Even though selling the iPhone can potentially bring carriers a huge influx of new customers, selling Apple’s treasured phone isn’t cheap. Before they were able to bring the iPhone to their network, Sprint had to give Apple $15.5 billion in committed purchases for four years, which sounded pretty crazy at the time.

In a recent interview, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse explained that committing to the iPhone was a huge risk, but ultimately, betting against Apple could have been disastrous.

iOS has a lot of great features, some of which are focused on preserving as much battery life as possible. One of them is the Auto-Lock feature, which defaults to dimming the screen of your iOS device after a really short period of time.

This obviously helps preserve battery life, as the less the screen is on at full brightness, the longer you’ll be able to use it on a single charge. If you’d like to control this, though, and even turn it off fully, it’s a simple trip into the Settings App.

Today, Apple re-uploaded the newest Siri ad, the one featuring Martin Scorsese, to its YouTube channel. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this type of thing happen on their channel, so I went to investigate.

It turns out that Apple just has a remarkable attention to detail. Thanks to the numerous people who always upload Apple’s ads, I was able to compare the new upload to the original. Here’s what I found.

With an update last week, iOS and Mac diary app Day One went from a tool for angst-mongering teens to full-fledged journal, adding support for photos (the original was pretty much text-only) and locations, and the ability to automatically pull in weather info.

But for serial hacker and tweaker Brett Terpstra, maker of the amazing Markdown preview app Marked, among many, many other things, this still wasn’t enough. So Brett wrote a tool called Slogger, which pulls in posts from your existing social networks and adds them to your Day One journal, rendering any text in Markdown, naturally.

The Tiki, from Blue Mic ($59), is a compact USB microphone designed to give you great audio for Skype calls and voice notes in rooms with even moderate ambient noise. And while Blue is known for creating mics that sound as good as they look, the Tiki’s beauty is only skin deep.

If you’re a professional photographer going to the London to cover the Olympics, you’d probably want to take a huge DSLR and a couple thousand dollars worth of extra lenses to get the best pictures possible, right? Wrong.

Dan Chung is covering the Olympics for The Guardian, only instead of using his fancy pants DSLR, Chung is capturing the entire event using only his iPhone 4S and some binoculars. He edits the photos using Snapseed before uploading them to the web, and the results are pretty impressive. Take a look for yourself.

Leap Motion‘s worldwide call for developers “to imagine and create the future” has resulted in a virtual stampede of interested parties applying for the Leap SDK, which will allow them to make apps using Leap Motion’s revolutionary 3D motion tracking technology.

Leap Motion is a San Francisco company developing the world’s most powerful and sensitive 3D motion-control and motion-sensing technology. Leap Motion’s first product, the Leap — featured with an exclusive hands-on video demonstration on Cult of Mac last month — will be available in early 2013. The Leap is the first product to let users navigate and interact with computer applications using natural hand and finger movements. Founded in 2010 by Michael Buckwald and David Holz (pictured), the company aims to revolutionize the way we interact with our computers.

Yesterday, Apple officially announced that the YouTube app will no longer be a default staple of iOS. While Google is working on a standalone app, Apple has informed developers that they will need to change their embedded YouTube URLs if they want them to continue to work.

In the changelog for iOS 6 beta 4, Apple explained the changes by linking to a video for one of the internet’s oldest memes – Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up video.

I’m a fan of lens caps over built-in lens covers on my cameras, mostly because 1) they never get stuck shut and 2) I can wander with my camera around my neck ready to shoot, and I don’t have to worry about whether the cap is on or not.

However, I have also lost and broken way more caps than I’d like to admit, and the safest place – my pocket – adds lint which inevitably ends up on the lens. What to do? I might try the ReadyCap, a handy spot to keep pretty much any cap you have.

Apple’s next iPhone is widely expected to feature a larger 4-inch display and slimmer form factor. While speculation has been that Apple will move to a larger display to accommodate the battery required for LTE 4G networking, exactly how Apple will implement a larger display has remained up in the air. Many seem to think that Apple will change the iPhone 5’s aspect ratio to 16:9 to match the taller display. According to new evidence found in Apple’s own iOS Simulator developer app, the iOS home screen can be scaled to fit a taller 640×1136 display with 5 rows of icons.

If you still need to turn your electronic documents into ink on paper, then FedEx will now let you print to its in-store photocopiers direct from your Dropbox, Box and Google Drive accounts.

There are plenty of stories out there about the explosive growth of mobile technology in the workplace. The trend towards bring your on device (BYOD) models in which employees are allowed or encouraged to bring their own iPhones, iPads, and other devices into the office is driving a massive expansion of the number of mobile devices used for work tasks. At the same time, the annual (or even more frequent) device an OS release cycles that have become common are driving up diversity of devices and resetting the mobile technology playing field every few months.

That constant change is forcing the IT professionals to adapt to new devices, apps, use cases, network models, and security threats faster than anything the IT industry has ever seen.

This is particularly visible in the mobile management space. A year ago, the primary method for handling mobile device and data security was to manage and lock down the device itself using one of dozens of mobile device management (MDM) suites on the market. Over the past six to nine months, however, MDM has been replaced by mobile app management (MAM) as the best way to secure business data. That’s a warp-speed transition in the mindset and goals of IT professionals.

Microsoft’s first tablet won’t reach customers until later this, but the company is already working on Surface 2. According to job adverts posted on its Microsoft Careers site between June and August, the company is “currently building the next generation” of “devices that fully express the Windows vision.”

The Geniuses at your local Apple Store are used to dealing with a wide assortment of complaints and problems. Broken harddrive, cracked iPhone screen, kidnapped woman? They can handle it all.

A few nights ago a kidnapped woman from Kentucky was forced to walk into an Apple store with her kidnapper who was trying to force her to purchase a bunch of Apple products with her credit cards. But thanks to an alert Apple Store employee, the woman was rescued and her kidnapper is now in the slammer.

Kodak is on the verge of bankruptcy, but in a final bid to raise some cash, the company is selling off its entire patent portfolio. The company believes it could fetch upwards of $2.6 billion, and Apple and Google are going head to head for them. However, neither company has submitted a bid anywhere near Kodak’s estimate.

A day after we started our campaign to turn him into an Internet meme, it seems like Apple is starting to be embarassed about their new Mac Guy ads. They’ve stopped airing the series of ads during Olympic television broadcasts.

Apple’s iPhone is so successful that the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, recently revealed that “each new generation sold approximately equal to all previous generations combined.” That’s pretty staggering when you think about it, and according to analyst firm Asymco, it could mean that Apple’s new iPhone will sell more than 263 million units.

Apple’s wireless accessories are great at conserving battery life… so great, in fact, that when they suddenly run out of juice, it can be a shock to the system, since you never knew they were hard up for electricity to begin with.

On a Mac, it’s fairly complicated to see battery life on your connected devices through System Preferences, but wouldn’t it be great if you could check them out in your menu bar, just like your Mac’s remaining battery life? Thanks to Battery Status, you can.

Remember Fluent? It was a webmail service which made your Gmail look like now-defunct iOS and Mac app Sparrow.

Now, like Sparrow (and the similar-looking Tweetie before it), Fluent is dead.

It’s likely to be at least a month before Apple releases iOS 6 to the public, and so it’s unlikely apps will receive iOS 6 support for a few weeks yet. But Spotify is getting its update out of the way early. Its latest iOS release — version 0.5.4 — brings iOS 6 support, more radio stations on the iPad, and bug fixes.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned blogging about Apple, it’s that the company doesn’t stand for copycats — especially when those copycats go after patents that Steve Jobs was particularly proud of. That’s what Samsung did when it copied Apple’s inertial scrolling feature, right after Jobs told them not to.

Are you an early adopter? So asks Beau Gunderson at Idego, via his Singly-powered nerd-boasting engine. Tap in your details and you will be told just how early you signed up for Instagram, Foursquare, Twitter and Gmail.

And if you were quick enough to get in before you were forced into a username like charliesorrel6969_solastyear, you might even want to grab the little widget to embed into whatever site you choose and show off your alpha-geek status.

Have you tried to get rid of an application or document from the Dock after an upgrade to Mountain Lion? Before now, it was a simple drag and release: click on the offending icon, drag it away from the Dock, and let go. The little “poof” cloud would appear and the icon would be gone from the Dock. New OS X users would freak out, crying, “You got rid of my app!” and I would laugh. Also, I would show them where the actual app was, and how to put the icon back in the Dock, as the icon is simply a pointer to the real app. But I digress.

In Mac OS X Mountain Lion, this doesn’t work in quite the same way anymore. Try to click, drag, and release just ends up with the icon speeding back to its previous place in the Dock. You want to get rid of it? You have to learn a new, subtly different behavior.

Sprint has a warehouse full of iPhone 4S units it needs to shift before Apple announces the new iPhone in September, which is great news for consumers. If you don’t plan on picking up the sixth-generation device later this year, you can now grab its predecessor for just $149 with a two-year contract. And if you buy online, Sprint will waive the $36 activation fee, too.

Apple wants Samsung to stump up a whopping $2.5 billion in damages for allegedly copying its iOS devices, but how much does Apple feel it is owed specifically for each device? A new court filing entitled “Summary of Apple’s Damages Calculations” provides a complete breakdown of the damages, and shows exactly which of Samsung’s Galaxy devices are accused of infringing Apple’s patents, and what the Cupertino company is demanding in damages for each one.