News - page 1708

You probably don’t need the 10,000-watt iNuke Boom speaker for your iPhone, but you might just find a place in your home for the iNuke Boom Junior, a 1:23 scale model of Behringer’s basbehemoth.

This is a guest post by Ken Segall, a Silicon Valley advertising executive who worked closely with Steve Jobs. Among other things, Segall put that little “i” in front of the iMac and helped develop Apple’s famous Think Different ad campaign. Segall is author of Insanely Simple, a very readable insightful account of what makes Apple tick.

Last time Apple went heavy on advertising in a sporting event, it didn’t exactly end well.

But let us not speak of the Genius anymore. All traces of that campaign have been hidden from our sight.

Now the baseball playoffs are here. And once again, Apple has made a very expensive media buy. This time, it’s blanketing the games with the new iPhone 5 ads.

But look. Someone else has moved into the neighborhood. Samsung showed up for the playoffs with equal force, in the form of its Galaxy S III ads. You know — the ones that make fun of the lost souls who line up to buy an iPhone, when they could just as easily have a much cooler Samsung phone.

It seems right now like Apple has a lot of prospective new products on the horizon. The 7.85-inch iPad mini. The 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. Updated iMacs. Yet despite the fact that all of these products have been highly rumored to debut this month in time of a busy holiday season, we’ve yet to see any of them. Now one report is suggesting a reason why: Apple’s having production problems on both the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro and iPad mini.

Instapaper developer Marco Arment has announced The Magazine for Newsstand, a new publication that’s “loosely about technology, but also gives tech writers a venue to explore other topics that like-minded geeks might find interesting.” The Magazine will get four articles every two weeks, and it costs $1.99 per month to subscribe with a 7-day free trial.

SnapSeed, probably our favorite photo editor here at Cult of Mac, has been updated to (finally!) work with iOS6 and the iPhone 5

Say what you want about Rovio, that Finnish firm sure knows how to milk a good cow. It’s been nearly three years since Angry Birds made its debut on iOS, and since then we’ve seen a handful of sequels reaching numerous platforms — plus the spin-off, Bad Piggies — Angry Birds plushes and toys, costumes, books, amusement park attractions, snacks, and even an Angry Birds cartoon (coming soon).

Now Rovio is tackling… cookbooks! Announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair today, Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes is a new interactive cookbook packed full of egg recipes that’s available now on the iPad.

This amazing prank sign was allegedly spotted on London’s Underground.

In the real world, as related in Walter Isaacson’s biography, the name of Apple Computers came when Steve Jobs was one one of his fruitarian diets, and was inspired to name his company after coming back from a mysterious commune in Oregon called “the Apple Orchard” because it sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”

In an alternate dimension filled with psychadelic bio-horror, though, what if Steve Jobs named his company Apple because he bit into an Apple and cut his mouth on a microchip inside, after which he began to be haunted by squiggling, biomechanical creatures with lurid, prehensile appendages strung together from silicon and copper wire.

The latter is the origin of Apple Computers as conveyed in Ryan Patrick’s new music video for Miike Snow’s “Pretender,” and while it may seem all a bit surreal, behind the best surrealism is another way of looking at the truth. Our friend Mark Wilson says over at FastCo. Design that maybe the best way to summarize Jobs’s life story is “as a gifted wild child who earnestly searched life for meaning and found computers.” Weird as it is, that’s what the video to “Pretender” is about too.

Via: Fast Co. Design

Google has updated its official Google+ app for iOS to deliver support for iOS 6 and the iPhone 5’s larger 4-inch display, and to add a number of new features — including the ability to view, post, and comment on Google+ pages, and save images to the camera roll.

Cork: soft, sustainable, impact-absorbing, grippy and nice to look at and touch. Who wouldn’t want to use it as an iPad case? The answer, in the case of the iCork from Pomm design, is anyone who like their iPad storage to be thin.

Japan’s third-largest carrier is reportedly in talks to buy control of Sprint, according to two people familiar with the matter. SoftBank wants to snap up two-thirds of the company with a stake worth “more than” 1.5 trillion yen ($19 billion), and it’s also eyeing Sprint’s partner, Clearwire, too.

Google has just made its “biggest ever update” to Street View, adding over a quarter of a million miles worth of roads around the globe.

How do we know the new iPod touch began shipping yesterday? Because iFixit’s gone and torn it apart already. That’s right, the fifth-generation device has received its customary teardown, revealing its whopping new battery, and all of its new components. iFixit have awarded the iPod touch a repairability score of 3 out of 10, meaning it’s not at all easy to fix.

While the purple lens flare that sometimes (rarely?) spoils your iPhone 5 photos is completely normal, it can still be somewhat frustrating — especially if you don’t notice it until you upload your photos to iPhoto, by which time it’s too late to take the shot again. But a new iPhone 5 case called the camHoodie promises to “greatly reduce” that purple lens flare and leave your photos looking flawless.

Apple’s efforts to be greener mean it boasts some of the most environmentally friendly gadgets on the planet. The new iPhone 5, for example, is one of the greenest smartphones money can buy. Apple also tries to make its packaging green. In fact, the packing for its new EarPods is so environmentally friendly that it turns to mush when you submerge it in water.

In remarks about Microsoft Office across a variety of platforms, a Czech executive told a local website that Microsoft Office for iOS and Android was coming in the first quarter of 2013. Quickly thereafter, A US Microsoft representative, Frank Shaw, denied the dates in a tweet, saying, “the information shared by our Czech Republic subsidiary is not accurate. We have nothing further to share.”

Just retooled for the iPhone 5, Vlock is a free app that displays a bold Android-ish clock, with date, on your iPhone. It’ll also let you play videos through the clock in a kind of video version of the iPad’s Picture Frame mode, complete with loop and transitions. Combine this with the app’s lockscreen feature, and you’ve got a faux animated Android-y lockscreen. All without a jailbreak.

The fourth installment of the five episode game series, The Walking Dead, is available now for your Mac on Steam. The group of survivors head into Savannah to find a boat to escape from the horror around them. Not only must they avoid the undead, but the human threat as well. The survivors are getting more and more skittish, even paranoid, and Lee must figure out a way to deal with them while protecting his young friend, Clementine.

Apple’s new Maps app in iOS 6 has been the subject of intense criticism in the press for weeks. Tim Cook had to issue a public apology for the widespread inaccuracy of Maps, and Apple is now recommending other third-party mapping solutions in the App Store. Not exactly a great product launch.

Google’s Eric Schmidt commented on Apple ditching Google Maps in an interview tonight. “Apple should have kept our maps,” said Schmidt. Why? Simply put, “They’re better maps.” Touche.

T-Mobile launched a new marketing campaign around the same time as the iPhone 5 launch. Called “Bring Your Own Device,” T-Mobile used Apple’s latest smartphone to demonstrate how customers can bring their unlocked devices from other carriers and use them on T-Mobile’s unlimited everything plan. Because Apple still hasn’t partnered with T-Mobile officially, the smaller carrier’s best bet is tempting unlockers with its attractive data pricing.

It’s only been a month into the campaign, but T-Mobile is already removing the iPhone brand from all marketing materials. Did Apple force T-Mobile’s hand? Not exactly.

When Steve Jobs said that the iPad was ushering in the “post-PC’ era, he was right. Gartner has released its PC shipment results for the third quarter of 2012, and things aren’t looking good for traditional computer makers like HP and Acer. The rise of smartphones and tablets has caused PC shipments to decline drastically in the last year, and it doesn’t look like the downwards spiral will be ending anytime soon.

There’s no denying that Apple’s success with iOS has influenced every aspect of their business, but it goes even further than you might think: Apple’s now even modeling its packaging after iOS app icons!

You see more and more of them every day: iPads, doubling as cash registers in businesses small and large, thanks to forward-thinking mobile payment companies like Square. Now Groupon, the deals-and-couponing social network, is getting in on the game with Breadcrumb, an incredible point-of-sale system which makes integrating an iPad into your business as simple as if Apple made the product themselves.

The Speck PixelSkin HD is a thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) case that’s designed to give you “slim and smooth” protection for your iPhone 5, while offering “grippyness [sic] with high-contrast matte pixels.”

Its raised bezel aims to keep your iPhone’s display free from scuffs and scratches should you drop it on its face, while the rubberized covers for the volume keys and sleep/wake button prevent fluff and grime from gathering within nooks and crannies.

The PixelSkin HD comes in a variety of colors — including red, purple, blue, black, and grey, and it’s priced at just under $30. The PixelSkin HD was one of my favorite “simple” cases for iPhone 4S, so will it retain that status for the iPhone 5?

EA announced back in June that Need For Speed Most Wanted would be coming to Android and iOS by the end of October. Well, that day is slowly approaching, and EA is reminding us by flaunting more in-game footage of this action-packed open world racer.