Cult of Mac

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell knows a thing about Microsoft. After all, he initially founded Valve Software — makers of such mega-hits as the Half-Life, Portal and Left 4 Dead series, as well as the popular Steam digital delivery service — using the millions he made working for Microsoft for 13 years.

So when Gabe Newell says that he thinks Windows 8 is going to be apocalyptical for PC makers and cause OEMs to start fleeing the platform in droves, it’s worth paying attention. Especially since Valve’s Steam delivery service is putting increasing emphasis on Windows alternative OSes like Linux and, yes, the Mac.

There’s always been a stigma around Apple products that they’re really just made for rich people. Almost all of Apple’s machine’s cost well over $1000, and the iPhone and iPad are two of the most expensive products in their categories.

Some people say only rich people can afford Apple products, and maybe they have a small point.  A recent report shows that Apple is the company of choice for users whose net worth is more than $100,000, and it just become more popular the more money you earn.

Sprint announced its financial results for the second quarter of 2012 today, which includes “strong” iPhone sales of 1.5 million units. 40% of these devices went to new customers, but they couldn’t help the carrier get out of the red. It reported a net loss of $1.2 billion over the three-month period, compared to a net loss of $847 million for the same quarter last year.

Earlier this month, we thought Boxcar had given on third-party push notifications for iOS. But it seems that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, the service is about to get a new lease of life after being acquired by Kwaga, the company behind WriteThat.name.

With the Safari 6.0 update, Apple decided we don’t need no stinkin’ RSS button in our web browser, so they took it out. Whether you agree with Cupertino or not is beside the point, the RSS button is gone and it’s probably not coming back.

Thankfully, one developer spotted the change months ago and already has a quick solution to bring back the RSS button to Safari.

Sprint may be a noob in the LTE market, but that isn’t going to stop them from bringing their LTE network to more cities across the U.S. Come Labor Day, you can expect four new cities to be basking in the increased speed of Sprint’s 4G LTE network. Announced today, Sprint will be lighting up the following cities very soon:

With the launch of Mountain Lion, Apple also pushed out an update to Safari which removed the RSS button so many people loved. We received a lot of email over the past 24 hours asking what the best RSS Reader Apps for Mac are, but we figure you guys read just as much news as us, so why not ask you.

What’s the best RSS Reader App for Mac, and why? What do you look for most in an RSS Reader?

CLICK HERE TO TELL US YOUR FAVORITE RSS READER APP IN OUR FORUMS

The iPhone Dev-Team have confirmed that the latest version of Redsn0w is fully compatible with Apple’s new OS X Mountain Lion software. However, until it has been signed with a Developer ID, you’ll have to bypass Gatekeeper to use it.

Here’s something cool you may not have noticed yet. With its new Keynote update, released alongside Pages and Numbers yesterday, Apple replaced the unique icon that features the somewhat depressing lyrics to The Bitch of the Living by Spirit Awakening with a new 2012 icon that displays a famous quote from the company’s Think Different commercial. The same quote now appears on several of Apple’s Mac OS X icons.

If you have been desperately seeking a Bluetooth speaker which looks like a video projector, or a small, mains-powered electric fan heater, then your search is over! Behold: the Croon, the wireless/wired
speaker of your twisted dreams.

Like a healthy baby in utero with all its fingers and toes showing on the ultrasound, we’ve now got a pretty good picture of what the next iPhone will look like: longer, thinner, a new metallic back, a smaller 19 pin dock connector and, of course, a bigger 4-inch display.

It’s going to be a beautiful phone, but what next? It’s unlikely that Apple will do another major iPhone revision for awhile, which means future iPhones will, for the forseeable future, probably just refine the forthcoming design.

Here’s a beautiful concept of what the iPhone’s design could look like in the next couple of years, courtesy of French designer Nak.

It didn’t take long for OS X Mountain Lion to hit the top of the Mac App Store’s paid chart following its release yesterday, which means Apple shifted a heck of a lot of copies on day one. In fact, it sold so many copies that traffic from the Cupertino company’s servers was up to six times higher than normal.

There are a few ways to keep your phone juiced as you ride. Those with foresight will have specced a wheel with a dynamo hub and USB adapter. Those who live in sunnier climes might opt for a solar panel. ANd those who lack both good weather and good planning skills can grab the Tigra BikeCharge, an iPhone charger that will fit any bike.

Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has over 200 new features. One of them resides in the Preview app, Apple’s answer to all of our PDF and image viewing needs. Mountain Lion tweaks the toolbar a bit, adds a new one, and allows a simpler annotation process. There’s also a new sharing option to go along with the highly publicized Documents in the Cloud initiative.

It’s hard to believe that it was just a little more than a year ago that Apple released OS X Lion. Only twelve months later, and we’re now staring right down the maw of Apple’s ninth major release of Mac OS X: Mountain Lion.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion signifies a new approach on Apple’s part towards OS X updates: instead of going years between major releases, Cupertino is trying to take the rapid release approach that has worked so well for them with iOS and apply it to the Mac.

Mountain Lion, then, feels in many ways less like OS X 10.8 than OS X 10.7.5: a smaller, more tightly focused update continuing what OS X Lion started, taking iOS’s best ideas and bringing them to Mac.

Thanks to major breakthrough features like iCloud syncing, Notification Center, Sharing, AirPlay Mirroring and more, there’s less of a distinction in Mountain Lion between the Mac and iOS than ever. But is that a good thing, and how will it change the way you use your Mac?

Earlier this month, I wrote an opinion piece that put forward a number of reasons why Microsoft’s new Surface tablet may have a surprising impact on the iPad. That was based on the assumption that the Surface would be priced competitively — like Microsoft said it would be.

But according to one European retailer, the entry-level slate running Windows RT — not full Windows 8 — will be priced from 6990 kr (Swedish Krona), which is approximately $1,013. If this is correct, Microsoft is wasting its time on releasing the Surface, and Apple needn’t worry about it stealing any of the iPad’s market share.

Path just pushed out a new update to its iPhone app, introducing a number of nifty new features. Users now have the ability to share their favorite films and books, send personal invitations with their own message to their friends, snap photos using the volume button and then edit them with Path’s new tools, and more.

We showed you how to switch on Power Nap on your Mountain Lion-running, SSD-equipped Mac, but just what does this new feature do?

We know that you Mac enters a kind of robotic REM sleep, where it’s brain activity spikes and the network connections power up to download various bits of data, just like Newsstand on iOS. But a new Apple Knowledge Base article outlines the surprising number of tasks which are going on under the sleepy-lidded hood.

Let’s keep this short and sweet. The amazing iStack Mac Bundle ends today (Thursday). This is it. Last chance.
No more excuses or “I’ll get it tomorrow” or “I don’t know will I really use all those apps…”. Look, the best thing about these bundles is that there are hidden gems that you didn’t know you needed until you have them. Maybe for you it will be Disk Drill to fix your Mac. Maybe it will be SnagIt to grab an image. Maybe it will be Text Soap when you have a mailing list to fix up. The only thing left for you is to…

Let me paint a scenario for you. You’re a creative type. Maybe professionally or as a hobby or maybe you’re just the go-to person in the office. You need to pull a rabbit out of your hat—again— and you’ve got nuthin‘. Like less than nuthin’. What you need are some creative resources to browse through and use for your project.

Most of us have a few things stashed away to use, but those get old and stale fast. Which is why from time to time you need to pick up some new fonts, textures, graphics, icons, and such. Something like The Creative Design Bundle 2.0.

Can’t find Mountain Lion’s Power Nap feature anywhere on your MacBook Air? Apple has issued a new firmware update to bring the feature to 2011-2012 models. In case you didn’t know, Power Nap is a system management feature in Mountain Lion that silently fetches your emails, iCloud data, software updates, etc. while your Mac sleeps. For Power Nap to work, your Mac must be connected to a power source. The Mountain Lion feature works only on Macs with an internal SSD drive, like the MacBook Air and mid-2012 MacBook Pro models.

Power Nap doesn’t seem to be included on all Macs running the newly-released Mountain Lion OS, but this new firmware update should restore any issues for MacBook Air users.

Rumors of Facebook rebuilding its official iPhone app have been circulating since The New York Times reported the news last month. Instead of an aesthetic redesign, Facebook was said to be focusing on fundamental improvements under the hood. The update was said to launch this summer. Interestingly, Facebook has also been hiring former Apple engineers who worked on the iPhone and iPad to help build a Facebook-centric smartphone with HTC as a device partner.

A new report today reiterates that Facebook is indeed building a speedier iPhone app, and that former Apple talent is helping build up Facebook’s mobile presence.

Steam, the online computer gaming portal, keeps track of what hardware its players are using to access the many games in its service.

Of interest in the exhaustive list of specs is the fact that 49.46 percent of Mac gamers on Steam game on a Macbook Pro. Which makes sense, of course, as that’s a pretty powerful laptop. From there, we see the iMac coming in at 28 percent, plain-jane MacBooks garnering 9.49 percent, and the MacBook Air, my personal machine, used by 6.29 percent of Mac Steam gamers. The MacBook Pro and MacBook Air both rose in the hardware charts, with an increase of .44 and .89 percent, respectively.

As reported earlier today, Apple has indeed updated its relatively new Podcasts app for iOS with a number of major bug fixes and stability improvements. It’s gracious to say that the original version of Podcasts had some… issues. Namely, podcasts wouldn’t always sync via iCloud between devices and the app as a whole was super sluggish.

With this new 1.0 update, many of the issues plaguing current users should be addressed.

If you’re worried about Microsoft’s 2011 Office Suite not working with Apple’s latest jungle cat, don’t sweat it. The guys and gals in Redmond have confirmed that both the 2011 and 2008 versions of Office are indeed fully compatible with the newly-released OS X Mountain Lion.

Microsoft wants its users to make sure Office for Mac’s AutoUpdate is enabled “to make the most of the upgrade to Mountain Lion” with future updates. Mountain Lion’s Gatekeeper security means that you’ll need to use Microsoft’s AutoUpdate tool to keep Office for Mac current.