News - page 1999

Apple has a pretty long and storied history naming their products after celebrities. In fact, it goes way back to 1994, when Apple’s engineers code-named the Power Mac 7100 “Carl Sagan” because they hoped to sell “billions and billions” of them. Sagan C&Ded Apple over the codename, which prompted Apple’s engineers to rename the computer internally to the BHA, or “Butt-Head Astronomer.”

Now reports indicate that Apple’s at it again, calling iOS 5’s upcoming Shortcut text-expansion feature after another butthead, Ashton Kutcher.

Teamsters Union boss James Hoffa thinks Apple and other tech companies relying on overseas factories to make the gadgets Americans love are being unpatriotic. “Everything [Apple does] is in China, or in Asia somewhere…There’s something wrong with that,” Hoffa told a cable news interviewer on the eve of Labor Day.

The iPhone could generate nearly half of Apple’s revenue by calendar 2013, with the tech giant forecasted to sell 143 million smartphones and 68 million iPads, according to a high-profile analyst Wednesday.

That unassuming picture of sushi above? Very likely taken by an iPhone 5. Too bad the plate’s not shinier, or we might be able to Blade Runner ourselves an actual image of the phone.

This remote controlled monster truck is the coolest iOS accessory I’ve ever seen. Forget remote controlled helicopters; nothing wreaks havoc like a monster truck, and this one from Dexim is controlled entirely by your iPhone.

Software maker Intuit, maker of QuickBooks, wants its QuickBooks for Mac 2012 to be tailored to the Apple-owned small enterprise. That means the next version of the accounting software package available Sept. 26 is “not about check-boxes and feature parity,” a product manager says.

Fancy yourself an up-and-coming screencaster? Want to do some of those sexy how-to videos the way Cult of Mac does?

Screeny developer Drew Wilson has knocked the price of his screencasting app down to free for today only, allowing even cheapskates without 15 bucks to rub together the ability to capture videos of what’s going on their Mac at any size.

You can grab it right now from the Mac App Store.

Have you ever attempted to read the whole iTunes Software License Agreement after installation? No, me neither. And there’s one good reason for that: it’s so dull it makes me want to gauge out my eyeballs and smash up my Mac. But one grab student has transformed the endlessly boring body of text into a pain-free masterpiece that even Apple itself would be proud of. 

The Find My iPhone feature that Apple offers for free to users packing iPhones is helping the Navy to locate the wreckage of a plane that crashed just off the island of Robinson Crusoe in Chile. Rescue teams have yet been able to locate the plane since it went down, but thanks to Apple’s service, they are now one step closer.

It’s gotten to the point that most Mac bundles are pretty blase affairs, but you can always trust MacUpdate to slide one past the gates of our cynicism. The latest MacUpdate bundle is a gobsmacker of a deal.

How good is it? They’re selling Roxio’s Toast Titanium optical disc authoring suite for half its retail price… then basically throwing in ten other equally excellent apps for free, including CoM favorite iStats Menu. Boom.

We’ve seen a MacBook Air being used to cut a cake, but now the razor-thin notebook can used to process and prepare food acting like a knife to slice and dice a variety of vegetables, fruit and your favorite crustacean.

A number of major carriers all over the globe have begun receiving a near-final build of Apple’s upcoming iOS 5 software for testing, according to one report. The software is said to be a newer than the beta recently seeded to developers, and includes a number of features that we’re still yet to see in previous betas, including that much-rumored speech-to-text technology.

Facebook issued an update to its iPhone application last night, and while it introduces a number of nice new features, it also removes all code related to the iPad version — meaning you can no longer install the official Facebook app for iPad before its release.

An Apple-related tidbit from the Carol Bartz-Yahoo saga that perhaps confirms the iPad’s dominance with corner office types. Her 42-word message about getting fired as CEO (over the phone, ouch) this afternoon ends with the “Sent from my iPad” signature.

Netflix has inflicted a recent number of price increases on its customers and now Netflix is inflicting it’s customers with a new restriction. A customer can only have one streaming video feed per account. This change is going to have a serious impact on families that share a Netflix account.

It’s already insane how thin an iPad 2 is — even thinner than the iPhone 4 — but come 2012, you’re about to see them get a lot thinner, thanks to some svelte battery packs that should shave up to 30% off the total footprint of the iPad 3.

Remember those sexy 27-inch Thunderbolt displays Apple announced it would sell once they slipped out the first Thunderbolt MacBook? They’re now zooming on their way to stores, featuring FaceTime HD cameras, 2.1 speaker systems, three USB ports, a lone Firewire 800 port, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a second Thunderbolt port for daisy chaining.

Don’t expect this to all run cheap, though. You’ll spend $999 for one, or about the price of a MacBook Air.

Social networking, schnetworking, right? Yeah, I know. I am so overshared I feel like a sexted pic at an 8th grade dance sometimes.

But I could still use good ideas about what apps or games are worth my time. Enter Kinetik: a free app whose goal is to help you share the apps you love for your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad and get suggestions from others about what is keeping them distracted during commute time or entertained during meetings.

Hot on the heels of the rumor that Apple is considering the acquisition of TV/movie streaming and subscription service Hulu, it’s now being reported that Google has entered the potential buyer foray with a handsome bid to put the others to rest.

Currently, Amazon, Yahoo, and the Dish Network are eying Hulu for a potential buyout, and there’s always the possibility that Apple could step in at the last minute. As of right now, Google may be the one that gets to take Hulu home.

An article on Macworld today sheds some light on the Towson Hack — a mysterious scam involving stolen iTunes store credit dating back to November of last year.

Macworld highlights a trafficked thread on the Apple support forums that tells story after story of stolen iTunes gift card credit, initially relating to a changed billing address to Towson, Maryland.

Believe it.

You could almost smell the desperation from the press release announcing the “first ever” premiere of a network television show on Apple’s iTunes. Fox, which usually keeps its first-run programming off iTunes, has released the pilot episode of “New Girl,” a series receiving lackluster reviews, as a free download on the service.

Fortune Magazine’s Adam Lashinsky will be penning an upcoming book titled, “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired — and Secretive — Company Really Works.”

The book will be an “expanded” look at Lashinsky’s well-read article of the same name from earlier this year. As one of the Silicon Valley’s premiere reporters, Lashinsky’s new book will be sure to permeate the inner workings of Apple in a new and refreshing way.

I hate cables, especially when traveling, but it always seems like I’m walking around with a whole suitcase full of spare electric umbilicals when I go on a trip. The MacAlly Dualsync nicely consolidates two of the cables I need: an Apple Dock Connector and a microUSB cable, thanks to the ingenuity of a removable, Apple-compliant head.

I’m also pretty fetched by the way the whole thing winds back down to just four and a half inches from a maximum length of about two feet. The price ain’t shabby, either: it’ll cost you just twenty five bucks.

[via iLounge]

And the dog pile’s on. Less than a week after the Department of Justice moved to block AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile, Sprint has sued both carriers to help ensure the deal doesn’t go through.