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Future iPhone Batteries To Be Manufactured By Robots [Rumor]

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Artist's impression of what a future Apple battery production line might look like.
Artist's impression of what a future Apple battery production line might look like.

Apple is set to start producing all its iPhone batteries on automated production lines starting later this year, according to a report from DigiTimes.

The decision is reportedly related to minimum wages rising in China — combined with labor shortages and high turnovers of staff, who have to be trained to use the manufacturing machinery.

What If The iWatch Isn’t A Watch At All?

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What if Apple’s iWatch is’t an iWatch at all? What if it’s a spec, like CarPlay, that lets folks like Casio and Rolex put an Apple chip inside their watches to make them talk to your iPhone?

Problems solved:

  • Apple doesn’t have to get into the fashion watch game, or make “ladies” and “gents” watches.
  • The watch industry gets a shot in the arm (pun intended) as watches get useful again.
  • You don’t need a power-sucking display. The iPhone is the display.

Tiny BOLT Is A Charger And Backup Battery In One

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The little BOLT Charger Battery is as clever as it is good looking. The USB wall-charger packs a backup battery into its tiny body, as body that leads its maker to call it the “The World’s Smallest Wall Charger + Battery Backup.”

I’m not sure how true that it, but who cares? It fits in your pocket and it’ll juice your iPhone twice, even without a wall to shove it into.

Closing A Tax Loophole May Result In UK Customers Paying More For Apps

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(Credit: Getty Images)
(Credit: Getty Images)

Have UK Apple users seen the end of 69p app downloads?

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has closed a tax loophole, which may result in iTunes and App Store prices in the UK rising by as much as 20% from 2015. The loophole meant that international companies including Apple were able to sell digital content in Britain through Luxemburg, where tax is as low as 3% — compared to the 20% it is charged at in the UK.

WSJ: Apple Talking To Comcast About A Streaming TV Service

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Apple and Comcast are in the early stages of negotiating a streaming TV service, according to The Wall Street Journal. The service “would use an Apple set-top box and get special treatment on Comcast’s cables to ensure it bypasses congestion on the Web.”

Rumors have been saying that Apple is working on a TV streaming product for years, and this latest report suggests that Apple is concerned about its customers have enough bandwidth to make the experience worthwhile at home.

3DS Max Tutorial: Animation And Modeling Has Never Been So Easy [Deals]

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Animation and modeling are very tough to learn on your own, so this Cult of Mac Deals offer aims to make the process that much easier.

With The 3DS Max Tutorial, animation and modeling have neever been easier. Designed for the beginner, you do not have to have any prior experience using 3DS Max to get the most out of these video animation or modeling tutorials. You will learn about materials and mapping, lighting, and how to operate cameras within 3DS Max. Finally, you will learn to animate, render and add special F/X to your models. And you’ll get the whole course for just $39 – a savings of 60%!

Why Android Wear Will Rule the Smartwatch

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The announcement of Android Wear, and smartwatches from LG and Motorola, was greeted by the public as: “Oh, look — a new kind of gadget!”

But the wearable revolution in general and Google’s Android Wear initiative in particular, is barely even about gadgets.

The smartwatch revolution is about three things: devices, smartphone apps and cloud services.

You’ll note, however, that these are listed in order from least to most important. Here’s why Google’s total dominance of the third aspect of the smartwatch revolution will make them unbeatable.

LG Tackles Phillips Hue With Its Own Smart Lighting System (At Half The Price)

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We’re big fans of the Philips Hue line of smart lightbulbs controllable with a slick, full-featured iOS app, but there’s no doubt it’s a pricey proposition for most people, with a single Hue bulb costing as much as $60.

If you want smart lighting in your home for about half the price, then, pay attention to what LG is doing. They have just announced their own smart bulb system called the LG Smart Lighting system, and each bulb will cost just $32.

Just Like Microsoft, Apple Reserves The Right To Read Your iCloud Email Anytime

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Last week, Alex Kibkalo, a former Microsoft employee living in Lebanon, was arrested on charges that he had sold the Windows 8 source code in retaliation for a bad performance review. What was most shocking about the arrest was the means by which Microsoft gathered evidence pinning the crime on Kibkalo: they went into his personal Hotmail account and read his email to figure out it was him, without a court order to do so.

Apple would never do something like that by reading iCloud email without a court order, right? It’s not that simple, actually. Like Hotmail, Yahoo, and other webmail providers, iCloud’s terms of service specify that Apple reserves the right to read your email at any time.

AviiQ High-Quality Headphones: Experience Music The Way You Want To Hear It [Deals]

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All those cheap, five dollar replacement headphones you’ve picked up after you lost or broke your last pair add up – and they don’t sound all that great, either. It’s time to stop wasting your money and save money through Cult of Mac Deals instead.

AViiQ’s In-Ear Headphones will put a stop to your reckless spending and constantly growing headphone graveyard because Cult of Mac Deals has these high-quality headphones for only $19.99 during this limited time promotional offer.

Incredible Jailbreak Tweak Aria Brings iOS 8’s Music Player To iOS 7 Today

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Want to supercharge your stock music player? If you’re on a jailbroken iPhone, check out Aria. It’s a new Cydia tweak that adds a number of new improvements to the stock Music.app in iOS 7.1, including the ability to see albums in a grid view, a new ‘Now Playing’ interface (like in Apple’s Remote app), an ‘Endless Playing’ feature that will start a shuffled play after an album ends, improved lyrics views, and a number of UI improvements, including gestural support.

This Seismograph Looks Like An Earthquake, But It’s Actually iOS 7.1 Hitting The Net [Chart]

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From a tectonic perspective, any time Apple releases a new version of iOS, it’s like an Earthquake hit the internet. But you might be surprised by how high on the Richter Scale an Apple iOS release is.

This chart by network management services provider Deepfield shows just how big of a seismic event the release of iOS 71 was. From almost zero traffic, iOS 7.1 caused traffic to spike to over 1 terrabyte of data per second… and that’s just a partial view of the effect iOS 7.1 had on the world’s networks. Imagine what this chart will look like when iOS 8 comes around?

Via: GigaOm

Patent Troll Blackberry Says Ryan Seacrest’s Typo Keyboard Is “Deliberate Copy”

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Blackberry — which recently celebrated the notable achievement of a zero percent marketshare in the smartphone space — has turned into a patent troll now. In suing Ryan Seacrest’s Typo iPhone Keyboard case (which gives the iPhone a physical QWERTY style keyboard which can be slide onto the screen when necessary) now claims that it is a “deliberate” copy of Blackberry that violates three patents.

How an Underappreciated iOS 7 Feature Will Change the World

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A curious download hit Apple’s App Store this week: a messaging app called FireChat.

It’s a new kind of app because it uses an iOS feature unavailable until version 7: the Multipeer Connectivity Framework. The app was developed by the crowdsourced connectivity provider Open Garden and this is their first iOS app.

The Multipeer Connectivity Framework enables users to flexibly use WiFi and Bluetooth peer-to-peer connections to chat and share photos even without an Internet connection. Big deal, right?

But here’s the really big deal — it can enable two users to chat not only without an Internet connection, but also when they are far beyond WiFi and Bluetooth range from each other — connected with a chain of peer-to-peer users between one user and a far-away Internet connection.

It’s called wireless mesh networking. And Apple has mainstreamed it in iOS 7. It’s going to change everything. Here’s why. 

Flapthulhu Gets Even Better With Addition Of Shoggoth And New Battle Mode

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Of the endless barrage of clones that emerged after Flappy Bird’s surprise success, Flapthulhu is the one that I go back to over and over again. Not only is it a clever parody of both the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the Flappy Bird phenomenon in general, but it’s a genuinely better game than Flappy Bird, with a subverseive sense of humor, fantastic 8-bit style graphics great style. Now, Flapthulhu has gotten better thanks to a version 2.0 update, which adds to major new features.

Every Other Smartphone Maker Would Kill To Have A “Flop” Like The iPhone 5c

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Photo: Apple

We’ll admit we’ve called the iPhone 5c a flop more than a few times. But it’s important to remember that what is a flop for Apple would be a huge success by the standards of any other company, which is why the iPhone 5c outsold every Blackberry, Windows Phone and Android flagship in Q4.

That’s not to say that the iPhone 5c’s sales are what Apple wants it to be. In the most recent quarterly earnings conference call, Tim Cook himself admitted that iPhone 5c demand “turned out to be different than we thought.” Even though the iPhone 5c is selling well according to the standards of the rest of the smartphone industry, you have to wonder if even for $100 less, people would really prever a colorful plastic iPhone 5c than a premium-feeling iPhone 5. Even people opting for year old miles are buying an iPhone to get a high-end product, and the major failing of the iPhone 5c seems to be the plastic just doesn’t satisfy that requirement. What do you think?