You wait weeks for an invite to an Apple event, and then two come along at once. Shortly after the company invited the media to its September 10 shindig in Cupertino, it sent out invitations to a second event in Beijing on September 11. It’s the first time Apple has made an announcement in China, so it must be for something pretty special — but what?

Well, we have some ideas.

The secret iPad supply chain is starting to look as leaky as the roof of my 100-year-old building during a rainstorm. Only instead of aluminum saucepans covering every flat surface, there are aluminum iPad 5 parts strewn all across internet rumor sites.

The latest is this rather convincing effort from Unbox Therapy, and shows just how small the new iPad 5 case is compared to the fat monster we’re forced to use at the moment.

If you take a lot of pictures on your iPhone, I can highly recommend the Canon Selphy CP900, a dye-sub photo printer which spits out 6×4 prints, and connects wirelessly to iPhones, iPads and Macs.

I’ve had one for a couple months, and the result is that I have a bunch of iPhonographs littering the apartment. It’s addictive, but now I don’t know what to do with all these prints. This graffiti-ready picture frame, though, might provide an answer.

Identity is like a Smart Cover for your iMac… kinda. It’s an aluminum strips that sticks to the iMac’s “chin” using magnets, and, uh, adds a strip of color. There’s even a cutout to let the Apple logo show through, a phenomenon familiar to aficionados of iPad cases (I call these peek-a-boo cases “assless iChaps”).

But wait: the iDentity isn’t quite as useless as it first seems. The strip can be customized – using lasers – to any design you like.

Iterate, iterate, iterate. That’s the Apple mantra, according to anyone who pays attention: Launch a groundbreaking device that changes the entire market and people will flock to buy your improved version of a category that may have existed already for years. Then, every September, and pretty much every year, you release an incremental update.

Year over year, it doesn’t look like much is happening. But like a glacier carving valleys from mountains, the compound result is amazing.

Except we’re not talking about Apple here. We’re talking about Amazon and the Kindle.

Apple released the 7th Preview build of OS X 10.9 Mavericks earlier today, and while the release didn’t include any major new features, Apple did add eight new wallpapers that are absolutely gorgeous.

Mavericks isn’t expected to be released until later this fall, but you can already wrap your Mac’s display in the new Mavericks wallpapers by downloading them from our gallery below:

Today Apple released OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 7 for those already on the beta software. The new preview doesn’t have any notable feature additions, but Apple has included several new wallpapers, one of which is pictured above.

Updates to the Mavericks beta have been pushed out systematically over the summer, and Apple will ship the OS to the public this fall. The September 10th event will focus on iPhones, and a separate media event is expected to take place next month. Apple could release Mavericks at any time this fall, but it’s likely that a release date will be given alongside new iPad/Mac hardware in October.

Every year Apple puts on the iTunes Festival in London, and many of the biggest names in music perform. One headliner and a lesser-known band play every day for the month of September. Tickets are free, but seating is extremely limited. Unless you’re a member of the press or happen to be best friends with a music executive’s daughter who loves Justin Timberlake, your chances of getting into a show are low.

But that’s ok, because over the past couple of years Apple has gotten really good at streaming the entire iTunes Festival for free—that’s right, no ads! For the whole month of September you can stream professionally shot shows in HD on just about any Apple device. It works great, and there are no strings attached. You can stream a show live or watch it over and over later for the rest of the month.

Apple has pushed out updates for its three iLife for iOS apps today that includes a number of compatibility fixes. iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand for iOS were all updated with compatibility fixes, while GarageBand also received some minor bug fixes for performance and stability.

With the official iOS 7 launch just weeks away, we wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is prepping the apps to play nice with the new OS, although we expect the icons and UI to get a redesign shortly after iOS 7 comes out.

Source: iTunes

While Apple has been getting dominated by Android in terms of the sheer number of smartphones sold, iOS users have still managed to capture the lion’s share of worldwide mobile web share company, but it looks like the size of their pie is shrinking.

According to the latest survey from NetApplications, iOS’s worldwide mobile web share has dropped 11% since August of 2012. While iOS is still at the top with 54.9%, Android has risen from 20.9% in August 2012, to 28.1% in August 2013.

It’s official. Apple sent out invites for its iPhone event on September 10th this morning. The tagline is “this should brighten everyone’s day,” which is a not-so-subtle hint at the Skittles-themed collection of colors expected for this year’s iPhones.

Now that the official unveiling is only a week away, why not get in the mood with a wallpaper version of Apple’s invite? Designer Thientam Bach has posted hi-res versions available for the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPad, and iPad mini. Visit the source link below to download.

Source: Dribble

The Wren V5AP is just about the best-looking speaker I’ve tested, with a tastefully contemporary case finished with bamboo and silvered cloth.

It’s also one of the best sounding, and although it might not be as convenient as some other AirPlay speakers, it makes up for it in other ways.

Google’s head of Android and Chrome, Sundar Pichai, has just confirmed that the next delicious version of Android won’t be just any old generic desert, but will instead be called Android 4.4 KitKat.

Along with the announcement of the new name Pichai told his Google+ followers that he just got back from a trip to Asia to visit device partners, and that Android has now passed over 1 Billion device activations:

Ever feel like submitting your will, nay, your sanity, to an Elder God? iOS game Ball of Cthulhu aims to make your dream a reality, with a narrative right out of the pulp magazines of the Lovecraftian era to pull you from one Peggle-styled level to the next.

Spotify announced today that it is launching a new way to streaming music to connected speakers around the house with its new “Spotify Connect” feature that is coming to a line-up of Spotify-supported speakers.

The new AirPlay-like feature allows you to walk into your house and seamlessly switch from listening  to your playlist on your iPhone to playing music on your living room speakers. You current listening session is synced up to the cloud so you can switch faster without stopping the flow of music.

Unlike AirPlay though, Spotify Connect will cost you some money as the feature will only be available soon to  Premium subscribers. Third-party OEMs are expect to roll out Connect supported speakers later this year.

Here’s a promo video on how Connect works:

Whether you’re building a native Mac app or a web app, you can no longer get away with those alone. You need to go mobile with your app. There’s just too many opportunities you’ll miss out on otherwise considering how widely used mobile devices are these days.

Not having a mobile version of your app can really hamper your user base. But it doesn’t need to cost you a fortune to have one. Cult of Mac Deals has an offer right now that features one year of unlimited mobile app development for just $99.

Following weeks of anticipation, Apple today issued invites for a September 10 press event that will finally see the grand unveiling of its latest iPhones. The Cupertino company is expected to show off both the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C, and announce a public release date for iOS 7.

We’ve been hearing all summer that the iPhone 5S will come with a fingerprint scanner, but it’s one of the few things that wasn’t being confirmed by the countless component leaks. That may have changed today, however. The flex cable pictured above could finally confirm that Apple’s next iPhone will have biometric security embedded within its home button.

Apple will begin delivering its new iPhones to retailers in the United Kingdom ahead of the handset’s launch on Friday, September 20, according to sources close to courier companies who have been speaking to The Telegraph. The Cupertino company has reportedly scheduled two “bookings” in anticipation of the early demand — but how many iPhones will be included in the shipments?

Last year, the classic PC Dungeons & Dragons RPG Baldur’s Gate finally made its way to the Mac in an enhanced port put together by Beamdog Entertainment, and from there, the iPad. We were excited about it at the time, but only because it paved the way for Baldur’s Gate II, which to this day might be the finest PC RPG game ever made. Baldur’s Gate is pretty good, but it hasn’t aged well. Baldur’s Gate II and its expansion, Throne of Bhaal, still hold up.

Time to get psyched, then. Beamdog is bringing Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition to the Mac on November 15. And if history is anything to judge by, an iPad version should follow a few months later.

Investment tycoon Carl Icahn has been bullish on Apple lately. In mid-August, Icahn unexpectedly tweeted that Icahn Enterprises, his diversified holding company, believed Apple to be “extremely undervalued.” Immediately, share prices jumped 5.6%. The next week, Icahn announced on Twitter that he and Tim Cook would be meeting in September to discuss a larger buyback program of AAPL shares.

That’s all nice, but Icahn is a business magnate, not an Apple fanboy. So what the heck is he up to here? A new theory being put forward by some investors is that Icahn has ulterior motives for his sudden Apple love affair: he wants Apple to buy Nuance, a company Icahn has a large stake in.

If you asked any Apple fan what they thought of Windows 8, they’d probably laugh and say it was a total dud, the perfect example on why Microsoft is just too hopeless to survive in the post-PC age. And you know what, there’d be something to that argument. After all, when Windows 8 shipped, it was fragmented between ARM and x86 versions from the start, and Windows 8 has been much lambasted from a usability perspective by both pros and casual users alike.

However, to call Windows 8 a total flop is probably going a little overboard. The latest operating system market share numbers suggest that Windows 8 is now installed on more computers than all versions of Mac OS X combined.

Case makers don’t always know more than the rest of us when it comes to when the next iPhone will come out, or even what it will look like. In a highly competitive market, case makers will routinely bet tens of thousands of dollars readying cases for iPhones that may not even exist, just in the hopes of being on the shelves at launch. Sometimes, though, case makers sometimes do have Far East assembly line sources who can give them leaked schematics of Apple’s upcoming devices.

So how to qualify this leaked render from Case-Mate, showing off a couple of iPhone 5C cases along with a very specific launch window.

Unless you’re young enough to think that the seemingly never-ending 80s fashion revival is actually cool, then it’s likely that you have a stack of real, printed photos in a box somewhere. And as we all know, printed photos are photos that you can’t post to Instagram, or backup on Dropbox.

What you need is to dig out that shoebox of pictures and send it off to somebody to scan.

Dreams of an Android-powered Nokia were well and truly quashed today when Microsoft announced that it has reached a deal to acquire Nokia’s Devices and Services unit for $7.2 billion. The move will see Microsoft take ownership of the Finnish firm’s entire smartphone lineup, giving it complete control over both hardware and software.