Late last year, Cult of Mac reported that New York City’s crime rate had increased for the first time in twenty years, not due to the resurgence of criminal gangs like the Warriors and the Baseball Furies, but because the iPhone was just such a popular thing to steal.
Why are criminals so interested in ripping off iPhones, though, and not, say, Samsung Galaxy S III’s? What it all comes down to is two things. One, the predictability of the resale market: you can predict what you can pawn an iPhone for, but other gadgets are harder. Two: an iPhone or iPad is easy to identify at a glance, where as other lucrative gadgets are harder to spot.
Apple and Foxconn’s jumper problem might not be a thing of the past after all, as reports over the weekend broke that two workers have jumped from the roof of Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory on Friday in reaction to job cuts, lowered wages and the end of free amenities at the world’s largest gadget manufacturer.
The iPad mini is one of Apple’s biggest successes to date, but that doesn’t matter to the US Patent and Trademark Office, which has turned down Apple’s request for a trademark on the iPad mini because it is “merely descriptive.”
Tim Cook may be leading one of the most influential and valuable companies on earth now, but he used to be in high school just like the rest of us. Some yearbook photos of Cook’s early years at Robertsdale High School in Robertsdale, Alabama have surfaced. How adorable!
Cook was unsurprisingly voted “most studious” freshman year, and it was an obvious mistake to exclude him from the “most likely to succeed” list.
iMessages have taken the iOS world by storm, offering multi-device messaging services that go across the internet, rather than the SMS systems of your cell phone provider. For those who pay per SMS message, this is great news, and for the rest of us it’s still, well, great news.
Here are five ways to get the most out of Messages and iMessage on your iPhone, as well as other iOS and Mac devices.
The most likely prediction for Facebook’s project, code-named “Buffy,” is that it’s a modified, Facebook-centric version of Android on an HTC handset with a promise of other handsets — some insiders call it an “application layer.”
The dark horse contender is a Facebook-branded phone.
That’s great, right? Facebook has now friended Google and will join the growing family of Android-loving companies. Uh, right?
Wrong. Facebook is joining the club of Google’s enemies who are using Android to take business away from Google.
The worst thing that could possibly happen to Apple has now happened: The company has run afoul of the authoritarian government of China.
Gatekeepers of the world’s largest and one of the fastest growing markets for every product Apple makes, the Chinese Communist Party-controlled government has decided to stop and reverse Apple’s growth in the country.
I have done a lot writing in my day, and there are times when I want to just let the words fly freely faster than I can possibly type them. When I’ve worked on my talks for seminars or wanted to work out some thoughts on a major piece of writing, I have given the reins to Dragon Dictate.
This Cult of Mac Deals offer has a huge savings on Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac – which has been an indispensable tool for me as a writer. You can get it for only $100 – that’s 50% off the regular price!
iCloud is a pretty neat system, working in the background across a ton of different apps without much input needed from us users, except our login name and password. It lets you sync Notes, Reminders, save documents, keep game saved-states, and even manage your music collection
Look, every once in a while a Mac app comes along that’s so incredibly useful, it becomes one of those rare staple apps no Mac should go without. On this week’s CultCast, we’ll introduce you to the incredibly talented Alfred, and reveal all the time-saving totally amazing feats this little bit of code can perform for you.
Plus! Word on the streets is T-Mobile’s getting the iPhone and their new plans could give the industry a shake down. We’ll tell you the pros and cons of big T’s contract free “uncarrier” plans and explain what makes them different from the pack.
All that and more on this episode of the CultCast! Subscribe now on iTunes to download our new episodes or just hit play below.
Major League Baseball is getting ready for the 2013 season by updating its official apps on both Google Play and the App Store. Today MLB.com At Bat was updated with live audio access for At Bat 13 subscribers and other features for various devices.
Twitter has a released an update to its video sharing service Vine that adds a couple of new features. You can now quickly share videos taken by other people in your feed on Twitter and Facebook. Just tap the ellipsis on the bottom right of a video and then “Share this post.”
Another addition is the ability to embed Vine videos on the web like tweets. Anything in your Vine feed can be embedded with the new option. Getting the actual embed code is a little clunky in the app right now. Tapping “Embed” in the iOS app creates an email with instructions to use the code on the web. You can choose from the “Simple” and “Postcard” frames along with the width of the actual video.
Today’s update also includes some bug fixes, so be sure to grab it for free in the App Store.
Apple has been rumored to release a Spotify-like music streaming service for quite some time, but complicated licensing negations with the record labels have kept the product at bay. Multiple reports from this year alone have suggested that Apple is finally starting to gain momentum; it seems clear that some kind of ‘iRadio’ is in the pipeline.
Previous speculation has said that Apple wants to release its upcoming music service sometime in 2013, and now a new report says the company is “pushing hard” for a launch this summer.
iOS is the most popular gaming platform in existence, and Apple has managed to create an incredible ecosystem of titles with only iOS devices. The company sells no actual controllers or joypads; everything is touch-based.
So does it make sense for Apple to make a physical game controller that somehow connects to your iPhone and iPad? According to a new report, the answer is yes.
LEGOs are one of the greatest toys ever invented. You can build pretty much anything you can dream of with them. Even a car. They’re amazing.
We’ve seen tons of Apple-inspired LEGO projects over the last couple of years, from LEGO Apple Store replicas, to a working LEGO Mac Pro. There is no limit to the creativity you can achieve with LEGOs, but these best LEGO projects we’ve ever seen:
One of the wacky things you may notice if you’ve just gotten a new iPhone is the default double alert whenever you get a text message, whether iMessage or SMS. Why Apple has this as the default, I’m not sure, but it kept freaking me out before I figured out how to turn it off.
However, I’m willing to see that you might want the double alert, or more (shudder), and there’s a simple way to make that happen, as well.
Artist Maico Akiba takes everyday gadgets and then imagines them as they would look if dug up from a landfill a hundred years from now. This is what Akiba thinks the iPhone 3G will look like in 2107.
Got to say, I’m skeptical the screen will hold up that well. There’s more art by Akiba at the link below.
If you think that last week’s huge security hole that allowed anyone with your Apple ID email address and birth date to reset your password was just a fluke, this damning report by Tim Carmody over at The Verge might just change your mind.
It’s a compelling argument that says that Apple is being extremely negligent and sloppy when it comes to your iCloud data’s security.
The latest Facebook SDK makes the Facebook on iOS experience even greater.
There have been rumors for over a year that Facebook is trying to make its own smartphone to compete with the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S3, but we haven’t had much reason to believe in them until now.
Facebook sent out invitations last night to an event on April 4th at its headquarters, where the company will allegedly unveil its own smartphone that was built in partnership with HTC.
Tired of scrolling through endless songs from burned CDs from years ago and having no idea what each one is because the tracks didn’t quite register with iTunes? Wish you could have more cover art in your collection? Is your iTunes Library teeming with duplicate tracks? This Cult of Mac Deals offer will magically eliminate what ails your iTunes because TuneUp transforms your music collection. Automagically™.
With over 12 million downloads, TuneUp is the best iTunes companion app in the industry, and in a just a few clicks your entire music collection will be fresh and clean. And Cult of Mac Deals has it for only $30!
Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of speculation suggesting that Google is in the process of releasing a unified chat application called Babel. Babel is rumored to have merged services such as Voice, Talk, and Google + Messenger. The new service is also rumored to be a cross-platform chat service, allowing users on iOS and Android to communicate with each other, within Babel itself. It’s like Google’s version of iMessage.
Things are crazy in North Korea right now. After hanging out with Dennis Rodman for a bit, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has decided to step up his propaganda by threatening to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S.
There’s no question that North Korea’s got nukes, but they might not be able to hit the U.S. for another few years. Plus, Kim Jong-un is running the show from an old 21-inch iMac that’s probably still running on OS X 10.5 Leopard, so we’re safe for now, right?
For the last two years, Best Buy stores across the country have hosted a mini Apple Store within a store to bring more attention to Apple’s iMacs and MacBooks. As a point of solace from the barrage of tablets, desktop PCs, and laptops in Best Buys busy stores, the little Apple Stores give customers more time and space to play with Apple’s PC products, so Samsung has decided to take a similar approach with their mobile products.
To kick off the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S4, Best Buy plans to setup a Samsung store-within-a-store in some of its highest traffic stores. Rather than hawking PC products, the Samsung store-within-a-store will focus on Samsung’s mobile offerings.
Do you hate in-app purchases? Sick of downloading an app only to discover its borderline unusable until you drop an extra five bucks? Sick of games that aren’t play to win, but pay to win?
Tough noogies. In-app purchases account for a staggering 76% of all iPhone App Store revenue, with 71% of all iPhone app revenue coming from in-app purchases for total free apps.
If there’s any comfort to be had from U.S. IAP haters, at least there’s this: Americans spend, on average, only about a buck in in-app purchases per download. In Japan, it’s four times that amount.
Without a doubt, my favorite Mountain Lion feature is AirPlay Mirroring, which allows me to easily mirror whatever is happening on my Mac to my Apple TV. My girlfriend and I use it pretty much all the time to watch movies at night — I digitized our vast DVD collection long ago to save space. It’s truly indispensible to me.
Although I love AirPlay Mirroring, the feature still has two main issues. First of all, AirPlay Mirroring doesn’t work at all on Macs released before 2011, meaning that my 2009-era 27-inch iMac can’t easily stream anything off of its 3.25 TB (rolled-at-home) Fusion Drive. There are apps like AirParrot that get around that limitation, but I’ve always found them to be a little bit strange and laggy, doing weird things like letterboxing my iMac’s display on all sides.
Even if you have a Mac that is newer than 2011, though, there’s one major limitation of AirPlay Mirroring: if you’re streaming a movie to your Apple TV using AirPlay Mirroring, you can’t actually do anything else with your Mac while the movie is playing. If you switch away from the video player to check your email or your Twitter account, it’s all mirrored on the screen.
What I have always wanted is this: the ability to easily stream a movie to my Apple TV from any Mac in my house, while allowing me to still use my Mac without disrupting the viewing experience.
Today, I discovered a gem of an app that lets me do all of this. It’s called Beamer and it frickin’ rocks.
