Apple's new MacBook Air will be thinner, lighter and boxier than the current model. Mockup exclusively for CultofMac.com by Dan Draper.
On Wednesday, Steve Jobs will likely introduce a redesigned 13.3-inch MacBook Air with a bigger battery and more ports — yet thinner and lighter — than the current model, CultofMac.com has independently confirmed.
Apple will probably also add a second, smaller 11.6-inch “Netbook” version, according to our well-placed source.
Our information independently corroborates recent reports by AppleInsider, and Engadget, which ran a picture of a purported prototype over the weekend.
The new model is also apparently much snappier than its underpowered predecessor. “It boots so fast, it’s unbelievable,” our source says. “It’s amazing how fast it boots up.”
If you can't be bothered to read the article, the short version is that Killer Edge Racing is back on the App Store! Hurrah!
Cult of Mac readers with long memories will remember our reports on Tim Langdell’s battle with Mobigame. In essence, Langdell claimed ownership over the word ‘Edge’ for videogames (and a bunch of other products) and set about suing anyone that infringed on these rights. The problem for Langdell is that many claimed his marks weren’t valid and that he’d doctored submissions to the USPTO.
Langdell then sued EA (over Mirror’s Edge, due to the title being similar to Langdell’s ‘Mirrors (a game by) Edge’—seriously), waking a sleeping giant. In tandem with the ChaosEdge project, set up to assist Mobigame, EA set about dismantling Langdell’s arguments via some savvy lawyers; luckily for all concerned (bar Langdell) the judge that dealt with the case was equally savvy, and he stripped Langdell of his marks (Joystiq), and he’s now been booted out of the IGDA as well (Pocket Gamer).
But Mobigame wasn’t the only indie that suffered due to Langdell’s actions. Nalin Sharma had created the game Killer Edge Racing (see this Pocket Gamer interview for more), a fun, arcade racer that had rapidly evolved from a tech demo. Naturally, Langdell figured the game was passing off his ‘famous’ brand and would confuse gamers worldwide, who wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between an indie iOS game and Langdell’s own Edge Racers (in reality a redressed PC game called Voltage, as outlined by ChaosEdge).
In a word: gah.
But this tale has a happy ending. Sharma contacted us the other day to note that his game is back on the App Store. “Given the EA ruling, I thought I would take a chance, and in four days, it has done 6000 downloads and was the #15 racing game in the USA on Saturday,” he says.
Want to pick yourself up one of Sanho’s amazing HyperMac batteries, which will allow you to recharge your MacBook, iPhone or iPad for dozens or even hundreds of hours on a single charge?
Well, better get moving: Sanho has just sent out a notice saying that they will soon stop selling their line of HyperMac products due to their current legal woes with Apple.
If you had a PC in the 1980s, you might have fond memories of playing Sierra’s line-up of classic adventure games: King’s Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, etc.
You’ll probably be delighted to learn, then, that these retro classics will soon be coming to the iPad, courtesy of Sarien.net. Best of all, they’ll be free.
It seems like just the other day that the App Store hit 200,000 apps, but the juggernaut just never stops, and sometime over the weekend, Apple rolled the speedometer over to 300k.
The numbers aren’t official yet, but according to Mobclix, their data shows that Apple added the 300,000th app to the App Store sometime on Saturday.
Is that old iPod Classic just not doing much since you got your 64GB fourth-gen iPod Touch? Wondering what to do with the old clickwheel? Head on over to Toys ‘R’ Us and trade it in for a Voltron or He-Man or Alien Goo Blaster or something. You can get up to $100 in gift cards for your old iPod, depending on how crappy it is.
That one programmer slaving away on Apple’s iOS Remote app has been working overtime, lately: he’s just issued an update to the app, fixing a number of bugs that showed up after the last major revision.
When the iPhone 4 launched in the Middle East — specifically in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Qatar — it did so without support for FaceTime. Needless to say, this prompted some speculation. Why would Apple have dropped theFaceTime capability only from Middle Eastern iPhone 4? Was it a carrier restriction… or was Apple trying to sidestep Middle Eastern governments getting interested in regulating the new video chat standard?
It now seems like the real explanation probably has more to do with carrier restrictions than anything else. According to iRamadah, FaceTime works in the Middle East on the new iPod Touches, despite the fact that even on the iPhone 4, FaceTime is a WiFi-only standard. Seems at this point more likely that the carriers kicked for whatever reason than anything to do with Big Brother.
Two of the richest men in America met a couple of weeks ago to swirl brandy about the translucent skulls of Peruvian albinos and toast evil, say sources.
Well, actually, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg probably just discussed Ping when the Facebook CEO was invited over to Jobs’ house for dinner and a walk. Close enough.
In 2005 Apple responded to mounting pressure from environmental activists by announcing a free recycling program for its iPod digital music players. Fast forward to 2010, five years later, and this wonderful program is still in existence. I thought I should remind you about it, because I nearly forgot about it when my 80 Gb iPod started to act flakey this month after years of service.
The program is a win-win for customers, like myself, that are interested in recycling electronics (an effort to save the Earth), upgrading to a new iPod, and saving 10 percent on a replacement.
The program allows you to bring an iPod that you no longer want regardless of whether or not it is working to any Apple store in the U.S. for free environmentally friendly disposal. The person dropping off any model of iPod will receive a 10 percent discount on the purchase of a new iPod, excluding the iPod shuffle, but you can turn in a shuffle for a 10% discount on a Nano, etc.
All iPods collected for recycling will be processed domestically in the U.S. and no e-waste or hazardous material is shipped overseas.
This is only a small part of Apple’s recycling program which also accepts mobile phones, computers, and monitors. In some cases even these have some monetary value that Apple will convert into a gift card towards the purchase of a new computer, etc.
More information about Apple’s worldwide recycling programs is available at Apple’s environmental website.
The must have jailbreak utility, TinyUmbrella, a tool written by Semaphore that assists you in saving your iOS devices SHSH Blobs has been updated with new features and a completely redesigned user interface.
As New York Times reporter Kate Zernike notes in her new book “Boiling Mad,” a good portion of the Tea Party movement is composed of youthful, tech-savvy hipsters — so it really shouldn’t be surprising that the movement has its own iPhone/iPad app.
The app features top news of interest to members of the movement, polemics from 11 conservative bloggers, Tea Party videos, and wouldn’t be complete with a feature called “Outrage of the Day.”
It doesn’t do much — no fancy vocal wizardry, just adjusts the pitch of the user’s voice up or down — but Devil Voice looks like the first instance of a real-time voice-changing app, without the need to record a user’s voice first before playback — though it can, if desired.
The app is a dollar, and comes out just in time for Halloween; see our forthcoming Halloween Guide for examples on how to duct tape it and attached speakers into a Darth Vader mask and whatnot.
It’s just a clever little piece of marketing for a band that’s not half bad — and the back story is that they had their real-life instruments stolen — but here’s Brooklyn band Atomic Tom rocking the NYC Subway with a bunch of iPhones.
Can’t wait to see the band that tries this with some Windows 7 phones.
Apple’s App Store is a textbook case of the way Capitalism is supposed to work, according to one developer, who quit his day job when he realized all he needs to earn a living is a laptop and an Internet connection.
Getting information out of anyone who works at Apple can be more difficult than getting truth out of a politician, but every now and then someone pipes up with a personal revelation that sheds light on what it’s like to work with the 2nd largest company in the U.S.A. today.
A case in point is Dylan Ginsburg, developer of River of News, a $3 Google Reader app for the iPad, whose software has enjoyed what he describes as “modest” success since its release in August. Ginsburg pulled back the curtain just a bit in a blog post he wrote because “no one talks about what they make on the App Store.” If Ginsburg’s experience is typical of developers whose apps enjoy even middling success, it’s not just the big hitters in the App Store line-up who stand to gain from developing software for Apple’s mobile devices.
Developing River of News has been the most rewarding “work” of my life. It’s not even close. My sleeping is all screwed up because I keep thinking about how I can make my software better.
That’s right, “my software,” Ginsburg wrote. “What a great thing to be able to say. I’ve gotten such tremendous satisfaction from creating something that people use and like.”
It’s early in the game yet, and River of News could well be supplanted by a new flavor of the month at any time, but Ginsburg felt he has enough of the big picture in focus to have quit his corporate software job — the one at which he earned twice as much as he’s been making so far with River of News — and is a confirmed believer in the App Store business model. “The genius is they created an ecosystem that benefits them, the developer, and the customer [it’s what] you are supposed to get from capitalism.”
Whether you are an employee wanting to use your iPad on the road or a company looking to integrate the Apple tablet into your workspace, AT&T says it has you covered. The exclusive U.S. iPhone carrier announced Friday it will offer plans to sell the iPad Wi-Fi + 3G to business customers.
“iPad is a great fit for our enterprise customers across a wide range of industries who are looking for ways to increase business productivity and offer greater flexibility,” said Michael Antieri, President, Advanced Enterprise Solutions, AT&T Solutions. The iPad provides “businesses with the tools they need to accelerate mobility-led productivity,” he adds.
Alone, the iPhone’s functions are pretty cool; then someone comes along, combines two (or more) of them and bam — vigorously ups the wow-factor.
Today that someone is TomTom, who has just updated its popular turn-by-turn GPS app (we’ve linked to the North American version, coz that’s where we’re based) to include a “navigate-to-photo” feature that lets users enter a destination simply by tapping on any geo-tagged photo on their iPhone.
The update also includes new optimized accuracy for the iPhone 4 and is currently available only for their North American and European versions.
The elusive white iPhone 4 that many of you wish you could get your hands on was recently spotted in New York. The folks over at Pocket-lint managed to catch up to a guy who was seen holding and using a white iPhone 4, which currently, is just as hard to spot as a Yeti in a snow storm.
How this guy happened to get a hold of his white iPhone 4 isn’t clear, but there are several ways this could have happened. He may have gotten it from someone at Apple that he knows, he may work at Apple, or this could be a clever iPhone 4 makeover.
Normally, Apple is able to deliver Rolls-Royce earnings numbers when Wall Street is predicting just Cadillac financial figures. Shortages in the Cupertino, Calif. company’s two most popular products – the iPad and iPhone 4 – could prevent Apple from reporting its usual 15 percent premium on expectations, one analyst cautions.
Wall Street consensus if for Apple to report Monday earnings-per-share of $4.03 on $18.76 billion in revenue for the three-month quarter ended September. However, for Apple to deliver its usual 15 percent above-expected earnings, the company would need to report $4.08 per share on $18.8 billion in revenue, something Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster doesn’t foresee.
Comment of the Week comes from @Ron regarding our interview with John Sculley about Steve Jobs. Going against the common wisdom that ex-CEO John Sculley was bad for Apple, @Ron has a different take on Sculley, who I feel has been unfairly demonized for his decade-long stint at Apple’s helm.
Great article. I worked with John occasionally in his last years at Apple. I didn’t realize at the time how burnt out he was, but it make sense now in retrospect. He was shy and seemed withdrawn.
John was a great CEO for the first few years. It’s easy to forget that Steve left Apple in complete disarray – it’s safe to say that he hadn’t developed his management or relationships skills at that point. Sculley held things together and got the place to run as a business. It’s only later when his lack of product vision caught up with him.
For Serious Ocean Mariners and Starfleet Captains of the Mind, Norwegian chair manufacturer NorSap has just unveiled a new concept iChair. Designed to offer strength and flexibility for helmsmen during long sea voyages, this Enterprise-worthy throne comes complete with two iPad docks – so you can navigate and goof off at the same time – cushioned forearm rests and an (optional) heated footrest!
Looks a bit like a cross between a dentist’s chair and Captain Pike’s wheelchair. I’d pilot this for a while.
Steve Jobs’ hypnotic cadence and idiosyncratic showmanship is obviously well-known enough to be channeled by international comedians looking for a laugh: over in Hong Kong, the Mass Transit Railway has just launched a new app, and they did so by hiring their own Chinese Fake Steve Jobs in the form of Law Kar-Ying to reveal it on stage. Law seems to have studied the man he was emulating quite well: he gets everything right, from the gulps of bottled water to the Levis and turtleneck. Hilarious.
The introduction of the first iPod back in 2001 officially signaled the beginning of Apple’s millennial renaissance, transforming the company from a computer manufacturer so niche that they were the butt of Michael Dell’s jokes to the biggest company in tech. See an overview of how it all happened after the jump.
