The biggest shopping day of the year is fast approaching. This Friday, countless retailers all over the U.S. will be slashing prices for Black Friday, causing a frenzy amongst shoppers who cannot wait to spend some of their hard-earned cash on discounted goods.
Apple famously recognizes the event by discounting some of its hottest products in the Apple online store for one day only, with savings to be made on new Macs, iOS devices, iPods, and even the latest accessories for your beloved Apple gadgets. This year will be no different, so based on the past few years’ reductions, here’s what to expect at the Apple online store on Black Friday.
Yes, the iPhone design is sleek and sexy – and the Apple device is full of jaw-dropping features. But while that may convince some, what really puts the cash in Cupertino’s pockets are those boring, unexciting carrier agreements. Indeed, 50 percent of cell phone growth comes from adding new carriers. Although Apple has inked deals with 230 carriers, that is just 30 percent of the nearly 800 global service providers.
This week we’re really excited to announce one of the best giveaways we’ve had in a while. We’re teaming up with Monster Cable to give readers the chance to win a Monster Accessory Pack worth over $250 AND a free iPhone 4S! For this giveaway you’ll have two chances to win one of the amazing prizes we have in store for you. Here’s how to play:
Carved from aircraft-grade aluminum with two tripod mounts, the iPhone Lens Dial defiantly asks — and responds to — the question, “Who says you can’t put external frickin’ lenses on your iPhone? Stupids, that’s who!” But who is stupider: the guy who doesn’t think you can put a lens on your iPhone, or the guy who pays $250 for a bulky case to do just that?
Described as an “explosive development in the tablet market,” the holiday season could finally see a two-way race for consumers’ attention as the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire vie for nearly 90 percent of sales. In a survey of North Americans intending to buy a tablet, 65 percent said they plan to buy an iPad, while 22 percent said they would pick the Kindle Fire, according to ChangeWave Research results released Monday. Those percentages may look disparate, but the Kindle Fire is still proving to be a shot across the bow of iPad… and it could soon become a full broadside.
The U.K.’s Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, has slammed Apple and its co-founder Steve Jobs for creating an egocentric and selfish consumer society that has only led to unhappiness. He claims the company’s advertising methods only make shoppers aware of what they don’t own, and he singled out Apple for creating a culture in which people only care about themselves. What hypocritical nonsense.
The folks at Canlys this morning are doing what analysts are fond of: playing the ‘if’ game. If iPads were included in the same category as computers, Apple might soon overtake HP as the world’s largest PC maker — particularly if the Cupertino, Calif. company launches the iPad 3, anticipated by many to be a 2012 release. Canalys, which does count tablets as PCs, expects Apple to pass HP before mid-2012.
Last week, we reported that French developer Applidium had managed to blow the Siri protocol wide open, making it possible for any internet connected device to dial into Apple’s Siri servers and get a response.
Any internet connected device? Pshaw, you might scoff. But one week later, we have the proof: a hacker who has tricked Siri into talking with his internet-connected thermostat!
Photo from Trey Ratcliff at www.StuckinCustoms.com
We exclusively confirmed way back in February that Apple had plans to build a store in Grand Central Station’s main terminal, and following months of speculation it seems the store is set to open its doors this week, just in time for the Christmas rush.
While we all eagerly await an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S, many of us are using custom settings shortcuts on our iOS homescreens to duplicate the functionality of a more robust Cydia hack like SBSettings.
The only problem? While the shortcuts work really well, some of the icons can be ugly and distinctly un-Apple-like.
Why settle for some puked-up icons, though, when you can have icons sexy enough to lick? Just go over to https://brdrck.me/settings/ on your iDevice and get downloading. Follow our previous how-to if you need guidance on setting these up.
A cooling stand is traditionally one of the ugliest accessories you can buy for your svelte MacBook Pro, one that’s guaranteed to take all that hard work Apple put into creating a beautiful notebook and just throwing it away. That is, until the TILT came along.
Sprint’s debut iPhone 4S commercial (unsurprisingly) boasts about the biggest reason for choosing Sprint over its rivals, and that’s “truly unlimited” data. It also praises Apple’s App Store, which is home to half a million apps, by floating popular app icons around New York City.
Walter Isaacson’s terrific Steve Jobs biography offers a magnificent insight into how Steve created Apple, and the work he did behind the scenes. However, it doesn’t talk all that much about NeXT — another computer company Steve founded during his spell away from Apple in the mid-eighties.
These fascinating clips from a series called Entrepreneurs do, however. They show Steve as many of us have never seen him before — discussing new ideas with his team, brainstorming on company retreats, and leading NeXT to create something awesome.
Check out more of the documentary after the break.
Greg Joswiak is Apple’s vice president of worldwide iPod, iPhone, and iOS product marketing. He’s presented at past iPhone and iOS Apple events and is a critical member of Apple’s corporate team.
While speaking at the “Silicon Valley Comes to Cambridge” event in the UK, Joswiak shared what he believes to be the four keys to Apple’s success.
Nick Bilton of The New York Times recently sat down with Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson. In the interview, Isaacson shared his opinions of Jobs and other details surrounding the book.
Steve Jobs “didn’t go into details” about Apple’s future products during his discussions with Isaacson, but Jobs did reveal three things he wanted to reinvent: the television, textbooks, and photography.
Last last week, VMware released Fusion 4.1, an update to its popular virtualization software that adds many improvements and bug fixes. The biggest improvement is the applications ability to run older versions of Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard.
Microsoft recently unveiled its first retail store on the East coast at the Tysons Corner mall in McLean, Virginia. Like other Microsoft stores, the new location is strategically placed near the local Apple Store.
In an attempt to appeal to the hip and cool computer geeks out there, Microsoft hired a DJ to play music during the store’s opening. Can you guess what kind of laptop the DJ used?
The Apple iPhone dominates the world of consumer smart phones, but is a bit of a laggard in the business market, right?
Wrong! It turns out that the opposite is true. Apple is in fact a relatively minor player in the global consumer smart phone market, but by far the dominant player in business.
According to Gartner, Android has 52.5% global smart phone market share, Symbian 16.9%, iOS 15%, BlackBerry 11%, Bada 2.2% and Microsoft 1.5%.
In business, however, the iPhone has recently emerged as the top market-share leader with 45%. To achieve this dominance, Apple recently edged out BlackBerry, which has now fallen to 32% of the market. Android gets 21%, recently surpassing Nokia.
To be accurate, these numbers are apples and oranges, so to speak. The Gartner numbers are for both consumer and business and worldwide, and the iPhone numbers are businesses worldwide.
Android’s big global consumer numbers and iPhone’s big business numbers say more about whose got money and who hasn’t than what people’s preferences would be if all phones were priced the same. The fact that very cheap Android phones exist in the world, but very cheap iPhones do not exist, explains much.
Still, it’s a shocking result that’s counter to the conventional wisdom.
Perhaps even more shocking is BlackBerry’s recent second-place status in businesses and enterprises to the iPhone. Business is all BlackBerry’s got. Yet iPhone clobbers RIM in this space now.
More to the point, how can a phone that supposedly ignores business concerns surpass a phone that’s totally designed for business in the business marketplace?
Just when you thought you could buy a totally free iPhone, AT&T raises the subsidized price of the iPhone 3GS to $0.99! What gives?
As spotted by MacRumors, one of the nation’s largest carriers is listing the iPhone 3GS as costing $0.99 on its online store. The carrier activation fee is waved with the purchase and AT&T is offering free overnight shipping. What’s really weird is that Apple still lists the iPhone 3GS as costing $0 on its own website.
There have been rumors of Retina iMacs practically since the day Apple announced Retina display was coming to iOS in 2010. Most of them have been complete nonsense, and Mac fans have had year after year of seeing their ultra-high-res hopes dashed whenever Apple would announce a new Mac product. Unlike pretty much every other item on this list, however, it looks like a Retina iMac may finally be happening, courtesy of recently discovered code in Apple's OS X 10.10 Yosemite beta. But maybe that’s just the optimism speaking...
Take this with a grain of salt, but a “reliable source” speaking to iLounge has three inside scoops on Apple’s 2012 product line-up. Their veracity? Offhand, we’d say one of them’s a certainty, one of them’s probable and the last one is nutty.
The iPad 2 has some impressive mobile silicon inside it. The A5 processor is a dual-core affair with a 1GHZ clock speed, capable of about 171 megaflops (or about 171 100 floating-point operations per second).
Not bad, right? But how does the iPad 2 stack up against the most powerful computer in the world, Fujitsu’s K Super Computer?
Not too well, according to the guys at Royal Pingdom. In fact, you would need about 61.5 million iPad 2s to match the 10 Billion megaflops of the K Computer.
That’s enough iPad 2s that if you stacked them on top of one another, the pile would be 540 kilometers high. That’s the equivalent of about 1,700 Eiffel Towers stacked end-to-end.
Well, sure. Fine. But can the K computer run Infinity Blade 2? Thought not.
Here’s a Hollywood marketing tactic we never thought of: Create an iTunes alternative so roundly despised that you’re forced to send angry consumers to iTunes. And you wonder why your DVD player is gathering dust?
A good friend of mine recently bought a new iPhone 4S from her local Apple Store. When presented with her new iPhone, the Apple Store salesperson tried to sell her on AppleCare+. It was a hard sell; in her opinion, the Apple Store salesperson went about it in all of the wrong ways. She’s a savvy consumer, reads Cult of Mac and other tech blogs, and has even read my new book. She did her own research before she bought the iPhone. She understood the differences between AppleCare and AppleCare+. She weighed risks of accidental damage against the price and limitations of AppleCare+, and decided the extra protection wasn’t for her.
She passed on AppleCare+, but believes that she might have been swayed if she hadn’t done her homework. She made a choice and, whether or not it turns out to be the right one, she was the one to make it. But not everyone is going to take the time to evaluate the pros and cons of AppleCare+ and will be confronted with this question at the time of purchase. Might you or someone you know fall victim to a hard sell on AppleCare+?
When Apple first announced the new $99 AppleCare+ program along with the iPhone 4S, there was a lot of confusion about it, largely because Apple required the coverage be purchased at the same time as the iPhone.
Luckily, Apple’s now cleared up its AppleCare+ policies. You now have 30 days to purchase AppleCare+ after you pick up a new iPhone.
What is AppleCare+? It replaces the previous $69 AppleCare for iPhone coverage that didn’t cover accidental coverage. With AppleCare+, you have coverage for up to two accidental breaks of your iPhone, each subject to a $49 service fee. For clumsy butterfingers like me, not a bad deal at all.
When Disney CEO Robert Iger joined Apple’s board of directors, the tech giant offered him a little gift — and it wasn’t a fruit basket. No, Iger received shares worth more than an estimated $84,000. Of course, the amount is Mickey Mouse compared to the $29 million he pulls in as Disney’s head exec.
