Jony Ive has been working hard on revamping iOS 7 with a “flatter,” less skeuomorphic design, and Apple is trying to get everything together in time for WWDC in June. iOS 7 is rumored to be a pretty big departure from past versions due to Ive’s involvement. Many of former iOS chief Scott Forstall’s design choices have reportedly been undone by Ive, who prefers a more minimalist aesthetic than Game Center’s green felt.

We haven’t seen OS X 10.9 yet because Apple has been pulling engineers off the project to finish iOS 7 in time for this summer, according to multiple reports. But don’t fret, iOS 7 should still “should ship on time” later this year.

People often underestimate the experience of having wireless headphones when you’re going about your day but once you try these you’ll understand why Bluetooth headphones receive all the hype these days.

They’re sleek, comfortable, wireless, Bluetooth compatible, they sound great, and they’re 43% off thanks to Cult of Mac Deals. For a limited time, these headphones are just $57 – and that includes the cost of shipping!

The iPad is one of the most magical devices ever created. It can store billions of books, photos, songs, and movies. It can entertain you with games, and help you boost your productivity with thousands of apps. It also doubles as a great head replacement.

Last week we put out the call to see what it would look like if Cult of Mac’s readers replaced their heads with iPads. The results were absolutely incredible. Some of you guys went with the funny route, while others showed off their serious photography skills. We’re giving five winners a free copy of FX Photo Studio Pro, but in our eyes they’re all winners.

Here are the 9 best people with iPads for heads:

Want to know why Steve Ballmer wakes up in a sweat at night, screaming at the shadows and clutching his hogshead-sized heart? Look at this chart of year-over-year growth rates of Windows PCs since the iPad came out, put together by the ever nuanced Horace Dediu at Asymco. When the iPad debuted, it immediately killed the PC industry as we know it.

In fact, as Dediu makes clear later in his analysis, Microsoft’s doing so poorly in the PC market right now that even though the Surface was a flop, it’s still accounting for a third of all Windows revenues. Absolutely mind boggling.

Source: Asymco

Everyone’s favorite digital rights crusaders Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have just released an annual report, ranking the biggest companies in tech for who does the best job protecting your data from being rifled through by the Federal Government.

Google’s really good about it. Apple? They’ll give away all your emails and data if the government just breathes on them, and they won’t bother telling you about it either.

CERN has given us many things in our day, most notable among them recent proof of the existence of the so-called ‘God particle’, the Higgs Boson… one of the most elusive objects in particle physics. But like the Higgs Boson, most of CERN’s achievements are pretty exotic.

On April 30 in 1993, though, CERN gave us something it gave all of us something we all use to this day: the worldwide web, software and technology that anyone could use (and everyone did) to build what we, today, called the Internet.

Like many of the revolutions of the computing age, though, the Internet owes a debt of gratitude to Steve Jobs.

Amazon’s Kindle app for iOS hasn’t always been as accessible as Apple’s own iBooks, but that changed today with a new update that adds VoiceOver support, among other new accessibility features. Kindle will now read aloud over 1.8 million books, allowing those who are visually impaired to kick back and listen to their favorite titles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTyqLHnU6yk

I’m not a big fan of screen protectors; partly because they’re real pain in the ass to apply, and partly because I’ve never felt like they really added much to the equation.

But if there was ever a screen protector to get me to change my mind, its Tech21‘s new Impact Shield. The company demoed its new protector for me over Skype recently, and I came away thoroughly stunned: The protector has a strange, almost magical way of protecting the screen from not only scratches but impacts — and is self-healing. It’s also applied onto a screen in a very different manner than most other screen protectors.

Google updated its Google Search app earlier this week to introduce Google Now to iOS. The feature brings Android’s awesome digital assistant to your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, allowing you to get information like the weather, sports scores, and travel assistance all in one place.

But many users have found that it also has a significantly negative affect on battery life. Because many of Google Now’s “cards” rely on location data, the service constantly gets updates on its whereabouts from nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots, and this means it’s eating away at your battery all the time.

Although I’m still stuck on the old version, Instacast by developer Vemedio is my go-to podcast manager on the iPhone and iPad… but on the Mac, I’m still using iTunes like a sucker. But hey, what’s this pretty shiny thing? Instacast Beta for Mac? GIMME.

That historic “grab a cuppa joe with Tim Cook” auction, which still has a couple of weeks to go and has already broken records, has had a little bit of a set back: credit card fraud that has set the auction back by thousands of dollars.

While the rear camera in the iPhone continues to improve by leaps and bounds — and we can expect the iPhone 5S to continue that trend — the front FaceTime camera improves at a far more glacial pace. In an age of selfies, the iPhone 5’s front facing camera isn’t that much better at offering the sort of fidelity of resolution necessary to deeply inspect our blackheads and pores than the iPhone 4 was.

That’s probably about to change though. Omnivision — maker of the iPhone 5’s front-facing camera sensor — have just announced the OV2724, which crams a full 1080p sensor (or 2MP, compared to the current camera’s 1.2MP sensor) into a tiny cube small enough to go into the next iPhone. And it even shoots at 60 frames per second and offers some impressive dynamic range to boot.

It’s going into production this summer. With decent yields and some luck, that should make it ready for the iPhone 5S when it lands in fall.

Source: Omnivision
Via: Gizmodo

One of the trickier things about creating a playlist for any party is making sure you have the right music for the people you’ve invited. Sometimes, though, you might want to give this entire nerve-wracking process a miss, and let the guests at your house choose the music from all the songs and artists you have in iTunes on your Mac.

Here’s how to do just that, using nothing more than your Mac and the iTunes Album Artwork screensaver.

Six months after taking responsibility of software design, Jony Ive is hard at work overhauling Apple’s upcoming iOS 7 operating system. And according to sources for Bloomberg, the changes he is making are so significant that they run the risk of delaying the update’s release.

The Google Search app for iOS was updated earlier this week to bring Google Now to your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. but it seems that the service isn’t yet supported in all territories. As is often the case, however, the jailbreaking community has a solution.

GoogleNowEnabler is a new tweak that promises to activate Google Now on your iOS device no matter where you live.

Samsung has had to defend the Galaxy S4’s plastic form factor quite a bit since the device was announced back in March, and one of the ways it has done that is by touting the handsets durability. Plastic, Samsung claims, makes the device much more robust than competing smartphones because it bends and absorbs impact.

But as we suspected all along, aluminum is stronger. In a smartphone torture test performed by warranty provider SquareTrade, the Galaxy S4 fails to beat the iPhone 5 in drop tests, and even proved to be more fragile than its predecessor, the Galaxy S III.

Although it’s been less than a year since it’s debut, and though it was widely criticized at its debut for a beefy $329 price tag and a low-resolution display, the iPad mini has quickly become the one 7-inch tablet to rule them all.

A new supplier report out of Asia puts the iPad mini’s triumph into sharp relief. Not only is the iPad mini pretty much the only 7-inch tablet that isn’t running headfirst down a profitability cliff in a race to crater at the bottom, it’s actually putting iPad sales to the knife.

In Apple’s latest earnings call, CEO Tim Cook was suddenly equivocal about whether or not Apple would do an iPhone with a larger display.

“Our competitors have made some significant tradeoffs in many of these areas to ship a larger display,” Cook said on the earnings call. “We would not ship a larger display iPhone while these tradeoffs exist.”

What that hints is Apple doesn’t have a larger screen iPhone in its pipeline yet, but they’re working on one, without any of the tradeoffs of the competition. (What these tradeoffs actually are in Apple’s mind are anyone’s guess.)

A new analyst report suggests that this larger screen iPhone will be the iPhone 6, and it will land in summer of 2014. This year, we’ll just have to deal with an iPhone 5S in a bevy of peacock fan of different color options.

Have you ever thought about building your own website without spending thousands of dollars…or thought about starting a freelance web development gig? What if we told you that it’s all possible without knowing how to code?

It’s true. WordPress is a full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes. It’s a system that makes it easy for anyone to get a professional website up and running without knowing how to code. WPMU has created an amazing membership service – we’ve called it The Ultimate WordPress Starter Kit – that will give you all the essential tools you need to get a WordPress website up and running for only $99 thanks to Cult of Mac Deals.

The patent war between Apple and Samsung has no end in sight. After Apple won a landmark victory against Samsung for patent infringement last summer to the tune of about $1 billion in damages, the court later deducted $450 million from what Samsung owes Apple. The California judge presiding over the case, Lucy Koh, said that the jury miscalculated what the damages should be for the 14 included Samsung devices.

All of the various charges and reexaminations being thrown around mean that Apple and Samsung will be heading to trial in the U.S. again not once, but twice in the coming year.

The tablet has become an indispensible reading device, and this Cult of Mac Deals offer is going to give you access to your favorite magazines right from your tablet…for free!

That’s right, Next Issue offers all-you-can-read access to over 80 of today’s most popular magazines on your tablet and thanks to Cult of Mac Deals now you can test it out with 2 free unlimited months of use. That’s a $30 value!

Apple executives have a long history of appearing at the All Things Digital (or “D”) conference every year. Steve Jobs gave some of his most revealing public interviews at D over the years, and Tim Cook’s first major interview as Apple’s newly-appointed CEO was at D10 last year.

For D11, Tim Cook will be headlining once again with an interview on the conference’s opening night, May 28th.

Today AT&T updated its store trade-in program to incentivize more customers to trade in used smartphones for an upgrade. The carrier is now giving $100+ credits towards the purchase of a new smartphone with a two-year plan. The catch is that you have to trade in a smartphone that is “no more than three years old and in good, working condition.”

Path was recently fined $800,000 by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for deceiving its users “by collecting personal information from their mobile device address books without their knowledge and consent.” Last year, the social network was caught storing all of its users’ contacts on its servers under the radar. Now users have started accusing Path of spamming friends to join the service via text message.

Despite having a mountain of cash overseas, Apple has decided it’d be cheaper for the company to go into debt for its stock buyback program, rather than bring the money back to the U.S. to be taxed.

After taking the initial steps yesterday toward offering bonds to investors, Apple opened up its order book today and plans to sell $17 billion worth of bonds. The six-part all dollar offering has already attracted more than $50 billion of orders within the first few hours, in what has become the largest non-bank bond deal in history.

According to a report from Reuters, Apple is offering $17 billion worth of bonds in the following six bond types to investors: