Less than a week after Apple released iOS 7 to the world, the majority of iPhone and iPad owners around the world are using the operating system, and if the past is anything to go by, that adoption rate won’t slacken until only a tiny sub-fraction of users are left boasting out-of-date versions of Apple’s mobile operating system.

It’s ironic, then, that a week after iOS 7 was released, the iOS 6.1.4 jailbreak is almost done.

Apple’s iMessage service is pretty terrific, but it has one big limitation, and that is that it’s only available on Macs and iOS devices. At least officially. But there is an unofficial app that brings iMessage to your Android-powered smartphone. It works just as advertised, but we strongly advise you not to use it.

Oh, ignoble irony, how bitter your sting. A new bug in iOS 7 that is striking some iWork users is crashing their devices with the fabled Blue Screen of Death.

BBM’s cross-platform launch failed miserably this weekend. The app made its way to the iPhone in a small few countries, but the rollout was halted before it could reach the United States — or Google Play.

BlackBerry’s excuse for the catastrophic failure was that a leaked BBM APK for Android was causing some server troubles, and now the Canadian company has told fans that it will “take some time” to fix the problem, and that we should not expect to see the app this week.

There’s one feature in Adobe’s new Photoshop Elements 12 which demonstrates exactly the market that the app is aimed at: Pet Eye Correction. That’s right: if you’re the kind of person who takes flash photos of their pets with a shitty compact camera, and yet is willing to spend around $100 on an application which will help organize and edit your photos, then Elements 12 is for you.

Maybe I’m a big dummy, but I always thought that the whole point of “read later” apps was that you could shunt long-form articles off the desktop and onto a device that was better suited for reading for extended periods. After all, on the desktop a combination of bookmarks and Safari’s Reader view takes care of things.

But what do I know? Clearly there’s a place for reader apps on the Mac, and the $10 Words looks to be a very nice example.

EA Sports has brought the controversial free-to-play game model to the world’s biggest soccer franchise in FIFA 14 for iOS, which is now available to download from the App Store — three days before the big console release.

The title boasts a whole heap of improvements, including a new and intuitive control system, online multiplayer, a game of the week feature, and the hugely popular FIFA Ultimate Team mode.

The Plicopá is a cardboard iPad sleeve which unfolds and refolds into a sturdy tablet stand, ready to support your iPad for poking, or just to prop it up while you tap out words on an external keyboard. It looks to be pretty much ideal for travelers.

Marshall’s beautiful Stanmore brings some retro styling to the Bluetooth speaker game, looking a lot like one of the company’s classic combo amps or – if you want to really rock out – like the front of a speaker from a stack, with the head-unit controls concealed on the top.

Here at Cult of Mac, we love Mailbox, the third-party Gmail client for iOS. But since it was optimized for iOS 7, it has been plagued by a hugely frustrating bug that causes email accounts to be deleted at random. Fortunately, the app’s latest update — which is available from the App Store now — finally fixes the problem.

But at what cost?

If you were one of the many Apple TV users who didn’t have a pleasant experience updating to the big 6.0 update a few days ago, it’s safe to re-download and try again. After there were widespread reports of the software bricking devices, Apple pulled the update from its servers.

That happened earlier today, and now version 6.0 is available again with a new build number and hopefully some bug fixes. You can find it in software update. Once it’s installed, your Apple TV will be able to install updates on its own.

Apple TV 6.0 is one of the biggest updates to the set-top box ever. It adds iTunes Radio, Airplay from iCloud, shared Photo Streams, Podcast syncing, and more.

Breaking Bad fans have been upset with Apple because of a mixup regarding Season Passes in the iTunes Store. If you’re a fan of the show you know that the creators decided to slip the last season into two parts, effectively creating two separate seasons of 8 episodes each: “Season 5” and “The Final Season.”

Purchasers of the iTunes Season Pass for Season 5 expected to get all 16 episodes, not just the first half. A lawsuit was filed against Apple recently claiming that the company owed Breaking Bad subscribers a $22.99 Season Pass for the last 8 episodes instead of making them pay twice.

Today Apple started issuing Season Pass subscribers promo codes for “The Final Season” of Breaking Bad on the house to the tune of $22.99.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and while Apple has tested this assumption in court against Samsung and other mobile device manufacturers, Android users and developers might have a different opinion.

Because, as you can see from the screenshot above, a whole bunch of apps have appeared in the Google Play store with the express purpose of making your Android handset look just like…well, an iPhone running iOS 7.

Of course, the argument could be made that only Android is open enough to actually allow its users to change the look and feel of their devices to a competing system’s visual system, but the result is still clear: Android developers, at least, think that you should be able to have a mobile phone that looks like the latest iOS devices on the screen as well as in the design of the handset itself.

There are lock screen apps for Android that mimic the parallax of the new iOS 7, apps that call themselves iOS 7 wallpaper, when they really aren’t, and apps that are just plain honest, titled iOS 7 Fake iPhone.

Hit some of those links above to try these out on your own, because we all know it’d be cool to have an Android phone that looks like an iPhone running iOS 7.

Right?

Discuss.

Upset with how expensive Adobe Cretive Cloud is? Us too! That’s why we at Cult of Mac Deals brought you a solution. With Flux 4  you can easily build professional-looking website creation for only $49.99 (a savings of 64%). The interface is  more design-oriented than “code-oriented”, which allows for a much easier learning curve than other apps in this space.

With the release of Adobe Creative Cloud, having Dreamweaver for $50/month is just too expensive! Flux 4 is the perfect replacement for design focused web design – agile, simple, and powerful. Plus, no coding is required! This deal ends tonight at midnight, so grab it while you can!

Apple sold a lot of new iPhones over the weekend—9 million to be exact. While we don’t know the breakdown sales for the 5c and 5s, estimates suggest that the ratio of 5s sales to 5c sales was around 3 to 1.

Launch supply of the 5s was significantly constrained due to what was likely shortages of new parts. It’s nearly impossible to get a 5s in most stores around the country. Many carriers and third-party retailers only got a few units per location for launch weekend.

Apple’s online store also sold out of all initial 5s stock over the weekend, and shipping estimates for all configurations have been pushed back to an ambiguous October timeframe. To help cope with demand, Apple is now offering an in-store pickup option for helping you find a 5s at a local Apple Store.

The Touch ID fingerprint sensor in the iPhone 5s has already been hacked—well, kind of. Over the weekend, a hacking team called the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) published a way to bypass Touch ID by replicating a lifted fingerprint.

Apple calls Touch ID “the most advanced hardware or software we’ve put in any device,” and the company believes the technology is the perfect replacement for a passcode. CCC disagrees.

Now that everyone has had a solid day or three to play with their shiny new iPhones, the Internet is ready with its customary wave of iPhone destruction videos.

We’ve already seen a number of durability tests, but RatedRR takes its testing to the extreme with its annual iPhone X vs .50 Cal Rifle test. The slo-mo shot of the bullet splitting the length of the gold iPhone 5s is pretty spectacular, if not the perfect celebration of American Consumerism, but why don’t they mix it up with like a bazooka, or ion cannon, or wheelchair-bomb once in a while?

With iOS 7, you are no longer a slave to the constant need to update your apps. John McCain should be totally happy.

With this new automatic update feature, though, it might be nice to see what’s been updated lately. To do that, it’s just a quick trip into the guts of iOS 7. Here’s how.

Friday, we reported that Apple TV was updated with a new v6.0 update, bringing with it features like AirPlay from iCloud and iTunes Radio.

Today, however, Electronista reports that the update has been pulled. We’ve confirmed that the update is no longer available, as our un-updated Apple TV still says it has up to date software today, showing Apple TV software version 5.3.

We assume the update was pulled due to several user reports on the Apple TV discussion forum of Apple TV devices becoming useless after updating to the new OS.

When the iPhone was originally launched in 2007, experts across the globe claimed it would never be able to compete against the #1 smartphone maker at the time – BlackBerry. Fast-forward six years and the iPhone 5s and 5c just had the best smartphone launch weekend ever, while BlackBerry just entered a letter of intent to sell itself for $4.7 billion.

The idea of being a martial-arts master has always sounded cool to me. But not the Zen-like, pensive, thoughtful type. If I’m honest, I’d really just kinda like to be the guy in the movies who can walk into a room full of generic dudes and beat them all up while they attack him one at a time. And I’m not particularly proud of that, but I challenge you to picture yourself doing it and not once think, “Yeah, that would be pretty neat.”

But one thing is standing between me and that dream. Alright, maybe a few more than one, but one major thing: I am completely uncoordinated. I don’t have the balance or grace to execute any of the amazing fighting maneuvers I see in movies, and so I watch them with a sad sort of wistfulness and self-disappointment. And this feeling extends to video games, in which physics and animations unbound by natural law allow for inhuman feats of martial prowess about which my clumsy limbs can only dream. If limbs dream, I guess.

Anyway, Dragon Finga, the recently released fighter by developer Another Place, did not inspire those feelings of inadequacy in me because it contains the least graceful fighting system I’ve ever seen.

And that’s a good thing.

The iPhone 5s might be the closest any smartphone’s ever come to perfection,  but none of its shiny glass, metal and chamfered surfaces really matter if they can stand up to some daily wear and tear. To see which new smartphone is the most durable, the gadget insurance company SquareTrade pitted the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c against the Moto X and Samsung Galaxy S4, in a series of damage tests, including getting dunked in water.

In the end, Moto X came out on top, with the iPhone 5s coming in a close second. The Galaxy S4 on the other hand didn’t fair too well, and was dominated by everyone, including the cheaper the iPhone 5c.

Watch the full results below:

BlackBerry is a great company with great products and great ideas. But BlackBerry is failing hard. And the reason is that BlackBerry’s model is obsolete.

Don’t look now, but it’s 2013. If your handset isn’t running iOS or Android, you will not succeed in the consumer smartphone market.

And succeeding is exactly what isn’t happening at BlackBerry. The company recently announced a quarterly loss of about $1 billion. They announced that 40% of BlackBerry employees will be laid off. They’ve put the company up for sale. They’re selling their jet.

It’s over, basically. But it doesn’t have to be.

What BlackBerry really needs is to become an Android-handset maker.

Apple sold 3 million iPhone 5s and 5c units everyday for the past three days this weekend for the most successful smartphone launch in history. Not only did Apple completely dominate its old sales numbers set by the iPhone 5, but based on this handy chart that Horace Dediu whipped up, Samsung has never even come close to any of the iPhone’s launch day performances.

Sure the Galaxy S 4 comes close to the iPhone 3G and 3GS sales numbers, but that was over five years ago. Looks like Samsung still has a lot of catching up to to do, and if early morning trading on AAPL shares is any indication, Wall Street agrees.

Source: Horace Dediu

The launch of the iPhone 5c went really well this weekend. So to keep you in remembrance of everything that is holy and fun with the new iPhone 5c, Apple released two new ads this morning showcasing the colorful sides of its iPhone 5c users.

The new ad called “Greetings” zips through a number of scenes of people saying “hello” in different languages on their iPhone 5c. An extended version of the ad was also released and can be viewed below: