has refined it over the years.

Samsung has surpassed Apple as the world’s biggest buyer of semiconductors, according to Gartner. The Korean company’s hugely popular smartphones, such as the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II, led to a 29% surge in chip purchases in 2012, taking its semiconductor spending past that of any other company.

One of the best things about owning an Apple TV is the ability to share everything on your Mac’s screen with the flatscreen in your living room. It works perfectly. If there’s video on the Internet that you can’t find on one of the Apple TV apps, you don’t have to worry about it; you just screen share and enjoy.

Google and Netflix are tired of Apple having all the fun with wireless video streaming between devices, so they’ve brewed up their own solution to compete with AirPlay. The new protocol is called DIAL, and like Android, it’s free and already has some big companies backing it.

App.net might be quickly turning into the recumbent bicycle of internet services, frequented only by anorak-wearing beardoes, but a new ADN client has a feature so neat that it should be included in any app which logs into a third-party service.

It’s called Riposte, and when you log in for the first time, it has a button that will send you straight off to 1Password.

When I’m not seated in front of a computer, I use my iPad mini for almost everything I need to do online. Checking my emails, banking, streaming movies and music, and reading the day’s news — it’s all done on a tablet. And it turns out I’m not the only one who’s abandoning my PC for a handheld.

Perion, the creator of IncrediMail, today unveiled the results of its latest survey of 4,400 iPad owners in the United States. The majority of respondents said they consider Apple’s popular tablet their favorite device for reading and writing emails, beating PCs and smartphones by a wide margin.

Tonido, a new service from CodeLathe, is a great way to access the music, movies, photos, and documents you have stored on your Mac or PC using another computer, or an Android or iOS device. Unlike cloud-based storage services, which require you to upload your content just to download it again, Tonido turns your computer into your storage locker and then provides other devices with direct access to it.

It’s easy to set up, and you sync up to 2GB of data without paying a penny.

Like a dummy, I bought a waterproof iPhone pouch without checking whether it fit my iPhone 5. It did, but only with some scary squeezing and bending. I bought the case to see me through a rainy trip to Paris at the end of last year, but when I discovered the mismatch (Paris Mis-Match?) I used my formidable mental powers to solve the problem – I hid in bars and coffee shops every time it rained.

If I’d had the mentalKase, though, I could’ve explored the city a little better. Well, almost.

Having utterly failed in my efforts to not buy an iPad mini, I have already started a collection of cases. Most of them are review units, and almost all of them add too much weight and bulk to the tiny mini. But the Booqpad mini seems to have a different idea: If you’re going to add weight anyway, why not just go the whole way and make the extra grams worth it?

Oh man. I know I get a little too excited about device chargers, but the brand new PlugBug World from Twelve South will get even the most anti-gadget of you fired up. It’s a new version of the already clever universal charger, only now it also works anywhere in the world (making it global as well as universal? I don’t know).

Mobile ecosystems analyst firm, VisionMobile, today released its fourth Developer Economics report. The 2013 report, sponsored by AT&T, Mozilla, and Nokia, looked at developer opinions, charting out which platforms have the highest mindshare among developers as well as which platforms make their devs the most money.

Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs threatened Palm CEO Edward Colligan with patent litigation if he did not agree to stop poaching Apple employees, according to a court filing that was made public on Tuesday.

Confidential emails between the pair, along with documents from Adobe and Google, have surfaced in a civil lawsuit that claims a number of major companies in Silicon Valley violated antitrust rules by entering into agreements not to recruit each other’s employees. Five employees are now fighting for class action status and damages for lost wages as a result of the “no-hire” agreements.