Limera1n and greenpois0n have made it possible to jailbreak your iOS 4.1 device for almost a couple weeks now, but if you’re like me, any jailbreak not officially released by the iPhone Dev Team under the PwnageTool moniker is worth an eyebrow arch of circumspection.
Good news, then: the Dev Team have finally released PwnageTool 4.1 for Mac OS X, which used a combination of geohot’s contentious limera1n exploit, Comex’s PF kernetl exploit and the Dev Team’s own pwnage2 exploit.
The previous generation MacBook Air was thin enough to slice a birthday cake or a loaf of bread as an ample library of YouTube videos proved at the time of the notebook’s release. It was so thin, in fact, that though I thought the laptop was functionally useless for real world use in that its wimpy specs and abysmal battery life, it would have been my go-to laptop for use in a post-apocalypse setting: simply file along the edge of the unibody enclosure and the first generation MacBook Air would have made a dandy makeshift machete, perfect for slicing the jugular of a gasoline-crazed motorcycle psycho or lopping off the top of the skull of a flesh-hungry zombie.
The latest MacBook Air is even thinner than its predecessor, and therefore continues the trend of being an excellent survivalist’s laptop. In fact, the new MacBook Air is actually thinner than the blade of an axe, even at the axe’s sharpest point. Yowza. Don’t knock it off the table and onto your toes.
Here’s my question: how long it will take a third-party accessory manufacturer to start selling a heavy, snap-on axe handle for the Air? I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
Steve Jobs has a penchant for ruthlessly killing off old technology. Throughout his career, Jobs has been celebrated for ditching dying technologies in favor of new: the command line (first Mac), the Floppy Disk (first iMac), SCSI drives, serial ports, dial-up modems, and FireWire on hard drives and iPods.
With Apple’s event yesterday Steve Jobs, went on a killing spree. Here’s eight technologies he gave the kiss of death to:
Sign seen in an electronics store in Surrey, Canada: Please Do Not Touch the iPod touch. Straight from the “People Unclear on the Concept” Department. Kafka would be proud.
Although one could argue that with Apple’s ongoing fetish for Shiny, Tiny objects, soon No One will be able to Touch the iPod Touch.
[via Ellen]
Yesterday we posted some first impressions of the Mac App Store by a list of some of the finest software developers around. Overnight we’ve had more responses from more superb developers, so here for your reading pleasure are their initial thoughts about the Store and what it means for their business.
Overall the mood is positive, but uncertain. There are still many questions to be answered. Almost all the devs we’ve spoken to are keen to get started, but not quite sure yet how they’re going to make it all come together.
(And to all the developers who took part, providing comment for this post and yesterday’s, Cult of Mac would like to say a big, big thank you. You people rock.)
So now we know that OS X 10.7 Lion will be released next summer, and that many of its features will be based on the loop of feedback Steve Jobs described: the Mac influenced the iPhone, which influenced the iPad, which is now influencing the Mac once more.
Or to put it another way: expect lots of iOS-style controls, widgets and designs in Lion.
If you looked closely at the demos in yesterday’s presentation, you might have noticed one or two little details that offer hints of what’s to come.
This bit from yesterday’s event made me laugh out loud.
This was about 30 minutes in, and Randy Ubillos was showing us the new iMovie ’11 and its built-in trailers. Impressive movie soundtrack music blared out.
Randy turned to the crowd and said: “For the music, we went to London, to Abbey Road studios, and made original recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra.”
He dropped that in so casually, but just think about it for a moment.
For the sound effects used in one feature, in one application that lives inside a larger suite of media apps, Apple hired an orchestra, a conductor, a composer, Abbey Road studios, and all the paraphernalia that must have come with them. Caterers, hotels, management, hangers-on, producers, heaven knows who and what else.
That’s what you do when you have $50bn in the bank.
Apple has released the following updates in order to support iLife ’11 more effectively: ProKit Update 6.0.1, and Aperture Update 3.1. In addition to those updates Apple has also release Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3 in order to better support ava SE 6 to 1.6.0_22.
The updates were made available earlier today. Just launch Software Update on your Mac to download and install these now.
Click the read link below for details on these new updates that were provided by Apple.
Crap! You just popped for a new MacBook Pro two weeks ago, and now Apple goes and releases the superfabulous iLife ’11, meaning you’ve gotta fork over another $49 for a copy (or $79 for the five-computer Family Pack), right?
Nope! Apple is letting recent Mac buyers upgrade from the previous version of iLife for $7, so long as they bought the Mac(s) on or after Oct. 1; same deal applies to anyone buying a Mac now or in the future without iLife ’11. Bummer: The $7 upgrade is only available online, so you’ll have to wait for it in the mail — or wince as you pay for a $49 copy from an Apple Store, if you’re in a hurry.
I hate to crow, I really do, but we nailed it on the MacBook Air rumors.
Just look at our mockup above, which we published on Monday, and the real deal. It’s pretty uncanny, especially as the designer, Don Draper, mocked it up based on a description from a source. Of course, Apple is very consistent with its design language, which makes things easier. We got the color of the screen bezel wrong and forgot to include the headphone jack. But still — just look at it.
We got most of the specs right too.
So this is what happens when you open FaceTime on your Mac, use it to call FaceTime on your iPhone, and then point the camera on one towards the camera on the other: infinite FaceTime!
Coming soon: infinite FaceTime inside infinite screensharing. Go on, I dare you.
This dream is collapsing. As long as we’ve got the timings right, we can ride the wake-ups all the way back to the real world.
Feast your eyes on the sleek new curves on the Macbook Air. Apple has definitely made one of the most beautiful notebooks I’ve ever seen. This new thin and light unibody notebook will definitely be an eye catcher.
Click the read link to see more images.
So there’s going to be an App Store for the Mac, just like the App Store we’re all used to on iOS.
What do OS X developers think of this?
I got in touch with a bunch of devs to ask them what they make of it. Many of them are still reading through the official documentation, and some of the questions they ask below may well be answered there. But here are some of their very first impressions…
Buster Heine: The new MacBook Air has a nice wafting odor of sex coming from the design (except for the metal bezel), but the specs and pricing are a bit disappointing for me. I’m not a rich businessman on the go, so I don’t think I’m in the target demographic of the new MBAs.
From a practical standpoint, the 13-inch is irrelevant. I’m really attracted to that beautiful 11.6 inch unit with a $999 price point, but there’s no point in replacing my 13′ Macbook Pro for an underpowered machine that is a few pounds lighter.
The new Macbook Airs confuse me. They seem designed to be a secondary computer, but if I already have an iPad + keyboard, an iPhone, and a MacBook Pro, there’s no point in buying it because it can’t handle everything a MacBook Pro can, and it’s too expensive to be an amateur’s computer. If Apple can bring down the price on the new units I might be tempted, but for now I’ll be resisting the urge to buy the new Apple gear, no matter how sexy it looks.
This is the software reinstall disk for the new MacBook Air. Cool eh?
Here’s the details of what’s on it, according to Apple’s knowledgebase article:
[polldaddy poll=”3957905″]
Steve Jobs called it the “future of the MacBook” line, but are you ready to give up your MacBook Pro for these shiny newcomers?
The 11.6-inch starts at $999 for 64GB SSD space and the 13.3-inch starts at $1,299 for a 128GB hard drive, and jumps to $1,599 for a 256GB hard drive.
What’s better: thin and slim or the old workhorse?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
Steve Jobs has just come on stage with his “one more thing”… and as predicted, it’s a new MacBook Air, in both 11.6 and 13.3-inch versions.
Steve explains that with the new MacBook Air, they wanted to leverage the advantages of the iPad to a real laptop, including instant on, great battery life, amazing standby time, solid state storage, no movie parts and thin and light.
That’s the design philosophy that led to the new MacBook Air. It’s a completely unibody design, 0.11 inches thick at its thinnest, and 0.68 inches at its thickest. Overall, it’s 90% smaller and lighter, with completely silent operation.
The 13.3-incher is running 1440×900 pixels, which makes it a higher pixel density than even the 15-inch MacBook Pro. It features a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo Processor, a max of 2GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics, a full size multitouch trackpad, one USB port, an SD card slot and a FaceTime camera.
It’s the battery life that astounds, though. It’s a holy crap moment: the new 13.3-inch MacBook Air will supposedly have a 30 day standby time and seven hours of wireless web usage. This thing is basically all battery inside.
The 11.6-inch is mostly the same specs, but has a woeful 1.4Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor, a smaller 1366×768 resolution and only 5 hours on wireless web… presumably because they had to shrink the battery packs.
So what’ll these cost? Well, the 11.6-inch starts at $999 for 64GB SSD space, while a bump to $1199 will double your storage. The 13.3-inch starts at $1299 for a 128GB hard drive, and jumps to $1599 for a 256GB hard drive.
Honestly? This is pretty underwhelming: even accounting for the major performance bumps you see when you go SSD, that’s a wimpy computer for the price. We’re not sure we’re sold. What do you think?
Steve Jobs has just announced the release date for OS X 10.7. It’ll be coming in summer of 2011.
But what about that new App Store? Do developers really have to wait almost a year for it? Nope. The Mac App Store will be released within Snow Leopard within the next ninety days, with App Submissions in November from developers.
That’s amazing. I wasn’t expecting the Mac App Store this generation of OS X, but here it is, coming down the pipe. I only wonder how worth using it’ll be without OS X 10.7 specific new features to make the most of apps within OS X.
With OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple’s also bringing a new element to Macs: the Launchpad.
In launchpad, all of your apps neatly arranged in rows. Thinks stacks for app icons, but instead of flying out of your dock, they are neatly arranged — complete with pages — on your desktop. You can even create folders, just like in iOS.
Essentially, Launchpad is an iOS interface layer for OS X for apps. Just another way in which OS X is becoming more iOS-like.
Apple is bringing the App Store to Macs, and while it won’t be the same as the iOS App Store, it’ll leverage some of their benefits.
It makes sense: there have been 7 billion downloads from the App Store, and Apple wants that money on the Mac side of things. According to Steve, it’ll be ““the best place to discover apps. It won’t be the only place, but be the best place.”
Apps will automatically install on the Mac app store, as well as updated, and will be licensed across all of your personal Macs.
Sounds like great news for app developers, and there’ll be the same 70/30 split. Let’s hope the approval process isn’t as absurd as it is on iOS.
Introducing what Steve humorously termed as the “entree for today,” Apple has just unveiled OS X 10.7, Lion, which they are, as rumored, describing as iOS meets OS X.
What are we getting? Multitouch gestures, an App Store, App Home Screens, full screen apps, auto save and apps that resume when launched… just like in iOS, although how much like in iOS remains to be seen.
First up, multitouch.
FaceTime’s been a huge success on the iPhone and iPod Touch. You knew it was coming to the Mac, and guess what? Now it has.
Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller demonstrated the new functionality, calling between an iPhone 4 and a Mac. When Steve rotates his iPhone, it rotates on Phil’s computer as well. It even does fullscreen.
Wonder how long you’ll have to wait? Barely any time at all: Apple will be releasing FaceTime for Mac in beta form today.
[image via Gizmodo]
iLife ’11 has made its showing, and it’s plenty impressive between the substantial improvements to iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband. But when it’ll be available?
Well, now. If you buy a new Mac today, it’ll be free, as always. Got an existing Mac? It’ll cost $49.
Expect to see our reviews as soon as we can get our grubby hands on it.
The final piece of the iLife ’11 puzzle? GarageBand ’11, which according to Steve, features some great new features to help fix timing in your music, some more guitar amps and effects, piano and guitar lessons built-in and an in-program “How Did I Play?” feature.
The next program in the iLife ’11 suite that Apple will be talking about today is iMovie ’11.
What’s new? According to Steve, iMovie ’11 has all new audio editing for mere mortals who don’t want to invest in Final Cut Pro, as well as one step effects, a people finder, news and sports themes and the ability to create movie trailers.