Jefferies analyst Peter Misek is one of our favorite Apple analysts in the entire world. Mostly because his Apple predictions are usually horribly wrong.
After the disastrous Apple TV SDK Event rumor he created earlier in the month, Misek is back with a new note to Apple investors, and it’s not a happy one. According to Misek, Apple is about to face a very rough two-year period, and he might actually be right.
The iBookstore might not be the most profitable leg of Apple’s empire, but it is said that Apple doesn’t get into a business if it can’t make a billion dollars off of it… so no surprise that the iBookstore is a billion dollar business, even if it’s not much more than that.
Remember that one time that a U.K. judge told Apple that they have to publish a public apology to Samsung on their homepage? It was a really weird punishment that made a lot of us scratch our heads, but Apple handled it pretty well.
Well it turns out that that same U.K. judge who was pro-Samsung now has a really good reason for wanting Samsung to win against Apple – he just got a new job with Samsung!
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – This year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was pretty disappointing from a gadget-lovers point of view. Samsung was there, but didn’t announce anything new. Microsoft didn’t even have a stand, and even the once-great App Planet section is little but a business-service wasteland (albeit with the best tea, coffee and beer in the show).
Still, even a pile of crap has variations in its texture, and so we bring you the “Best” of Mobile World Congress 2013.
Apple announced today that their free education portal, iTunes U, just topped over one billion downloads for content. iTunes U provides free educational content from some of the top universities around the world and is the world’s largest online catalog of free educational content.
If you’re looking for a free education, or just want to brush up on some subjects, you can enroll in iTunes U courses from professors at Duke, Yale, Cambridge, MIT, Oxford, and Stanford.
One of the longest running complaints with iOS is the lack of a filesystem, particularly for pro users. Some might even say that it’s a problem limiting the adoption of iOS devices as primary computers. To help bridge this gap, developers have released countless file management apps in the App Store, all attempting to solve this issue. The problem is, none of these apps got it quite right. Some had great UIs and a lack of features, while some were visually upsetting while littered with an abundance of options. Files App, a new application from Sonico Mobile, changes all that. Not only does it look great, it provides a myriad of functions as well, making it one of the best file management apps I’ve ever seen for iOS.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – Bluetooth speakers are great in the kitchen. But the the Josiah from Kwamecorp is possibly the best kitchen speaker ever. Not only does its beautifully minimal styling fit right into any kitchen, but it’s fashioned from ceramic, and can even act as a snack tray.
This small Bluetooth speaker looks remarkably like the iconic Jawbone Jambox, arguably the most popular ultra-portable Bluetooth speaker on the market right now. And just like the Jambox, it can be used to stream music and make calls. It even comes in what looks like the same colors — or very similar colors — the Jambox comes in.
But look more closely, and you’ll see small cosmetic differences — because this isn’t the Jambox. It’s the Urge Basics Sound Brick, and it has one very big difference with the Jambox: it’s less than one-third the price.
We say “might,” because we haven’t tested it yet; but sandwiched between the hard exterior shell of Incase’s new Chisel case and the iPhone it protects is a second, soft case with a secret ingredient called Poron XRD — a material we’ve found almost unbelievably excellent at absorbing impact energy.
After texting on the iPhone for awhile, you get used to seeing the “…” bubble mid-conversation. Whenever someone with iMessage is typing to you, the ellipsis bubble appears in that thread of the Message app. It helps you know that whoever you’re talking to is about to respond, and it also gives people away when they choose to start an iMessage and then stop.
What if you could see when someone was sending you an iMessage no matter where you are in iOS? The iPhone’s status bar would be the perfect place to display such a notifier, wouldn’t it?
Today Amazon updated its Cloud Player iOS app with full support for the iPad. Amazon’s music streaming and storage service got its own iPhone app last summer, and now the app has been made universal with an interface that’s optimized for the iPad’s larger display.
With Cloud Player on the iPad, Amazon customers can stream music and download tracks to play offline. The app displays larger album artwork while music is playing, and it retains the same look and feel of the iPhone version.
The new year is well underway, and we’ve got a bundle lined up for you here at Cult of Mac Deals that will help you make the most of your Mac over the months to come. And the best part is that you’ll get all 8 of these time-savings apps for free as part of The Mac Freebie Bundle.
Guy Kawasaki was one of Apple’s most famous evangelists. He’s the guy who helped Steve Jobs market the hell out of the original Macintosh back in 1984 to really put Apple on the map.
Guy left his post as Chief Evangelist of Apple in 1987 and has reclined into a life of venture capitalism along with running his popular blog, but now he’s gearing up to help Google do battle with Apple by advising for Google-owned Motorola.
Speaking in front of an audience at TED today, Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a bizarre pitch for buying his company’s wearable Google Glass headset, essentially by arguing that product utilizing one of his company’s biggest projects — Android — were effeminate and made for wussies.
Even though Steve Jobs gets credit for making the gutsy move to open Apple retail stores across the country, Ron Johnson deserves a lot of praise for the Apple Store’s success.
Johnson’s vision helped Steve create the most successful chain of retails stores on the planet. Then Johnson left to become the CEO of JC Penny, where he’s faced some heavy criticism for his efforts to revitalize the brand. According to Apple’s old marketing guru Ken Segall, Ron is a visionary in his own right, and he’s transforming JC Penny just like Steve Jobs transformed Apple.
At today’s Apple Shareholders Meeting, CEO Tim Cook admitted that Apple was “looking at new product categories” but that the company had no interest in just “pressing a button or two” to have Apple make the most products.
Steve Jobs pitched the idea of an Apple spaceship-like campus in the summer of 2011. He said that the project would be completed by 2015, but there have been a couple delays that have pushed the project back a little farther.
During today’s annual shareholders meeting, Tim Cook addressed the reports that the new campus won’t be ready in 2015, and said that they should break ground soon and be ready to move in by 2016.
Apple hosted its annual shareholder meeting today at Apple HQ in Cupertino. There were some big rumors yesterday that Tim Cook would announce a stock split during the meeting, but that never actually happened.
At this years shareholder’s meeting, all the board members were re-elected, and Tim Cook got 99.1% of investor approval. There were two proposals put to vote that Apple did not support, but both of those were struck down too.
Heads up! If you use Amazon’s Kindle app for the iPhone or iPad, don’t hit update! The new 3.6.1 update will, if installed, delete your entire book library from your device. Amazon’s working on the problem, and for a problem of this magnitude, expect a quick fix.
Update: And it’s now been fixed!
Back in November, we reviewed PanoPerfect, an iPhone app that let you easily share panoramas right from your phone. Today, the developers behind PanoPerfect, HalfPeeled LLC, released an all new iPad version of PanoPerfect, along with a web client.
If you paid a couple thousand dollars for your Mac, but you’re currently not taking advantage of its hidden features, then you’ve wasted a lot of money. Your Mac has a ton of useful capabilities – don’t let those features go to waste. Especially when they’re going to directly benefit your life by saving hundreds of hours over the course of a year.
Have you ever found yourself doing tedious work copy and pasting, moving files around, or boring data entry stuff? Most likely, that’s a “yes”, isn’t it? Everyone comes across these daily tasks and sometimes this repetitive grunt-work can take up 2 to 3 hours of your precious time. Your Mac can slice that time in half if you know the proper techniques.
You deserve to work faster because the potential with your Mac is right at your fingertips. Let The Mac Hacker Course (featuring over 18 lectures and 1.5 hrs of content) turn you into a Mac dojo master for only $29!
The company Twelve South, which is well known for making iPhone and iPad cases that look like old books, has come out with a BookBook cover for the MacBook Pro with Retina Display.
The cover protects your MacBook Pro with too hardback covers enclosed in genuine leather, plus a cushioned interior. It’s all enclosed with a zipper.
You can use the MacBook with the case still on, or remove it.
There’s a BookBook cover for the 13-inch and also the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. It’s available now for $79.99.
The company also makes a BookBook for the MacBook Pro.
It was only yesterday that we found out that music streaming apps like Spotify and Rdio are helping kill music piracy, as the music industry reported that global revenue rose in 2012 for the first time in 13 years.
Well, according to a different report that crunched some serious numbers, Apple’s iTunes Store played a big part in the music industry’s growth, by accounting for 60 percent of global digital music revenues.
Apple’s always looking to miniaturize its gadgets down to the slimmest, smallest form factor possible, which is why the venerable iOS home button is such a conspicuous space waster: although the button grounds users in the iOS operating system, it’s also a fairly big and bulky element of the front of the device.
According to Peter Zigich in his new concepts for the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 mini and iPhone 6 Maxi, Apple should just eliminate it from the front of the device to make way for a nearly bezel-less screen. Bizarrely, though, he thinks it should be shifted to the lower left hand side of the device, in a lower location on each side.
