Cult of Mac

With security becoming an ever more serious issue, keeping your files safe is more important than ever before. Using an encrypted disk image is an easy way to safely store away files, while keeping them in one consolidated location. In this video, I’ll show you how to set up encrypted disk images.

Greg Joswiak is Apple’s vice president of worldwide iPod, iPhone, and iOS product marketing. He’s presented at past iPhone and iOS Apple events and is a critical member of Apple’s corporate team.

While speaking at the “Silicon Valley Comes to Cambridge” event in the UK, Joswiak shared what he believes to be the four keys to Apple’s success.

Nick Bilton of The New York Times recently sat down with Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson. In the interview, Isaacson shared his opinions of Jobs and other details surrounding the book.

Steve Jobs “didn’t go into details” about Apple’s future products during his discussions with Isaacson, but Jobs did reveal three things he wanted to reinvent: the television, textbooks, and photography.

Last last week, VMware released Fusion 4.1, an update to its popular virtualization software that adds many improvements and bug fixes. The biggest improvement is the applications ability to run older versions of Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard.

Microsoft recently unveiled its first retail store on the East coast at the Tysons Corner mall in McLean, Virginia. Like other Microsoft stores, the new location is strategically placed near the local Apple Store.

In an attempt to appeal to the hip and cool computer geeks out there, Microsoft hired a DJ to play music during the store’s opening. Can you guess what kind of laptop the DJ used?

The Apple iPhone dominates the world of consumer smart phones, but is a bit of a laggard in the business market, right?

Wrong! It turns out that the opposite is true. Apple is in fact a relatively minor player in the global consumer smart phone market, but by far the dominant player in business.

According to Gartner, Android has 52.5% global smart phone market share, Symbian 16.9%, iOS 15%, BlackBerry 11%, Bada 2.2% and Microsoft 1.5%.

In business, however, the iPhone has recently emerged as the top market-share leader with 45%. To achieve this dominance, Apple recently edged out BlackBerry, which has now fallen to 32% of the market. Android gets 21%, recently surpassing Nokia.

To be accurate, these numbers are apples and oranges, so to speak. The Gartner numbers are for both consumer and business and worldwide, and the iPhone numbers are businesses worldwide.

Android’s big global consumer numbers and iPhone’s big business numbers say more about whose got money and who hasn’t than what people’s preferences would be if all phones were priced the same. The fact that very cheap Android phones exist in the world, but very cheap iPhones do not exist, explains much.

Still, it’s a shocking result that’s counter to the conventional wisdom.

Perhaps even more shocking is BlackBerry’s recent second-place status in businesses and enterprises to the iPhone. Business is all BlackBerry’s got. Yet iPhone clobbers RIM in this space now.

More to the point, how can a phone that supposedly ignores business concerns surpass a phone that’s totally designed for business in the business marketplace?

Here’s why iPhone beats BlackBerry in business.

Early reviews of Amazon’s Kindle Fire haven’t been kind, but I like the device. It’s a versatile and enjoyable little media tablet.

It doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not (a general-purpose tab), and though not as polished as Apple’s products, its a good first try.

The trouble is that everyone is comparing the Kindle Fire to the iPad, and it will always come up short. The Kindle Fire is actually closer to the iPod touch, but it’s not that either. It’s a well-made, well-designed window into Amazon’s media ecosystem, and on that score, it succeeds very well.

Hauling my back end out of bed each morning is a horrible task, especially during the winter months. Even with the recommended eight hours sleep, I never wake up feeling refreshed. However, I was hoping all that was about to change, thanks to a little app-enhanced headband.

The WakeMate ($60) is an accessory and app for your iOS device that has two main objectives: to help you track and analyze your sleep pattern; and to wake you up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle so that you feel better about waking up early — which is just what I needed.

If you caught our canalphone roundup a few weeks back, you’ve by now come to the accurate realization that there’s no shortage of real alternatives to those awful white buds bundled with each iPhone. But these two are a little different.

Like the five we reviewed that week, these two pairs of IEMs — the MEElectronics CC51 ($90) and the Thinksound ts02+mic ($110)— are higher-end, designed with superior sound quality in mind and cost around $100. But unlike the others, these two are from small, boutique manufacturers; they also both have housings made from exotic materials (the CC51’s is ceramic, while the ts02’s is wood), and eschew the inline volume controls of the pairs of reviewed in the $100 IEM week, instead making do with a single control button on their inline microphones.

It’s that time of the year. The busiest shopping day in existence is nearly upon us: Black Friday.

As Apple and iOS fanatics, we naturally look to the App Store for useful apps when life’s obstacles are thrown our way. The topic of Black Friday is no exception, so we’ve collected some of the best, free iPhone apps available to help you make the most out of your shopping experience this year.

Just when you thought you could buy a totally free iPhone, AT&T raises the subsidized price of the iPhone 3GS to $0.99! What gives?

As spotted by MacRumors, one of the nation’s largest carriers is listing the iPhone 3GS as costing $0.99 on its online store. The carrier activation fee is waved with the purchase and AT&T is offering free overnight shipping. What’s really weird is that Apple still lists the iPhone 3GS as costing $0 on its own website.

Take this with a grain of salt, but a “reliable source” speaking to iLounge has three inside scoops on Apple’s 2012 product line-up. Their veracity? Offhand, we’d say one of them’s a certainty, one of them’s probable and the last one is nutty.

By now, every iPhone 4S user has to know about the raise to speak feature that activates Siri. You simply raise your iPhone 4S to your ear, wait for the two tones and start talking. Ask Siri a silly or serious question and it usually has an answer for you. Sometime it isn’t what you would expect.

Although it is fun to ask Siri questions, you can also use Siri for dictation purposes. You can activate dictation by pressing the microphone button on the iOS pop-up keyboard. But did you know there is another way to start dictation?

The iPad 2 has some impressive mobile silicon inside it. The A5 processor is a dual-core affair with a 1GHZ clock speed, capable of about 171 megaflops (or about 171 100 floating-point operations per second).

Not bad, right? But how does the iPad 2 stack up against the most powerful computer in the world, Fujitsu’s K Super Computer?

Not too well, according to the guys at Royal Pingdom. In fact, you would need about 61.5 million iPad 2s to match the 10 Billion megaflops of the K Computer.

That’s enough iPad 2s that if you stacked them on top of one another, the pile would be 540 kilometers high. That’s the equivalent of about 1,700 Eiffel Towers stacked end-to-end.

Well, sure. Fine. But can the K computer run Infinity Blade 2? Thought not.

Here’s a Hollywood marketing tactic we never thought of: Create an iTunes alternative so roundly despised that you’re forced to send angry consumers to iTunes. And you wonder why your DVD player is gathering dust?

A good friend of mine recently bought a new iPhone 4S from her local Apple Store. When presented with her new iPhone, the Apple Store salesperson tried to sell her on AppleCare+. It was a hard sell; in her opinion, the Apple Store salesperson went about it in all of the wrong ways. She’s a savvy consumer, reads Cult of Mac and other tech blogs, and has even read my new book. She did her own research before she bought the iPhone. She understood the differences between AppleCare and AppleCare+. She weighed risks of accidental damage against the price and limitations of AppleCare+, and decided the extra protection wasn’t for her.

She passed on AppleCare+, but believes that she might have been swayed if she hadn’t done her homework. She made a choice and, whether or not it turns out to be the right one, she was the one to make it. But not everyone is going to take the time to evaluate the pros and cons of AppleCare+ and will be confronted with this question at the time of purchase. Might you or someone you know fall victim to a hard sell on AppleCare+?

When Apple first announced the new $99 AppleCare+ program along with the iPhone 4S, there was a lot of confusion about it, largely because Apple required the coverage be purchased at the same time as the iPhone.

Luckily, Apple’s now cleared up its AppleCare+ policies. You now have 30 days to purchase AppleCare+ after you pick up a new iPhone.

What is AppleCare+? It replaces the previous $69 AppleCare for iPhone coverage that didn’t cover accidental coverage. With AppleCare+, you have coverage for up to two accidental breaks of your iPhone, each subject to a $49 service fee. For clumsy butterfingers like me, not a bad deal at all.

When Disney CEO Robert Iger joined Apple’s board of directors, the tech giant offered him a little gift — and it wasn’t a fruit basket. No, Iger received shares worth more than an estimated $84,000. Of course, the amount is Mickey Mouse compared to the $29 million he pulls in as Disney’s head exec.

Forget Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Boston and all the rest of the 995 protests. The Occupy movement is now coming to your browser, but not how you’d expect: they want to eliminate Adobe Flash from all web browsers.

Today’s – probably this week’s – Best Thing Ever is the amazing, ear-exploding wonder that is Brian Blessed Alarm Clock.

A special education teacher from Lincoln High School in Stockton, California, is currently on paid leave after she set up a pornographic website business on a MacBook issued to her by the school. Heidi Kaeslin was suspended when school officials discovered her moneymaking scheme, and she is now under investigation.

Earlier this week we announced our newest Cult of Mac Deal – a $79 iOS App Development Course. To make things even better for our awesome readers, this weekend we’re having a giveaway for one free admission into the course so you can get started on turning your ideas into the next great app. This contest will run from today till Sunday, November 20th at 9PM PST. The rules for entering are incredibly simple; here’s what you got to do to enter.

High-profile PC makers such as HP and Dell may be preparing to “gradually phase out” of the tablet business, leaving the market to Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s Nook tablets. The rumored sea change follows the realization that best-selling tablets make money from the content they pump out, not from selling the hardware.

If I told you that Pirates of Silicon Valley star Noah Wyle was set to return to the screen as Steve Jobs in the upcoming biopic based upon Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography, you’d probably say, “Great Choice!” After all, Wyle was great as Steve. The role fits him. It would be wonderful to see him settle back into it over a decade later, and finish the arc.

Now, what if I told you that Noah Wyle had some competition for the role of Steve, and that competition was his old ER co-star George Clooney? What would you say then? My guess is your response would be the same as mine: “What the fffffffff……”

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