News - page 2172

Traditionally Black Friday takes place on the Friday immediately following Thanksgiving — November 26th this year. It is the official start of the holiday season when retailers generally open up very early and offer deep discounts on items geared towards drawing you into their stores. They hope you’ll buy more through impulse buying.

However, in recent years things are changing so start looking for deals – now. The holiday shopping season seems to start earlier every year, but actually practically after Halloween in the US. Best Buy, Target and Walmart are already offering pre-Black Friday deals on their websites and many other retailers are too.

If you are looking for the best Black Friday deals you’re in luck because you have Apple technology to help you find them. You need to use that technology to your advantage so you don’t miss out on some good deals. I will help you get started with this first post — a technology overview for all you avid shoppers out there.

Later this week and next week I’ll follow-up with more specific information on applying these technologies which I’ll summarize here. I hope all this information will turn you into a savvy Black Friday shopper.

You don’t need fancy Bluetooth technology to make a good wireless headset: all you need to do is plug your iPod shuffle into the side-mounted 3.5mm jack on the side of the right can. Ingenious. $50 will get you a pair, in Japan at least, but we’ll have to wait for this set (or a knockoff) to cross the shores.

[via Gadget Lab]

Although Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash was a devastating opening salvo against Adobe’s bloated, buggy and insecure browser plugin, perhaps the most brutal attack in the war between Apple and Flash was Cupertino’s decision to exclude it from the software shipping on the MacBook Air… a move that has notably saved the Air two hours in battery life while simultaneously making Adobe look like a bunch of inept chumps.

Now Adobe CEO Shantau Narayan is commenting on the matter at this week’s Web 2.0 summit. Asked by Engadget about the MacBook Air’s battery life improvement without Flash installed, Narayan responded: “When we have access to hardware acceleration, we’ve proven that Flash has equal or better performance on every platform.”

Which is, of course, a besides-the-point response. Performance isn’t the issue: energy efficiency is.

However, it does seem like Adobe is ready to admit there may actually be an issue they can address, because Narayen followed that comment with an admission that Adobe was working in the labs to optimize a beta for the new Air. Not that you’d catch me dead installing it at this point, but your mileage may well vary.

We were skeptical of yesterday’s purportedly leaked shot of a new CDMA iPhone running on the Verizon network, but perhaps e’re wrong: a recent Tweet coming from Verizon’s own Verizon Careers Twitter account seems to suggest the iPhone is coming to the network soon.

The evidence is admittedly a bit ambiguous. The operator of Verizon Careers’ Twitter account pimped their recent addition of the iPad to their mobile line-up, and was then asked by Twitter user slink317 for an “iPhone hint?”

Verizon Career’s response accompanied a retweet of slinky123’s question: “yes that is the latest scoop.”

The wording’s pretty strange, but we’re not sure how else to read that besides as a quasi-official confirmation that the iPhone is coming to Verizon sometime soon. Lending some veracity to that interpretation, the Verizon Careers tweet in question has since been pulled.

What do you think? Is the Verizon coming to iPhone, or was this just some low-level drone paid to man a Twitter account making a mistake and openly speculating on Verizon’s iPhone future?

Apple has finally filled the board of directors seat vacated when Steve Jobs critic Jerome York died in March. Ron Sugar, a former Northrop Grumman CEO will chair the Audit and Finance Committee. Sugar “has been involved in the development of some very sophisticated technology,” the Cupertino, Calif. company announced Wednesday.

“I have always had enormous admiration for the people of Apple,” Sugar said in a statement. Not so for the late Jerome York, who once said he was “disgusted” by Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ concealment of his previous illness. Jobs hailed Sugar as “an engineer at heart, who then became a very successful business leader.”

One New York teenager was so put out by Apple’s endless delays in delivering the white iPhone 4 that he used gray market sources to build a $130,000 business selling them himself.

17 year old Fei Lam started whiteiPhone4now.com after production problems (namely, light leaking through the casing and onto the camera’s sensor) caused the first of the white iPhone 4’s delays.

Like many similar sites, whiteiPhone4now.com sells aftermarket conversion kits that allow iPhone 4 owners to mod their iPhone 4s to a white model themselves.

Unlike most of those other sites, though, Lam knows a guy who knows a guy who works at Foxconn, and was able to get Apple certified white iPhone 4 components shipped to him straight in Queens.

There’s a reason Amazon’s responding to Apple’s Beatles iTunes coup by slashing pricing on Fab Four CDs instead of undercutting the iTunes price in their own music service, Amazon MP3: Apple’s secured the online exclusive to Beatles tracks until sometime in 2011.

Ever since researchers announced Apple had passed RIM in handset sales, the CEO of the BlackBerry maker has been on the warpath. The latest battleground was the Web 2.0 Summit, where the leader of the Canadian company said the lead was just in Steve Jobs distorted mind.

“For those of us who live outside of Apple’s distortion field, we know that 7” tablets will actually be a big portion of the market and we know that Adobe Flash support actually matters to customers who want a real web experience,” Jim Balsille said at his blog site. The words were echoed in a Tuesday speech on Web 2.0 technology.

This a is a guest post by Jerry Halstead of Frontier Design Group, a small, independent app development company.

Not everyone’s app is going to be featured in a viral video. Maybe yours will be mentioned by a celebrity, used in an Apple commercial, featured in a blog or news story. Whatever the event, be prepared to act quickly and don’t be reluctant to try to capitalize on it.

Here’s how we capitalized on a viral video featuring our app, iShred.

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

Apple had traditionally enjoyed 50 percent of the educational market, however a tight economy coupled with lower PC prices led by netbooks until recently depressed the Cupertino, Calif. company’s classroom reach to just about 20 percent. While the iPad is credited with many advances, it also sparked a comeback for Apple, making the $500 tablet competitive with PCs in the secondary and higher education markets, according to Needham & Company’s Charlie Wolf earlier this year.

Wolf’s prediction, made before the iPad really hit the street, has been confirmed again and again.

It’s Education Week on CultofMac.com. How’s Apple doing in schools these days? What are the best education apps? Is iTunes U worthwhile? Join us as we learn more about Apple in Education.

Cedars School in Greenock, Scotland, has become the first school in the world to deploy an iPad to every child in the age groups it serves (roughly 5 to 16 year-olds). We’ve mentioned this effort before, so Cult of Mac decided to check in on the project again for our Education special and see how they’re doing.

“The iPad has become far more embedded in our school day than I ever thought it would become,” Fraser Speirs, the architect behind the project, wrote on his blog.

Remember those wildly popular, hideously happy “slap bracelets” born of the late ’80s that — like Oakley Iridium Frogskin sunglasses — adorned those young individuals who were blissfully devoid of any sense of fashion whatsoever? Well, Griffin thinks it’s time to bring them back — but this time, they’re making them cooler, by sticking iPod Nanos in them and turning the whole thing into a Swatch (another fashion gift from the ’80s) -ish watch.

A cool $25 will get you (or the giftee of your choice) one of Griffin’s silicon Slap Cases for the 6th-gen Nano, in one of several retina-destroying colors.

It seems like everyone except Steve Jobs was underwhelmed by the Beatles on iTunes announcement today.

The reaction here, on other blogs, and on Twitter was unanimous: Who cares?

Most Beatles fans have already bought the CDs and added them to iTunes. The music is 40-50 years old. Half the band is dead.

Perhaps Apple overplayed it a bit, announcing that this was a day we’d never forget. Then it turned over the homepage, iTunes and Ping to The Beatles. There’s even four TV ads. Overkill? Maybe.

But seen from Steve Jobs’ point of view it is gotta be a big deal. Symbolically, at least. This is the day iTunes triumphed over the old music industry. It marks the complete obsolecence of the old distribution system and the triumph of the new.

The Beatles catalog was one of the last trump cards held by the old music industry. Giving it up is an admission that iTunes has prevailed. Music is fully digital, and there’s no going back. The other holdouts — AC/DC, Led Zeppelin Garth Brooks (CNet has a list here) — must surely follow.

Jobs has been working on this for seven years or more. To him, it’s a massive validation. Like he says, a day that won’t be forgotten.

Ever since we posted about  Let’s Create Pottery HD last month, we’ve been wondering when the app — that lets users have a go at creating virtual pottery on the iPad — would be out (or even be practical) on the smaller screen of the iPhone/iPt.

Last week, developer Infinite Dreams released the iPhone version, then added further enticement to get our hands dirty by releasing a free, try-before-you-buy version of the app a few days later (Which is a good thing, because the paid version looks like it might be a little prone to crashing, judging by the comments).

Still, the lite version checks out pretty well, and the full version, with its expanded creative options, is on sale right now for just a buck.

Apple has finally approved the native Google Voice app after a 16 month delay.

Download it from iTunes here. It’s free, offers low-rate international calling and push notifications for new text or voicemail messages. It’s quicker than the HTML5 version, and has access to the iPhone’s contact list.

More info on Google Voice Blog.

Could this be a white iPhone 4 for Verizon? Note:

1. The lack of a SIM card slot (Verizon doesn’t use SIM cards)

2. A new external antenna design (Goodbye Antennagate)

3. The Verizon symbol in the upper left of the screen.

Wouldn’t it be great? But I call BS. The photo looks fake. It’s too good. Shots of prototypes are usually crappy. This looks too staged. I’ll bet it’s a Chinese knockoff.

Below is the full-size image.

Via CoveringWeb.

NVIDIA has just announced a mid-range upgrade graphics card for the Mac Pro: the Quadro 4000 For Mac.

Aimed at workstation applications (video, graphics, scientific data crunching), the Quadro 4000 falls in the middle of NVIDIA’s professional lineup. It features NVIDIA’s latest Fermi architecture, boasting 256 CUDA cores and 2GB of GDDR5 memory.

But for a mid-range card, it’s pretty pricey: $1,199 when it ships later this month. The PC-compatible card is about $700. It shouldn’t take long for GPU hackers to create a Mac-compatible ROM. We’ll keep an eye out.

Here’s NVIDIA’s full press release:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpXdk-dkQ_E

Filmmaker Greg Richters had enough with blue screens of death and viruses. So he made this aggro ode to Microsoft which ends in flames.

“I used PCs all the time but I got fed up with its bugs and constant crashing and so I switched to Mac three years ago,” he tells Cult of Mac.

The video shows a frazzled Microsoft user fighting his virus-ridden PC, until it explodes in its face — something that does actually happen with PCs.

(And a few Apple devices, too, we note. But not as many? And what’s with all the burning and blowing up of innocent computers lately?)

Anyway, the message? “Just say no to Microsoft, get a Mac,” Richters tells us.

Via Films United

Research in Motion has taken to YouTube to compare its recently unveiled PlayBook tablet with the leading iPad from Apple. After RIM CEO Jim Balsillie last week said its tablet would beat Apple on price, now the Canadian BlackBerry maker now has a video claiming to show web browsing on the PlayBook is faster than the iPad.

The video, showing the PlayBook loading pages at a faster clip and with complete Adobe Flash support, reminds one of an earlier showdown between Apple’s iPhone 4 and RIM. Earlier this year, Apple briefly posted a video on its website hoping to illustrate the iPhone 4’s much-discussed troublesome antenna was actually a problem shared by other major handset makers, including the BlackBerry. After a storm of complaints from its rivals, Apple quickly removed the video, instead announcing a free bumper program.

The competition is scrambling to keep up with Apple after they finally succeeded in landing the Beatles catalogue for iTunes: in the hour since the announcement, Amazon has already dropped the price of at least two Beatles offerings to undercut Apple’s own prices on the same albums.

Apple’s accompanied its surprise announcement of the Beatles coming to iTunes with the expected press release, but this one’s more worth reading than normal: it’s filled with winning quotes from Ringo Starr, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

After a decade’s absence from the most popular music store on earth, the Beatles have finally come to iTunes today… and to pay tribute to Beatlemania both past and present, Apple is celebrating the occasion by streaming The Fab Four’s history making concert at the Washington Coliseum back in February 11th 1964 on the official Apple.com website.

[polldaddy poll=”4096031″]
The Fab Four are finally on iTunes. Is this the moment that you have been waiting for — or have you already ripped all your Beatle’s CDs and couldn’t care less?

Let us know in the comments.

There’s no shortage of iPad docks out there, but most offerings force you to dock in portrait position, which can make typing on your iPad via a Bluetooth keyboard something of a pain.

Altec Lansing’s latest dock, the Octiv Stage, fixes that by allowing you to swivel the iPad when it’s docked between landscape and portrait, while also packing in some impressive speakers to add a little bit of oomph to your iPad’s audio output.

It’s a nice looking dock, if a bit beefy, but unfortunately it has an equally beefy price: $150.

As predicted, Apple’s big iTunes announcement today wasn’t iTunes in the cloud, or streaming, or a subscription fee… it’s John, Paul, Ringo and George. After ten years, the Beatles and their music catalogue have finally hit iTunes.

Although it’s not been announced on Apple.com as of writing, the Beatles’ presence on the iTunes Store now commands most of the upper fold. The entire catalog seems to be available, along with a link to the band’s page, the Beatles Box set and more. You’re even getting a decent deal on the Beatles Box Set: it cost $250 when it was released last year, and currently costs $154.99 on Amazon at a heavily discounted price. Apple’s price? Just $150 for every Beatles song ever recorded.

The sudden resolution of Apple’s decades-long standoff with Apple Records, first for the Apple trademark and then for the Beatles catalog, has happened swiftly. One thing’s for sure: however Steve got Apple Records and EMI to agree to iTunes’ terms, it’s going to make one hell of a read when the story finally comes to light.

Although many of us already own the Beatles’ catalog — I have the full collection of the recent remasters already converted to lossless MP3s — and while many will be apathetic to this news, this is a big win for Apple, as the record labels release their death grip on one of the last digital music holdouts.

CDs and records aren’t the future of music anymore: iTunes is, and the labels have finally been forced to give up one of their last aces-in-the-holes in order to stay relevant.