Microsoft’s hopes of slowly taking over the U.S. tablet market just took another hit as Lenovo, the world’s largest PC maker, has decided there’s pretty much no demand for any Windows tablets under 10-inches.
Lenovo told PC World that they’re seeing stronger interest in larger screen sizes in North America, so they’re going to stop selling all of their small Windows Tablets in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and push the ThinkPad 10.
Most of us take videos from time to time. You know, the kind of videos that are taken from boring, ground based, vantage points. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have the freedom to take high definition videos from any angle or elevation?
Meet the DJI Phantom FC40 drone. Using its on-board Smart Camera, you can record just about any event from one stunning perspective after another. Now, the DJI Phantom FC40 can be yours for the very low price of $499 at Cult of Mac Deals. As an added bonus, use the promo code phantom50 to get an additional $50 off, for a final price of $449!
While Android has a significantly larger user base, iOS has always been the more profitable platform for app developers. That’s expected to change over the next three years, however. One analyst believes that by 2018, Google Play will bring in more revenue than the App Store for the first time ever.
Apple is set to open its third brick-and-mortar retail store in Western Australia, at the Lakeside Joondalup shopping mall in Joondalup, Perth.
The 5,000 square-foot location will be part of a major revamp of the shopping center, that will see it become the largest in Western Australia.
The location doesn’t come as a total surprise: almost two years ago Apple real estates scouts were seen walking in the hallmarks of the mall, although it’s only with the mall’s current renovation and expansion that Apple has found a location suitable to lease.
We get slammed 24/7 with new Apple rumors. Some are accurate, most are not. To give you a clue about what’s really coming out of Cupertino in the future, we’re busting out our rumor debunker each week to blow up the nonsense.
The onslaught of ridiculous iPhone 6 rumors continues this week with reports claiming a huge megapixel boost is coming thanks to a new camera sensor. We’ve also heard whispers of week-long battery life coming soon, seen glimpses a possible iPhone 6 TouchID, and heard new details on the iWatch coming in different sizes this fall.
There’s even some new reports of production delays with the 5.5-inch iPhone 6, but you’ll have to gaze deep into our crystal ball to find out who the hell really knows what’s going on with Apple’s iPhablet.
An iPad case should:
The Logitech Hinge manages the first three of these, and were it not for the failure on point No. 4, it would be my new favorite case. As it is, the cool Logitech Hinge is my favorite case for using around the house.
The European Commission has issued some words to Google and Apple about both companies’ steps to ensure children don’t rack up huge amounts of money on in-app purchases without their parents’ permission.
In a statement released by the Commission on Friday, Google is praised for a series of changes that will be put in effect by the end of September — while Apple finds itself on the receiving end of some harsh criticism.
The Rumor: New backlight LCD tech will make the iPhone 6 skinnier than any iPhone ever.
The Verdict: Most likely. To make the 5.5-inch iPhone Air as thin as possible, supply chain sources at China Times say Apple will only use one brightness enhancement film for the backlit LCD display. We know Jony is gaga for shrinking his devices and it looks like the engineering team has found the answer. The only question is can they get enough supplies in time.
Production of the iPhone 6 has either just begun, or is days away from starting, according to a new report from Taiwan’s Economic Daily News.
The newspaper claims that mass-production of the eagerly-anticipated next generation 4.7-inch iPhone 6 handset is set to begin during the third week of July — making it either this week or next — while production of the larger 5.5-inch “phablet” iPhone 6 will begin during the second week of August. No sources were cited for either of these reports.
Fans of strategy simulation games can rejoice at the news that the popular Anno series — which first arrived on PC back in 1998 and has continued as a successful franchise to the present day — has landed on iPad.
Called Anno: Build an Empire, the games starts with you colonizing an uninhabited island, which you harvest for resources, before building your way up to a fully-fledged, bonafide civilization — featuring various colonized islands under your control.
During his 25-year career as a photographer, Dan Marcolina has captured moments of everyday despair and delight, from beaches and backyards to bus stations and wedding celebrations.
His work exhibits the ease of an inside joke or a knowing wink; the images are visual juxtapositions that live up to a high point of praise from Richard Avedon, who once commented that Marcolina makes images that aren’t “trying to be beautiful.”
Apple relies heavily on caffeine. A recent company job listing advertised a role for an iCup technician, with the important task of providing “a fresh brew coffee to all Apple employees within their department.”
Jony Ive’s design team is especially obsessed with the black stuff: For years they kept a $3,000-plus Italian Grimac espresso machine, despite the fact that it leaked all the time. For a while in the 1990s, the design team was even mockingly dubbed “Espresso” for their unabashed love of caffeine culture.
Apple’s not alone in its coffee snob behavior. The rise of coffee shops — with seemingly hundreds of variations on the old coffee standards — have infiltrated every city across the United States: Americans spend $18 billion per year on specialty coffee alone.
But how much do we actually know about it?
There are some incredibly clever examples of people painting masterpieces using their iPad, but a new 3-D painting app called Psykopaint is promising to provide the most authentic painting experience yet.
Psykopaint gives you an astonishing variety of materials and options to work with: ranging from different textures and opacities of paint types, to a selection of papers and canvases, each with their own absorption rates, textures, and amount of grain. You can paint freestyle, or choose to work within an accepted artistic style like Impressionism and Impasto — courtesy of custom brushes that imitate the brushstrokes of artists like Monet, Van Gogh, and Gauguin.
In short, it’s the closest thing you’ll get to feeling like a real artist.
Earlier today it was reported that Bill Campbell, aka Apple’s longest-serving board member, has elected to step down after 17 years. In a timely interview with Fortune, Campbell — who has been involved with Apple dating back to 1983 — reflects on several topics, ranging from Tim Cook’s leadership style to the challenge of balancing advisory work at Google with Steve Jobs’ “thermonuclear war” threats.
Selected highlights are below:
The iPhone comes preloaded with many stock applications, but not all are as powerful as you wish they’d be. Luckily there are tons of developers pushing new apps into the App Store, and many of their creations upstage the stock iOS applications.
In today’s video we take a look at five iOS apps that can easily replace baked-in Apple apps and enhance your iPhone experience. Look at weather in more detail, refresh your music player and more with these powerful apps.
Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.
No name in the world of iPhone hacking looms larger thank George Hotz. At only 17 years old, Hotz, aka geohot, became the first person in the world to jailbreak the iPhone back in 2007. He also released a few jailbreaks and ended up in a legal battle with Sony after hacking the PS3, but now Hotz is taking his talents to the other side, by joining an elite team of security hackers at Google.
To help plug security holes in every major piece of software that touches the internet, Google has recruited an elite team of talented hackers called Project Zero. Their mission? Find as many zero day vulnerabilities as possible, and get paid a lot of cash in process.
The iPhone 6 is widely expected to feature a sapphire glass display, but the protective material could only be offered with more expensive models that pack the most storage.
Apple’s sapphire supplier in Arizona, GT Advanced Technologies, might not be able to produce enough displays to meet initial demand when new iPhones come out this fall. While opinions are varied as to how many displays Apple will be able to make, it’s being reported that sapphire could very well only be available in the most expensive iPhone 6 models.
Apple is continuing its push to diversify its leadership with the announcement this afternoon that Susan Wagner, a wall street insider who co-found one the world’s top investment firms, has been added to the company’s board of directors, taking the spot of the board’s longest serving member.
Bill Campbell has been on Apple’s board for 17 years but has decided to retire, making room for Wagner to take her seat on Tim Cook’s board. Wagner comes to the board after co-founding BlackRock in 1988 and leading it to become one of the world’s most successful asset-management companies. She’ll continue to serve on BlackRock’s board, as well as boards for Swiss Re, Wellesley College, and Hackley School.
In an press release announcing the changes, Tim Cook had high praises for Wagner, as well as the man she’s replacing:
Today Apple rolled out two-step verification for Apple ID accounts in 48 new countries. With the addition of countries like China, Japan, India, and France, two-step verification for Apple IDs is now supported in a total of 59 countries. Only 11 countries offered the extra security measure until today.
Lightning ports haven’t even been around for two years now, but I think it might be time for Apple to consider replacing it with the MacBook’s most underrated feature: Magsafe power connectors.
Cabin is a new a Kickstarter projected aimed at bringing the MacBook’s awesome MagSafe power connector to the iPhone 5 and 5s, with a battery case that’s so sleek and unapologetically aluminum, you’d think it came straight from Jony Ive’s prototype design lab.
Time tracking for clients can be a huge pain, but there’s a new iPhone app out called Hours to make the process easier.
“Three years ago we got so frustrated with time tracking software that we decided to do something about it,” said Jeremy Olson of Tapity, an Apple Design Award-winning studio behind apps like Languages and Grades. Hours features a simple, elegant interface with flexible options for keep track of when you work.
Facebook’s ‘make a bunch of apps and see which ones stick’ strategy for mobile has unleashed a new app for the iPhone this morning, and it’s supposed to make interacting with famous people on Mark Zuckerburg’s social network easier than ever, but you’re probably not cool enough to use it.
Apple’s new mothership isn’t expected to touchdown in Cupertino until 2016, but construction on the new campus is starting to hit a rapid pace, as new areal photos reveal the exterior walls are nearing completion as well as the construction of underground tunnels.
Are you bummed that don’t have anyone to sext with, or that the sexting has dried up in your relationship?
Don’t worry. Thanks to a new game, you can sext just as easily as picking up your iPhone and sending a text to a bot.
When you’re dealing with a genre as tired as the endless runner (no pun intended), it can be difficult to do something new. That’s not the case with Fotonica, an upcoming iOS title.
By switching the genre to a first-person perspective (you even see your arms pumping back and forth at the edges of the screen) and adopting sparse vector art, the dynamic game looks like the kind of title we might have dreamed of owning back in the 1980s.
Microsoft is going through some major turbulence. Today it has announced major layoffs, beginning with 13,000 positions to go immediately, with a total of 18,000 expecting to find themselves out of a job sometime during 2014.
The vast majority of these sackings involve the company’s Nokia division. Microsoft acquired Nokia’s Devices and Services unit back in September 2013 for $7.2 billion. Along with taking ownership of the Finnish firm’s entire smartphone lineup — giving it complete control over both hardware and software– the acquisition saw 25,000 Nokia employees join the Microsoft ranks.
The current Microsoft layoffs means that up to half of the Nokia people will probably leave the company, although it will also likely signal the end for some previous Microsoft employees to allow for incoming Nokia talent.