With the MacBook Pro, Air and iMac lineups all expected to see a refresh at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference next week, it looks like the seemingly-abanonded Mac Pro will also be updated. Apple has begun pulling Mac Pro stock from its retail stores and online shipping estimates are also starting to slip. This type of activity is typical right before a new version of an Apple product is announced, as Apple clears out its old inventory to make room for the new.

The Mac Pro saw its last refresh in July of 2010, and many have begun to lose faith that Apple will continue to support its ‘pro’ users as the company transitions to being more consumer-oriented. It would seem that we can all be hopeful for the future of the Mac Pro, as the machine is about to see its first refresh in nearly two years.

Apple today released a very minor update for the second and third-gen Apple TV. iOS 5.0.2 is available now, and the release follows version 5.0.1 released for the Apple TV on May 10th.

No new changes have been provided for 5.0.2 other than, “Addresses an issue which caused content restrictions to be incorrectly applied for the iTunes Store in Australia.” You can download the update now on your Apple TV set-top box.

It’s been rumored that Apple will unveil a totally new Apple TV OS to developers at WWDC. We’ll have to wait and see what Apple announces at Moscone next week.

Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference is set to kick off next Monday with a media keynote, and signage for the conference is already being put up. We expected the banners to start going up Friday afternoon, but Apple has started decorating earlier than normal.

Thousands of developers will fill the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California all next week, and Apple is expected to unveil iOS 6, new Macs, and some other surprises. It’s going to be a wild week!

Update: We’ve gotten more pics from the Moscone Center for you to check out.

Apple’s tower of power, the Mac Pro, hasn’t been updated in almost two years, but on our latest CultCast, we’ll tell you why that could soon change.

And, did you catch Tim Cook at last week’s All Things D conference? We’ll get you up-to-date quick as we analyze and scrutinize every little thing he said (and didn’t!).

All that and our answers to your questions on our brand new CultCast. Subscribe now in iTunes and read on through for our show notes.

Microsoft may end up facing even steeper competition in the tablet arena than it expected. Seeking to establish a a foothold in the tablet market at a lower price point than full fledged Windows 8 tablets, Microsoft developed Windows RT. Windows RT is a variation of Windows 8 that will run on tablets powered by ARM processors rather than Intel x86/x64 chips,. While the full details about Windows RT tablets aren’t yet available, the information that is out there makes it pretty clear that Windows RT tablets could be a tough sell to business and enterprise markets.

Competing just on business and enterprise features actually gives the iPad a leg up over Windows RT devices. Making the situation look grim for Microsoft, research firm IDC believes that the company may not be able to compete against the iPad on price in either the business or consumer markets.

Whale Trail, one of my favorite iPhone and iPad games to date, just received its biggest update yet today in the App Store. Version 2.0 of the popular side-scroller includes several new features, including a new system for unlocking and upgrading power-ups in the game.

Have you ever been making a phone call and had an email notification chime in your ear? Or how bout a banner notification pop up during a game or video? Sometimes you may just want to get away from alerts and incoming messages. Instead of notification after notification endlessly causing vibrations in your pocket, why not tell your iPhone that you’re out for lunch?

It would be nice for Apple to implement a “Do Not Disturb” feature into the iOS Notification Center, but until that day comes, jailbreakers can tell Notification Center to shut up with a couple of handy Cydia tweaks.

The iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S’s Retina Displays are already ludicrously pixel packed at 326 ppi, but even so, that’s only enough pixels to make it so that the human eye can’t resolve them when the phone is held twelve inches away from your face.

Apple can do better, and maybe someday they will, thanks to Japan Display’s new technology which squeeze 651 pixels per inch into an LCD screen. Their latest display has a resolution of 1280 x 800, the same as the existing 13-inch MacBook Pro, but is only 2.3 inches across.

That’s just one ppi from a true pixel doubling, which Apple has done for iOS devices to maintain backwards compatibility amongst apps and UI elements. If Apple picked this technology up, they’d finally have a display that was “retina” in the truest sense of the term… albeit, at four times the impact on the GPU.

Source: Tech-On
Via: Gizmodo

The paperless office is something we’ve been aiming at for at least a decade, if not longer. With the proliferation of affordable yet powerful digital devices like the iPhone and the iPad, the dream may be more in reach that we realize. David Sparks has released an iBook (created with iBooks Author, no less) that will help us all use less and less paper in our lives.

Apple typically score high in brand loyalty and product satisfaction. As a result, it doesn’t come as a huge surprise to hear that the new iPad and iPad 2 are leading tablet satisfaction surveys. Nor is it surprising that the iPads aren’t just scoring better than other tablets, they’re kicking some Android butt.

According to the latest numbers from Changewave, 81% of new iPad owners are very satisfied with their devices and while an additional 15% are somewhat satisfied. That means 96% of users can be called happy with the new iPad.

Imagine that you stood in one place and took a bunch of photos in different directions. Now imagine that you printed these photos onto glass sheets and arranged them in the same planes that they were shot: the picture you took of the sky is horizontal, facing down. The mountain off to the left is upright and facing right.

Now imagine that these pieces of glass magically intersect to make a lattice which you can turn to view, and that those pieces of glass disappear from view when they are edge on.

You just imagined Stilla, a great new iPhone app which does all of this for you, without harming a single sheet of glass.

The Somersault ($90), from iBackFlip Studios, is a sling-style backpack built to give you quick, on-the-go access to the tablet it is also sworn to protect: your iPad.

It works like this. While traversing life’s urban landscapes, you keep the Somersault on your back, iPad stowed safely within. When you want to use your iDevice, you simply swing the bag around to your chest, unzip the iPad storage pocket, and now your iPad sits perpendicular to your stomach, ready and waiting for all your oily finger-poking.

Google has announced its acquisition of leading mobile office solution Quickoffice. Quickoffice has proved to be one of the most powerful mobile office suites available and has shared success across multiple mobile platforms including Android and iOS. It’s tough to tell what Google has planned for the office suite but we’re sure it involves Google Docs, Google Drive, and a host of other productivity apps.

There’s no telling what the future will hold for the Quickoffice suite currently on iOS, as well as platforms other than Android — but one has to wonder: will Google simply kill them off or keep them after they integrate its features into their own apps? Details are bit scarce at this point but we’ll keep you updated.

Looks like Google is on another acquisition kick, as they’ve been scooping up companies left and right over the past month. We certainly welcome this latest addition and look forward to the Quickoffice integration.

Source: Google Blog

Let’s face it: the iPhone is the Hot Rod of smartphones. If Steve McQueen was still alive, he’d own one; Jay Leno probably has a hanger filled with a hundred of them. Nothing seems more appropriate to me, then, but to see a Hot Rod style exhaust snaking out of an iPhone. The iPhone is the most powerful thing you can drive that fits in your pocket.

That’s just what the iXoost dock does. It’s a speaker dock handbuilt by Xoost in Italy that grafts some gorgeous aluminum exhaust pipes onto your iPhone.

Cricket Mobile’s recent announcement that they will be selling the iPhone 4 and 4S to prepaid customers (while offering enormous savings over traditional plans) seems to have started an avalanche, as now Sprint’s Virgin Mobile prepaid brand is reported to be following their lead.

You might have heard that today’s a pretty special day, astronomically speaking. Venus is in transit between Earth and the Sun today, which is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Today only, right before sunset in the United States, if you look up at the sun, you’ll be able to see the silhouetted Venus passing between us and our life-giving star. And due to the differences between Venus’s solar year and our own orbit around the Sun, you’ll have to wait a hundred years until this event happens again.

In other words, if you’re American, you don’t want to miss this if you have any curiosity about the heavens at all. And luckily, there’s an app that will help you make sure you don’t.

Remember Favs, the Mac app which collects your favorite items from pretty much any service on the internet and puts them all together in one place? Well, now you can use it on the iPhone, too: Favs for iOS just launched and it looks like a great way to keep track of your starred items when on the go.

I want to lose weight. Really. I mean, I just gained 30lbs over the last 18months thanks to the magical folks at Chipotle and it’s time for a change. Problem is, every time I invite my friends to come jogging with me plans fall through and then I have another excuse to inhale half of a blueberry cheesecake.

Admittedly, I’ve sunk pretty low, but I’m not sure if I’ve reached the point where I need a robot to whip me into shape. Maybe I do though, and the guys behind the Joggobot have created one of the oddest contraptions to help nerds lose weight by chasing them around with a deranged robot quadrocopter.

There are a few record player simulation apps for the iPad, but attention to detail and awesome graphics may make Vinyl Tap the best. And better still, it comes with not one but two turntables, with more promised in future updates.

Apple began sending out MobileMe eviction notices last week. The notices remind anyone still using MobileMe that they have until the end of June to transition to iCloud and/or copy all data stored in their MobileMe accounts to their Mac or PC. Any files stored in MobileMe’s range of services that can’t be converted to iCloud will be deleted. If you opt not to use iCloud, all data in your MobileMe account will be deleted.

Although iCloud offers several advances over MobileMe, there are some MobileMe services that don’t have direct iCloud equivalents. These include MobileMe Galleries for sharing photos and videos, website creation using Apple’s iWeb, and iDisk remote storage and file sharing. File and information sync is available using iCloud, but the functionality is implemented a bit differently than in MobileMe.

There isn’t a single online service that delivers quite the same mix of features and functionality that Apple offered with MobileMe but by combining some apps and services, you can get pretty close to MobileMe’s feature set.

Following the trend of stolen technology turning in thieves red-handed, a man was recently arrested after the MacBook he stole secretly uploaded his picture and sent it to its rightful owner.

Logan Chadde’s laptop and other belongings were stolen by a 19-year-old thief over the weekend in Ann Arbor, Michigan. While the crook raided Chadde’s room, he grabbed a backup containing a MacBook. Little did he know that Chadde had installed anti-theft software that would lead to the police catching the 19-year-old.

The new 1.3 update to the stop-motion-animation app Frameographer has a new feature called Smart Zoom, and it is so obviously good that every video-shooting app for iOS should be using it already.

These official Star Wars iPhone cases just announced by PowerA are just super cute. At $40, they’re pretty pricy, but LucasArts licensing ain’t cheap. Each case distills the iconic style of Star Wars‘s core characters — C-3PO, Darth Vader, R2-D2 and Chewbacca — into an attractive, quasi-abstract pattern. I particularly like the fur matting on the Chewbacca one.

Hey, who says a fanboy can’t look smart? These cases should be out later in the year.

Source: PowerA

When former Apple retail boss Ron Johnson took his leave from Cupertino to become the new CEO of JC Penney late last year, there wasn’t as much “WTF-ing” as you might expect. Sure, there was some incredulity as Johnson left the gleaming stores he had founded for JC Penney’s chain of mouldering clothing outlets, but there was also a lot of optimism: if anyone could turn around a business like JC Penney, it would be Johnson.

Johnson may still succeed, but his first moves at rehabilitating JC Penney have been failures. The stock is tanking and JC Penney posted a $163 million loss last quarter alone. Customers, it seems, are not reacting well to the new JC Penney, which eschews sales, circulars, coupons and fine print for plain, honest pricing… the kind of store where all the .99s are dropped from the price tag.

Why? Honest pricing might work for Apple, but in most of the retail word, it appears to be a sucker’s game. Customers, it turns out, only say they want fair pricing. What the really want to do is treat shopping like a game.

Don’t worry, you won’t have to copy and paste anything into automator or know any Applescript for this tip. However, I’m sure there’s some of you out there that would like to customize iTunes in the ways this freely downloadable application/script allows you to.