Cult of Mac

One of the consequences of the iPhone 5’s streamlined, ultra-thin design is that you can no longer just pop off the backplate of the device and replace it. That means no more Don-Draper-esque teak backs or glowing Apple logos or anything else that you could do to deeply personalize your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S.

So what do you do if you want to customize your iPhone 5 without having to slap a bulky case on it? You skin it. And RAW out of Brooklyn is making some of the best custom skins for the iPhone 5 around out of quality leather and wood grain to give your handset a classier look.

If you have any idea what an ollie is, or a 50:50 grind, or a heel-flip (or — if you grew up in the 1980s, an acid drop or boneless), then you should buy True Skate right this minute. Seriously. I’ll wait.

Why? Because — despite some v1 limitations — True Skate is the closest you’re going to get to a dead-on skateboarding sim in 2012. The only things missing are the security guards to come and harass you, and bad fast food.

Microsoft claims its new Surface RT tablet, which begins shipping later this month, has a display that’s superior to the Retina display in the third-generation iPad. But according to DisplayMate CEO Dr. Raymond M. Soneira, that may not be the case. After some basic comparisons, Soneira found the Surface tablet’s display is “significantly less sharp” than the new iPad’s.

The first thing you notice about the 2012 fifth-generation iPod touch is how beautifully it’s made. Crazy thin, ridiculously light, yet sturdy as a slab of slate.

The fit and finish are extraordinary. There are no seams, screws, gaps, cracks or openings. It’s literally seamless. The buttons look like they’re part of the iPod’s case, not nubbins that poke through. Who makes stuff this good? Oh yeah, Apple.

Other reviews have complained about the price (it starts at $300) and some reviewers seem unimpressed by the touch. Who is it for, they wonder? Especially if you already have an iPhone.

Well, it’s for the kids. It’s a kids’ computer. Their first computer, if you like. It’s a relatively cheap, highly portable, extremely capable little handheld computer for children. It plays games, music and movies; surfs the net; communicates via text and Facebook; and hosts a bazillion apps for entertainment or homework. It also displays e-books, though let’s be honest: reading is the last thing it’ll be used for.

But $300 is a lot of money to spend on a kid. Is it worth it?

Lomo has launched yet another gorgeous new film camera, and this one looks as lame as all the rest. It’s called the Belair X 6-12, and it’s medium format.

Apple has begun work on the first phase of its Prineville data center, which will include clearing and flattening the land for one of two 330,000 square-foot buildings. Each building is said to be more than twice the size of a typical Costco store, and this initial phase of construction alone is expected to cost Apple $68 million.

Safari 6, the web browser that comes with OS X Mountain Lion, added a ton of new features when it launched a while back, and Reading List is one of the cool ones. Reading List will let you save articles without having to bookmark them, thus avoiding all the hassles of organizing and/or synchronizing bookmarks. It’s a similar system to something like Instapaper or Pocket (formerly) Read It Later, but baked right in to your Safari browser.

One thing’s clear: the iPhone 5 isn’t going to be a cakewalk to jailbreak. It’s based upon an all-new chip and an all-new operating system, and so far, the Dev Team has been stumped as to how to get a jailbreak out to the masses. But now Planetbeing, a member of the Chronic Dev Team, has given iPhone 5 owners a ray of hope: he says he’s almost figured out a full tethered jailbreak for the iPhone 5, and from there, an untethered jailbreak is on the horizon. But there’s a big catch: it can only be run from a developer account.

Earlier this week, Stainless Games brought the 1997 reckless driving sensation that is Carmageddon to iOS, and I haven’t been able to put it down since — it’s as good today as it was 15 years ago on the Dreamcast. However, it does have one issue holding it back: a save game bug that could wipe all your progress.

New, mini iPads; new, thinner iMacs; 13-inch Macbook Pros with Retina displays; you could wait till Tuesday to discover all the great products Apple’s about to unleash into the world, but that’s what grandpas do. Join us on our newest CultCast, and find out everything we know and expect from next week’s big media event right now. And, um, no offense to actual grandpas, cause I love grandpas, they’re the best.

Plus: 3rd-party lightening adapters and cables—they’d make great stocking stuffers, am-i-right? We’ll tell you when you can finally expect to see them in stores.

All that and more on our newest CultCast! Subscribe now on iTunes, or easily stream The CultCast via Apple’s free Podcasts App.

Read on for the show notes!

Here’s a nifty little tweak that’ll help you write new emails a little quicker: It’s called SpotMail, and it lets you create new emails from directly within Spotlight on your jailbreak iOS device. All you have to do is type in the recipient’s email address and hit search.

Prepare to conquer the world! No, this isn’t a call to arms from an evil genius, it’s more like Risk, on steroids—Rule The World With Making History II: Prepare For The Ultimate Grand Strategy Experience With This Fun Mac Game.

My father-in-law is really into these games. He spends hours researching and playing strategy games on his PC. I don’t know what my mother-in-law thinks of all this virtual carnage and destruction, but I think it’s pretty cool. If my father-in-law had a Mac (he does have an iPad), I’d get him this game for his birthday (since it’s next week) because it looks freakin’ cool.

As a publicly traded company, Apple submits its financial reports every quarter to let their investors know how well the company is doing. However, Apple is under no obligation to share specific financial results about each of the individual products it sells, data that it is still trying to protect via the court in the Apple v Samsung case in Northern California.

However, rabid interest in the specifics continues unabated. In a survey reported today, CNN Money asked 61 Apple analysts, 31 from Wall Street and 30 independent analysts, what their estimates were for specific device sales in the quarter that just ended on September 29, 2012. Turns out, the analysts estimates were all over the place when it came to predicting the number of iPads sold.

Apple released a small Java update for OS X users this Wednesday. The update effectively removed the Java applet plug-in that typically comes pre-installed in all web browsers on the Mac. Why? Well, Apple has been trying to distance itself from Java for quite some time, mainly due to the fact that most malware spreads via Java vulnerabilities.

Take the recent Flashback trojan, for example. Millions of Macs were comprised because hackers were able to exploit a security vulnerability in Java on the browser. You could visit a bad site with a corrupt Java applet and get infected. After this week’s update, Java is no longer included in browsers like Safari.

There are few jailbreak hackers in the world regarded as highly as Nicholas Allegra, also known as “comex.” In the earlier days of iOS, Allegra released JailbreakMe, the first and only web-based jailbreak of its kind. He has worked on numerous jailbreaks throughout the years, but recently he’s been working off the radar.

Allegra has been in hiding for the last year because of Apple. The 20-year-old Brown student’s expertise in iOS security was noticed by the all-seeing eye of Cupertino last August, and for the past year Allegra has been working as an intern at Apple, presumably helping patch the vulnerabilities he so adeptly reverse engineered. As of today, Allegra no longer works at Apple, and there’s no telling what he’ll do next.

Telltale Games announced today that iOS users can now download Episode Three of The Walking Dead: The Game, entitled “Long Road Ahead,” to their iPhone or iPad. It’s the third of five episodes in the critically acclaimed series based on Robert Kirkman’s zombie drama, The Walking Dead, which started as an award-winning comic book, then made its way to become a critically-acclaimed television series on AMC.

By now you’ve heard about the many problems with Apple’s new Maps app in iOS 6. It can be unreliable and just flat out wrong pretty often, and many well-known locations are either missing or severely misplaced. Maps will get better over time, but Apple has a lot of work to do.

David Bonnefoy upgraded to iOS 6 on his iPhone and noticed many of the same issues that have been reported on for weeks. There were also several points of interest that were misplaced due to overlapping streets.

Although I’ve used a Mac exclusively since 2005, before that, I was a PC guy, which means I have lots of gauzy memories of halcyon days well-spent in front of a menagerie of beige boxes falling backwards in time through a decade of classic PC gaming, starting with the old 8-bit Ultima games and Nethack under DOS and continuing well into the Windows era with games like Grim Fandango, Half-Life, Planescape: Torment and System Shock 2.

I love the Mac, but the one thing I miss about having a PC is easily playing classic PC games without loading them up in Boot Camp or Parallels. Luckily, it looks like that’s about to change, as GOG.com — a digital distributor of classic PC games updated to work on modern machines and distributed without DRM — is now releasing their titles to work on Mac.

Tweetbot just dropped on the Mac App Store today, and perhaps the most surprising thing about it is the price. At $20, it’s significantly more expensive than most social networking clients. The thing is, it’s important not to see the number and instantly start making comparisons. You need to look at the price and ask: does this app provide 20 dollars worth of value? Judge it by that standard, and it doesn’t seem so expensive after all.

Shared Photo Streams are fantastic, of course, barring the niggling detail that only the person who creates them can add photos to them. Sometimes, though, as with all tech, things don’t necessarily work the way they should. For example, sometimes you won’t be able to see comments that have been posted by subscribers. Other times, deleting a comment from a shared Photo Stream via iPhoto or Aperture won’t be reflected on your iPhone.

Here’s how to fix that.

It seems financial printer RR Donnelley made one hell of mistake earlier today, causing Google’s stock to drop 9% before Google was able to halt trading. What did they do? They filed an early draft of Google’s earnings without authorization.

Aside from being fatter and heavier than the the last-gen model, and running hot, and taking like a year to charge, the iPad is almost perfect. Apart from all those problems, of course.

But while those issues all stem from jamming a multi-million-pixel display into a mobile device, the iPad’s speaker is another matter. It sounds just fine — if you’re standing behind the iPad that it.

The SoundJaw Unlimited — itself a sequel to a thinner product — fixes that. And fixes it good.

White gadgets became an iconic symbol under the careful craftsmanship of Apple. When Apple released the original iPod 11 years ago in classic Apple white, everybody wanted one, and eventually every gadget manufacturer in the world tried to copy that style.

Over the last few years though, black iDevices have started to gain in popularity over their white brethren. Black is classy, professional, and always down for a good time, whereas white is starting to come off as fun but a bit more feminine. Some people think white is making a comeback, but a new study  suggests that nearly 70% of Apple owners prefer black over white now, and there’s no turning back.

Google just announced their newest Chromebook. It runs Google’s Chrome OS. It has an 11.6-inch screen with 1366 x 768 resolution, 6 hours of battery life, a 100 GB flash storage drive and it only costs $249. It’s beautiful. It looks just like the 11-inch MacBook Air. And of course, it’s made by Samsung.

Image: Matt Buchanan

A flurry of rumors have surrounded the failed video app start-up Color over the past 24 hours. First a rumors hit that Color was going to completely shutdown after failing to gain widespread use after a year. A few hours later a second rumor claimed that Color wasn’t shutting down, they were just being bought by Apple.

It appears that both rumors were completely wrong and sort of right at the same time. Color – as a company – isn’t being purchased by Apple for an eight figure sum, but Apple is buying Color’s team of 20 engineers for a modest figure of $2 million to $5 million.