News - page 2141

Microsoft’s attempts out replicate Apple’s successes in the retail space have always seemed… well… rather bereft of imagination and mindlessly emulative. Microsoft Stores almost always are opened in the same malls as Apple Stores, sometimes directly across the way. Instead of a Genius Bar, there’s a Guru Bar. And so on.

Microsoft’s “Me Too”ism in the retail has simply been painful to watch… so painful that it prompted us to write a post entitled “Why Microsoft’s Mall of America Store Will Fail” just last month.

Looks like we were right. According to the LA Times, Microsoft’s retail stores are a complete bust, despite having been designed by George Blankenship, who helped build Apple’s own retail stores.

What will the CPU of your next MacBook look like? Well, it’ll almost definitely be one of Intel’s Sandy Bridge microprocessors, and if you want to see the future, you should peer into the entrails of the latest Windows notebooks.

Leaping right out of the “What the heck?!?!” category comes Welcome to the CrApple Store a blog for disgruntled Apple Store employees. A couple of readers pointed it out to me today

The complaints  touted on the blog range from the size of repair parts packaging to things like brain-washing and drinking the Apple Kool-Aid. It just goes to show you that you cannot make everyone happy.

Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, apparently reads the Cult. After we published the recent piece on the Cupertinto, Calif. company buying HP’s old campus in the city, Wozniak offered more historical details on Apple’s connection with the acquisition of the 98-acre parcel. “Apple really is returning home,” Woz said in a comment.

“Actually, almost all of the Apple ][ development occurred in the HP calculator division (APD) which was located in the section acquired earlier. When this HP division moved to Corvallis, Oregon, my wife did not want to move so I transferred to HP’s Data Systems Division (HP-3000) across Pruneridge and I worked there for about one month, at first choosing not to start Apple due to my love for HP,” he said, shedding light on Apple’s early connection with the HP site.

The HP location, for which Apple reportedly paid $300 million, also had a connection to Apple’s earliest computer – the Apple I.

“This is also the division of HP that had the PROM burners I used to burn the 256-byte “monitor” program of the Apple I (took 2 PROM chips – not much memory in those days). I had previously learned how to burn these PROMs to display 4-letter words when you missed the ball on a Pong game I’d built for myself,” Wozniak wrote.

Only 11 more days til Christmas!  Yikes. If you are still at a loss as to what to get your loved ones, look no further, CultofMac is here to save the Holidays! Keep in mind that most of the cheap or free shipping ends this week.

Apple notebooks continue to meteorically rise in popularity: according to component makers, Apple will soon be shipping over a million units per month, with MacBook Air orders already accounting for almost 25 percent of the volume.

Says Digitimes:

The sources cited IDC’s figures and pointed out that Apple’s combined shipments for the first three quarters of 2010 reached about 6.88 million units, and its global notebook market share rose from 3.7% in the first quarter to 5.2% in the third, while its market share in the US market surged from 6.7% to 12.6%.

The MacBook’s only going to get bigger from here.

[via 9to5Mac]

Apple has become the largest landowner in Cupertino, Calif., the city which headquarters the computer and media giant. Apple recently purchased for a reported $300 million a 98-acre campus which formerly housed Hewlett-Packard. The site adjoins Apple’s 50-acre site it purchased in 2006.

“We now occupy 57 buildings in Cupertino and our campus is bursting at the seams,” Apple PR chief Steve Dowling told the Mercury News. “The offices will give us more room for our employees as we continue to grow,” he added.

Apple’s second-gen iPad 2 is most likely coming down the pipeline in April, and now a Digitimes is reporting what to

For more thoughts on the report, check out Computerworld’s excellent analysis.

If you want to AirPrint and you have a Mac, Printopia will do the job for you on almost any printer out there, Apple’s last minute feature pruning be damned. Windows users, however, have been in the lurch until now.

Enter Activate Printer, which according to a lot of users doesn’t work reliably a lot of the time, but it can’t hurt giving it a go if you just can’t wait.

We don’t have a Windows machine to test it out, but apparently, all you need to do is download and install the executable, share your printer under printer properties in your system preferences, then enable AirPrint.exe in Windows Firewall.

Like we said, we’re seeing a lot of “doesn’t work for me” messages about this, so don’t be surprised if it’s all for nought. Still, we’re rooting for you — yes, you! — to strike gold here.

Better iBooks management is on the horizon, according to 9to5Mac, who say that both folders (similar to the way folders work on the iOS homescreen) and “Collections” will be coming to iBooks soon, as well as printing PDFs via AirPrint.

Does your iPad feel speedier since iOS 4.2.1? Italian site iPadevice put together this handy chart, illustrating how well Apple’s managed to refine the memory requirements of certain applications under the new operating system.

Looks like Apple will be offering offering about 10% off for Black Friday — if Apple Australia’s prices are anything to go by.

Apple has posted sale prices down under, offering 10-15% off many items, including iPad (A$50 off),, iMac and MacBook Pro (A$121 off) 13-inch MacBook Air (A$121.00 off), iPod nano (A$25 off).

The best deal looks like the iPod Touch at about 20% off (up to A$51). Also on sale are the Time Capsule, Magic Trackpad, and a range of iPad accessories. The same savings are likely to carry across to U.S. sales, which are one-day only.

Here’s details of Apple Australia’s other sale items:

In the spirit of the holiday, we here at Cult of Mac have decided to spend the day with our friends and families, but before we do, we thought we’d observe the holiday in the most Apple-centric way we know how… by each writing about the Apple product or related product that we’re most thankful for this year. You can find our choices after the jump, and we hope to hear your choices too.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Irritated as much as we are by Apple changing the orientation lock switch on the iPad to a mute switch in iOS 4.2? Jailbreak your tablet and install NoMute through the BigBoss repository on Cydia and make everything all right again.

Seriously, a mute switch, Apple? The iPad’s not a phone. Jeez.

We have a few hours to go, but it’s already Black Friday in Australia, and with discounts hovering at between 8-9%, it looks like tomorrow will be a very, very good day indeed to buy an Apple product.

President Obama’s becoming an old pro at signing iPads. At the recent Lisbon Summit, a European autograph speaker was able to get the Prez to jot down his a digitally inputed John Hancock on his proferred iPad. As he did so, he quipped: “Hey, ‘Sign my iPad.’ I’ve done this once before.” Right on.

Now here’s something you don’t see every day: Science and Sons have just released the Phonofone III, a ceramic horn-shaped dock for the iPhone which serves as a passive amplification system. Output from the iPhone’s built-in speakers is boosted approximately 60dB by the horn’s acoustical characteristics, rivaling output from many small powered docking systems.

What’s a holiday season without kids? (Quiet, for one thing). We’ve put together a mini list just for the mini ‘uns, to help keep them happy, and you sane.

It is going to be tough Christmas if you are a company that plans on selling a potential iPad rival. One company, Maylong, is selling their Android powered M-150 TabletPC at Walgreens for $99 and it’s going to be hard to sell after a review on Ars technica concluded with a verdict of “run screaming in the other direction. ”

Now Best Buy has come to the rescue with great ideas for iPad rivals that just don’t cut it via their BBYOpen blog.  Here are a few of my favorite suggestions they had for anyone unlucky enough to find an M-150 or something just as bad under their Christmas tree this year.

Apple previously claimed the flaky proximity sensor in the iPhone 4 had been fixed by the iOS 4.1 update. But there was mounting evidence that the proximity sensor wasn’t fixed at all.

Shortly after the release of iOS 4.1 iPhone user Ryan Bell performed a series of comprehensive tests using Apple’s iPhone configuration utility, and came to the conclusion that iOS 4.1 doesn’t fix the proximity sensor.

The proximity sensor problems were being blamed on software bugs, relocation of the proximity sensor due to the addition of the front facing camera, or greasy ear canals.

‘Tis the season: time to gather with friends and family and answer an endless barrage of hideous tech support questions.

You’re reading this Web site. That means you’re the most technical person in your extended family and therefore know off the top of your head why your mother-in-law’s PC won’t print, right? Your uncle is convinced that if he can corner you between dinner and pie, you’ll solve the riddle of that obscure error message he gets every time he boots his PC.

And your cousin wants to buy her husband the latest gadget. She has a Black Friday coupon for something, but doesn’t remember what it’s called. Should she buy it?

Ugh! Where’s that eggnog?

Fortunately, Apple has provided us all with a universal answer: “Get an iPad!”

Click here to read the whole article.

The U.S. International Trade Commission has decided to investigate Apple’s allegations against Motorola. In October, the two handset makers accused each other of patent infringement. Apple charges the Schaumberg, Ill.-based Motorola violated six multi-touch patents.

If the ITC rules in Apple’s favor, importation and sale of Motorola smartphones could be banned in the United States. The patent spat erupted in early October when Motorola accused Apple of violating 18 patents and refusing to agree to license Moto’s technology. Apple fired back in late October, claiming Motorola had violated its patents.

First Apple took RIM’s spot as the No. 4 mobile phone maker. Now the Cupertino, Calif. company is poaching sales executives from the BlackBerry maker. At least five RIM employees have been hired away by Apple over the past eighteen months, reports say.

Apple’s goal of increased business sales got a shot in the arm after RIM’s Head of Strategic Sales, Geoff Perfect, joined Apple in April 2009. Perfect now heads the iPhone’s Enterprise Sales unit, according to the Wall Street Journal. Other defections from RIM include it’s Senior Global Sales Manager, Global Strategic Account Manager and Global Account Manager. They now sell iOS devices to the corporate market.

Chinese knockoff maker DragonFly has just made their already shameless MacBook clone a little more so: while the 14-inch netbook already adhered closely enough to the Ive aesthetic to be mistaken for a real MacBook Pro by the Magoo-like, they’ve now gone even farther by replacing the original DragonFly logo with Apple’s own… plus Hackintoshing the notebook in the factory to run Snow Leopard. It even comes with a fake MagSafe charger!

Try this in America and Apple’s legal team would cram your head so forcibly up your posterior that you’d give a vomitous birth unto yourself, but DragonFly hails from China, so they’ll probably be fine. $436 will buy you one on the Beijing electronics blackmarket.

If you happened to switch to the iPhone from your old BlackBerry, you might miss UberTwitter, probably the best native Twitter client available on the BlackBerry OS. Wipe away wistful tears no longer: Ubertwitter is now available for free on the App Store, replete with its excellent UberView feature that allows you to access links within tweets without leaving either the app or the window.