It was recently revealed that Verizon sells the iPhone 5 factory unlocked out of the box. Not only can you use the Verizon iPhone 5 on another CDMA carrier, but the device will also work on non-LTE GSM networks, like AT&T. U.S. carriers will typically unlock off-contract iPhones for free, but Verizon is selling the iPhone 5 unlocked with a two-year contract as well.

Buying an iPhone 5 at the full, unsubsidized price on AT&T doesn’t guarantee that it will be unlocked, but AT&T will typically grant unlock requests for customers in good standing. The same goes for AT&T iPhone owners who have fulfilled the life of their two-year contract.

There’s been multiple theories suggested to explain why Verizon is behaving this way, but the real reason is much simpler than you would think.

MacTech Conference 2012 in Los Angeles doesn’t start till October 17th 2012, but pre-registration is ending pretty soon — and with it your chance to save $300. If you’re interested in learning about all things Mac in some world-class sessions by some phenomenally brilliant Apple fans than you need to hurry and register.

MacTech 2012 will features special sessions with people like former Apple evangelist Matt Drance, and a special NASA Jet Propulsion Lan on “Interplanetary Networking, Curiosity Style.” You’ll even get to go over to Walt Disney Animation Studios and get a behind-the-scenes look at the advanced technology Disney uses to make their films.

We all knew this was coming. It was only a matter of time before Hitler found out about Apple’s new iOS 6 Maps. As you may have already guessed, der Führer isn’t all that happy with the new service and is quite irate over the fact that his house is listed as a fountain in Austria.

Watch the hilarity unfold as Hitler is informed that a Google Maps app has yet to be approved and his army is officially all out of 30-pin connectors.

Thieves love iPhones and Apple products. But the theives in New York City? Those dudes have a fiery lustful passion for Apple products. So much so that Apple product theft now accounts for 14 percent of all crime in New York City according to the NYPD. Even though NYC’s crime rate only rose four percent this year compared to 2011, Apple product theft rose a whopping 40 percent.

The iPhone 5 and iOS 6 have brought a new, more powerful Siri into the limelight. We thought it might be time to start looking for ways to best query the spunky digital assistant for a variety of tasks, like checking the weather, for example.

Being able to use your voice to find out the forecast for the next several days is a fantastic feature that more folks might use, if only they knew the right way to ask. While Siri definitely handles natural-language questions with aplomb, you can help her understand your intent better by using the following types of questions.

The iPhone 5 is packed with all sorts of neat new hardware internals that Apple has poured their energy and R&D dollars into. Its camera is ridiculously thin, and the processor has been custom designed and manually layed out for maximum efficiency, but there’s another new hardware feature no one’s talking about.

One secret of the iPhone 5 is that it contains a chip that may have been included just so it will work on the world’s largest mobile carrier – China Mobile – giving Apple access to 700 million new potential customers.

The Wahoo Blue HR ($79) heart rate strap performs a neat trick: by pairing with your iPhone (4S or 5 only) via Bluetooth, it allows you to transform your favorite iOS device into any of the amazing heart rate monitors available on the App Store today. Even better, it works with all the best cycling and running apps too, so now you can monitor your heart and calories on your rides or runs.

iOS 6's Passbook app isn't just for big-business companies to use. Yes, you'll be able to use it to check in to your flights, and to get discounts at your favorite international coffee chain, but now mom and pop stores, your local food cart or even a stall at the local flea market will be able to offer you coupons and membership, using a new free app called People's Card.

Apple’s Find My iPhone feature is great for whenever you lose your iPhone or MacBook, but what about when you lose other stuff, like a wallet, dog, luggage, camera, keys, or anything else? There are a few GPS solutions that you can attach to everything you prize most in life, but that’s kind of costly.

FinderCodes is a new service that is trying to make QR codes actually useful by allowing people to attach one to everything they love so it can be traced back to them through the FinderCodes database. It’s simple, but more elegant than writing your name, address, and phone number on everything.

The iPhone isn’t the only thing that looks more handsome when it gets taller and thinner. Bookbindery cases get better looking too, as you can see with event he quickest glance and Pad&Quill’s new Little Pocket Book. Stretched lengthwise and squashed a little depth-wise, it’s “thinnest we have ever made,” says P&Q honcho Brian Holmes.

Remember when Buster found an iPhone at the bottom of a river while he was floating down it on an inner-tube? The previous owner had the right idea: he sealed it in a plastic bag to keep out the elements. But he forgot one thing: Even in a bag, the short, heavy, ugly iPhone 4 will sink like, well, like last year's crappy iPhone.

What he should have used was Coghlan's Dry Pouch.

Apple’s new Lightning connector is freaking teeny tiny and incredibly awesome. Apple managed to shrink the connector down to just eight contact pins and give it the ability to insert it in either orientation. While some users may have wished for Apple to use micro-USB, the Lightning connector is full of amazing little pieces of tech that make it a lot better than other options.

Rainer Brockerhoff has been doing an autopsy on the Lightning connector all weekend and has discovered some really cool features. For instance, did you know that the Lightning connector has the ability to detect which types of devices it’s connected to and re-assign pin functionalities for each situation?

Oh sure now Apple decides to improve their ear buds! I haven’t tried them, but I’m not convinced. Regardless of the hype around the new Apple earbuds (I’ll have to try the new design, right now my Apple ear buds are purely “backup” when all other options aren’t available), I think it’s worth checking out earbuds from folks who just do earbuds.

We’ve had BodyGaurdz here before, but I think this is the first time we’ve had a pair with a mic—BodyGuardz Moxy Earbuds With Mic—which is a must-have for me. See I don’t want to carry a set of earbuds for music and something else for calls (or worse have to use the iPhone or iPad mic for calls when using earbuds). It’s about having a compact kit, you know?

 If you ever lose your iPhone 5 and have to track it down using iCloud.com’s Find My iPhone web app, you can at least rest assured that you’ll have the best mapping data available to track it down, because iCloud.com is still using Google Maps.

Even though Apple has switched the Find My iPhone iOS app to use Apple Maps, their website is still using Google Maps to provide location information on lost devices. Users can log in to iCloud.com and go to Find My iPhone to see where their devices are located on a Google Maps app rather than Apple’s new map app that users have complained about.

You're in a hotel room, and you want to hook up to the in-room Wi-Fi. And guess what? It sucks, just like at every other hotel you ever stayed at. So Instead you dig out your MacBook and hook it up to the hotel's Ethernet cable, and use internet sharing to generate your own wireless network.

Wait… The newest MacBooks Air don't have Ethernet ports. But don't worry: you can pick up the $60 mySpot from Kanex, a little dongle which takes an Ethernet connector and turns its sweet network payload into a wireless cloud, ready for all your iDevices and your non-Ethernet MacBook Air.

 The iPhone 5 is an incredible smartphone. I’ve been using mine since it arrived on my doorstep at 7:48 p.m. the day after launch day (after a painfully long wait), and I love it. It’s spectacularly thin and light, it’s beautiful — like most Apple products — and that larger display is such a welcome improvement. If you’re upgrading to a new iPhone, you may want to check how Apple purchases can now be migrated between accounts for a seamless transition.

I chose the white and silver model — I’ve had white iPhones for as long as they’ve been available — and I think it’s the prettiest gadget I’ve ever owned. It’s also powerful, and noticeably faster than my already snappy iPhone 4S. Its battery life is excellent, and so is the camera.

Overall, I have a long list of positive things to say about the iPhone 5 — the hardware is just unbeatable. But I think there’s one thing letting it down, and that’s iOS 6.

We already know a few details about the A6 chip thanks to iFixit’s immaculate teardown, but there’s still a lot to learn about how much hard work Apple put into custom designing their A6 chip.

iFixit teamed up with Chipworks to dive into Apple’s A6 processor to find out what makes Apple’s new chip so special. To their surprise, the team found out that Apple manually laid out each of the Dual Arm Corse, making it the first manual layout chip to hit the market in several years.

Some gadget accessories just keep coming back, getting useful again after they've been sat at the back of a kitchen drawer of a closet for a few months, or even a few years. I have an acrylic business-card display thingy which has done duty as an iPad 1 stand, a speaker hook, a phone charging station and –right now — an iPad 3 movie-watching stand. And I thought €8 was expensive for a piece of bent Perspex.

The ItFits looks like that kind of accessory. It bends to fit almost any small phone-sized gadget, and acts as both a stand and a clip. Let's take a look:

Twelve South has today announced a new height-adjustable stand for iMac called HiRise, which claims the be the first adjustable stand to offer a built-in storage bay — the perfect place to store your external hard drives, cables, discs, and even your wallet and keys.

We’ve had scrollbars nearly since the invention of graphical user interfaces. At first they were bulky, ugly, eyesores that took up precious screen real estate. But now they’re elegant and simple. The image above shows some of the major scrollbar changes throughout UI design, and sure does make us glad we’re not stuck with the Apple Lisa scrollbars anymore.

Source: Reddit

While the vast majority of us couldn’t be happier with our new iPhone 5s, a number of users who decided to purchase the black & slate model have noticed that its anodized aluminum finish is prone to chipping and scratching. Unfortunately, it’s not an isolated issue affecting a certain batch of black devices, either — it appears to be affecting them all.

Could this be an issue Apple quickly needs to address? No. Apparently not. According to the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, those chips and scratches are “normal.”

It seemed like Apple was coping well with the iPhone 5 demand, despite it being the company’s fastest-selling iPhone to date. Sure, pre-orders sold out within the first hour of availability, but those who were told they wouldn’t get their new smartphone until October have already begun receiving shipping notifications.

But iPhone 5 production may have hit a stumbling black. The handset’s new 4-inch display, which boasts in-cell touch technology that allows it to be incredible thin, it reportedly causing “significant production constraints” that mean Apple cannot produce the device fast enough.

Adobe has launched new, simpler versions of its Elements editing apps for the desktop: Photoshop Elements (photos) and Premier elements (video). These are already cut-down versions of Photoshop and Premier, and are already simplified, but the newer versions go further still.

While I was researching an OS X Tips column for later this week, I came across a .sit file. Now, if you’ve been working with Macs as long as I have (my first Mac was a Performa 638 CD, just before PowerMacs showed up), you’ll know all about .sit files and how to open them.

For those of you new to Macs, especially Mountain Lion, which only seems to handle .zip file archives, you might be a bit stumped as to how to open a .sit file. Well, luckily this old guy is here to tell you how.

Speaking at a company event in Sydney, Australia, this week, Apple co-founder and everyone’s favorite geek Steve Wozniak spoke out about Apple’s new Maps service, which got its public debut alongside iOS 6 last Wednesday. Like most of us, Woz says he’s disappointed with the new app, and that Google’s Maps service is better. However, he doesn’t feel that the issues users have been experiencing are “that severe.”