News - page 2024

This is one time where the bridesmaid wore white, sort of upstaged the bride and nobody minded.

Besides the Lion USB keys, the only thing new that came about after the Apple Store crashed offline for hours all around the world earlier today? On the Mac Pro page only, you can share the model of Mac Pro you want to select on either Facebook or Twitter.

Totally bizarre. Presumably Apple will roll this out to other Apple Store pages, but it seems like a pretty strange and useless addition to us.

Edit: Apparently, it’s on the iPod Classic page now too. Huh.

This week, Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer took part in a conference call hosted by Gleacher & Company, an investment firm. No surprises here: someone asked Oppenheimer what Apple thought of the $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google.

Oppenheimer’s response? Classically understated. “$12.5 billion is a lot of money.”

You should probably read “too much money” into that statement for Apple’s snide opinion on the matter.

In a surprise move, Skype has released a WiFi app that allows users to access over one million hotspots with Skype’s pay per minute credits. The app is clearly geared towards international travelers, and Skype is offering its new WiFI app for free in the App Store.

The image above would seemingly brook no further comment without sniggering. To all appearances, it is a prosthetic to strap onto your iPad, possibly for use with some tele-dildonics app that snuck by the App Store review process. But looks can be deceiving.

Is it time for Apple to tweak its back-to-school sales campaign? An analyst claims Mac sales are off up to 40 percent, as consumers become more sensitive to prices. But the report differs from another forecast suggesting Mac demand is “encouraging.”

From the “maybe I can get these on Cydia” department: musician and artist David Byrne has created a number of authentic looking app store listings for fake iPhone apps, as contributions to a social media-related art exhibition being held in New York City next month. One handy offering is called Invisible Me, an auto-reply app for texts and emails allowing you to avoid work while pretending to be engaged. Sweet!

In the first of its kind, an iOS developer recently paid $50,000 to settle a Federal Trade Commission complaint charging child-oriented apps collected personal data without parental knowledge. Broken Thumbs Apps, sells several games, such as Zombie Duck Hunt, Truth or Dare, and Emily’s Dress Up.

Andy Miller, the founder of Quattro Wireless who became Apple’s VP of mobile advertising and the head of iAd after Apple acquired his company for $250 million, is leaving the company.

Love Apple’s wireless Bluetooth keyboard but fed up of buying new batteries? Logitech’s new K75o keyboard could be the answer: a wireless keyboard — complete with a numeric keypad — powered entirely by the sun, which is sure to save you a small fortune and help the environment.

Attention patent shoppers: aisle one has a deal on digital imaging. Kodak is worth billions – not as a company, but for its patent portfolio. Indeed, just a portion of Kodak’s intellectual property is worth more than five times its stock value. Are you listening, Apple?

Are these white suited factory workers building iPhone 5 screens? It sure looks like it, given the elongated home button, widely rumored to be a capacitive number in the next iPhone. It’s even alleged to be taken in Wintek’s touchscreen plant, which handles the iPhone 4.

It certainly looks pretty legit to us. What do you think?

[via MIC Gadget]

Remember that court ruling in Korea last month that ordered Apple to pay out around $950 to the first person to sue over the whole Locationgate fiasco? Well, we knew it wouldn’t stop there.

27,000 users are now suing the Cupertino company for around $930 each — that’s a whopping $25 million lawsuit.

Woe be the mighty HP. Retail giant Best Buy wants the PC maker’s tablets off its shelves after selling just 25,000 TouchPads. That’s not all, Walmart and others are also having trouble getting rid of the devices, according to a Wednesday report. Say it with us: there’s no tablet market, only an iPad market.

For the past several hours, the Apple Store has been down, but unlike when we usually say that, Apple’s seemingly not doing just maintenance… instead, store.apple.com seems to have totally crashed.

Making things stranger, the Apple Online Store fell over on a Wednesday, as opposed to the traditional Tuesday maintenance period. Some users have reported in the last hour the usual ‘We’re Updating The Store” message… so could a new product be imminent?

We covered Google’s new Photovine photo sharing app when it first hit the App Store back in July, but it was initially available only to a select few users who were lucky enough to get an invite. But now we can all join in on the fun, because today Photovine is officially open to all.

Apple’s retail stores are famous for their wow-factor, with the iconic glass cube above the Fifth Avenue store in New York City, the rooftop gardens atop the Boylston Street store in Boston, Massachusetts, and the glass cylinder that leads into the Pundong store in Shanghai.

But there could soon be another store to add to our list of the weirdest and most interesting Apple stores on Earth, with plans of a huge new store on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica that features a breathtaking glass roof.

Following recent issues with iPad displays from LG Display, which has forced the company to turn to rival Samsung, Apple is said to be considering a $1 billion investment in Sharp to secure touch screens for the iPhone and iPad.

TeamViewer has been steadily updating its free remote-desktop app for the iPhone and iPad with big features ever since it first hit the App Store over a year ago. This big new update adds another meaty treat: the ability to transfer files back and forth between your iDevice and a Mac (or PC).

No, that’s not an electronic Tootsie Roll — It’s Logitech’s brand-new $50 iPad Speaker (actually, they’re calling it the “Tablet Speaker”; because, apparently, there are other tablets out there. Who knew.)

Mac sales continue on a steep upward trend, with Needham analyst Charlie Wolf weighing in on Apple’s Mac sales for June of 2011. As Wolf notes, the Mac saw its 21st consecutive quarter in which shipment growth for the Mac surpassed that of the entire PC market.

Overall, the Mac saw an astounding 14.6% growth in worldwide shipments, while the PC market saw a minimal growth rate of 2.7%. The reason for the Mac’s continued spike in growth? Asia.

The Games category is by far the most popular corner of the iOS App Store, and a new report has surfaced that says most people spend their money on virtual, in-app goods and upgrades in their favorite games.

In terms of Android and iOS users, the ‘freemium’ model seems to be the reigning king of mobile gaming. Users are starting to prefer free games that offer in-app upgrades and purchases to unlock new content.

For all the convenience of the Mac App Store, sometimes buying your software directly from Apple isn’t the best choice if you want to get all the features and functionality an app is capable of.

Why? As the case of Bare Bone Software’s popular text editing program BBEdit makes clear, the devs of some of the best software on OS X have been forced to cripple their apps in order to comply with Apple’s Mac App Store developer guidelines.

Apple has just released the first public update to OS X Lion since the software’s initial release. OS X 10.7.1 is now available in Software Update for Mac users running Apple’s latest desktop operating system.

The main purpose of OS X 10.7.1 is bug fixes, and it’s recommended that all Lion users upgrade.

Those weirdo Taiwanese animators are back, and this time they’re covering the Google-Motorola deal, complete with Steve Jobs in a Darth Vader helmet, swinging a lightsaber at an Android robot.