Cult of Mac

Saucytime is the latest company to pair sex with Apple’s handy videoconferencing technology FaceTime.

Apple’s desire to keep their devices G-rated hasn’t kept adult chat services from trying. But iP4Play, the first company to launch a porn chat service over FaceTime went bust after just a few months, citing low FaceTime adoption.

The latest come-hither chat service is the UK-based Saucytime. To my American ears, the name promises more Benny Hill-esque titillation than graphic raunch. That’s intentional, says co-founder Lei.

Here’s a cautionary tale that should turn you into a hoarder: a contract of a nearly bankrupt tech company in the mid-1990s is now headed for the auction block with a $150,000 price tag. The company is Apple and the document is the tech giant’s founding contract with signatures of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne — who must be kicking himself at this very moment.

Look, we hate crappy iPad knock-offs as much as any red-blooded Apple fan, but we’re going to make an exception in this case. Why? Sure, the knock-off tablet looks gaudy, but the Chinese student who built it didn’t make it to cash in on Apple’s brand: he made it for his girlfriend out of love.

Ever gone a trip overseas and felt silly trying to talk to locals who didn’t speak a lick of English? Yeah, me too. It’s actually become a bit of problem for me because I love traveling to different countries, but hate not being able to communicate with the locals. Today we’re offering a heat-seeking deal from Ultralingua. If learning a new language has ever crossed your mind, this buy one, get one free Cyber Monday special is a definite piece of gold!

Ultralingua dictionaries are available in dozens of language combinations, and they make a great gift for students, business professionals, teachers, and travelers. Use this deal for yourself or any of the language lovers on your gift list! Each language app includes a variety of reference and learning tools in a beautiful and simple interface.

For only $35, you’ll get two Mac App Dictionaries of your choice!

Your options include:

It’s probably good that Apple is in the gadget creation business and not jobs. Turns out, the $1 billion data center the tech giant built down in North Carolina created just 50 full-time local jobs, working out to around $200,000 per spot. Although iCloud and other services likely to come from the site have plenty of tech fans, you won’t find too many “I Love Apple” bumper stickers in a town with double-digit unemployment.

Best Buy has launched a new ad that hopes to lure Apple fans into its stores this Christmas. In addition to Macs, iPads, iPhones, and iPods, the humorous “Everything Apple at Best Buy” ad also includes an appearance from old St. Nick himself.

While Apple’s iPhone is famous for packing a long list of fancy features, self combustion definitely should not be one of them. For one iPhone 4 user who recently took their device onboard an Australian airplane, however, that’s exactly what they got.

How did you spend your day after Thanksgiving? If you worked at any of Apple’s 358 retail locations, it was likely just a blur. Some rather outstanding statistics emerged from Black Friday sales of Apple gear, including the sale of 14.8 iPads every hour per store, and 89 every minute around the US – or 1.5 tablets each second. Stacked together, consumers bought almost a mile of iPads on the first day of holiday shopping, or a tower 900 feet taller than the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

It’s been less than a week since Siri was hacked to work with potentially every Internet-controlled gadget out there, even your car. But if that’s too far out for you, the latest plug-in for Siri Proxy allows you to control your Mac desktop using your iPhone.

If you still have Apple products to purchase for loved ones this Christmas, then you’ll be pleased to know that you can now get free shipping on all items in the Apple online store. The company started the promotion today as part of its Christmas sales push, and it will run until December 22.

Apple changed many things on the Finder sidebar with the release of Mac OS X Lion. Probably one of the better changes was how Apple locked down the sidebar. It is now harder to accidentally remove an item from the Favorite section on the sidebar.

If you work in AppleCare or any other kind of support organization you probably want to hug someone for this change, because it probably generated a lot of calls for support in earlier versions of Mac OS X.

Cyber Monday is here, and along with it, MuscleNerd — only one of the very jammingest of console cowboys in cyberspace — has given iPhone 4S owners a nice little gift of hope: word that an iPhone 4S unlock is on the way.

The new iTunes Match service is a handy way to share music among all your computers and iDevices. One reader is wondering if this feature can also be used to replace older 128kbps DRM encoded tracks with their higher bitrate, unencumbered iTunes Plus versions:

Just wondering something about iTunes Match. I’ve got a bunch of songs on iTunes that I purchased early in the game, and they are in .m4p format, so they have the DRM locks and can’t easily be converted to .mp3 format. They are only at 128kbps, which is the only thing iTunes offered back in the day. If I sign up for iTunes Match, will these songs be updated to their new DRM-free 256kbps versions, or do I have to pay for the iTunes Plus service first?

While rumors surrounding a 15-inch MacBook Air have been circulating for a number of months now, we had no idea when Apple might be gearing up to launch the new device. Sources “from the upstream supply chain” are now reporting, however, that the 15-inch ultraportable will arrive during the first quarter of 2012 as part of a completely refreshed MacBook Air family.

While Apple chose to stick with the same 3.5-inch display for the iPhone 4S that it had previously employed in older iPhones, the Cupertino company looks certain to increase that for its iPhone 5. According to a source in Apple’s supply chain, both Hitachi and Sony have already begun shipping 4-inch LCD panels for a “new iOS device,” believed to be the sixth-generation iPhone.

Sure, the 32GB iPad has enough storage space for a bunch of apps, some songs and maybe even a movie or two. But for those of us with large media collections, even the mega 64GB version will start to feel a little cramped when stuffed full of music and videos (and I have no idea how those of you with 16GB iPads get by).

So, what if you could just stick a portable external drive into your iPad, like you would with a MacBook? Bam, extra storage! Well, yeah — but you can’t, right? Wrong! Well, sorta — you can’t plug one in physically; but the 500GB Seagate GoFlex Satellite ($200) gets around the whole physical connection thing by supplying its own wifi hotspot that lets you create a wifi link between it and your iPad. Genius.

With the dawn of solid state storage becoming a viable option for computers, many users are presented with the problem of managing disk space, as SSDs are typically much smaller than traditional spinning hard drives. In this video, I’ll show you how to effectively free up disk space on your Mac.

One of the biggest customer complaints about the iPhone 4S is battery life. The battery never manages to last even a whole day and sometimes not even a half of a day. Although the iPhone 4 has always managed to last nearly a whole day, it isn’t much better. Apple is working on an iOS 5 software fix that might eventually take care of the battery draining issues that face iPhone 4S customers. Their first attempt, the release of iOS 5.0.1, wasn’t much help for some users.

If you cannot wait any longer and you own either of these phones one solution could be the MiLi Power Pack 4 ($60) from xengadget.com. The 3000 mAh slider case will give your iPhone 4 or 4S the extra power boost it needs to last until bed time. I tested it on my iPhone 4S and I’d like to share my experience with you.

In the 50s, some futurists predicted food pills instead of meals. It never happened.

The biggest reason futurists fail is that too many predictions are based on the possible, rather than the desirable.

It’s now possible for anyone to take all their nutrition from pills. But people enjoy eating food. That’s why we don’t take pills instead.

If you want to predict the future, you need to deconstruct human nature. You also need to know what will be possible. Where these two things intersect is where accurate predictions can be made.

And that’s why I can already tell you what your iMac will be like in a few years.

Last week we announced another stellar Cult of Mac Deal – 40% off of the $79 Internet Security Barrier X6 suite of Mac Apps. We wrangled two free copies for our loyal Cult of Mac readers which are up for grabs during this weekend’s Deals giveaway! This contest will run from today till Tuesday, November 29th at 9AM PST. The rules for entering are incredibly simple; here’s what you got to do to enter.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief strategy and research officer, recently said that Windows Phone 7 beat Siri to the punch. In an interview, Mundie argued that Apple only marketed Siri well, and that Microsoft has had the same technology for more than a year already.

Jason from TechAU has created a video face-off between Microsoft’s voice recognition software, called TellMe, and Siri on the iPhone 4S. We’ll let you guess which one actually works.

Review by Kelly Keltner

Many headsets promise a headset utopia, making smartphone users’ heads fill with visions of commanding their world with a simple voice command.

The Plantronics Marque M155 ($60) and the Motorola HX550 ($60) both make similar promises, with the HX550’s packaging going as far as to promise a “complete hands-free solution.” Both headsets offer liberation from holding the phone, but how do these midrange ‘sets match up to the marketing promises — or the abilities of their more expensive siblings?

Apple’s series of heated lawsuits with Samsung have put the two companies at odds, and Apple has been reportedly looking to other suppliers for hi-res displays. Specifically, Apple now has Sharp on deck to supply screens for the upcoming iPad 3.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is adding Sharp to its roster of screen suppliers for the next-generation iPad. The displays will allegedly be of higher resolution and thinner than the screens found in previous generations.

There’s a new jailbreak app on the block, and it doesn’t place nice. MobileMonitor is perhaps the scariest activity monitoring tool we’ve come across for the iPhone, and it’s available for anyone to download in the jailbreak equivalent to the App Store, Cydia.

Once installed, not only does MobileMonitor become untraceable on the iPhone itself, but it records and uploads all of your personal data to a website that can be accessed by anyone with the correct login information.

Weathermob is new and hip on the App Store this week. It’s a weather app with a twist – it’s social. Think of it as Instagram for clouds. Kinda.