Rumors surrounding Apple’s next iPhone have reached a fever pitch in the weeks leading up to the expected announcement date, September 12th. With pre-orders rumored to begin on the same day, Apple is expected to see record sales this holiday season. Anticipation for the next iPhone is higher than it’s ever been, and smartphone sales from the past quarter reflect that fact.

Gartner’s results for Q2 show slowed iPhone growth, with Apple sitting behind Samsung and Nokia in worldwide smartphone sales.

IM+ and IM+ Pro, two hugely popular messaging apps from Shape Services, have been updated today to introduce a new feature dubbed “Off-the-Record” messaging. It’s a $4.99 in-app purchase that allows users to have secret, encrypted conversations with other IM+ users.

Meta is yet another photo filter app for the iPhone, but if you have any interest in this kind of thing, you should just go and buy it right now (it’s just one lousy buck).

Meta gives you a bunch of live filters through which you can snap pictures, and lets you share and upload to the usual places. The difference here is that the filters are genuinely new, and that you’re going to love them.

Burglars have broken into Steve Jobs’s family home in Northern California and stolen more than $60,000 worth of “computers and personal items.” 35-year-old Kariem McFarlin, of Alameda, has been arrested and charged with residential burglary and selling stolen property.

Update: This deal is wrapping up and so is the Retina MacBook Pro Giveaway!

Following up on the suggestion to pick up HydraPro before you head off on holidays, here are another couple apps you should toss into your (virtual) kit—Inpaint and iResizer. Why? Because these two apps combined solve one of the most common issues with photos—getting rid of stuff you don’t want in your pictures.

Inpaint helps you remove objects, people, date stamps, or flaws in your pictures. iResizer let’s you take out one element in a picture, remove it, and move the other parts of the image around like it wasn’t ever there. Sweet, eh? More after the jump.

It’s pretty clear that the original Macintosh and the iPad are the same device, separated only by almost three decades of technology. So it’s somehow fitting to clip ThinkGeek’s latest offering onto the back of your modern-day computer-for-the-rest-of-us and pretend that it’s an old 1984-vintage Mac.

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of inserting an old floppy of Jordan Mechner’s classic beat-em-up Karateka into a vintage Apple II, you already know it’s one of the most timelessly classic video ames ever made.

Ever tried inserting the floppy disk upside down, though? If you’re one of the few people who have, whether by accident or design, you’ve experienced one of the greatest and funniest Apple easter eggs of all time: the whole game played upside down.

Launchpad tries to bring an iOS-style app interace to OS X. Whether you like it or not, it’s here to stay. Introduced in OS X Lion, Launchpad arranges the apps you have installed on your Mac in a grid array, much like the apps are arranged on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Of course, your Mac has a much bigger screen than these iOS devices (hopefully), so there’s even more of a need to filter out the apps you don’t want so that you can find the apps you do want to find.

In iOS, as you get more and more apps installed on your device, you’re gonna end up swiping to the right of the home screen at some point and typing the name of an app into the Search field there. Prior to Mountain Lion, there was no way to do this in OS X. Now, however, there is, and I sincerely hope they bring this concept back to enrich iOS itself.

If you’ve been waiting with bated breath for Apple’s official iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S bumper to come in (PRODUCT) Red, or just want your iPhone case to help fight AIDS in Africa as well as scratches, good news: you can now buy a (PRODUCT) Red iPhone bumper on the Apple online store for just $29.00, with shipping happening in between 4-6 business days. Who is getting one?

Source: Apple
Thanks: Nick G!

Verizon Wireless has announced that Viewdini is making its debut on iOS today, allowing users with an iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad 2, or new iPad to enjoy the video-on-demand service on the go. The app provides access to both free and subscription-based providers, including Comcast Xfinity, Hulu Plus, mSpot, Netflix, Vimeo, and more.

With Nintendo adamant it’ll never bring its games to iOS, the only way to enjoy your favorite titles on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is to jailbreak your device and download an emulator. But that’s no longer the case. You can now enjoy more than 100 NES and Game Boy games in your iPhone’s web browser.

Remember that Big Bang Theory episode where Sheldon decides he won’t live long enough to download his consciousness into a robot body to attain immortality, so he hides himself in his room to focus on eating healthy and avoiding the dangers of life, both real and imagined? No? Well, you really should watch The Big Bang Theory more. It’s on the CBS website.

Anyway, in the episode, Sheldon uses what he calls the “Shelbot” to narrowcast his face into a wheeled robot with a big giant monitor on the top of it and a T-Shirt hanging from the front.

Now, for a measley $2400, you can do the same thing, only with iPads. I love the future.

Apple claims that its internal research shows that the main reason US smartphone consumers purchased an Android phone instead of an iPhone was in order to stay with their current carrier. The study only covers the US smartphone marked and was brought up by Samsung today as court evidence in the patent infringement trial between the two companies in Northern California.

The study was published at Apple in January of 2011, and shows that 48 percent of those surveyed said that they had went with an Android phone because they “wanted to stay with current wireless provider.”

36 percent said that they “trusted the Google brand,” while 30 percent just like bigger screens. Sometimes, bigger *is* better, according to these folks.

In the latest drama in the contentious Apple-Samsung patent trial, Samsung accused Apple of trying to extend the range of authorship of its patent holdings through sales figures of global products not covered by U.S. law.

Lawyers for Samsung explained that three phones that have been repeatedly used as examples of exact replication by Apple are not, in fact, sold in the US and have been trying to throw them out of evidence. Their argument is that if the phones are not really sold in the U.S., and there are no significant marketing attempts to help sell them, then there is no reason they should be admitted in a U.S. court where they don’t have any effect on Samsung’s or Apple’s sales.

Each week Apple selects a paid App Store app and makes it totally free. CultCast listeners may know this already, but I’m a huge fan of Kayak for creating trip itineraries and ordering plane tickets, hotel rooms, etc.

There’s a free version of Kayak in the App Store that runs on the iPhone and iPad, but there’s also a pro version with additional features that normally sells for $1.

Earlier this year I praised Skip Tunes as a simple, gorgeously designed Mac menu bar app for controlling music. The best thing about Skip Tunes is that it can control not only iTunes playback, but Spotify and Rdio as well. Verizon 2.0 of the app has arrived in the Mac App Store, and the update packs some nice features.

One of the challenges of 21st century education is determining the appropriate ways to use technology in the classroom. That’s a challenge that each school or district needs to confront in its own way. One thing that is universal, however, is that the policies and processes put into place around technology need to come from an ongoing dialog between teachers, school administrators, and IT professionals.

While some schools may have restrictive policies, those policies are emblematic of the community to which the schools belongs. They are the policies that the school itself and the parents of its students feel are needed to protect its students. Those policies also teach students what is acceptable behavior and how to protect themselves in the online world.

Lots of people love to jailbreak the Apple TV, but the process of unlocking the little hockey puck’s full potential can be a pain. When you want to jailbreak an iPhone or iPad, it’s as easy as downloading the free Absinthe tool, plugging your device into your Mac, and clicking a button. Once you’re jailbroken, Cydia is automatically installed as an alternative App Store for finding tweaks and apps.

On the Apple TV, it’s not so easy. Sure, the actual process of jailbreaking isn’t that difficult, but aside from staple packages like aTV Flash (black), you have to manually install third-party Apple TV apps via a command line interface on a connected desktop computer.

A new installer app for the Mac called Nito makes it much easier to install third-party apps on a jailbroken Apple TV.

The Tweetbot for Mac public Alpha has received a significant update today that packs several new features, including the ability to edit a profile. Borrowing from the popular iOS version of Tweetbot, users can now setup muted keywords on the Mac. Many of you will be happy to learn that animated support for .gif images (like these) have been baked into this version as well.

Photos take up a lot of space on our iOS devices. It’s important to many of us with the lower end iPhones to leave enough room on the device to capture new photos, let alone apps and music and books.

With the advent of Photostream, it’s easy to have the photos we take on our iPhone show up on our Macs or iPads, so deleting them from the iPhone makes a lot of sense and is much less of a scary proposition. Here’s how.

I do all my work these days on an iPad. From organizing reviews through gathering story ideas to actually writing posts and features, and even photographing and editing gadgets for those reviews, it’s all — every last bit — done on Apple’s tablet. I just spent two weeks away from home using the iPad’s 3G connection to work, only opening up my MacBook to sync my FitBit.

And they still say the iPad is just for consumption.

One of the biggest problems with the iPad has been writing blog posts. You really did need a Mac to take care of the multiple browser windows and — most of all — the image uploading. Now, though, while there isn’t quite a wealth of options, there are certainly several credible methods to do this all from the iPad. So make a coffee, sit back and enjoy this how-to:

Apple is expected to unveil the next iPhone at a rumored media event Wednesday, September 12th. Today iMore reports that Apple will start U.S. pre-orders for the sixth-gen iPhone on the same day as the announcement. International customers will reportedly have to wait until the first week of October to place pre-orders.

iMore originally reported the September 12th announcement date and an in-store U.S. release date of Friday, September 21st.

When I first glimpsed the Highline, I teased, calling it “an almost spectacularly misguided idea.” The Highline is a curly cable which hooks into your iDevice’s 30-pin dock connector and keeps it safe from drops and attempted snatch-and-grabs. Despite my conclusions, the kind folks at Kenu sent one over to the Cult of Mac test labs to check out. And while I’d probably never have a use for one, it turns out that it does its job just fine.

Apple is often accused by the likes of Samsung that it is unwilling to license its technology to competitors, but that’s not true. In fact, Apple has licensed many of its design patents to Microsoft, under the condition of an “anti-cloning agreement” that prevents Microsoft from releasing mere doppelgangers of the iPhone and iPad. You know, like Apple is accusing Samsung of doing.

Your iPhone contains a whole lotta information about your personal life. You got your bank apps, email, text messages, phone calls, browsing history, plus all those embarrassing songs you listen to on Spotify you don’t want people to know about.

You don’t expect to get hardcore encryption security on a tiny iPhone, and when the iPhone was first released in 2007 you didn’t. Huge security holes allowed  hackers to easily take over the device, but Apple learned from their mistakes, and now your iPhone is like a freaking Fort Knox for data. Even the NSA is having a hard time breaking iPhone encryption, and it’s frustrating the hell out them.