The U.K.’s Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, has slammed Apple and its co-founder Steve Jobs for creating an egocentric and selfish consumer society that has only led to unhappiness. He claims the company’s advertising methods only make shoppers aware of what they don’t own, and he singled out Apple for creating a culture in which people only care about themselves. What hypocritical nonsense.
The folks at Canlys this morning are doing what analysts are fond of: playing the ‘if’ game. If iPads were included in the same category as computers, Apple might soon overtake HP as the world’s largest PC maker — particularly if the Cupertino, Calif. company launches the iPad 3, anticipated by many to be a 2012 release. Canalys, which does count tablets as PCs, expects Apple to pass HP before mid-2012.
Last week, we reported that French developer Applidium had managed to blow the Siri protocol wide open, making it possible for any internet connected device to dial into Apple’s Siri servers and get a response.
Any internet connected device? Pshaw, you might scoff. But one week later, we have the proof: a hacker who has tricked Siri into talking with his internet-connected thermostat!
We exclusively confirmed way back in February that Apple had plans to build a store in Grand Central Station’s main terminal, and following months of speculation it seems the store is set to open its doors this week, just in time for the Christmas rush.
While we all eagerly await an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S, many of us are using custom settings shortcuts on our iOS homescreens to duplicate the functionality of a more robust Cydia hack like SBSettings.
The only problem? While the shortcuts work really well, some of the icons can be ugly and distinctly un-Apple-like.
Why settle for some puked-up icons, though, when you can have icons sexy enough to lick? Just go over to https://brdrck.me/settings/ on your iDevice and get downloading. Follow our previous how-to if you need guidance on setting these up.
[via iDB]
The Tilt by madMINDS from Sulmo Kim on Vimeo.
A cooling stand is traditionally one of the ugliest accessories you can buy for your svelte MacBook Pro, one that’s guaranteed to take all that hard work Apple put into creating a beautiful notebook and just throwing it away. That is, until the TILT came along.
It’s Thanksgiving Week, and that means most of us Americans will start thinking about how much weight we’ll gain and how much money we’ll end up spending on Black Friday, especially if we have children clamoring for an iPhone, iPod or iPad.
If you, like many other parents, are planning on buying your kids an iDevice this Christmas, you should know that your kids will need an iTunes account to use with their new device. Presumably, you’ll want to control how much they can spend buying apps. So you’ll be happy to know you can set up an iTunes account without a credit card. Your kid will be able to download a plethora of free apps and you’ll be able to give them gift cards to use to buy paid ones. This will let you control how much they spend, which is a lot better than giving them carte blanche access to your line of credit.
Sprint’s debut iPhone 4S commercial (unsurprisingly) boasts about the biggest reason for choosing Sprint over its rivals, and that’s “truly unlimited” data. It also praises Apple’s App Store, which is home to half a million apps, by floating popular app icons around New York City.
Walter Isaacson’s terrific Steve Jobs biography offers a magnificent insight into how Steve created Apple, and the work he did behind the scenes. However, it doesn’t talk all that much about NeXT — another computer company Steve founded during his spell away from Apple in the mid-eighties.
These fascinating clips from a series called Entrepreneurs do, however. They show Steve as many of us have never seen him before — discussing new ideas with his team, brainstorming on company retreats, and leading NeXT to create something awesome.
Check out more of the documentary after the break.
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.
There have been rumors of Retina iMacs practically since the day Apple announced Retina display was coming to iOS in 2010. Most of them have been complete nonsense, and Mac fans have had year after year of seeing their ultra-high-res hopes dashed whenever Apple would announce a new Mac product. Unlike pretty much every other item on this list, however, it looks like a Retina iMac may finally be happening, courtesy of recently discovered code in Apple's OS X 10.10 Yosemite beta. But maybe that’s just the optimism speaking...
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+?
