News - page 2048

One look at this vintage pic of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates from the early days of each man’s career says a whole lot about the ultimate trajectories of both their businesses and their customers, dont’cha think?

The original provenance of the photo is unknown, though it clearly predates the historic conversation the two tech titans had at the All Things D conference in 2007.

From the looks of it, we’ll hazard a guess here it’s from a visit Gates made to Jobs’ California home back when the battle between Microsoft and Apple was more of a fair fight. What do you think?

[Awesome People Hanging Out Together]

15% of all iPhone owners use one of just ten passwords on their lock screen, making it trivial for thieves with physical access to hack into their device with just some remedial trial-and-error. Is your passcode on the list?

Looking to avoid an outright banning ahead of Apple’s move to jettison all such apps from the iOS App Store, Trapster has taken the preemptive step of removing the DUI Checkpoint functionality from their popular app.

Steve Jobs wanted to build his futuristic spaceship campus thirty years ago, reports the San Jose Mercury News.

Jobs wanted a “shimmery glass structure” surrounded by trees in rural San Jose. He had purchased the land and had lined up world-class architect I.M. Pei to design it.

“To me, it’s as if time hasn’t shifted — 30 years, same vision, same scope, same dream,” said real estate consultant Bob Feld, who worked with Jobs at the time.

So what happened?

To celebrate IBM’s centenary next week, the world’s leading financial magazine, The Economist, took a look at what high-tech companies might survive 100 years.

Apple made the cut, but Microsoft didn’t. And Google is looking sketchy. Why?

Apple’s iCloud may be looking to revolutionize the way consumers interact with the cloud, but that doesn’t mean Cupertino’s not drawing on its competitors expertise when it comes to actually hosting their online services.

In fact, Apple’s pushing the iCloud online with more than a little bit of help from both Microsoft and Amazon.

New to iOS will be the ability to use the volume up button on an iDevice to take a picture. Because of this, you’re also able to use the volume up button on your headphones to do the same thing.

Obviously, you’ll need a headset or pair of ear buds that support Apple’s volume-up/volume-down functionality (like Apple’s official ear buds) to get this to work.

Once it’s set up, though, this is just great additional functionality for those of us who take pictures with our iPhones using a tripod, or those of us who want to take really steady shots. Just plug in your headphones, line up your iPhone on a table, and use your headset to trigger the shutter, with no resulting wobble!

One tech reviewer has likened RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook to “the herpes of tablets.” Although the CNN writer was joking, not so funny is how consumers are shying away from the iPad rival.

Here’s another little neat trick from the latest developer beta: in iOS 5, you’ll be able to download and install more than one app at a time, even on 3G.

Need a clue to how fast the world’s changing? Apple – which has been in the phone business less than five years – is about to sell more smartphones than Nokia for the first time ever. That’s the last laurel Nokia has left.

Apple has just confirmed that they are recalling a limited number of Verizon iPad 2s, and now we know the reason why.

The bleeding just won’t stop for BlackBerry-maker RIM. A half-dozen Wall Street analysts are cutting the share’s target prices amid concern the Canadian company is in free-fall and Apple’s iMessage just cut the emergency parachute.

If you’re still hosting on iWeb and worried about what yet another year without an update means especially after the announcement of iCloud, prepare to have your worst fears confirmed.

Mobile is the future. Despite App Store integration in OS X Lion and Apple’s increased excitement about the Mac, the number of iOS developers also working on Mac applications has dwindled to single digits.

The iPhone 4S might not be out until September, but that doesn’t mean a new iPhone won’t be released in its traditional launch window that June. In fact, new iPhones could hit the Apple Store as early as Wednesday… but don’t expect new hardware. Instead, if the latest report pans out, expect carrier unlocked iPhones that could work on both Verizon and AT&T.

Apple announced Mac OS X 10.7 Lion on June 6th and shortly there after renamed it to OS X Lion. If you are using the non-server version of OS X Lion you’ll be eligible for a free update under specific circumstances.

We met some amazingly fantastic people at our first-ever shindig (at San Francisco’s Il Pirata) and gave out a smorgasbord of smashing raffle prizes.

Remember when Samsung announced that their then-upcoming Galaxy Tab 10.1 Honeycomb tablet would be a smidge thinner than the iPad 2? And remember when someone actually looked at the Galaxy Tab 10.1 prototypeand found out it was actually thicker than the iPad 2?

Confusing, right? But it’s about to get even more confusing: while the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is just a hair thinner than the iPad 2 right now, Samsung will likely be forced to make it thicker than the iPad 2 in order to get around supply shortages. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 will soon be both thicker and thinner than the iPad 2 at the same time!

Are you looking for an external battery for your MacBook Air cobbled together from the cutting edge of Kruschev-era Soviet electronics? Want less functionality in that battery than one of Sanho’s excellent HyperMac offerings while also doing your small part to slaughter Mother Earth? Most importantly, want a gadget that can accomplish all of these heady things at a price far, far greater than the more eco-friendly competition? We’ve got you covered.

Back before The Simpsons and Futurama were even glimmers in his eye, Matt Groening did some contract work for Apple Computers. The result was this 1989 Apple Student’s Guide called Who Needs A Computer Anyway?, which features many of Groening’s Life in Hell characters. Check it out!

Apple has ordered 400,000 next-generation MacBook Airs to be built this month for a July launch, and each and every one of them will ship with low-watt versions of Intel’s cutting edge Sandy Bridge processors.

We’ve been raving about Apple’s new iMessage feature in iOS 5 all week. If our current findings haven’t piqued your interest in the new messaging service that let’s you ditch SMS messaging, then maybe this little tidbit will intrigue you. With iMessage, Apple is also introducing the best mobile group chat client to ever hit a smartphone.

There’s plenty of software programs on the Mac App Store that will allow you to add a signature to a PDF, but come Lion, you won’t need any of them: Preview.app will do it by creating a perfect digital pen signature via FaceTime.

Here’s how to sign a PDF in Preview under OS X Lion.

Apple is the world’s No. 1 consumer of flash memory, passing HP on its way to spending $17.5 billion for iPads, iPhones and other mobile devices. With that number only set to rise, it is very possible that next year, Apple will spend more per year on flash memory than Nokia’s entire market cap.

As the resident dead head of Cult of Mac, I’ve always been a little disappointed with Pop Cap’s Plants vs. Zombies for the iPhone and iPod Touch ($2.99). It’s a great game, but limited compared to the Mac and iPad versions.

Great news, though! Pop Cap has just updated Plants vs. Zombies and not only it it getting some of the features it was previously missing over its brother ports, but it even is getting a feature that Plants vs. Zombies HD doesn’t have… at least for now.