You’ve heard the collective judgement by the tech echo chamber: The new iPhone was just like the old iPhone, only taller.

The iPhone 5 is boring. Apple is too conservative. They didn’t really change the phone, but only made minor tweaks.

And that’s what’s wrong with the iPhone 5: It’s just not radical enough.

Here’s the problem: The echo chamber not only got this wrong, they got it backward.

The trouble with the iPhone 5 is that it’s too much, too soon.

Let me explain. 

You never meant for this to happen. In your rush to dive into the ocean, you forgot to take your iPhone out of your pocket, and didn’t realize it till you came out of the water. It’s a disaster. You leave your drowned iPhone 4S in a bag of rice for three days, praying to God, Allah, Jehovah, Moses, Shiva, and Oprah Winfrey that some magical power will make it work again. It doesn’t. You blow-dry it. Nada. Every conceivable way to resurrect your iPhone is met with failure and a blank screen.

Because you know the iPhone 5 is coming out in three months you decide not to waste your money and upgrade eligibility. Once you get home you rummage through your desk and find the Galaxy Nexus Samsung sent you three months ago. You sit in your chair staring at it almost hesitant to turn it on. You run your hands along the contours of its plastic grey body, pop in your new SIM card, take a deep breath, and then you dive in. This is it – your new digital home and the beginning of a three month exile into Android.

SAN FRANCISCO, JailbreakCon 2012 —Jailbreak hacker extraordinaire Cyril, or “pod2g,” just took the stage to talk about jailbreak techniques and the future of iOS 6 jailbreaking. After giving a technical run-through of his past exploits in iOS 4 and 5, Cyril explained that there is no working untethered jailbreak for iOS 6.

Considering that this is the world’s only jailbreak convention, many speculated that Cyril and the Chronic Dev Team would announce an iOS 6 jailbreak today, but that is not the case.

Cyril opened the iOS 6 section of his talk with, “Will I release the iOS 6 jailbreak today? No! Of course not!”

Remember how I was talking recently (like, umm, yesterday) about getting good tools in your toolkit? Apps that you might not need right now, but you’ll certainly need later? Not to mention that the apps (or bundle) are at a great price. Right. Well today is another of those times/deals—The Web Dev Power Pack Bundle: Get Three Mac Apps + 1,001 Design Assets That Will Turn You Into a Master Web Developer.

You get three solid apps plus a ton of clip art (don’t think for a moment that you won’t need some clip art at some point) for $89. It’s a nice, and inexpensive, way to get a solid dev environment started.

SAN FRANCISCO, JailbreakCon 2012 — Since Apple added iMessage to the Mac in OS X, there’s even more ways to communicate between Apple devices. The iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Mac can all send and receive via iMessage, but one person usually sends from multiple addresses across devices. You may, for instance, send a message through your phone number on the iPhone, and then later send another through your Apple ID email address on the Mac.

Apple recently introduced iMessage contact unification in iOS 6, meaning that you can now be reached at both a phone number and email address on a device like the iPad. But there’s still an annoying problem with iMessage: messages from different IDs create new conversation threads. Conversations in the Messages app are not always up to date and properly synced between devices, and it can be confusing to track down which thread to reply to.

Developer and designer Joshua Tucker introduced a jailbreak tweak today called Merge. Tucker’s new tweak solves the aforementioned problem with an elegant, Apple-like solution.

SAN FRANCISCO, JailbreakCon 2012 — Joshua Tucker, a leading interaction and interface designer for iOS, just unveiled several new Cydia projects at JailbreakCon. After explaining his approach to design and past jailbreak tweaks, Tucker announced the release of Emblem, a complete rethinking of iOS push notifications. Emblem is available now in Cydia $1.99.

Emblem can best be described as the way Apple should have done notifications on the iPad. Instead of iPhone-like banners, Emblem introduces OS X-like banners with intuitive gestures and message handling.

Siri has been updated along with the rest of the iOS in the new iteration from Apple. The personal voice assistant can take dictation, help you plan your wardrobe around the weather, keep track of your buddies, inform you on all sorts of sports information, and help you choose the best movie to go see, all using basic spoken English. You can discover more siri tricks to help you get the most out of your device in this article.

Of course, it helps to know what kinds of questions and commands you can actually say to produce the desired results. Here’s five things you can do with Siri the right way, so you can spend less time repeating yourself and more time going to those movies and meeting up with those friends.

SAN FRANCISCO, JailbreakCon 2012 –The world’s first global jailbreak convention is today at the South San Francisco Center, and I’ll be on the show floor all day reporting for Cult of Mac. The greatest jailbreak hackers and developers in the world are gathered together, and there’s going to be plenty of announcements regarding the future of jailbreaking, iOS 6, and possibly even the iPhone 5.

The convention kicks off September 29th at 9 A.M. PST. Make sure to tune in for breaking coverage on Cult of Mac and the video livestream below!

FIFA 13 kicks off this week’s must-have games roundup, delivering a much-improved version of everyone’s favorite soccer sim. In addition to new visuals and optimization for the iPhone 5, FIFA 13 finally boasts an online multiplayer mode, allowing you to play against friends and random opponents over the Internet.

We also have Rovio’s latest release, Bad Piggies; a stunning adventure RPG called Lili, a new Monsters Ate My Condo game, and more.

While we all know that most consumer electronics are manufactured in places like China, Apple has become the public face of the current practice. While the company continues to rake in huge profits from their iPhone and iPad devices, there has been much finger-pointing in Apple’s direction when unfair and degrading labor practices in manufacturing plants in China, like Foxconn, are brought to the forefront in Western media.

Apple seems pretty aware that it’s fighting this public relations battle on their own. The company’s Labor and Human Rights webpage has just been updated to include data on how many hours per week the 800,000 production workers in their supply chain have to work.

It’s the weekend–time to relax, chill out, play some video games. You know, the usual. We checked out the new Mac Game Store app today to see what was on special, and found a ton of great games for $15 and less. Here they are, all available from the new Mac Game Store app or website. All of these are great games (except that sixth one, but it’s great for nostalgic reasons alone), so consider it money well spent.

Apple silently updated the iOS 6 App Store today, adding more accessibility features to its VoiceOver interface for users who experience blindness and low vision. The new changes are in response to user complaints about accessibility in the iOS 6 App Store, and will help those users perform faster searches when interacting with the App Store via the VoiceOver system.

I have to admit, I was intrigued by Passbook when I first heard of it. An app that keeps my airline and movie tickets together with my coupons and customer loyalty cards seems like a good idea. For now, however, Passbook in iOS 6 seems like a placeholder to me, an app with no real purpose in and of itself, a place to link to other apps.

Apple quietly added a little explanation in the form of a paragraph in the iTunes Store page for Passbook apps which shows, at least, that they’re planning on more and that they understand that we all might feel a bit nonplused about one of the bigger features of the new iOS.

Apple doesn’t have a rich history of apologizing for their errors, big or small. When AntennaGate shook the web, Apple held a conference but they never said they were sorry. They just told us that antennas suck sometimes but they’ll give us a free bumper to be quiet. In fact, I can’t remember many times at all where Apple came out and publicly admitted a mistake.

Tim Cook’s apology this morning was a great gesture. It was almost a first for the company. Admitting that Apple’s not perfect and made a mistake isn’t easy, but did Tim Cook need to apologize to satisfy Apple customers? Could they have done something else to resolve the situation? We’d love to hear your ideas, so come over to the forums and talk to us about it.

Click here to go to the Cult of Mac Forums and talk about Tim Cook’s apology

Apple did something unprecedented today.

I’m not talking about Tim Cook’s apology for iOS 6 Maps. While it’s rare, Apple has apologized before, especially recently: see John Browett’s admission that the company had “messed up” when cutting shifts among Retail Employees, and Apple’s public about-face when pulling out of the EPEAT rating system. One of the things that makes Apple great is they’re not afraid to be as harsh on themselves as they are on the competition when they’ve fucked up.

No, what Apple did today is far more uncharacteristic than an apology. They suggested that you use a third-party app instead of their own.

The weekend is a great time to hit the theater, especially if it’s cold and rainy out. Siri has been updated in iOS 6 to provide a wealth of information on movies, including local showtimes, movie reviews, and even specific information about movies themselves, like actors, directors, and ratings. There’s a ton of stuff that Siri can help you find. But how do you know what kinds of questions are even possible? Well, you can start here with the following types of questions.

Today the iPhone 5 goes on sale in The Rest Of The World, and it goes out into that world naked and empty, free of contracts and lock-ins. Yes, you can hook up with your favorite carrier and get a subsidized handset, but real men go commando.

And in this case, unless you have some forward-thinking telcos in your country, “going commando” means “cutting your own SIM.”

Which is why we’re taking a timely look at this natty Nano SIM adapter, which will let you put just about any SIM into any phone.

For the last month rumors have floated around the web that Apple is been planning to build it’s own Pandora-like music-streaming service. It makes perfect sense to us, but Apple didn’t announce it at the iPhone 5 keynote which had many people wondering if it’s going to actually happen.

A report from the New York Post this morning is claiming that the reason Apple hasn’t launched their music-streaming service is because negotiations with Sony/ATV hit a last minute snag, forcing Apple to scrap the iTunes Streamer announcement from the iPhone 5 keynote.

Earlier this morning Tim Cook published an apology letter to all Apple fans for how horrible Apple Maps have been. Not only did he apologize, but he actually told users that they should try some alternatives while Apple fixes their mapping fiasco.

It’s great that Apple is taking responsibility for their shoddy work, but now that they’ve kicked Google Maps out of iOS 6, what are the best alternative? We took a quick look at the alternative map apps that Tim suggested, to find out which one you should use if you plan to ditch Apple Maps for a while. Here’s what we found out.

Not only has Apple apologized for the embarassing state of iOS 6 Maps today, and not only has Tim Cook personally advised users to try competing app products like Bing, Mapquest and Google Maps as they get iOS 6 Maps’ shit together, but Apple is now promoting Maps alternatives at the very top of the iOS App Store listings. This is an unprecedented admission of fault by Apple. It’s mea culpas all the way down.

Via: Twitter

Would you buy an iPhone photography app that only let you take one photo? Not one per day, or one per week, but one photo ever. No? Neither would I. But I would download a free app just to see what was going on.

That app is real, and it’s called One Memento.

If there were ever a time for Google to play “good guy” it would be now. Apple has simply been piling up the negative criticism with everything from its ridiculous legal attacks to its latest Mapsgate debacle. While Google has been going down the wrong path by setting itself up to bite back (see Motorola Mobility), I believe now to be the perfect time to turn the other cheek. Specifically with their Maps service.

The iPhone 5 has been a massive success for Apple. It’s only been out a week, but it’s already the fastest-selling iPhone in history, racking up 5 million units sold during its first three days of availability. But this isn’t just having a positive affect on Apple’s revenue; it’s also big business for iOS developers, who are seeing massive boosts to their download figures.

Quick, you’ve got five minutes and no budget and you need to great an interesting logo/graphic/text graphic for a presentation. Now generally I’d say you’d be hooped, however if you had taken a couple minutes and $5 today, I’d say you’ll probably be okay.

See, today’s $5 Friday app is Logoist—Easily Create Stunning Images With Logoist: Develop Professional Quality Images With Ease—and I remember trying this out a while back for a regular priced deal. I spent about 5 minutes and had something that I would be happy with for a presentation or a website mockup. Therefore, if you take a moment and grab this deal now, you’d got another tool in the kit. Another Hawkeye coolio arrow in your quiver to pull out when the need arises.

Tripod and lighting supremo Manfrotto — the Italian company whose name seems to combine the words “man” and “frottage” — is finally getting in on the iPhonegraphy game. And its Klyp looks to be every bit as sturdy and well thought out as the rest of its products.