Cult of Mac

One of the perks that comes with having your face on television is the torrent of free stuff that companies throw at you in the hope that you’ll be spotted using their product and boost its sales. Celebrities receive all kinds of gifts from expensive jewelry, to clothes, cars, and even $100,000 gift bags just for attending the Oscars. But they can forget receiving any preferential treatment from Apple.

The Cupertino company refuses to give away its products to famous faces, and it certainly won’t send them out early. Celebrities must wait until launch day just like you and I.

The new iPad appears to be all upside: A retina display, 4G connection, no loss in battery life and a potentially great new camera. But there is a dark side lurking in there somewhere, one that you won’t see until developers start to update their apps to be retina ready, and those apps start to gobble up your 16, 32 or 64GB of storage by the Gigabyte.

What am I talking about? Bitmap images. When quadrupled in size to look nice on the hi-res screen, bitmaps bloat the apps containing them. For example, iMovie for iOS jumps from a merely large 70MB to a terrifying 404MB. That 16GB iPad is starting to look a little small, right?

Part II of this two-article series focuses on battery usage. Battery usage refers to how long you can use your Mac off of a single charge cycle. In addition to proper battery care, there are numerous ways to improve or supplement battery usage. When there’s no power outlet available, consider the following two options. First, optimize your Mac for maximum battery life. Second, supplement your Mac’s battery with a secondary power source.

The new iPad requires a lot more power than the iPad 2. How much more power? So much that despite an astounding 70% increase in the new iPad’s battery capacity (42.5 watt-hour up from 25 watt-hour), it will still run for the same amount of time as the iPad 2 on a single charge. The new iPad is a power-hungry beast and, therefore, knowing a thing or two about its battery is more important than ever.

If you’ve owned any type of portable device for an extended period of time you’ve probably noticed that its battery gets worse with time. You may have wondered what you could do to maximize your device’s battery life or even suspected that a short-lived battery was defective, but didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe you’re interested in extending the usage time you get out of a single charge or need even more battery power than your Mac’s internal battery has to offer, but don’t know what to look for in an external battery pack. This is a two-part guide on the battery basics everyone needs to know. It’s aim is to give you useful information about the batteries used by all of your Macs – including the new iPad.

Vietnamese bloggers at Tinhte.vn — fresh from their early iPad unboxing yesterday — have taken the new iPad’s new camera and retina display for a spin. The results are not exactly surprising, but if you click the screenshot below you’ll get an idea of just how many pixel Apple has managed to squeeze into the iPad’s 10-inch screen.

Our affiliate partner MacUpdate is offering their new March 2012 Bundle featuring VMware Fusion 4, Drive Genius 3, PDFpen 5, Typinator 5, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and five other top-notch apps for $49.99. Ten of the eleven apps have never been offered in a bundle before.

Here are the details:

Back by popular demand! Cult Of Mac has a new Apple-inspired tee for all you Apple fan boys and girls, and we think you’re really going to like this one.

The Apple Lisa computer was one of Steve Jobs’s finest creations, but her cosmic $10,000 price tag made her harder to sell than the Newton. We liked her vintage style though, so we partnered with Seattle indie brand Might Tees to make her good looks available again on our new In Love With Lisa graphic tee.

Our new tee is finely crafted and printed right here in the beautiful USA, and is available now for only $25. Get one for yourself or for your cousin in Kazahkstan — these fine garments ship worldwide!

DODOcase makes some great iOS device accessories, but they’re most known for their series of unique iPad cases. Apple’s new iPad is arriving this Friday, and DODOcase has announced its new line of books cases for the magical tablet.

The Classic ($60), Essentials ($70), and Spring Summer ($80) lines are available for purchase now.

This stunning shot of Apple’s flagship 5th Avenue store in New York City was recently taken by Barry McLynn with a Canon EOS 60D. We’ve seen lots of shots of the new glass cube, but this one definitely takes the cake. Reminds you of what makes Apple special.

Today the International Data Corporation raised its 2012 tablet forecast to 106.1 million units, up from its previous forecast of 87.7 million units thanks to a stronger-than-expected 2011 finish. According to IDC, tablet shipments rose 155%, leading to a full-year 2011 total of 68.7 million units shipped. The IDC credits Amazon for raising consumers’ awareness of the tablet category in 2011 thanks to their popular $199 Kindle Fire.

Last week Microsoft accused cloud gaming company OnLive and users of its OnLive Desktop of pirating Windows 7. OnLive made headlines when it launched OnLive Desktop earlier this year and again when it updated the product to support additional features and subscription plans. The app, which is available for the iPad and for Android, provides users with a cloud hosted Windows 7 desktop complete with the core Office apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) as well as Adobe Reader and a copy of Internet Explorer that iPad users can use to play Flash content.

After not voicing an opinion about OnLive Desktop for several weeks, Microsoft publicly announced that the OnLive was violating its license agreements and effectively breaking the law in the process. The issue appears to be specific to the licensing restrictions when offering Windows 7 in a virtual desktop scenario.

Although OnLive Desktop is probably the most well known cloud-based Windows and Office mobile solution, it isn’t the only one. And its competitors are quick to point the legality of their services and their compliance with Microsoft’s licensing policies.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has subpoenaed Apple to give the details of its iPhone search deal with Google. The request is a result of the Google antitrust probe the FTC is currently conducting. Apple has been required to reveal the agreements it made to make Google the preferred search engine on the iPhone.

Oh, Samsung. We know you have a complicated relationship with Apple, building components for them with the one hand, suing with the other. But can’t you stop mouthing off about the components you’re building them about Cupertino’s top-secret upcoming projects? Keep this up and you’re likely to find yourself wearing concrete shoes at the bottom of the local reservoir.

Have you ever wanted to have access to the lyrics of your favorite tunes in the iOS Music app? Do you not want to take the time to manually add lyrics for every song in iTunes? A jailbreak tweak called Lyricalizer automatically fetches the lyrics for songs as their playing on the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad and lets you view them right in the default Music app.

This is pretty hard to believe, but if true, it could have a huge impact on the future audience of the MacBook Pro line: Apple could have dropped NVIDIA as the supplier of the next-gen MacBook Pro’s discrete GPUs, and will instead go with Intel integrated graphics. Huh?

One short sentence in the help documents for the new Apple Configurator tool shows that the company is aware that many workers are bringing their personal devices into the office. More noteworthy is the fact that it shows that Apple is thinking about some of the potential privacy issues that can arise in situations like BYOD programs where a personal iPhone or iPad is managed by a company’s IT department.

The sentence in question is in the section on supervised or managed devices. It reads as follows:

Important: When a device is initially supervised during the Prepare process, it’s wiped of all content and settings. This prevents a person’s personal device from being supervised without their knowledge.

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Your iPhone’s camera might be good enough to replace your old point-and-shoot — especially if you have the iPhone 4S — but it does have some flaws. For instance, it’s not great at taking those really close-up shots for catching the smallest details; it just doesn’t focus.

But with just a droplet of water, you can add a macro lens to your iPhone that allows you to capture  crystal clear high-resolution close-ups. Here’s how!

The LensBaby Composer Pro with Sweet 35 lens ($400) can create beautiful mixes of blur and focus in your images, but beginner photographers beware — this optic pair is not for the faint of heart.

Camera+ is one of the best photography apps available, period. And today sees the release of Camera+ 3, a major update with lots of new features.

Siri is arguably, the best digital personal assistant in the world. She can tell you if you need an umbrella. Wake you up when your late. Remind you that you forgot to buy your girlfriend a birthday present, and so many other tasks that sure are nifty. She’s better than having a personal assistant because she doesn’t get all pissed off when you tell her to go get you a coffee, or call in sick so she can go hangout at the beach with her friends.

Did you know Siri can sing too? Yeah, she totally can, and it’s like having J.Lo in your back pocket at all times, without the obtrusive lady lumps. Need proof? Here’s Siri singing a tear jerking robotic rendition of Stairway To Heaven.

We’re huge, unwavering fans of Tapbot’s Tweetbot Twitter client for iPhone and iPad. It just blows the official Twitter client out of the water in every respect. Ahead of the debut of the new iPad on Friday, though, and in accompaniment with their recent update to Camera+, Tapbot has pushed through the 2.1 update of Tweetbot for iPad (iPhone version coming soon), and not only does it support Retina Display resolution and Camera+ 3.0 image capturing and editing… it introduces streaming to the mix!

Apple Configurator is a new free tool that let’s you manage iOS devices in business or education settings. The app can be used simply as an initial deployment tool or as an ongoing management solution. It’s particularly well suited to environments where iPads and other iOS devices will be shared among multiple users since it can be used in “lending library” fashion with users checking out devices because Configurator backs up user data on check-in and applies to a new device on check-out.

This guide covers each part of Configurator  with step-by-step instructions.

Everybody has heard of how crappy Apple supplier Foxconn treats their workers. Long hours. Low pay. Shoddy conditions. Working at a Foxconn factory is in no way glamorous and wonderful, and it looks like even Foxconn is ready to admit as much. In an effort to reshape their image, Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory is looking to hire a Saftey and Security Officer and a Lifestyle Services Manager to make life a little bit more fabulous for their workforce.

The new iPad is almost identical to the old iPad, in terms of its physical dimensions at least. This means that many of your old accessories will fit it, and some will not. Styluses, of course, will be just fine, but cases and docks will either just squeeze on, or not fit at all.

So what should you look out for when considering an upgrade for your accessories as well as your iPad?

Gizmodo’s resident PhotoShop freak and controversy-stirrer extraordinaire Jesus Diaz has posted up a fantastic couple of images putting into perspective just how frickin’ densely packed the new iPad’s 3+ million pixels really are.

In the image above, a new iPad is placed right next to a vintage Macintosh. The idea here is that if the pixels of the vintage Mac and the new iPad were exactly the same size, the iPad would have to be positively Brobdingnagian to accommodate all of them.

And that’s not all.