Chrome started life as a browser, now it’s an OS. Well, sort of an OS. If you’re only running one application, you don’t need much OS.
The Chrome Notebook is Google’s very early foray into the world of hardware – backed, of course, by its extensive existing online software products. Here’s an overview video:
The Chrome Notebook has a full size keyboard, 8 hour battery life, a built-in webcam, and both wifi and 3G connectivity. You log in with your Google Account. The Chrome browser treats webapps the way the iTunes Store treats iOS apps: you can browse them, and “install” them. Each app runs in a separate tab.
Skitch, the screenshot and image editor that’s been in beta since the day your parents were born (OK, since 2007), has finally reached 1.0.
If you’ve not tried Skitch before, now’s a good time to give it a spin. The emphasis is definitely on screenshots – taking them, and adding text, arrows, annotations and other fun stuff. It’s an app much beloved by writers of Mac blogs, who’ve made much use of it over the years for making quick-and-easy illustrations for their posts. Guilty as charged, Your Honour.
The deal with Skitch 1.0 is simple: you can still use the app for free if you like (“YAY!” cry the Mac bloggers), but if you shell out about $15 a year, you can get all sorts of sexy extras like no ads, more image formats, SSL encryption and more more more.
In an email to a frustrated user, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has confirmed that the company’s MobileMe subscription service will improve in 2011. Jobs’ reply was a signature short response, but it promises a better service for the many disgruntled users who sign up to Apple’s email, hosting, and syncing service each year.
One MacRumorsreader became so dissatisfied with the MobileMe service, that he emailed Jobs to let him know.
I love my iPad and iPhone4 and am a huge fan of yours and all that Apple does. I desperately want to stay inside of Apple’e ecosystem as much as possible.
However, MobileMe is making it very difficult for me to do so. Unreliable/unpredictable syncing, creating duplicate entries (sometimes scores of them), etc. It’s almost unusable.
And I know from forums (including Apple’s own support boards) that I am not the only one experiencing these very real and frustrating problems.
Please tell me it will get better, and soon?
Jobs’ reply was simply, “Yes, it will get a lot better in 2011.”
Unsurprisingly, Steve’s response doesn’t give away much for us to get excited about, other than the reassurance of a significantly enhanced MobileMe service next year. Whether that means improvements to existing MobileMe services, or the introduction of new features is unclear at this time.
The $99 yearly subscription service from Apple providers users with email, file/photo hosting, and syncing across all of their devices, including Macs, PCs, iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches.
If you have your hands on Apple’s latest must-have gadget the iPad, you’ve probably wondered how to keep other people’s hands off it.
Sure, you can password protect the screen. But that’s not going to do much if someone decides to pick up the handy tablet and run with it.
Enter the iPad lock. Well, it’s actually a $40 case with room for a standard computer lock (sold separately.) The hard clear plastic case has a prominent slot on the side, then you attach a lock which you need to secure to a table or other stationary too-big-to-walk-off-with item.
Google’s Android operating system, which seemed to be a popular alternative to Apple’s iPhone and a way for wireless carriers to combat the lure of Cupertino’s handset, appears to be slowing. Android activations have held steady at about 200,000 activations per day since August, according to a report.
When the Mountain View, Calif. company Monday introduced a new version of its operating system codenamed “Gingerbread,” the firm said they were activating 1.5 million phones per wee, or 214, 200 per day. In early August, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporters the company had topped 200,000 activations per day.
We’ve presumed for some time that Apple would follow its blockbuster hit iPad tablet with another version sometime in early 2011. Now comes word Apple’s main supplier will start shipping the iPad 2 at the end of February, according to a Taiwan-based industry publication Tuesday.
Initial shipments by Foxconn will number 400,000 to 600,000 and follow reduced production of the original iPad to between 1.6 and 1.8 million tablets, the publication reports. Apple preferred to begin shipping the new iPad in January, but continued tests of the tablet’s firmware delayed the schedule.
Taking the windmill concept to a personal level, Dutch designer Tjeerd Veenhoven has created a custom wind-powered charger for his iPhone. Made from a computer cooling fan and a soft rubber bumper case with integrated dock connector, the iFan recharges the phone as you walk around town:
By using a modified computer fan it took me 6 hours to charge my phone, rather long I think… but it works. I can shave off many charging hours by redesigning the fan blades, making it more efficient in catching the wind while sun bathing at the beach, doing walking trips in the mountains or just holding it outside your car window while driving along…
Perhaps not a practical solution for everybody, but it does show creativity and ingenuity in an environmentally friendly package. Keep a good grip on that iPhone while it’s poking out the car window!
Did you know Apple is currently embroiled in 42 patent litigation actions against two major Android phone manufacturers, Motorola and HTC? As these things tend to do, resolution of the disputes will take years — and the legal battles surrounding Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android will enrich dozens of attorneys and their families in the process.
Outside of those attorneys there may be no one on earth who has followed the litigation more closely than Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents. Mueller published an exhaustive summary of the current state of affairs last week, and updated it on Monday with the handy graphic pictured above.
Click on the image for a larger view and read Mueller’s updated summary if you dare: it’s a document synthesized from thousands of court filings, organized into 13 “moves” — and fills 25 PDF pages.
A teenage girl reportedly listening to her iPod survived getting clipped by a freight train in Ohio.
According to police reports, 16-year-old Isatu Kanu was late to school on Friday morning, making her way from home to Olentangy Orange High School at about 10:30 am. She had the hood of her coat up and headphones in, they say.
Police report that train engineers saw the teen and sounded the horn to warn her of the train’s approach. They say she did not appear to react.
Even though the introduction of the iPad-only publicationThe Daily is slated to also herald the coming of iTunes app subscriptions early next year, don’t necessarily expect that move to suddenly make your iPad a digital stand-in for the local newsstand: traditional magazine publishers remain skeptical of Cupertino’s app subscription plan because of the company’s refusal to share credit and billing information.
Just like the Visible Man, Apple used to make transparent Macs with the viscera tightly packed and clearly exposed inside. The idea was to allow Apple’s designers to see and understand how components actually sat inside a Mac before the case was attached and the beige slapped on.
These transparent Macs were super rare: only ten are known to exist. One such transparent Mac SE was recently put up on eBay with a rather aggressive reserve price of $25,000.00.
Apple continues to gobble up worldwide market share thanks to the popularity of the iPad, but limited content offerings in local languages are a speed bump.
Apple snared a 12.4% share of global mobile PC shipments in Q3’10 – taking the third spot worldwide behind HP and Acer, according to DisplaySearch’s Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report
Still, early adopters in places like Japan are not snapping up the tablet, in part due to the lack of content in Japanese.
I have a bet for my pinky finger with a certain man from the south that Apple will never release the white iPhone 4.
What’s the point? After long delays caused by light leaking onto the camera sensor, the white iPhone 4 has been delayed nearly nine months… and the next-gen iPhone is, at best, due out a mere three months after the white iPhone 4 is set to debut. At that point, anyone who wants one is going to just wait for a white iPhone 5.
I’d always assumed Apple was just hoping that delaying it until spring of 2011 would just get everyone to forget about the white iPhone 4, but their latest official signage at Apple Stores around the country reminds people that the albino iPhone 4 is still coming.
Crap. Maybe I’m about to lose that pinky bet after all.
Sales deals on Apple products are precious occurrences, as spontaneous and rare as the collision of matter and antimatter localized entirely on the Grand Concourse Parkway in the Bronx. Sure, you can get a buck or two off at some of the big boxes; you may be able to weasel a fin out of Amazon, but ultimately, Apple’s MSRP is an immutable law.
So this is exciting: the iPhone 4’s first honest-to-goodness sale at a physical and reputable retailer. Effective as of Friday, if you sign up for an AT&T contract at one of Radio Shack’s stores (new or upgrade), you can get an iPhone for $50 off the retail price. That’s $249 for the 32GB iPhone 4 (usually $299), $149 for the 16GB iPhone 4 (usually $199) and $49 for the 8GB iPhone 3GS (usually $99).
Remember all the chatter about a year ago that iPhone pricing separated Apple and Verizon? Well, it seems the carrier has moved closer to Apple’s thinking, spurring by a desire to block T-Mobile USA or Sprint from obtaining the popular handset, according to an analyst Monday.
Kaufman Bros.’ Shaw Wu told clients he is “picking up that iPhone economics to Apple are likely to be favorable, similar to that offered by AT&T.” Apparently, Verizon “may be willing to pay for exclusivity to itself and AT&T,” Wu writes.
The latest MacBooks (including the Pro and the new Airs) have been understandably criticized for their anachronistic adherence to Intel’s last-gen Core 2 Duo CPU when competing notebooks have all moved on to the superior Arrandale architecture.
There’s a good reason for that, though: a lawsuit between Intel and GPU maker NVIDIA that prevents the latter company from making chipsets for current-gen Intel CPUs that include an NVIDIA memory controller. That lawsuit may be on the cusp of being resolved.
There are many good ways to promote your product or service. Here at Cult of Mac, we’re particularly taken with people prancing around in animal costumes, then being hit in slow-motion by a barrage of baseballs while the product’s name flashes on the screen. Advertising’s not so hard after all.
Of course, not every advertiser is so inventive, and so there is a lesser school of guerilla advertising: destroying a beautiful and expensive gadget in a web video in lurid, torture porn detail, then directing viewers to a stupid, countdown and uninformative website that the viewer will forget the second it fails to illuminate.
In this case, the site in question is Say Hi To Space, and while the video is beautifully produced and an industrial drill a novel way to destroy an iPad, one can’t help but feel that the iPad’s lack of a camera is just a slight-of-hand justification for the iPad’s destruction… one that will ultimately lead us to a website that has nothing to do whatsoever with Apple or its products.
Apple intends on using the 100 acres of land they purchased for $300 million from HP last month to build a partially domed, green-friendly campus with an intensive subterranean road and transportation network, according to a recent report by a Spanish paper… and they’ve already hired the visionary architect to make the futuristic, utopian campus city happen.
Apple reportedly wants to launch its Mac App Store Dec. 13, in time for Christmas shopping and ahead of schedule. Although CEO Steve jobs would have liked to have the App Store already up and running, “that’s obviously didn’t happen,” according to the report.
Citing an unnamed source, the report suggests the Dec. 13 date is meant to “take advantage of the Christmas rush.”The Cupertino, Calif. company told developers should have their apps ready. Last week, Apple released another beta of OS X 10.6.6 containing “developer support for fetching and renewing App Store receipts.”
Back in September, there was a general uproar online when a PowerPoint “Fuck List” created by a 2010 Duke graduate went viral. The list provided a detailed evaluation of each of the woman’s encounters
The New York teenager who made a small fortune making white iPhone 4s has shut down his website.
“We have closed the site, possibly permanently,” said Lam, 17, in an email to CultofMac.com.
It’s not clear why Lam shut the whiteiPhone4now.com website down. He didn’t elaborate. But Apple is the obvious suspect. Lam has already received a threatening letter from a private investigator representing Apple, who accused Lam of “selling stolen goods.”
Thanks to the number-crunchers and graphics staff at Mobclix we see a nice representation of iPhone’s participation in the Great Holiday Recovery of 2010.
Consumers’ credit-card spending returned to “pre-recession levels” this year on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), traditionally considered the start of the Holiday Shopping season, and overall spending activity saw double-digit increases over 2009.
As reported earlier this week by First Data, overall consumer spending activity at the shopping season’s kickoff has much improved over last year, sparked by aggressive marketing that lured value-conscious consumers to post a 10.1% increase in transaction volume — and it looks like Apple iPhone users played a large role in hitting that number.
Interestingly, the consumer electronics category fared poorly and was down -6.7% compared to last year. The First Data report speculated that consumers may be holding out for lower prices on electronics later in the holiday season.
If you’ve ever wondered how well your Mac performs — against its peers, against similar models, against the latest releases from Cupertino — Primate Labs’ Geekbench might be worth a look.
Geekbench is free software that, as the company states, “provides a comprehensive set of benchmarks engineered to quickly and accurately measure processor and memory performance.”
The baseline score of 1000 that Geekbench uses to help compare performance among Macs is the score a Power Mac G5 @ 1.6GHz would receive. Higher scores indicate better performance.
It’s also worth noting that benchmarks only measure processor and memory performance which is why, for example, MacBook and MacBook Pro scores are so similar, despite both having radically different graphics adapters.
Check out their periodically updated chart on the web and take a peek under the hood of your own machine.
Mophie’s back with another Juice Pack, this time meant to both charge and ensconce your iPhone 4, while simultaneously protecting it from drops and guarding the antenna from finger-induced signal attenuation.
When the Mac App Store launches, it’ll have the same dichotomy that the iOS App Store has: free apps and paid apps. Don’t expect Apple to use the launching of the Mac App Store to finally introduce a new demo category, though… Apple is now telling developers that they will not accept demos, trials or betas for Mac App Store review.
According to a new posting on their Developer News Portal, Apple will only accept feature complete versions of apps, saying:
Your website is the best place to provide demos, trial versions, or betas of your software for customers to explore. The apps you submit to be reviewed for the Mac App Store should be fully functional, retail versions of your apps.
It’s a strange move for Apple to make. Surely, insisting that developers host demo and trial versions of their apps simply means that Apple is going to risk losing out on money generated by customers who want to try before they buy. If a customer downloads a demo from the software maker’s website, surely he’ll go directly back to that website — or click a link inside the software itself going to the website — which means Apple will miss out on its 30% commission.
Moreover, in saying that developers can’t submit trial, demo or beta versions of their software, Apple’s Mac App Store Review Team is still leaving a loop hole open for developers to submit Lite versions of their apps, a la iOS, which are demos in their own right. So what’s the point?
