Cult of Mac

After touting the success of the Mac by calling it the number one desktop and laptop platform in the United States, Tim Cook brought Apple’s Phil Schiller onstage to talk MacBook. Schiller then unveiled the rumored 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. The new laptop is 20% thinner and a pound lighter than the previous 13-inch MacBook Pro.

The 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro leaked several days ago via a Chinese forum. The machine features a HDMI port, USB 3.0, and SD card slot like the 15-inch Retina. It’s awesome, but it will cost you.

If you’ve been worried that Apple is going to forget about iBooks, you worried about nothing: today, Apple is announcing a new version of iBooks.

The first new feature of iBooks 3.0 has continuous scrolling, without pagination.

In addition, books now sync their reading position through iCloud across multiple devices. You can share passages and books across Twitter and Facebook.

iBooks is also getting more language support, namely for Asian languages like Korean, Japanese and Chinese.

The new version of iBooks is out today, and will be downloaded in the App Store.

(This story is developing.Check back for updates.)

Tim Cook just dropped the bomb on iOS 6 numbers: 200 million iOS devices are running Apple’s latest mobile OS. That staggering figure means that iOS 6 has the fastest upgrade rate of any software in history. Here are some of the latest numbers from the mouth of Cook himself:

Apple switched gears for the iPad Mini event. Rather than holding it at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco they’re holding it at the California Theater in San Jose and the theater is amazingly gorgeous.

We wouldn’t mind if all future Apple keynotes were held here. Check out these pictures Apple’s been showing off on the live stream the last few minutes:

It’s finally here. Returning to the California Theater in San Jose, California — a long neglected venue for Apple announcements — Tim Cook has just taken the stage for today’s ‘iPad mini’ event.

Not that they’ve confirmed the iPad mini, but we’ve got a good idea it’s coming, along with a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, new iMacs, a new Mac mini, iTunes 11, iBooks 3 and more.

“It’s great to be back at the California Theater. We have some great memories here, and we’re about to create some new ones.”

But first, the inevitable numbers.

Apple isn’t expected to make the iPad mini available for sale until Friday, November 2nd, but that hasn’t stopped case manufacturers like HardCandy from already promoting their new cases for the rumored tablet. The HardCandy ShockDrop iPad mini case is set to ship on October 25th, which is more than a week before Apple is even expected to sell the tablet itself.

HardCandy also released an iPhone “5” case last year before Apple released the iPhone 4S, and the case didn’t fit the device at all. Here’s to hoping the leaked dimensions for the iPad mini prove to be reliable this time around.

Apple has fired its South Korean boss, Dominique Oh, reportedly due to sluggish sales of its products there. Oh has been with the Cupertino company for just over a year, joining from LG Electronics where he oversaw the company’s Android and Windows Phone divisions. 

Here it is: the iPad mini, shown in the flesh and fully constructed in this new video by E-Trade supply.

Disingenuously, the video is called a “Power-On” test but I’m pretty sure that this unit isn’t actually functional, since it looks to me like that boot-up logo at the end is simply superimposed.

Either way, though, this is a really good comparison video, and gives a great feel for what the iPad mini will actually feel like in your hand… where it will be very, very soon.

The iPad mini hasn’t even been officially announced yet, but we all know it’s coming, right? But here’s the bigger question of the morning – are you already planning on buying an iPad mini even though you don’t really know what it’s going to look like or how much it will cost?

The smaller form factor of the iPad mini is really appealing to me, so I’m already thinking I’ll ditch my iPad 3 for the iPad mini, but is it lunacy to plan to buy a gadget you know so little about? Is anyone here in the same boat? We want to hear about your iPad mini purchasing plans this morning, so come on over and let’s talk.

Click here to go to the Cult of Mac Forums and tell us if you’re already planning to buy an iPad Mini

Phishing emails are some of the most frustrating emails I have delivered to my inbox. While I’ve never fallen for one, the sheer audacity of the sender, who makes a lame and shameless attempt to steal my login and/or bank details (often using the name of a bank I’ve never dealt with in my life) really infuriates me.

There seems to be one going around at the moment that claims to be from Apple targeting iCloud customers. Unlike traditional spam emails, however, this one won’t attempt to steal your login details when you click on its link. Instead, it wants to sell you flowers.

Apple probably didn’t invite you to today’s iPad mini event, but that doesn’t mean you have to feel left out. You can get your own novelty iPad mini event Passbook ticket right on your iPhone so you can feel like you’re totally legit.

To get the iPad mini event ticket, just open this link in Safari. If you’re opening the link from an iOS device, iOS 6 will automatically preview the ticket and allow you to import it into Passbook.

Here’s what the ticket looks like:

IoShutterCam is a neat, new take on iPhone camera apps. Instead of focusing (ahem) on adding filters to your images and sending them off to ever more social networking services, the new app instead concentrates on capture.

If you’re interested in time-lapse, triggering your shutter with sound, or many other neat shutter-tripping functions, then the $3 ioShutterCam is for you.

Apple has just lost one of its magic patent bullets thanks to a non-final Office action by the USPTO. Patent No, 7,469,381 (used against Samsung in California) has been declared invalid after evidence supporting prior art (as well as being obvious) was brought about during a reexamination request.

This news is not only great for Samsung, but many other manufacturers who are currently caught up in Apple’s legal charades.

Apple is expected to unveil a new, smaller iPad today, October 23rd, 2012, at 10AM ET/1PM PST, with a launch of the device expected for sale on November 2. Invites to the event were sent out last week. 

This is the most anticipated iPad release yet, bringing the apples-and-oranges competition between Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the newly-releaced Google Nexus 7 to a boil just in time for the holiday gift-giving season of 2012. We’re all extremely excited to see what this heavily rumored new form factor will bring to the table, and how Apple will position the device in its already spectacularly successful line of iOS devices.

The iPad 2 was announced in March of 2011, with the new iPad (not the iPad 3, as we all assumed) was revealed in March of 2012. The iPad 2 broke the thinness barrier of the iPad one, and brought faster CPU and graphics enhancements, while the iPad 3 upped the ante to Retina-quality resolution and a faster, warmer CPU.

What will the iPad mini do to convince us all we need yet one more of Cupertino’s magical devices in our households? In this Cult of Mac rumor roundup, we’ll examine everything we think we know about the iPad Mini.

Sharp has been hard at work on a new display technology known as IGZO which looks set to be a perfect solution for mobile devices. Not only does it offer higher touch sensitivity, but it’s so energy efficient it can triple the battery life of devices. We’ve been expecting Apple to use IGZO displays for some time, but reports have suggested that Sharp simply cannot make them quick enough to meet the demand of Apple’s consumers. However, it seems that’s all changed.

Just hours ahead of Apple’s iPad mini event in San Jose, Sharp has announced that it soon expects sales of its IGZO displays to surge.

Apple will hold a media event at 10AM PT/1PM ET today, October 23rd at the California Theatre in San Jose. Select members of the press will gather to see the “little more” Apple has up its sleeve for the holiday season. The rumored iPad mini is expected to be announced as well as new Mac hardware and iTunes 11.

Wondering what all Apple will announce this time around? Here’s what you can expect to see at tomorrow’s event:

The Apple Store is down. As usual, Apple’s replaced it with a blank page and a little sticky note that say’s “We’ll be back.” But if Apple ever decided to be a bit more honest, the sticky note would look a lot more like the one in the picture above.

Source: Reddit

CineXPlayer, the best (and most awkwardly-capitalized) movie-playing app for the iPad, now plays MKV files, streams movies direct from network-attached storage (NAS) drives and makes your lovely HD movie files all crispy and nasty-looking with the optional SuperSharp feature.

Apple’s search engine leaked the iPhone 5 hours before the actual keynote announcement last month. This time Apple search engine hasn’t spoiled any of the announcement, but the world’s most popular search engine has one of the main products of today’s announcement.

This morning Google search was pulling results from Apple.com that revealed Apple will release a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display today. Google’s web crawlers even picked up that the pricing on the new units too.

Hate, nay loathe the horizontal? Does laying down leave you feeling unseemly? Does landscape orientation drive you crazy? Would you rather live in a tiny apartment at the top of a skyscraper than in a luxurious two-story country home? Then NewerTech’s new NuStand Alloy stands are for you.

While most of Apple’s stock iOS apps are pretty handy, there are a few that the large majority of us probably never open. I’m talking about apps like Stocks, Voice Memos, and Weather (which always seems to be inaccurate in the U.K.). Unfortunately, the Cupertino company doesn’t allow us to remove these, so the only way to do it was to jailbreak. Until now.

Thanks to a nifty new web app, you can temporarily remove stock iOS icons from your device without jailbreaking. Here’s how.

Stainless Games brought the 1997 classic that is Carmageddon to the App Store last week, but its launch was marred by a nasty save game bug that was capable of wiping all the progress you had made in the game.

Thankfully, the company has now issued an update that fixes the problem.

When Apple holds a press event to announce its latest gadget, the vast majority of us are frantically refreshing our favorite websites in an effort to keep up with the news as it’s breaking. It’s not often we get to watch the event live.

But sometimes, Apple treats us to a live video feed. And it’s doing that today for the much-anticipated iPad mini event.

Preview is a catch-all file viewer, handling a variety of image formats as well as the ubiquitous portable document format, otherwise known as the PDF, which was introduced by Adobe in 1993, and was released as an open standard in 2008. One thing Preview has had trouble with, until now, has been adding extra pages to a PDF document.

Not anymore, as the Mountain Lion version of Preview will let you add pages to PDF documents on the fly. Here’s how.

Pictures of a new and improved front-facing camera have emerged, but whether it’s for the iPad 3 or a future model is unclear.

BGR has posted photos purporting to be a new display assembly for the iPad. It features a bigger opening for the front-facing camera, suggesting a HD camera is coming.