And here you thought Terminal was just for Unix geeks.

Ok, well, maybe it really is, but there’s a fun easter egg or two hidden in the old UNIX code that underlies Apple’s OS X software.

Turns out that you can play Tetris and Snake, two classic games from the dawn of digital gaming, in a Terminal window. Intrigued? It’s super easy.

Apple has today announced that iBooks Textbooks and iTunes U Course Manager are expanding into new markets across Asia, Latin America, Europe, and other countries around the world. The expansions brings the total number of countries supported by iBooks Textbooks up to 51, while iTunes U Course Manager is now available in 70, including Russia, Thailand and Malaysia.

If you have the word Candy in the name of your app, watch out. King.com Limited — the makers of the hypnotically popular mobile game Candy Crush Saga — is gunning for you. They have trademarked the word ‘candy.’

Miss iOS 6’s reflective glass dock? This jailbreak tweak has got you covered.

While all attention is currently being placed on the new fourth iOS 7.1 beta, a feature that seems to have skipped most people’s attention is that beta version 3 includes a female counterpart to the British male variant of Siri, which users can choose between.

With Nintendo recently admitting that its Wii U console has flopped — slashing its sales forecasts for the device by 70 percent, despite U.S. spending on games consoles reaching a three-year high — the rumor mill has been abuzz with reports that the Japanese games manufacturer would exit the hardware business altogether, and instead focus on creating games for existing smartphones and tablets.

Less than two weeks after its iOS launch, intelligent news app NewsBrain has received an update that allows it to read news articles aloud to you.

To activate NewsBrain’s text-to-speech capability, simply tap the “share” button or press and hold on an article, before selecting the “speak” option — letting you get caught up with your reading while, for instance, jogging or driving to work.

Way back in early 2012, Cult of Mac reported on the way that genius artist rap singer Kanye West had raised the ire of Apple fans by claiming that he was “[picking] up where Steve Jobs left off.”

Since then he has repeated the statement on several occasions — telling the New York Times in 2013 that, “I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means,” and describing himself as, “undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump.”

A New Zealand father-and-son duo tracked down their stolen iPad using the device’s “Find My iPad” function.

After enjoying a meal in a restaurant in Nelson, New Zealand, Chris and Markham Phillips returned to the parking lot to find their car had been ransacked — and cash, glasses and an iPad were missing.

“As despair and disgust begin to kick in, we remember a newly installed tracking application on both the stolen iPad and the retained iPhone,” son Markham told a local reporter. “We fire up the app [and] the iPad icon pings onto the map.”

Joining the likes of iTunes Radio, Pandora, Spotify, and Rdio, Beats Music — the music subscription service spearheaded by Jimmy Iovine — launches today, 21 January.

Combining human curation from “the best music experts” to algorithm-based automated recommendations, Beats Music will offer access to over 20 million songs via unlimited, ad-free streaming for $9.99 a month on all the usual platforms — including iOS and Mac.

The Bpen is a clever gadget indeed. It takes something almost useless — an iPhone stylus — and turns it into something useful: an iPhone stand. It even works as a car mount, and yet can still be used as a stylus. And as a regular pen. How is this unholy magic achieved? Let’s see…

Man, do I feel clean today. No, it’s not the fact that I quit drinking two summers ago. Nor that I stopped smoking a few years before that. Nope. I feel clean because I finally deleted iPhoto from my Mac. It’s gone, never to spin up the fans again because it’s detecting faces with the accuracy of a demented uncle, nor to inexplicably flip away from the album I’m viewing every single time I switch to another app, however briefly.

I don’t even need Apple’s worst app (worse than iTunes I say) for Photo Stream any more, becasue now I have the $4, 6 MB MyPhotostream to take its place.

VLC, the versatile play-anything video app that I have installed on every Mac I’ve had admin access to in the last half decade, has gotten a great update in its iOS incarnation. VLC for iOS not only looks better, but will now grab video from Dropbox and Google Drive.

iOS 7.1 takes another slow step closer to launch with the release of beta 4 to developers. As ever, the release notes are scant, so it’ll take some digging to really find out what has changed. There’s on bit of good news though: the Messages app should no longer lie to you about messages failing.

One of the things I like most about iOS 7 is the two different colors of keyboards, but unfortunately, they only come in monochrome: black or white.

Enter Fancy. A new jailbreak tweak, Fancy allows you to color iOS 7’s UI any pigment you want, from having a sea green Notification Center to a blood red soft keyboard, and much, mucj more.

Fancy is compatible with the iPhone 5, 5c, and 5S, iPod Touch (5th Gen), iPad (4th Gen) & iPad mini. It’s available from the ModMyi Cydia Repository for $0.99.

If you want iOS 7 to drink some of the electric kool-aid, this is the tweak for you.

Via: iClarified

When Steve Jobs first debuted the original iPhone back in 2007, he promised the audience a device that was three major devices in one: “a widescreen iPod with touch controls,” a “revolutionary mobile phone,” and “a breakthrough Internet communicator.”

At the time, those three things seemed pretty impressive, but if anything, Steve Jobs the Showman was underselling himself. In fact, if you look at this 1991 circular from Radio Shack (which now does quite a bit of business selling the iPhone), Apple’s smartphone is pretty much fourteen devices in one.

Way back in November, we reported that Apple would start repairing broken iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s screens in-store soon, but while Apple has happily repaired iPhone 5 screens in-store for sometime, the iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s have been holdouts up until now.

There’s good news and bad news. The iPhone 5s? Still can’t be repaired at an Apple Store. But the iPhone 5c is a different story. CNN was able to confirm with Apple that screen repairs of the iPhone 5c are available as of Monday (today!) for theprice of $149. If you want to avail yourself of the service, just stop by your local Apple Store.

Source: CNN

If you’ve wanted to order a Mac Pro at any point since it was unveiled in December, you’ve faced a long wait, with shipping times almost immediately slipping to February.

A month later, and you’d think things would be getting wrong, but you’re wrong. On Apple’s online store, Mac Pro shipping times have slipped another month to March.

Generally speaking, even when Apple launches a product with constrained supply, it gains momentum on manufacturing and is soon able to meet demand within a month’s time. The new Mac Pro, though, remains in scarce supply over a month since launch.

Is that the true cost of Made in USA?

Source: Apple

When Apple unveiled the iPad Air back in October, they curiously decided to keep the iPad 2 around for another generation at a $399 price point… the exact same price as an entry-level iPad mini with Retina Display.

In theory, Apple’s idea here seems to have been to price the vintage iPad 2 at a sub-$400 price point so as to have a cheaper 9.7-inch tablet available for educational institutions, budget shoppers and the like. But it looks like no one’s really all that interested, with only one customer in twenty opting to buy an iPad 2 in the latest quarter. Despite this, though, average price of a purchased iPad fell for the second year in a row.

Apple’s entire beef with Samsung is that the Korean electronics maker keeps on shamelessly ripping off the design of their devices, so is anyone surprised that the latest roadblock in the Apple vs. Samsung case has to do with an anti-cloning clause that Samsung is trying to be tricky about?

42. Thanks for all the fish. Milliway’s. Famed author Douglas Adams is known for many things, including his legendary Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series. But did you know Adams was not only a die-hard Apple fan, but the last message he ever posted online was essentially a love letter to OS X?

Mega Jump 2 is a game about jumping. Forever.

iOS 7 came with a new look and feel, including the font used across the system. It’s a little thinner than earlier versions of iOS, so it might be a bit tricky to read, especially on the small iPhone screen.

You can always increase the size of text dynamically, but if you just need a little boost to the readability, try enabling Bold Text.

There was a rumor early this morning that iOS 7.1 beta 4 was coming to developers to tomorrow, but it looks like it’s here now. Apple just made iOS 7.1 beta 4 available to developers as an OTA update. You can also grab it from the Dev Center.

Along with the iOS 7.1 beta 4 release, there’s a new beta for Apple TV as well. We’ll update you with all the new changes once we get it downloaded on our devices. Feel free to yell at us on Twitter (@cultofmac) if you come across anything yourself.

In the meantime, get to downloading. Here are all links:

Apple will hold its quarterly earnings call next Monday, which means analysts are beginning to weigh in on how many iPhones Apple sold during the holiday quarter. Although Apple’s new sales with China Mobile didn’t make it into the quarter, Apple still had a ton of pent up demand to go along with a set of new phones, plus its was the holidays. All those conditions should make for a perfect storm of sales, and so far top analysts are predicting Apple sold a record-shattering 55.3 million iPhones.