Apple is yet to strike a deal with China Mobile over the iPhone, but that hasn’t stopped the Cupertino company from supporting China Mobile customers who want to use its latest smartphone with the carrier unofficially. Just a month after Apple confirmed that the iPhone 4S has issues with China Mobile SIM cards, it has fixed the device to eliminate signal issues.

Here’s a jailbreak tweak guaranteed to put a smile on your face if you’re a music junkie. It’s called Plugication and it automatically resumes your music when you plug your headphones into your iOS device, negating the need to open up the Music app and resume it manually. Best of all, it’s completely free.

This simple image has become a cliché in the UK in recent years, and is now much parodied and remixed everywhere you look. Now you can remix it yourself, thanks to a variety of (very similar-looking) apps for iOS.

A man bought what he thought was an iPhone in an electronics plaza in Zhengzhou. But when he found out it was fake, he grabbed a kitchen knife and went back to the plaza to find the seller.

After coming back every day for several days unsuccessfully finding the seller, he found another group of counterfeit iPhone sellers, got into an argument and ending up stabbing one of them to death.

Read the rest of the story.

Over the last couple of months we’ve seen a truck load of individual leaked parts of the iPad 3 hit the web, but no one has had them all in one place. Someone finally got their hands on both the front and rear shells of the iPad 3 and put them together on video to reveal that what the iPad 3 will look like.

The release of OS X Mountain Lion is still months away, but it’s never too early to save some money.

OS X Mountain Lion is going to be the first major OS X update sold and distributed exclusively through the App Store. This means that if you want to upgrade you must purchase and download it from the App Store. For savvy buyers out there, this might be a good opportunity to get a discount on your upgrade by taking advantage of special deals on iTunes Gift Cards.

Take a glance at the App Store Top Paid Apps list and you’ll see that 7 out of 10 are games. So, if you want to CRUSH it with an iOS app…then this iOS game development course may just be your ticket.

Angry Birds, Cut The Rope, Peggle— each one is as unique as they come, but they’re tied together to one simple principle: they’re built using Cocos2D. In this course, expert Cocos2D instructor, Marin Todorov takes a hands-on approach and walks you step-by-step through the process of building a complete game.

Get it while you can, this Cult of Mac Deal is 50% off for a limited time!

Is Apple getting into the car business? No, Apple isn’t building a car. But it makes perfect sense that Apple would be working on an in-dash system.

The car blog Jalopnik said this week that a Chinese head-hunting firm is apparently helping Apple hire someone expert in the manufacturing of car parts. The recruiter apparently placed the position in the automotive section of LinkedIn. The listing said:

“Apple(China) Looking for SQE/NPI with over 4 years Mechanical engineering background familiar with CNC/die casting/stamping/plastic injection, can use APQP/ PPAP/SPC to control product quality.”

PatentlyApple.com has reported over the years multiple patents held by Apple for in-car user interfaces.

The circumstantial evidence suggests that Apple is at least thinking about getting serious about the automotive dashboard business.

And getting into the car business just makes sense for Apple. Here’s why. 

The U.S. Air Force has been awarded a $9.36 million to buy up to 18,000 iPads. They will be used for navigation and as digital flight manuals.

It’s one of the military’s largest orders of tablets.

Did you know Cult of Mac has a brand new podcast? No lies! We’re calling it The CultCast, and it’s the best 30 minute conversation you’ll hear about Apple all week long.

And wouldn’t you know it, we just released episode two into the wild! Join Leander Kahney, Buster Heine, and me, Erfon Elijah, as we yay and nay our way though all the iPad 3 rumors you’ve been hearing; ponder how Apple’s stock price could make it to $1000 per share; and argue about whether AT&T should be allowed to throttle those of us with unlimited iPhone data plans.

Sound tasty? Well dig in my friend! You can subscribe to The CultCast right now in iTunes and listen to episode two on your way to work!

Want an iPad 3?

Tim Cook will be introducing it next week. Take our reader survey and you’ll be entered into a sweepstakes to win one.

We’ve grown a tremendous amount these last three years, from just a few thousand pageviews a month to more than 9 million in February — and that was a short month. We need a favor — some data about you, the readers, to help attract advertisers and sponsorship partners. This is crucial — our bandwidth costs are through the roof!

There’s more. We’d like to learn something about the state of the Apple ecosystem — what devices you are using and how. Do you use your iPad at work? What are you planning to buy this year? We’d also like to learn what you think of the site and what we could do better.

Apple’s App Store just hit 25 billion app downloads. The countdown just clicked over at about 9.45PM PST. Apple has promised a $10,000 gift card to the person who downloaded the 25,000,000,000 billionth app. The winner will be notified shortly and revealed on the countdown’s web page.

The countdown began on February 17th and proceeded at an estimated rate of 49 million app downloads a day. It took the wildly popular App Store just four years to reach the 25 billion download mark. By contrast, it took eight-and-half years for 16 billion songs to be downloaded from the iTunes Store. For more insights into key Apple milestones, check out the latest on apple news today.

Here’s a video of Apple’s 25 billion countdown timer clicking over:

We all can’t wait to get our hands on a Retina display-equipped iPad in the coming weeks, and many developers are starting to get their current iPad apps ready for the rumored 2048×1536 resolution.

One developer in particular decided to share and compare Retina display screenshots of his iPad game. The differences between the new and current resolution are pretty stunning.

If you’ve been thinking there’s a chance the next-gen iPad will be more expensive than the entry $500 price of the current iPad 2, don’t sweat it any longer. According to a new report, pricing for the iPad 3 will remain the same. The offered storage capacities will also not change. 

The only problem with Instagram is that all the photos I’ve taken of the delicious lunches I’ve eaten are all stored in “the cloud”, which means I don’t have any physical evidence to support my wild stories of debauchery. Those faux-vintage snapshots I’ve taken with friends need to be preserved in an analog format, and with a little bit of funding, Instaprint is hoping to ease all my worries.

TidyTilt is a nifty earbud cord wrap, multi-position kickstand and mount for iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S that looks a lot like Apple’s iPad Smartcover.

The brainchild of Zahra Tashakorinia and Derek Tarnow, students at the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, TidyTilt was so popular that its massive overfunding on Kickstarter turned their little project into a business.

Meet the G4 Apple //c. The coolest freaking Apple mod I’ve ever seen.  This little puppy is a gorgeous Frankintosh project that houses a G4 Mac Mini in the case of an Apple //c. On the outside, the Apple //c hasn’t lost any of it’s retro charms. It’s like the ghost of Steve Jobs transported this cute little guy through time in almost perfect condition and decided to give him an update while he was at it.

The machine, keyboard, and mouse are all fully functional. Inside, the G4 Apple //c is rocking a 1.4GHz G4 with a gig of RAM, which is an insane upgrade from the 1MHz 65C02 and 128k of RAM it was cruising around with back in 1984.

We decided to visit the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco to get a peek at the signage Apple is currently putting up for its iPad event next week. The colorful look and feel reminds us of the original iPad launch back in 2010.

Yesterday we showed you how to make your own gorgeous pixel art with The Grix. Today we’re looking at pixels again, this time with a clever new photo toy for iOS called pxl, by Rainer Kohlberger.

Apple has started preparing the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California for its iPad 3 announcement on Wednesday, March 7th at 10 AM PDT. As always, workers have started hanging signage for the media event.

Apple said today that it is responsible for creating 514,000 jobs in the U.S. alone. Citing retail, customer support, transportation, healthcare, corporate, manufacturing, and developer jobs that have all been created “through innovation,” Apple claims responsibly for over a half million jobs spanning across 50 states.

Today would have been Theodor Seuss Geisel’s 108th birthday. Of course we know him as Dr. Seuss, one of the most revered children’s book authors of all time. Many people and organizations will be celebrating his works today and even Hollywood is doing its part by bringing the classic Thorax (auto-correct fail) The Lorax to life in an amazing looking 3-D CGI film (in theaters today). While his books have entertained and educated children for generations, recent technology has breathed new life into his classics via digital interactive children’s books. Oceanhouse Media, a leader in DICBs, has also joined the celebration by discounting their Dr. Seuss apps on both Android and iOS.

The iPhone and iPad have been core players in the so-called consumerization of IT. This trend that is transforming whole industries is both a challenge and an opportunity for IT professionals, managers, and individuals in just about every field out there.

The first ever Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise (CITE) conference and expo as it kicks off this weekend in San Francisco. The conference is a unique opportunity to hear from IT and business leaders from every industry was well as vendors, experts, and end users that have jumped in and seized the reins of this new workplace phenomenon. On tap will be stories about innovation, case studies in successful mobile initiatives, and much more.

Have Apple employees already loaded up iOS 6 on the unreleased iPad 3? Apple certainly tests protypes and beta software well before unveiling it to the public and it looks like Apple is currently testing iOS 6 on the new iPad 3.

Apple is set to open its first retail store in The Netherlands tomorrow, and it looks gorgeous. Located in the historic Hirsch building, the museum-like store features ornate, regal architecture and a beautiful glass staircase.

Photographer Thomas Schlijper has posted several images from inside the new Amsterdam store.