By Silicon Valley standards, Apple doesn’t lobby much in Washington. Last year, they spent a little under $2 million on lobbying, a drop in the bucket to Google’s $18 million spent.
But scrutiny of Apple in Washington is starting to heat up, especially the company’s accounting methods. That’s why Apple is looking to double its lobbying spending this year to close to $4 million.
Apple has stopped advertising 24-hour dispatch for products sold through some international online stores. Many of the Cupertino company’s popular products offered 24-hour dispatch providing they were in stock, but in some markets that’s now been increased to 1-2 business days.
Steve Jobs received a lot of criticism for not giving away more of the cash he made from Apple and his other ventures, but thanks to wife Laurene Powell Jobs, the Jobs family contributes more than you might think. In fact, they’ve been giving money away for more then two decades, they just happen to be very good at keeping it under wraps.
As originally pitched, iBooks looked as though it was going to dramatically shake up the way we read books: adding multimedia elements that would markedly separate it from the low-fi offering Amazon currently gives. Sadly it seems that iBooks have been somewhat forgotten in recent years. As Amazon moves into more areas that compete with Apple, it would be great to see Apple work to re-imagine a format that has stayed the same for years.
Innocent until proven guilty? Not for Cupertino. Apple’s e-book antitrust trial starts on June 3rd, but the U.S. District Judge in charge of the case is already openly expressing her belief that Apple engaged in a conspiracy.
Verizon Cloud, a new backup service that first came to Android last month, is now available on iOS. The app allows you to backup your photos and videos to the cloud, and access contacts, documents, and music that you’ve stored in the cloud using your PC.
At work, I use a big Acer monitor connected to my Macbook Air via an HDMI dongle from Moshi and an HDMI cable. For quite some time, I was content with having the sound come out of the Macbook Air, which I have set up just to the left of the big monitor as a second screen.
But the other day, since I have the huge TV in my office, the rest of the staff came in to preview a promotional video we’d done for our agency. The tinny sound of my Macbook Air speakers wasn’t enough. I wanted to hear it out of the TV.
This is what I did.
Best Buy is set to knock $50 off the iPhone for a four-week promotion that starts this Sunday, AllThingsD reports. The discount will apply to the iPhone 4, the iPhone 4S, and the iPhone 5 when bought with a two-year contract on AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon.
Let’s play a game:
You wake up. You’re outside, laying on hard ground. The sky above is blue, with fast moving clouds. You have no memory of falling asleep anywhere but in your own bed, and you have no idea where you are.
You look for hints. The road is dark gray asphalt. The lines running along its center are white and broken into long strips. The dirt off the shoulder is a reddish brown. A car passes. The model looks familiar but the license plate is blurred, offering no clues.
You stand and find yourself uninjured. Where the hell are you? You walk east, keeping the sun out of your eyes as the shadows lengthen, and eventually you spot a road sign. It’s in Spanish. That narrows it down to around 22 countries where Spanish is used.
Remember those cool glass filters that act like a real-life Instagram for your real-life camera? They’re finally ready for pre-order, kinda.
Remember when the iPhone launched, and people complained that the non-removable battery was a “deal-breaker”? And then the very same thing happened to the MacBook in the form of the Air, and the very same people whined the same whine?
Happy days indeed. Now we know better: we can indeed carry spare batteries for our iPhones, only they’re external and don’t require that we power down the phone just to swap them.
And the batteries in our MacBook last way longer thanks to the fact that they are squished into every internal nook and cranny of the computer’s case instead of having to be an easy-to-remove rectangle. Not that anyone ever needed to swap a battery into a computer anyway. Well, except those dullards who would stare at a single Excel spreadsheet for the entire duration of a six-hour plane ride, and they all own PCs anyway.
Which is to say, in a very roundabout way, that Eagle has made available yet another external battery pack. And this one is orange.
Probably the biggest problem you have in your modern life is finding a place to store your earbuds when you’re not using them. Unless, of course, your life isn’t a shallow, empty parody of existence used by a gadget blogger to make a lame point.
That said, tangled cables are a pain. Probably not enough of a pain for me to stick a special case to the back of my iPhone and actually use it, but I’m just plain lazy. For those of you who care, there’s the Sound Pocket, a rear shell with a small compartment on the back for your Apple EarPods.
UltimateEars Boom is yet another wireless Bluetooth speaker, a category that has gone from a mere sprinkling of spores on the petri dish of consumer gadgets to a veritable mushroom field of musical materiel. However, as is now necessary in this crowded corner of consumerism, there’s a twist: This speaker will annoy everyone equally, wherever they may be.
The obvious thing to say about the XiStera is to call it the "“Swiss Army Knife” of iPhone 5 accessories. Leaving aside for a second the fact that, if all the Swiss Army is bringing to the fight is that little knife, it’s no wonder it refuses to play in any wars, let’s make a better analogy for the Xistera. It’s like a Glif crossed with a Pulltaps corkscrew.
Music is what started it all for the modern Apple with the iPod back in 2001.
Today, the consumer electronics giant released a new TV ad entitled “Music Every Day.”
Have you ever wanted to introduce two super interesting people from different circles of friends, but never really knew how to go about it? Tinder, a new app that helps you discover new people around you in real time, has just updated with an added feature: Matchmaker.
“Introducing two people, whatever the purpose, can be time consuming and often times socially awkward,” says Sean Rad, CEO of Tinder. “Matchmaker gives you an extremely easy and socially acceptable way to make that introduction, while furthering Tinder’s vision to be the platform people use to meet new people.”
Google is considering a buyout of Waze, the mapping app for iPhone and Android that specializes in crowd-sourced information. Waze’s asking price is around $1 billion, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Other big tech companies have been courting the map startup, most notably Facebook.
“None of the bidders is close to clinching a deal and the talks may fall apart,” says the report. There have been whispers that Apple has also considered an acquisition, but nothing concrete has surfaced yet.
Waze would be a good asset for any of the three aforementioned companies. The service has more than 40 million users that report valuable information like traffic incidents and wrecks. At this point, Apple Maps could probably use the functionality more than Google.
Source: Bloomberg
The makers of Whale Trail, a popular iOS game where you fly a whale through a psychedelic skyline, have a new game out in the App Store. It’s called Blup, a new puzzler that aims to be an “addictive conundrum of coloration.”
iPhone games like Letterpress have started setting the trend of more flat, squared interface aesthetics. It’s something Apple is expected to do in iOS 7. Blup falls right into that category, and it looks pretty interesting.
Earlier today, Microsoft released a new ad that attempts to show how much better the ASUS VivoTab is at getting stuff done than the iPad. A similar TV spot was aired last night with Siri being used to mock things like the iPad’s lack of Powerpoint (a Microsoft product).
Alongside its TV ads, Microsoft has put up a new webpage called “iPad vs. Windows.” At the bottom of the comparison it says that the ASUS ViviTab “has a bigger touchscreen” than the iPad.
False.
Apple is rumored to be working on a budget iPhone targeted at emerging markets. The device will allegedly be made of plastic and look like an iPod touch in the back and an iPhone 5 in the front. Other reports have claimed that Apple is working on multiple color variations beyond the traditional black and white.
Today a new report from Japanese publication Macotakara claims that Apple is currently testing such a device in the supply chain for production later this year.
Looking for a powerful little Mac app that will help you create sweet videos using your photos and music? Photo Movie Maker Pro can showcase your story to fit any occasion and with a real film feel you can effortlessly make a stylish movie in no time – and Cult of Mac has it for a limited time for just $19.99.
Rhapsody, the online music streaming service a few of your friends used ten years ago, has released a redesigned version of its iPhone app. Like Spotify and Rdio, Rhapsody allows you to create playlists, download tracks for listening offline, and look up artist/album information. It costs $10 per month for access to millions of tracks.
“Beautiful and fully redesigned, the latest incarnation of the Rhapsody experience gets the music playing faster than ever,” according to the company. Rhapsody is calling this the “Ferrari of iPhone apps,” which is a bit of a stretch. Today’s update brings a lot of interface elements that have been in competing apps for a long time. Rhapsody still doesn’t look any better than Rdio, or even Spotify. The iPad version blatantly copies parts of Spotify’s iPad app, actually.
Nice try, Rhapsody.
Source: App Store
Via: The Rhapsody Blog
When reading an iBook on your iPad or iPhone, you typically tap the right side of the page to go forward, and tap the left side of the page to go backward, right? If you want to skip to a different part of the iBook, you can tap on the table of contents button in the upper left and tap to the chapter you want to go to.
How do you quickly navigate more than one page forward or backward, though? With a real book, you just flip through the pages until you find the one you’re looking for. In iBooks, you don’t riffle through pages, but you can navigate quickly and visually to other portions of the book.
Add the Olloclip accessory lens’s price to the cost of this new Olloclip Quick-Flip case and you get to $120. That used to be the price of an entry-level camera from a fairly decent brand, but I’d recommend you buy the Olloclip gear instead. Your iPhone’s camera way, way better than a $100-200 point-and-shoot, and the Olloclip gear makes it much easier to use.
As the most popular game franchise the App Store has ever seen, Rovio doesn’t like to giveaway its prized Angry Bird apps for free, but for the first time ever you can now download Angry Birds Space for free.
Apple named Angry Birds Space as its ‘App of the Week’, which means everyone gets to download it for free for the next 7 days. If you’ve ever wanted to slingshot cute little birds into the vacuum of deep space, then here’s your chance to do so risk free.
Source: App Store
Tim Cook survived his grilling during his appearance before the U.S. Senate Sub-Committee Hearing to Examine Offshore Profit Shifting and Tax Avoidance by Apple Inc. Even though some of the senators still aren’t happy with Apple’s international tax practices, a solution to the problem wasn’t given.
Not one to pass up the opportunity to make fun of senators, John Stewart broke down the Senate hearing on his show last night and jokingly proposed the U.S. create the ‘Tax Code Nano.’ The entire bit is pretty hilarious, you can watch it below: