The Apple online store went down for just over four hours earlier today, and it came back with Apple’s new Father’s Day promotion and a few noticeable design changes.
The Cupertino company is again heavily promoting the iPad and the iPad mini, but the iPhone 5 also gets a lot of room on the store’s homepage.
Apparently the OLPC cemented the colors green and white as the color scheme of choice for the education market, because now the new Logitech Wired Keyboard for iPad is similarly hued.
I have no problem with that: the combo is so ugly that it’ll seriously diminish the resale value should light-fingered pupils decide to earn a little extra pocket money.
Two new iPad mini keyboard cases from Zagg today: A super-thin magnetic cover and a thicker stick-on “folio” case, similar to the Pro Plus case for the regular-sized iPad only with a top cover too. And both, amazingly, are backlit.
Wallets: I hate them, but having loose coins in your pocket which fall out every time you sit down is worse. Especially in a country where the coins are actually worth something. Right now I have a typically over-engineered German wallet which will probably last me forever, but I like the look of SF Bags’ new Finn. It’s flat, it holds cash and cars and – if you pick the bigger model – it also has space for your iPhone.
PhotoExif is an app that lets you add EXIF data to photos shot with a film camera. You can dial in aperture, shutter speed, focus distance and focal length, along with notes about your photo, and when you get the photos back, freshly scanned from the lab, you can add the info to the digital images.
Haunting Melissa is a horror "movie" which is dripped into your real, everyday life by your iPad or your iPhone. Instead of sitting down for an hour and a half and watching the story unfold, the story comes in episodes.
The twist is that the snippets are delivered at unexpected times, and you’re told about them through push notifications sent to your iDevice.
I quite like the dark linen texture that sits behind the elements of the iOS (and recently OS X) interface, but I’m pretty sure that Jony Ive’s upcoming Great Purge will consign it to the same tomb as brushed aluminum – after all, this is a designer so minimalist that he even removed a superfluous “n” from his own name.
So this wraparound case from Plus Motif might be my last chance at linen.
Ok, so if you’ve been paying attention to the gaming space today, you’ll know that Microsoft unveiled its new gaming console, the Xbox One. This next generation console is going to play video games, control your TV (sort of), and act as a DVD/Blue-Ray player. It’s got a Kinect motion sensor box on top, which can not be disconnected, and the console won’t play Xbox 360 discs.
This is all well and good, and represents a step forward in Microsoft’s quest to own the living room, even though a lot of us don’t have the time, space, or extra cash to spend on a huge entertainment hub these days, anyway. That’s really not what bothers me, though.
The Xbox One is just uglier than anything I could have imagined.
Heck, my ten year-old son, not a maven of design in any way, saw pictures of the new Xbox, and chuckled. “Why is it bigger than the Xbox 360?” he asked. “It looks the same, just more square.”
Which really made it all hit home for me: design matters. The case design of the Xbox One is firmly rooted in the past. Which makes a lot of sense if you consider the reveal today, full of the same games and the same brands with better graphics.
Walmart’s video on demand service, Vudu, just rolled out a new update for its iOS app. Version 2.0 of Vudu now lets you download videos from the service, and then watch them even if you’re offline. The player itself is streamlined, and Closed Captioning–already supported on the iPad version of the Vudu app–is now available on the iPhone, too.
Badger is a new jailbreak tweak that lets you access unread notifications from an app icon. Instead of opening Notification Center, swiping on a specific icon can reveal a list of notifications. From there, you can clear individual messages and even respond to texts.
Apple has published the opening statements read by CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer earlier today at the U.S. Senate Subcommittee hearing on corporate taxes. The hearing lasted several hours and was televised live on CSPAN.
Senators like Carl Levin, John McCain, and Rand Paul were present to lead the committee and hear from industry experts. Apple was called to the stand to explain why it stores a large percentage of its billions in cash overseas.
Today Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One at its Redmond, Washington campus. As the battle for the living room rages on, Microsoft has won a decisive victory that puts it well ahead of the competition.
The Xbox One is just as much for all-around entertainment as it is for gaming, perhaps even more so. It’s designed to be the one box that sits below your TV and does everything: games, movies, live TV, music, surfing the web, messaging, and even video calling. Minority Report-style gestures control the experience, it can recognize your face when you walk in the room, and you can talk to it like Siri on steroids.
Should Apple be worried? The answer is no, at least not yet.
Intel lost the opportunity to power the iPhone, but the company is hard at work to make sure they don’t get completely shut out of mobile hardware, and to do so they’re hiring some old Apple talent.
To lead the charge in its plans to build “smart devices” Intel has hired former Apple Vice President, Mike Bell, to head up Intel’s new Smart Devices Unit.
iBooks is not only a fantastic e-reading app on your iPhone or iPad, but it’s also a fantastic study tool. If you need to read books for class or your own learning objectives, you can use iBooks to highlight words or passages, search the text for specific words or phrases, and make notes that appear in the margins as little colored sticky notes.
Using these tools could help you become a much more organized studier, letting you go back to a passage in a book to remember the important things with a couple of taps. Here’s how, using iBooks 3.1, the latest version of iBooks.
I just got back from a week-long vacation. We were staying in Tel Aviv, Israel, which meant lots of walking and cycling (I took my Brompton), plus day trips. Which in turn meant traveling light.
The iPad is perfect traveling companion, and the iPad mini is even better. But if you want to take lots of photos with an actual camera, or – worse still – a camera that shoots huge RAW images, you need to plan ahead. And as I didn’t want to take a Mac with me, I needed a few tricks to help out.
This post isn’t about how I managed my photos on the trip (although I will mention that side of things a little in terms of the hardware I used). It’s about the gadgets and apps that help you work around the limitations of the iPad when you’re relying on it away from home.
This morning Microsoft unveiled its newest console, the Xbox One. Unlike previous Xbox models though, Xbox One isn’t just about games, it’s about becoming the one system your living room needs, and it probably means trouble for the Apple TV.
Not only can Microsoft’s latest box play video games with the best of them, but Microsoft has added features to make it the only box your TV really needs by recognizing who you are, what you movies and shows you like, and allowing you to control it all with just your voice.
Once I started my review of the ScanSnap iX500 document scanner, the new model in Fujitsu’s hugely popular line of top-tier ScanSnap scanners, it didn’t take long to see this machine was going to earn its pedigree.
With a small footprint, dashing good-looks, scanning direct to an iOS device, and progressional-grade intake rollers, the iX500 actually makes digitizing papers easy, and dare I say, maybe a little sexy. Its included software suit also makes sense of doing something with all those scanned docs.
There’s a reason many consider Fujitsu’s ScanSnaps the finest scanners around, and the iX500 continues in that legacy with some useful new features.
The iPhone has become just as much a camera as a communication device. So if you love using your iPhone and want to take advantage of its ability to take great photos then Cult of Mac has a video course for you – and at the low price of only $19 for a limited time.
U.S. Senator Rob Portman from Ohio has just raised a fascinating point at today’s Senate Sub-Committee Hearing to Examine Offshore Profit Shifting and Tax Avoidance by Apple Inc.
The American corporate tax system is so broken that Apple is at a competitive disadvantage against Samsung when it comes to the taxes it pays globally, and how easily it moves its money around.
With WWDC less than a month away, we’ve seen a ton of designers come out with their visions for what iOS 7 might look like, but the next iPhone has been ignored.
Concept designers Uygar Kaya and Ran Avni have a new video for the iPhone 6 that gives it a slimmer profile, waterproof coating, wireless charging, a notification LED, and more. It’s one of the sleekest iPhone 6 concepts we’ve seen yet, but would Apple actually add those features? Guess we’ll have to wait till 2014 to find out.
Check out the concept video below:
Senator Claire McCaskill has just asked Apple CEO Tim Cook about the deal Apple forged with Ireland to pay only 2% taxes, and whether or not there will ever be a country that offers Apple such a great tax deal that they would pack up and move out of Cupertino to overseas.
After Oklahoma City was ravaged by a tornado yesterday where 91 souls lost their lives, AT&T has announced that it will be waving all voice, data, and text overage charges for victims of the tornado.
The tornado system was reported to be one mile wide as it ripped through parts of Oklahoma City Monday afternoon as it left a colossal amount of devastation in its wake.
John McCain ended his grilling of Apple CEO Tim Cook at today’s Senate Sub-Committee Hearing to Examine Offshore Profit Shifting and Tax Avoidance by Apple Inc. with a nice little joke.
“Sir, there’s only one thing I wanted to ask you today: why do I keep on having to update all the apps on my iPhone? Can’t you guys fix that already?”
“Sir,” Tim cook laughed. “We’re working on making our products better all the time.”
“Do you feel that you’ve been bullied or harassed by this committee?” Senator John McCain has just asked Tim Cook at the Senate Sub-Committee Hearing to Examine Offshore Profit Shifting and Tax Avoidance by Apple Inc.
“I feel good to be participating in this. I hope to help the process. I’d like comprehensive tax reform to be passed this year, and we will help in anyway we can.”
“I wasn’t dragged here, sir,” Tim Cook laughed.
“You’ve obviously taken advantage legally of a number of loopholes. Couldn’t you draw a conclusion that you have an unfair advantage over domestic companies?” asked McCain.
“No, it’s not the way I see it. Apple pays 30.5% of its profits in taxes on the United States. I would guess that’s high on the list of how it stacks up against other companies. We do have a low tax rate outside the U.S., but it’s for products we sell there, not within. So the way I look at this is there’s no shifting going on.”
Tim Cook is saying that because domestic companies operate only domestically, Apple has no advantage over them domestically: it only has an international advantage, which isn’t applicable in talking about “competitive advantage” in a U.S.-only context.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer are in Washington D.C. this morning to talk to a Senate subcommittee about Apple’s off-shore cash hoard. The Apple execs are expected to face a lot of heat surrounding Apple’s Irish subsidiary, through which Apple has funneled 64% of its earnings without paying any tax, yet has zero employees.
Before the hearing got underway though, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Eamon Gilmore, issued a public statement which claimed Ireland isn’t to blame for Apple’s low tax bill, even though the country has become a tax haven for multinationals since the 1960s.