Apple has been forced to pay a couple in Tokyo, Japan, ¥600,000 (approx. $7,400) for medical fees and pain and suffering after their first-generation iPod nano spontaneously burst into flames, causing burns to the hand that took more than a month to completely heal.
Lonely Planet guides are a great way to make sure you spend your vacations sharing hotels and restaurants with cheap, filthy backpacking hippies. And now, in addition to various iPhone city guides, the company has just launched a range of country guides.
The U.S. Department of Justice recently accused Apple of conspiring with book publishers to thwart Amazon’s power over eBook pricing. Today Apple has responded saying that “the DOJ’s accusation of collusion against Apple is simply not true.”
Remember Lodsys? Many of you may recall how the patent troll sued App Store developers left and right last year. Apple tried to step in and release its blood-thirsty Cupertino hounds (code for “lawyers”) on Lodsys, claiming that its third-party developers were legally covered from any patent infringement claims.
Apple has finally been granted access to intervene and crush Lodsys once and for all, according to a new report.
Apple has just released an update to Java for OS X that effectively removes any traces of the notorious Flashback trojan from an infected system. The update can be downloaded now in Software Update on all Macs running Snow Leopard through Mountain Lion.
Have you ever wondered what the back of your favorite iPhone app icon looks like? Some icons are so well designed nowadays that they almost have a 3D look. Such is the case with the extremely detailed Instagram icon. Professional photographer and designer Cole Rise thought it would be interesting to envision the rear of the Instagram icon’s camera, so he threw together a beautiful concept.
Do you like Chair Entertainment’s blockbuster iOS game, Infinity Blade II? A beefy new update has just hit the App Store, and it adds new content for ClashMob, the game’s awesome social battle mode. In addition, the new update adds over two dozen new items and fully implements iOS 5.1 support. while Chair promises that an expended single-player campaign is coming soon.
Intel’s upcoming Ivy Bridge update are scheduled to be officially announced and made available on April 23rd, and they will most likely be immediately used to build updated, Air-like MacBook Pros including second-gen Thunderbolt controllers.
But could the next MacBook Pros also have HiDPI, Retina-ready displays? It’s conjecture at this point, but we know Apple has been interested in moving to Retina quality displays in its Mac line for quite some time, and now a recent comment from Intel VP Kirk Skaugen confirms that Ivy Bridge makes it possible for PC makers to make retina display laptops and computers, “if OEMs choose to use it.”
In other words? The next MacBook Pros might not just have slimmer footprints and ditch the optical drives, but pack four times the pixels. Swoon.
[via 9to5Mac]
8-bit pixel art is so last year. These days, all the cool kids and hipsters are into 1-bit photos. That’s right, one-bit. Now there’s an app that will render all your photographs as if they were taken on an old Nintendo Game Boy camera.
With its iBooks Author software, Apple has made it incredibly easy for almost anyone to write and publish their own e-book. And it hopes to make it just as easy to create iOS apps. One patent application shows the Cupertino company has been working on a tool that would allow users without any programming knowledge at all to build their own iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch software.
Did you think the $399 iPad 2 was just Apple cleaning out inventory? Think again: the iPad 2,4, as its known inside its own firmware, has a new A5 chip built upon a 32 nanometer process, which means it’s cheaper for Apple to make… and potentially more battery efficient to boot.
In an effort to increase security for your Apple ID, Apple is forcing users to set a number of security questions and answers that will help “verify your identity in the future.” If you forget your password or your account is compromised, you will be asked to answer these questions to prove who you are.
LogMeIn has launched a new cloud-based storage, syncing, and sharing service that hopes to compete with services like Dropbox, Box.net, and the upcoming Google Drive. Called ‘Cubby’, the service offers 5GB of free storage which is protected by LogMeIn’s 128-bit SSL encryption, and it can be accessed from a web browser or using the official Cubby apps for Android and iOS.
Got a little corner of your property that you’d like to keep a closer eye on? Or are you just concerned that the babysitter is not shaking your kids hard enough when they start acting up? Then what you need is the Dropcam HD, a Wi-Fi video camera designed for remote monitoring.
Picle, the photo/audio hybrid app launched a month ago at SxSW (and reviewed by us here), just got updated with some cool new features, the best of which is converting Picles to movies.
Intel has reportedly shifted the announcement of its next-generation Ivy Bridge processor from April 29 to April 23 as PC makers gear up to release their second-generation of ultrabooks in May. But you could see it powering Mac OS X before then, with the new chip expected to replace its predecessor, the Sandy Bridge processor, in Apple’s next MacBook Pro and iMac.
Installing Flash Player on a Mac is a surefire way to ensuring all of your processing power and RAM is maxed out on a frequent basis. Whether you’re watching a video on YouTube or playing a simple puzzle game, the second Flash begins to load your system becomes an unstable mess.
Unfortunately, a lot of sites still insist on using Flash content, so you’re forced to install it or put up with a half-baked worldwide web. But it’s good to know Adobe is still hard at work on improving the experience. The company has just released the first Flash Player 11.3 beta for Mac OS X, which features all sorts of enhancements and tweaks.
If you’re approaching or have arrived at forty, and you had any kind of interest in skateboarding as a youngster, then I have some very exciting news for you, which I shall deliver in four words: Bones Brigade iPhone cases.
Apple has granted Rob Schmitz of Marketplace direct access to the Foxconn supply chain following his debunking of Mike Daisy’s inaccurate claims regarding Chinese working conditions. This makes Schmitz the second reporter to ever take a video crew behind the scenes at Foxconn. ABC News and Bill Weir previously visited China for a Nightline segment.
This 2 in a half minute video briefly takes you though the iPad manufacturing line and Foxconn life in general. Schmitz offers a very different take than that of Mike Daisey, highlighting how much people actually want to work at Foxconn.
Apple has always been considered the underdog of the PC industry, although Mac sales have been on an upwards trend for the last few years while the rest of the industry continues to take a nosedive. The iPad is cannibalizing PC sales, and PC manufacturers are starting to concentrate on the smartphone and tablet space. The “PC” sales numbers are still not quite matching up with reality: the iPad is a personal computer, and Apple is crushing the competition.
With that in mind, research firm Gartner has released its PC shipments report for the first quarter of 2012. According to the report, Apple sits as the third largest PC maker in the U.S.. And the iPad? Well, no one can touch the iPad.
It’s been some time since we’ve seen an update to the popular productivity app Springpad, and for good reason. After fishing through months of feedback from over 3 million users, it appears the Springpad team has been hard at work improving their “Smart Notebooks,” and readying the release of their new and improved Smartpad 3.0. Released today, Springpad for Android and iOS features a complete redesign, with a clean UI and a plethora of new functions.
Remember the Mac 128K prototype with the 5.25-inch ‘Twiggy’ drive? Our own Adam Rosen showed you the prototype in detail several months ago, and a model has now surfaced on eBay. The cost to own this piece of Apple history? $100,000. What’s even more interesting about this item is the seller. Looks like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak might be cleaning out his closet.
Apple recently responded to the Flashback trojan that has reportedly infected at least 600,000 Macs. The Cupertino company said that it is working on an antivirus tool to detect and remove Flashback from infected computers. Another tool called FlashBackChecker can check to see if you’re infected right now.
Russian firm Kaspersky Lab has released a free Mac antivirus tool to not only discover, but also delete Flashback from your Mac.
When Apple first debuted the new 1080p Apple TV in March, they said they’d brought their set-top box up to spec with the rest of the industry by including what they called a “single-core variant” of the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S’s A5 processor.
But how is it an A5 processor if only has one core? The answer is that technically, the A5 inside the Apple TV is still a dual-core chip, but one of them’s a dud.
One of the big discussions emerging around BYOD programs and the expanding use of mobile technologies like the iPhone and iPad is whether it’s a better approach to manage the device itself or simply the business data that’s on it. There are benefits and drawbacks to each approach and they aren’t mutually exclusive – IT can manage and lock down a device as well as create a secure sandbox on it to hold corporate data.
The one thing that both approaches have in common, however, is that they require some form of on-device solution (an agent for device management or an app/suite for information management). Even when an iOS device is deployed without a management agent, configuration data or profiles are still loaded on the device itself.
Mobilisafe is a new mobile management company (their flagship product is still in beta) that is taking a novel approach and developing a mobile management solution that don’t load anything onto mobile devices themselves.