News - page 1731

Buying an unlocked iPhone and using a prepaid plan can save you a lot of money over two years. Over $1000 in savings actually.  T-Mobile is the only major U.S. carrier that hasn’t landed a deal for the iPhone yet, but they’re not letting that stop them from getting new iPhone customers.

This week T-Mobile is pushing their new Unlimited & Unlocked campaign to get future iPhone 5 owners to buy an unlocked iPhone and bring it over to their network where they can save $1200 over two years versus AT&T.

The always sketechy Digitimes has a new report out, and as usual, douse your taste buds with brine, because they say that a Retina Display iMac was supposed to debut this month, but has been delayed because of production problems. They also say the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro wil be out by October.

After a lot of confusion and denials from the FBI and Apple, the real source of the 1 million hacked UDIDs that Anonymous leaked last week has finally been found, and aswas theorized last week, it was just an app publisher.

Blue Toad, an app publishing company in Florida, revealed to NBC News that they’re 100 percent confident that Anonymous hacked their databases and stole the UDIDs from them.

OS X Mountain Lion comes with 35 great wallpapers pre-installed, but what if that’s not enough to satisfy your computer’s cravings for more cosmic landscapes and jaw-dropping scenery straight out of National Geographics? Some of use need more. Like, at least 43 more.

Apple actually includes 43 incredible wallpapers with a 3200×2000 resolution that are hidden inside OS X Mountain Lion. They include stuff like scenery from National Geographics, nature patterns, and cosmic photos from the Hubble telescope. Finding the wallpapers and unlocking them is actually really easy too, here’s how to do it:

Yes, Amazon just released some beautiful new Kindles with HD screens and an ecosystem that could one day potentially rival Apple’s. Not only do the new Kindles look great, but they’re super cheap too, because Amazon wants to make money when you’re using their devices, not when you buy their devices.

If you take a look at the chart above you can see how completely different Amazon is from Apple. While Amazon is content to sell products now and make profit later, Apple makes big profits off of small devices now, and keeps customers coming back with an incredible ecosystem. Which strategy do you think is best? Money talks right?

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Over the past couple of days, Apple’s been busy updating Yerba Buena and rehearsing their keynote deliveries in preparation for the iPhone 5 announcement. The iPhone 5 is a sure bet. We know it’s coming. You know it’s coming. But will Apple have any other goodies to show off at Wednesday’s keynote?

What do you think Apple will announce along side the iPhone 5? New iTunes? Apple TV update? Maybe an iWatch? We want to hear your ideas, whether they’re totally legit or completely whacky.

Click here to tell us what you think Apple will announce on Wednesday at the Cult of Mac Forums

Using mobile Safari’s private browsing mode on an iOS device is a pain, because you have to activate and deactivate via the Settings app. In fact, I’ve always found that it’s just easier to use a third-party browser. But not anymore. If you’ve got a jailbroken iOS device, installing the Privata tweak allows you to switch back and forth between Safari’s private browsing mode within Safari itself.

Itching to get a Retina Mac, but worried the 15-inch MacBook Pro is too big? Well you may not have to wait too long for the 13-inch model. According to one report, Apple’s suppliers have already begun shipping the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and refreshed iMacs ahead of their launch in the coming months.

What happens if you give ten strangers the same piece of paper to draw on at the same time? Let’s up the stakes. Let’s make that paper a blank iPad screen, and let’s give all the “artists” the anonymity of the internet. This app exists, and it’s called uDraw HD.

Acclaim’s 1999 R/C racing classic, Re-Volt, is coming to iOS this month. The title has been ported by development studio Big Bit Ltd, which is run by Nick Baynes, one of the original creators of the game, who has been teasing its release on Twitter.

Man oh man. This leaked Sony RX1 looks sweet indeed. If the rumors are to be believed, the camera is a mirrorless body with a full-frame sensor (the same sensor as the also-rumored Sony A99) and a whole bunch of manual controls. It also looks like it’ll play nice with proper, old-school 35mm lenses.

When Apple announced the original iPhone back in 2007, Google’s first Android handset wasn’t too far behind. The search giant got a compelling iOS alternative out of the gate before anyone else, and it’s been a head-to-head battle between the two platforms ever since. But how was Android able to follow the iPhone so quickly?

Well, that’s fairly obvious to most. You see, Google chairman Eric Schmidt was an Apple board member when the Cupertino company was developing the iPhone, and so he got an inside look at the device before anyone else. Little did Apple know that Schmidt would use what he saw inside Apple’s headquarters to create the iPhone’s biggest competitor.

With the iPad, however, it was a different story. That was years ahead of everything else, and not even Google had a slate ready to do battle when the iPad launched in 2010. Why? Because Steve Jobs made sure Schmidt knew nothing about the iPad before its debut.

After unveiling its latest Kindle lineup last week, Amazon has updated its Kindle app for Mac OS X to introduce support for new books that employ the Kindle 8 format. It also adds OS X Lion gestures and a number of improvements.

According to Enderle Group analyst Rob Enderle, Apple might walk out a celebrity during the iPhone 5 event on September 12.

Why? First of all, because Enderle thinks that so many details about the iPhone 5 have already leaked out that no one’s going to bother watching the event.

Do you wish that Spotify had a free web version like Pandora? Your wish may soon be granted.

According to multiple reports, popular music streaming service Spotify is gearing up to unleash a full web app for paid and free customers.

Remember the giant ‘Retina’ in Apple’s huge event banner for the third-gen iPad? If you thought that was a subtle hint, then get ready, cause it’s even better this time around. We showed you the colorful signage Apple put up at the Yerba Buena Center over the weekend, and it sadly looked like there were no immediate iPhone 5 hints in the banner’s design. Think again.

Believe it or not, the banner currently hanging from Yerba Buena in San Francisco points to the rumored 4-inch display for the iPhone 5.

A great new photography app, which allows you to add more than 100 stunning effects to your images, is kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup. It’s accompanied by Giftly, a clever app for sending all kinds of gifts; a new note-taking app called Scrapnote; and a great new update to Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPad.

We already know that the iPhone 5 will support faster 4G LTE networking, but details surrounding international availability have remained scarce. While it’s assumed that the iPhone 5 will support LTE speeds on U.S. carriers like AT&T and Verizon, accessing LTE on carriers in other continents is a whole other issue.

According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, the next iPhone will indeed support LTE on certain networks in Europe and Asia:

Kicking off this week’s must-have games roundup is Wild Blood, Gameloft’s first game to be built upon the impressive Unreal Engine, which lets you live out the story of Sir Lancelot. There’s also a new title from Marvel, the awesome sequel to VS. Racing, and Square Enix’s latest Final Fantasy title.

On Friday Apple started preparing the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, California for the long-awaited iPhone 5 event that will be taking place this Wednesday. Journalists will pile into the venue to watch Tim Cook and company unveil the next iPhone and other surprises. Per tradition, Apple has begun putting up larger banners outside of Yerba Buena the weekend before the event.

We stopped by Yerba Buena to get a look at the signage Apple is putting up. Check out more on-location shots from Yerba Buena in our gallery below.

Cheaper e-books would be great, right? According to industry executives, that may just happen in the next one to three months after a federal judge entered an approval of an antitrust settlement between several e-book publishers and the Justice Department itself.

In the final settlement today, publishers Lagardere, Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins have the next 10 days to notify e-book retailers like Amazon that any previous agreements regarding e-book pricing are no longer valid. The deal gave publishers only seven days to notify Apple, interestingly enough.

According to the report in the Wall Street Journal, one executive, who asked to not be identified, said, “It could be pretty fast.”

The publishers have to let retailers out of any agreements that prevent discounting, and the retailers are also able to terminate said contracts within 30 days.

This last weekend at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), I spent time with the developers at Wizards of the Coast, the creators of Magic: The Gathering, to talk about their latest Magic: The Gathering expansion, due out on iOS, PC, and console, Return To Ravnica. They sat me down in the nice room behind the Magic and Dungeons and Dragons booth for some hands-on time with the expansion, which takes players to a new plane in the Magic: The Gathering Universe, Ravnica.

The expansion comes with new single player opponents, each with their own deck and playstyle. As in the original iOS version of Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013, once you beat one of the computer enemies, you unlock their card deck to play in your own battles with the online multiplayer.

Let’s face it: we Apple fanatics have a certain stereotype. We all love our Apple devices, and it shows. Sometimes too much.

If there has ever been a video parody perfectly suited for the Cult of Mac, it’s this one. Behold part 1 and 2 of “Sh*#t Apple Fanatics Say:”

If you’ve been itching for an unlock on your iPhone, then you may be able to score a free factory unlock from AT&T. The way it typically works is that a U.S. carrier will unlock an iPhone after its two-year contract is up, but it looks like AT&T is offering unlocks for free to certain on-contract iPhones.

Requesting an unlock through AT&T’s web form has produced good results for multiple iPhone owners. If you’d like an unlock to use your iPhone on any GSM carrier worldwide, then it’s worth a shot.

Following this morning’s enigmatic shots of the inside of the lobby, news shots of what is happening outside the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts ahead of September 12th’s iPhone 5 event have emerged, showing the first stages of what will become the public-facing banners of what will undoubtedly prove to be Apple’s biggest event yet.

The banners are going up right now, but we’ve got our own photographer heading down, hopefully to capture more. In the past, the banners that hang outside of the Yerba Buena Center Of The Arts have tended to make some reference to an unannounced new product or service, so hopefully, we’ll soon have an inkling of what Apple’s set to announce.

More images at MacStories below.

Source: MacStories