You probably already know the Macintosh Portable, Apple’s first Mac laptop released for $7,300 in 1989, which looked and weighed about as much as a small suitcase full of dark matter. No joke: you could ship an entire crate of MacBook Airs inside of one.

But can you believe that there was an even bigger, more unwieldy Mac laptop that preceded it? It wasn’t an official Cupertino joint, to be sure, but meet the Walkmac: a 1987 modded Mac SE with a working LCD screen and a battery pack.

Google Play will overtake the App Store’s recently celebrated 50 billion downloads and become the most popular app platform in the world within months, according to a new report from Distimo. Driven by popular devices from Samsung, Google Play is currently seeing over 500 million more app downloads per month.

Apple has released a new WWDC 2013 companion app for iOS, which is designed to give developers the opportunity to follow the event each day. Designed for both attendees and those who cannot make it, the app offers a WWDC schedule, the latest news, daily session videos for registered developers, and more.

PopCap has today confirmed the release date for the much-anticipated Plants vs. Zombies 2: It’s About Time, which will be exclusive to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The company has also released an awesome new launch trailer that teases some of the new plants and new worlds.

Starting up your Mac each day may seem a simple thing, right? Just press the power key on your keyboard or main Mac unit, hear the Mac chime, and then get to work, right?

Sometimes, though, you might want to boot a Windows partition with Boot Camp, or start up from a network volume. Heck, you might even want to start from a completely different OS X disk.

In that case, use the following keyboard shortcuts to do so.

Apple is expected to announce a new low-cost iPhone later this year in an effort to compete with rivals like Samsung in emerging markets. Reports have suggested that to keep costs low, the Cupertino company will give it a plastic form factor similar to that of the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS.

And now that plastic shell appears to have been leaked for the first time.

Thanks to Apple’s strict software approval process, iOS devices are generally considered some of the most secure. But you might want to be careful about where you plug them in for charging. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a modified charger capable of installing malware onto any device running Apple’s latest iOS operating system.

Vodafone has confirmed that it will roll out its new 4G LTE network in the United Kingdom this summer, ready for a launch “later this year.” The move follows the carrier’s £790 million ($1.2 billion) acquisition of a chunk of 4G spectrum back in February.

This is the Bracketron, a robot which will help you fill out your NCAA tournament charts. Not really. The Bracketron is in fact a robot which will help you put up shelves that won’t fall down as soon as you place something breakable up there.

NOT REALLY AGAIN. The Bracketron is a USB charger which leeches its power from an outlet that is already in use. Which actually makes it better than my first two lies… Except for the robot part.

This amazing little iPhone stand has two great features: it is the size and shape of a credit card, letting you carry it with you always. And it somehow manages to hold the iPhone at any angle you like, in vertical or horizontal orientations. Is it magic?

Asus has today announced its latest Transformer Pad Infinity slate at Computex 2013 in Taipei, and boy is it a beast. Not only does it carry NVIDIA’s latest Tegra 4 processor — which has a 72-core GeForce GPU — but it also has a 10.1-inch display with the same 2560×1600 resolution as the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro.

That’s a whopping 299 pixels-per-inch.

Brett “I just built this” Terpstra has been at it again. Inspired by Evernote’s new reminders feature, launched last week, Brett decided to add something similar to his app NValt, itself a fork of the notable Notational Velocity. It’s called “nvremind,” and it’s pretty awesome.

Now, just by tagging a note with “@remind,” you’ll be sent a notification or an e-mail at the chosen time, and in Mountain Lion, clicking the notification will take you to the note in NValt.

The Genii is a case which adds flashing LEDs and media buttons to your iPhone 5. That’s right – just like the Walkmans you rocked out to in the 1980s, the iPhone 5 can now have four real, physical buttons along its edge letting your play, pause and skip tracks without dragging the iPhone from your pocket and unlocking the screen.

Sick of tangled cords when traveling? Want to look more like a cool-headed doctor than a disorganized teenager when you tend to the charging of your various iGadgets? Then the Cordito Wrap is for you: It’s a super-stylish (and super-simple) leather sheet for organizing cables and chargers.

I like the direction iPhone docks are headed in, post-Lightning. It seems that making a dock with the little connector is too hard, or manufacturers have already been stung once by the switch from 30-pin connectors, or that they’ve just gotten sick of paying Apple’s Made For iPhone fees.

The upshot is that they’ve gone back to basics. Instead of making a dock, they’re making things that do the job of a dock. And what is a dock’s job? To hold your iPhone, and to (optionally) charge it.

The Alupocket does both, but it does it on the form of an aluminum taco which is stuck to the wall.

We’ve been hearing about Apple’s plans for a music streaming service for over a year now. Negotiations with the labels have kept Apple’s product, commonly referred to as “iRadio,” at bay. With competitors like Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, and now Google, the race is on.

Word on the street has been that a least a couple of the big labels have been holding out on Apple, but now Warner has signed on. All signs point to Apple wanting iRadio to be ready in time for an unveiling at WWDC on June 10th.

Every successful company has one massively great idea upon which all their success is based.

Google’s massively great idea is that amazing algorithms plus overwhelming compute power can solve just about any problem.

Apple’s massively great idea is that horrible content-consumption experiences can be fixed with blank-slate thinking and well-designed hardware-software-service combinations.

And Microsoft’s massively great idea, which preceded Google’s by decades, is that software does not want to be free. Software wants to be profitable and hardware wants to be a zero-margin commodity. The “secret sauce” for this approach, which enabled Microsoft to dominate for years, is that making more money on software lets you spend more on new software products, which gives you an advantage in emerging software markets.

Have you ever wanted to use Adobe InDesign better than ever before? If so, this Cult of Mac Deals offer is going to be right up your alley.

The Adobe InDesign CS6 Master Class will help you, the budding designer, open up a new world of creativity. You’ll learn to create professional looking content documents from basic brochures to engaging interactive and animated projects for multiple platforms. This video course will teach you everything you need to know to get started and will even get into the advanced features of the program to turn you into an expert. And for a limited time, you can get this course for only $39.

Evernote is a fantastically useful service, with clients for the web, Mac, PC, and iOS. The iOS version is as full featured as the desktop version, a rarity these days, and really makes Evernote my go-to app for keeping track of stuff of all kinds.

Here, then, are four fantastic tips and tricks to get the most out of the Evernote app on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

Circumstantial evidence may suggest that Apple has acquired the predictive search app Grokr. And if they haven’t done, they should do.

Grokr has been called the “Google Now for iOS.”

With Grokr’s predictive search capability and Siri’s natural language capability combined into a single feature could put Apple in the overall lead in the crucial area of virtual assistant technology.

Here’s why Apple needs to buy Grokr (and why I think they already did).

The Dock is one of those things that we all use on our Macs, but may not really do much more than swap out applications and use whatever Stacks were put there when we got the darn Mac.

However, if you really want to get the most out of your Mac, you might as well learn how to do a bit more with the Dock, and master your use of this oft-overlooked bit of user software. Here are four great ways to do just that.

I was browsing around the internet, looking for a fun, inexpensive game to play on my Mac, and maybe pass along to you Cult of Mac readers for your weekend fun. I found Tower Wars, a fairly deep tower offense and defense title, and it seemed to be a nice price at eight dollars.

Then I went over to the Steam store and found it going for 40 percent off, making this already inexpensive Mac game even cheaper at $4.79.

So, if you’ve got five bucks, some time to spare, and you like tower defense (and offense), you might want to grab yourself a copy, too.

Tired of slingshotting those angry birds at ever-more preposterous structures build by pigs? Bored with trying to best your friends using nothing more than words?

Bloom Box is a new, cutesy puzzle game from Nexx Studio (Pig Shot, Glow Puzzle) where you’ll need to set up chain reactions to explode the aforementioned boxes, make flowers bloom, and collect all the stars in each level.

Did you know that you can add Passbook passes to your iPhone from your Mac? It’s a feature Apple hasn’t really promoted, but iCloud syncs passes added from OS X to the iPhone with a click of a button.

Hat tip to David Chartier for pointing out this feature on his Finer Things in Tech blog. When viewing a Passbook pass from a source like Ticketmaster or Second Gear Software, simply click the “Add to Passbook” button. You’ll then see the above prompt, and the pass will be added to your iPhone via iCloud.

For more great Passbook tips, check out our handy roundup.

Source: Finer Things in Tech

The Chicago Sun-Times, one of the remnants of traditional paper journalism, has let go its entire photography staff of 28 people. Now its reporters will start receiving “iPhone photography basics” training to start producing their own photos and videos.

The move is part of a growing trend towards publications using the iPhone as a replacement for fancy, expensive DSLRs. It’s a also a sign of how traditional journalism is being changed by technology like the iPhone and the advent of digital publishing.