Cult of Mac

Normincies Leather and Aluminum Bag

From $643 — Cases — Mac

This absurdly hot bag is the cool equivalent of those nylon executive laptop cases that are so lame you can’t even call them dorky. It has the usual attache-case features inside, with pockets to keep everything in place when you open it, along with a splash of fashionable color.

Outside is an aluminum band which protects the case and doubles as a handle, and the whole thing is wrapped in lovely nappa leather. If your significant other absolutely has to use a briefcase, you should make it at least as cool as this one.

Normincies Leather and Aluminum Bag

Gräf & Lantz MacBook Sleeve

$50 — Cases — Mac

iPad cases never felt so good. No, I mean that literally. They never “felt” so good. Get it? It’s because these Gräf & Lanz iPad sleeves are made from felted wool, and… Never mind.

I won’t bother with a description other than to say that they’re felt and come in lots of nice bright colors. Instead I ‘ll tell you something about felt so you can regale the lucky recipient with your impressive knowledge on Christmas morning:

Felt is made by a process called wet felting where the natural wool fibres, stimulated by friction and lubricated by moisture (usually soapy water)…

That line came straight from Wikipedia, and proves that the Wikipedia authors do have hot blood running through their brains after all.

Gräf & Lantz MacBook Sleeve

Pad & Quill Field Bag

$329 — Cases — Mac

The Field Bag is a notebook and iPad bag from Pad&Quill, and is designed and made with as much care as the company’s everlasting bookbindery iCases. The leather even comes with a 25-year warranty.

Inside the waxed canvas outer are plentiful pockets, enough to hold cable sand chargers along with MacBooks and iPads. And the vertical shape means that it will hand comfortably at your side.

You’ll have to love the giftee though, as the Field Bag will cost you $329.

Field Bag

Smart Travel Router

$45 — Chargers & Batteries — Anything

This gadget really is handy for the frequent traveller. Plug it into the mains and you have a two-port USB charger, but that’s just the beginning. The little dongle also plugs into just about any socket in the world, and will wrangle networks wireless and wired alike. It can work as a router, as a repeater (boost a signal in a big hotel suite), an access point (make a network so your devices can talk to each other), or as a client, turning an Ethernet-only device into a wireless device.

You could pay $45 for any of these features alone, but all together the price is a steal. I’m probably going to buy one for myself — at least that way I have a chance of getting something I want this year.

Smart Travel Router

Cartella Pro

$100 — Cases — iPad

Got a friend who likes to hide their CRT TV in a giant faux-wooden cabinet at the end of their bed? Or that buys those speakers that hang on the wall and look like paintings on canvas? Then you should buy them a Cartella case for their Retina MacBook Pro, which comes from the fine and upstanding folks at Pad&Quill.

Not only will it turn their 21st-century gadget into a centuries-old book, it does it with protection (a baltic birch frame), style (a leather bookbindery cover) and some measure of practicality (you can use the MacBook while it’s in the case without impeding airflow).

Not that your luddite friend/family member will care about such modern niceties. Maybe you should just ignore him and buy this for yourself instead.

Cartella Pro

Landing Zone

From $50 — Docks & Stands — Mac

Here’s the perfect gift for your annoying uncle who bought MacBook Air when he really should have bought an iMac. You know the guy: he has his little 13-inch Air perched on the desk with tubes and wires running to it like it was a in a hospital emergency room after being found unconscious at home with a vacuum cleaner pipe… [That’s enough –ed]

Ahem. Back to your uncle, whose poor MacBook is tied to the desk by external hard drives, thunderbolt accessories, an external display, an Ethernet dongle and probably a powered USB hub to keep it all going. What he needs is the Landing Zone dock, an amazing piece of plastic and steel which leaves the MacBook free to come and go.

The units are fitted to specific models (make sure you buy the right one) and clamp onto the back of the Mac like a facehugging alien onto a, uh, face. It inserts itself into all available ports, and can be ejected with a single lever. Meanwhile, you can hook up all your peripherals and even the power cable to the dock and leave them permanently connected.

Landing Zone

MiniDrive

$20 — Storage — Mac

Having an ultra portable MacBook with enough battery power to work all day and then watch a few adult videos in the hotel afterwards? Priceless. Having just 128GB on which to store your business-trip entertainment? Lame, with a capital “lay.”

Which is why you should buy your husband/lover a MiniDrive, a tiny sliver of plastic that acts like the iPhone’s SIM card tray, only instead of a SIM it carries a microSD card. And instead of working with an iPhone it slides into the redundant SD card slot on the side of a MacBook Air.

It’s a semi-permanent solution, the idea being that you add a high-capacity (up to 64GB) microSD card and enjoy the extra storage. Speed depends on the speed of the card you buy (the SanDisk Ultras are a good bet), but for the odd porno you should be good.

MiniDrive

Back in early 2008, “Dogfight” author Fred Vogelstein wrote an article for Wired that still ranks as one of my favorites of recent years. Called “The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry” Vogelstein told — with characteristic aplomb — the story of how the iPhone rose from top secret research project to industry-changing device. (Cult of Mac talked to Vogelstein about the iPhone wars in our interview.)

No doubt that article, along with Vogelstein’s other pieces of reportage over the past several years, made him long for a larger canvas upon which to tell not just the story of 21st-century Apple, but also its complex changing relationship with Google: a rivalry that Steve Jobs once predicted would end in nothing less than (hopefully metaphorical) “thermonuclear war.”

Vogelstein clearly recognizes the importance of this feud and observes that Apple vs. Google (or, more specifically, Apple vs. Android) is in this regard the latest era-defining tech rivalry: the successor to previous clashes of the titans including Apple vs. Microsoft in the 1980s, and Microsoft vs. Netscape was in the 90s. Like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Google and Apple started out as friends and allies, and one of the strands this book tugs on is the degree of collusion which existing between both companies as they pared down the competition, before eventually turning on each other.

“Vogelstein clearly recognizes the importance of this feud”

As companies, the differences between Apple and Google are both legion and fascinating. Although both grow out of the same libertarian Silicon Valley impulse, their mission statement and subsequent outlook on the world is very different. Apple, Vogelstein posits, has prospered because of its Jobsian focus on form and function; a company built by marketers. Google, on the other hand, is a company in thrall of engineers, whose “zaniness and embrace of chaos” makes it the ideological opposite of the ordered, secretive Apple.

With Apple as a Fordist company making physical products, and Google as an informational one specializing in search, if they were modest companies Google and Apple need never clash. But of course they aren’t, and their eventual collision is made inevitable by both companies’ ultimate mission statement of expanding to fill the role of operating systems of our lives — a one-stop tech shop of the type most recently explored in Dave Eggers’ latest novel “The Circle.”

It is the lack of this larger story — about what Apple and Google say about the modern digital world — that I felt most wanting in parts of “Dogfight.” Vogelstein tells the company vs. company narrative compellingly, but having introduced Apple and Google’s personalities — and then illustrated them with plenty of anecdotal tidbits, many taken from testimony given in the 2012 Samsung vs. Apple patent trial — he doesn’t always do enough to push the implications as far as he might. The disappointment of this is made all the more tangible by virtue of the fact that these “big picture” demands are exactly the thing that Wired (where Vogelstein presently works) typically does so well.

“There can be few who will fail to be gripped by the author’s ability to take potentially dry information and present it in the manner of a fast-moving cinematic narrative”

Whatever criticisms can occasionally be leveled at it, one thing that absolutely can’t be said about is that Wired fails to appreciate technology’s grand narrative — with every minuscule or infinitesimal advance lauded as part of an overall march toward a utopia staffed by machines of loving grace.

As companies that embrace their role as purveyors of digital ideology (Google’s promise to not be evil, compared with Apple’s stated desire to think different), both Apple and Google could be used as the vessels through which to explore the modern digital age; serving as a cliff notes primer on the big tech issues of the day — as well as its major players. At its best, “Dogfight” hints at this idea; stringing together the basis for a compelling argument as to why the smartphone and tablet should be “an inflection point, such as the moment when the PC was invented, when the Internet browser took hold, when Google reinvented web search, and when Facebook created the social network.”

That it doesn’t do this consistently most likely has as much to do with the book’s timing (coming very much in the midst of proceedings, before enough time has elapsed to draw overarching conclusions) as it does with Vogelstein’s (considerable) talents as a tech writer.

But if this is what “Dogfight” sometimes fails to do, what does it succeed at? Long-time Wired readers will know what to expect here. Although there are parts of the book where reader interest flags — such as a history of patent infringement suites that reads like an unnecessary excerpt from a first-year legal textbook — there can be few who will fail to be gripped by the author’s ability to take potentially dry information and present it in the manner of a fast-moving cinematic narrative à la “The Social Network.” These “character moments” and fun pieces of behind-the-scenes trivia proliferate. It hardly takes me to point out that Vogelstein has a great eye for detail — and he pulls out fun factoids from well-trodden ground, such as the fact that the iPhone building was labeled “Fight Club” on account of Apple’s secrecy and the fact that the first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club.

Ultimately, if there is a challenge to the book it might simply be the familiar one in today’s age of digital overload of too much available information. “The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry” was published in 2008; less than a year after the iPhone made it to market. At the time, not only was the smartphone war a hot new topic, but there was still a slew of new details about its back story unfamiliar to most readers.

To paraphrase Dinah Washington, “what a diff’rence several years make.” Since then we have had Walter Isaacson’s well received (and widely read) Steve Jobs biography, as well as Steven Levy’s “In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives” — to name just two of the volumes written about Apple and Google and the changing nature of digital media in general. As Vogelstein will know from his years of solid tech reporting, latecomers entering an entrenched marketplace can have difficulty cementing themselves, regardless of the quality of what they have on offer.

If you’re a regular consumer of tech news, or even one who glances, perhaps, just once a week at Cult of Mac or Cult of Android and has done with it (shame on you!), you’re still likely to know a lot of what is reported here. Because of Apple’s secrecy it is their side of the story (as opposed to Google’s) that likely holds the most tantalizing revelations and unsurprisingly this is the side that Vogelstein didn’t have ready access to, as he acknowledges in his afterword.

That’s not to say that you won’t get some value out of “Dogfight,” but it is likely the kind of “completist” value you might get from finding a deleted scene to a familiar film as opposed to uncovering a whole new narrative you didn’t know existed.

If you’re a tech newbie, on the other hand and are looking for a swift read that sums up the Google vs. Apple story in as to-the-minute detail as possible — and don’t want to pick up two books (Isaacson and Levy) which are now two years old — this book comes recommended. If you enjoy Vogelstein’s writing and want something that reads like an expanded Wired article (no bad thing in itself) this may be the book for you.

Just be aware that while it tells the story of battles, no one has yet won this particular war.

Product Name: Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution The Good: Vogelstein can spin a compelling narrative out of potentially dry news events The Bad: Much of the information will already be well known to readers The Verdict A lively, if occasionally lacking, summary of the Google vs. Apple clash Buy from: Amazon.com

[rating=good]

An Infinity Bravura Dash – Knights of the King is a very long name for a straight forward side-scrolling shooter. In I Bravura (the app store title for the game) you play as one of three knights that fire endlessly into an ever-flowing wave of slimes and goblins. One hit can kill you, so your goal is to take down as many baddies as you can while collecting potions and coins that fly toward you.

Beyond walking right and shooting, there’s not a lot to I Bravura, but that isn’t a bad thing. Your character can walk forward and back a little, which makes it much easier to avoid enemies while diving for collectibles. The simplicity behind I Bravura makes it a very relaxing game to play. Once you gain enough gold and unlock the other knights, your objective is really just to make it as far as you can without dying. You can pick the game up any time and just slaughter enemies to your heart’s content.

Dog Diary — Lifestyle — Free

Dog Diary is an app that helps you keep track of all the people and events in your canine friend’s life. You can store important, pet-related contacts, expenses, and photos. You can also create entries for multiple animals to keep everything organized. It’s an address book, a photo album, and a bookkeeping program all in one. You can also track measurements like body temperature, provided you’re not shy about pulling out your phone as soon as the vet pulls out the thermometer.

I’m still waiting for an app that will walk the little guy for me once it gets snowy out, but we might need a robot for that.

Dog Diary

I grew up in the 80s, so I know how close we came to total nuclear annihilation when the WOPR computer became self-aware, as we saw in the 1983 documentary WarGames. The only thing that saved us back then was Tic Tac Toe, a game that became the savior of all humanity just by being stupid and largely unwinnable.

Tic Tactics aims to solve its predecessor’s “what the hell, we’re bored” factor by adding eight more boards and some much-needed lateral thinking.

And it succeeds admirably.

I’ve had a chance to test a number of headphones throughout the past year, and have grown more fond of the more traditional “over-ear” headphones during that time. As a regular podcaster – and as the person who edits those podcasts – having little to no bleed from outside sources has become increasingly important.

That said, I don’t want to spend a fortune on headphones, either. I want decent sound quality, the ability to wear them for a couple of hours comfortably, and compact portability. The Atlas Carbon Headphones by MEElectronics offer all three, which is rare. I was provided with a set to put through the paces, and was very happy with the results. (And Cult of Mac Deals just so happens to have the Atlas Carbon Headphones for 35% off the regular price – just $65 – during a very limited time offer. This promotion, however, is available only to continental USA customers.)

If you’ve been meaning to treat yourself to a Pebble smartwatch and you haven’t already blown all of your savings on other Black Friday deals, then you might be interested to know that you can now get $20 off the device for one day only.

Apple surprised us with its Black Friday deals for Australia, which include free Apple Store gift cards with new Macs and iOS devices, but no discounts. And as you may have suspected, it’s the same story in the U.S., where customers can now get credit worth $150 with a new Mac, up to $75 with a new iPad, and up to $50 with a new iPod.

Apple is also offering gift cards worth up to $25 with other accessories and gadgets, including the Apple TV, the Nike+ FuelBand SE, and Logitech’s Ultrathin Keyboard Cover for iPad mini.

Readdle, the team behind some of the best productivity apps and utilities for iOS, has slashed 50% off five of its top offerings for Black Friday. The sale includes titles like PDF Expert for iPhone and iPad, Calendars 5, and Printer Pro — all of which are now half price for a limited time.

Giveaway: Win an iPad Air & 5 Deals of Your Choice from Inky Deals!

By entering this contest, automatically receive a pack of premium resources worth $55 for free. It comes from the Inky Deals best seller Full Design Library: $3,860 worth of Premium Resources for Only $49.

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FIFA has launched its new app as part of the countdown to 6 December’s 2014 football World Cup draw.

The free app is available for both iOS and Android devices, and offers not just the live draw in streaming video, but also match schedules, destination guides and team profiles for the tournament — set to take place in Brazil in summer 2014.

Yahoo! has released its list of top searches for 2013 and, when it comes to tech, Apple is once again leading the way.

The iPhone had the most searches (the second most searched subject overall), with the iPad making it to fourth place — ahead of PS4 and XBox One — and the iPod to eighth, above the Nokia Lumia and just below the Blackberry.

Practically everyone reading this will have heard the reports about the lengths Apple will go to in order to ensure that its products are on the cutting edge of industrial design.

Well, to those reports you can add the one which suggests that Apple recently paid a total of $578 million — more than half a billion dollars — to GT Advanced Technologies to speed up “the development of its next generation, large capacity ASF furnaces to deliver low cost, high volume manufacturing of sapphire material.”

This move is designed to help keep down the costs of the Sapphire Glass screen rumored to be featured as part of the iPhone 6 — along with a redesign and bigger display.

When you’re among the world’s most sued companies, we imagine that you get used to some pretty hefty legal fees from keeping lawyers on retainer.

Even Apple has kicked up a fuss, however, when its court-appointed “monitor” — given the job of ensuring Apple’s antitrust compliance concerning e-book price fixing — handed in what the company considered a fairly outrageous time sheet.

There are different ways to measure the success of a tech company — thing like how many lucrative patents it’s sitting on, how much money it’s giving back to shareholders, and what its overall market penetration is in whatever area it’s operating in.

Well, there’s another way also: how much do its product launches correlate with a spike rates. You can keep your reports about Apple’s recent financial quarters disappointing Wall Street analysts — as far as San Francisco’s criminal element is concerned, Apple is doing better than it has in years.

The ClipR is a little disk that turns any headphones into a set of Bluetooth headphones. Or, to be more accurate, it turns any 3.5mm jack cable into a Bluetooth-enabled jack cable.

And it has a clip, so you can tuck that cable neatly away.

It’s Black Friday everyone, and Cult of Mac is here to tell you that Apple has kicked off its sales across retail outlets in Europe (including the UK). We’re not just talking about gift cards being on offer, either — but real cash savings.

Here are the the most popular savings being given on Apple’s most popular products:

When I ordered a Retina iPad mini, I went for the cellular version – and not only because it means I can get online anywhere without draining my iPhone’s battery by tethering. I got it for the GPS, which is pretty fantastic to have when traveling, especially in the (big) pocket-sized mini.

But if you didn’t have the foresight to spend the extra $130 on a cellular, you can now spend that exact same $130 on a dongle that adds GPS through the Lightning port.

I love my Olloclip, but I wince every time I use it and see its anodized red body next to my white iPhone. Kidding. Who cares if it matches? After all, it’s what’s on the inside that counts and beauty is only skiZzzzzzz.

Kidding again. Somebody at Olloclip cares, which is why you can now snap up a limited edition gold or space gray Olloclip, along with a neat Cyber Monday cyber discount of 10%.

Native Union wasn’t kidding around when it chose the name “Gripster” – this thing can be gripped and grabbed any way you like. Hell, even a Dolphin could get a purchase on this thing with its slippery flippers. The case, now available for the iPad mini, had a swiveling hand loop, a kickstand/carrying handle and a Smart Cover that folds up to add yet another handle.

If the new iPad Air or Mini with Retina display is on your or a loved one’s list this holiday season – this bundle from the award-winning designers at Just Mobile is a deal that’s too good to pass up.

The Slide iPad stand and the AluPen stylus are winners of nearly a dozen prestigious awards, including Best of Show, Design, and other Category awards from the likes of MacWorld, iF International Forum, Reddot, iLounge, Computex, Spark, and others. And Cult of Mac Deals has them packaged together for just $59.99 for a limited time.

Hatch, the cute virtual pet for iPhone from the makers of Clear, has received its first update just one week after making its App Store debut. The release adds some beautiful wallpapers for your iPhone, introduces some new shop items, and makes a long list of fixes, tweaks, and improvements.

You’ve probably heard that the new iPad mini with Retina display has a significantly smaller color gamut that the larger iPad Air, but how does it compete against rival tablets like the Google Nexus 7 and Amazon’s new Kindle Fire HDX?

According to the experts at DisplayMate, not very well. In fact, the new iPad mini came a “distant third” in their tablet display shootout, thanks to Apple’s “inexcusable” decision to use old technology.

“Apple was once the leader in mobile displays, unfortunately it has fallen way behind,” DisplayMate says.

Hoping to get a nice discount on your next Mac or iOS device this Black Friday? Then you’d better buy it from a third-party retailer. Apple has taken a new approach to its Black Friday deals this year and decided to give away gift cards rather than discount its goods.

An astonishing 76 percent of new smartphone sales in Japan for the month of October were either iPhone 5s or 5c handsets, according to recent data.

The report comes from a Kantar World Panel, and demonstrates just how far Apple’s share of the Japanese smartphone market has increased over the present quarter.