Cult of Mac

Did you buy a song off of iTunes for $1.29 before May 2010 with an iTunes Gift Card that said each song cost only $0.99? Thanks to the efforts of lawyers at Kurtzman Carson Consultants, you may be eligible for a class-action payout!

Make room in your piggy bank: you could be up to three dollars and twenty-five cents richer today than you were yesterday!

The class action lawsuit basically deals with iTunes Gift Cards that had been purchased when Apple was transitioning to $1.29 iTunes plus DRM-free songs from their previous standard of $0.99 DRM-protected tracks.

The cards claimed that each iTunes track only sold for about a buck, when actually, Apple had jacked the price of their songs by thirty cents. The class-action lawsuit filed by Gabriel Johnson in July 2009 claimed that consumers became confused by the discrepancy, and deserved their money back.

It seems ridiculous — Apple clearly wasn’t trying to rip anyone off — but the lawsuit continued for the past two years. It has now finally been reconciled, with both parties agreeing to settle out of court to prevent future expense.

If you’d like to file for your three bucks, head on over to Kurtzman Carson Consultants.

Forty percent of Blackberry owners say they want to switch to another smartphone. Following a service outage and an upcoming move to a new operating system, business professionals surveyed in the U.K. see Apple as the preferred alternative to trouble-plagued Research in Motion.

A poll of over five thousand consumers aged eight to twenty-four has found that Apple is the most popular electronic brand in America today.

Not that it’s in particularly flattering company. In fact, just looking at the companies kids today like, it seems as if most of our nation’s youth spend the majority of their time gorging themselves on junk food. Go figure!

In Apple’s own soothing Siri commercial, dozens of beautiful people living in utopian cityscapes and country vistas effortlessly interact with their iPhone 4Ses as if they were confabbing with the most soliciting of manservants.

In real life, though, things aren’t quite so pretty, as TBS’s Conan O’Brien is quick to point out in this hysterical parody video in which Apple’s original ad is intercut with two disheveled grossies asking Siri to direct them towards the fastest way to Diarrheatown, or compute the circumference of their manhoods.

It is, I’m sorry to say, a perhaps accurate depiction of at least my iPhone 4S post-launch Saturday night.

Back in 2001, a freelance copywriter named Vinnie Chieco who was hired to help Apple come up with a name for their MP3 player took one look at the device and exclaimed: “Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL!” And thus, the iPod was christened.

Chieco was making a tongue-in-cheek pop reference to Stanley Kubrick’s transcendental sci-fi masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a ship’s onboard AI, HAL 9000, makes an evolutionary leap after coming in radio contact with a monolith circling Jupiter. Acting erratically, HAL 9000 eventually lashes out, revealing a murderous new self-preservation instinct when his human charges want to shut him down.

Perhaps because HAL isn’t exactly cinema’s most touchy-feely computer, Apple wasn’t willing to embrace the association between 2001 and the iPod line. But now that HAL’s soothingly detached cadence and artificial intelligence capabilities have been mimicked by Siri, perhaps it’s time to revisit the connection with ThinkGeek’s new Iris 9000 voice control module that will let you Siri from across the room… or trapped on the opposite side of the pod bay doors rocketing through deep space.

Make HAL proud and help Siri touch the monolith. It only costs $59.99.

Add free hotel Wi-Fi to the list of services Apple’s iPad is making a thing of the past. The bad thing about the iPad being the best-selling gadget on the planet is, paradoxically, that the iPad is the best selling gadget on the planet. Turns out, the iPad sucks up quadruple the amount of wireless bandwidth as a smartphone — and hotels want to start metering your usage.

Six weeks before it officially goes on sale, Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire is shaping up to be the biggest tablet launch ever… and Cult of Android has the numbers to prove it.

A verified source within the Seattle based online retail giant has provided Cult of Android with exclusive screenshots of Amazon’s internal inventory management system Alaska (Availability Lookup and SKU Aggregator).

These leaked shoots show that orders for Amazon’s Android-based tablet are racking up at an average rate of over 2,000 units per hour, or over 50,000 per day.

In the five days since Amazon put the Kindle Fire up on their official site, over 250,000 tablets have been preordered. If this level of consumer demand for the Kindle Fire continues, Amazon will have 2.5 million preorders for the device before it officially goes on sale on November 15th.

Those numbers make the Kindle Fire’s launch likely to be the biggest tablet launch in history, beating both the iPad and iPad 2 in first month sales.

Having acquired the movie rights to Walter Isaacson’s authorized Steve Jobs biography earlier this month, Sony is now looking for a writer that can deliver Steve’s story to the big screen. At the top of the company’s wish list, according to a report from The LA Times, is Aaron Sokin, the writer behind The Social Network.

Steve Jobs’s quest for perfection was pursued down to the smallest details. It made him the father of some of the greatest products and interfaces in computer history.

As Walter Isaacson’s new biography on Steve Jobs makes clear, though, it could also sometimes make him nightmarish to live with… the sort of obsessive who could make even the most mundane seemingly household decisions into maddening, endless debates.

Depending on where you stand, a recent mobile advertising study was good news for Apple or Android. While Apple’s iPad and iPhone were the most connected devices for advertising, Google’s Android was the leading smartphone operating system, according to the report.

Tony Fadell is often referred to as the ‘father of the iPod’. He’s a former Apple engineer who helped develop Apple’s first portable music player along with Jeff Robbin, and he’s just announced a new 100-person startup called Nest Labs.

Having been a former DJ and overseeing 18 iterations of the iPod and the three generations of the iPhone, we’ve been keen to find out what Fadell and his company have been working on. But it isn’t a revolutionary new music player or communication device. It’s a thermostat.

While Apple is yet to open its iOS 5 Notification Center up to third-party widgets, developers have been hard at work creating awesome tweaks that can be installed on jailbroken devices. One of the best is a tweak called WeeSpaces, which makes it easier than ever to multitask on an iOS device.

First a China supplier of MacBook unibody cases was forced to spend millions on pollution cleanup, now an iPhone plant is under scrutiny for noise and gas pollution. Pegatron, just days from an investor conference, announced plans to update equipment and work closely with local residents.

Did you buy an app for your Mac that you later regret having bought? Or did you decide it was so terrible that you don’t want to be reminded about having bought it? Well, you are in luck, because now there is a way to remove purchases now from your Purchased history in the Mac App Store.

One thing you can be sure that Apple will improve with every iteration of its iPhone is the device’s camera. The original iPhone packed a 2-megapixel camera that wasn’t all that great at taking photos; things got significantly better two generations later with the iPhone 3GS. The 5-megapixel camera in the iPhone 4 received a ton of praise, but its 8-megapixel successor in the iPhone 4S is even more terrific.

So terrific, in fact, that the developer behind the hugely successful Camera+ application for the iPhone, Lisa Bettany, says the device “outshines” many of the high-end compact cameras currently on the market.

Apple’s iPhone 4S has been a huge success for Sprint since its launch on October 14, breaking both opening day sales and activation records. For many customers, however, life with the latest iPhone on Sprint isn’t all that fun, with painfully slow data speeds throttling the iPhone’s capabilities when away from a Wi-Fi connection. According to the carrier, however, its data speeds match those offered by its competitors.

Bloomberg reports that the original creator of iTunes, Jeff Robbin, is allegedly working on Apple’s upcoming TV set. Robbin also helped co-launch the original iPod with Tony Fadell.

The report cites “three people with knowledge of the project” and notes that Robbin’s involvement is “a sign of Apple’s commitment to extending its leadership in smartphones and tablets into the living room.”

Apple appears to have resolved the problems where 15-inch Mid-2010 MacBook Pro computers may intermittently free or stop displaying video.

The resolution has appeared in the form of a software update that is available now.

Apple has updated the firmware for Apple TV to version 4.4.2 about a week after pulling and releasing for a second time the earlier 4.4.1 update. The earlier update provided a some bug fixes and if we were to guess this one probably does too.

It looks like Apple is also offering an Apple TV tip for updating which I hope isn’t the normal thing to expect going forward. I’ve had a lot of trouble getting my Apple TV to find and install new updates. I hope that 4.4.2 resolves that problem for good.

Apple introduced High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography along with the iPhone 4 and iOS 4. HDR will automatically produce improved camera shots by combining three camera shots into one image. The HDR setting in the Camera app remains in iOS 5 and the new iPhone 4S.

That isn’t necessarily a good thing if you are prone to using the camera in your iPhone and HDR a lot, because HDR produces two images which are stored on your camera roll: the original and the HDR enhanced one. If your device has limited storage space this could start to be a problem.

If you have an iPhone 4S the images produced by the 8 Megapixel camera are larger than the ones produced on the iPhone 4 or iPhone 3Gs. Luckily there is a way for you to force the Camera app to only save the HDR image.

David Kelley and Steve Jobs have a lot in common. Kelley, the designer of Apple’s original mouse, was diagnosed with throat cancer back in 2007.

In addition to working with Apple on the mouse project, Jobs introduced Kelley to his wife. When Kelley was in the hospital, Jobs came to visit his old friend. And just like any well-wisher, he didn’t come empty handed.

Instead of flowers or candy, Jobs brought Kelley, who went on to found seminal design firm IDEO, the very first iPhone as a “get well” present. There was just one small problem: Jobs couldn’t get the iPhone to work.

Earlier today I got a chance to talk to Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs’ authorized biographer. Isaacson’s 620-page book hits bookstands today. He spoke while preparing to check out of his hotel in New York, where he’s conducting a whirlwind media tour for the book, which promises to be one of the biggest hits of the year.

In our interview, Isaacson revealed that Jobs was actually a lot more active in his cancer treatment than previous reports have suggested. He also thinks Apple will be OK without Jobs because he spent a decade building a great team and an institution infused with his DNA. And that the man, like the company he built, was an intriguiging mix of the arts and sciences.

The official Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson went live on the iBookstore and Amazon last night, and the title hit shelves everywhere this morning.

Initial pre-orders of the bio ushered it to the top of the charts on Amazon, and after less than 24 hours of availability, the book is on track to become Amazon’s best-selling title of 2011.

Serial entrepreneur Kevin Rose is known for founding companies like Digg and Revision3. He now works at an app development company he started called “Milk.”

Rose demoed his newest creation at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week. “Oink” is an upcoming app that lets users rank and share things with each other. Taking cues from Digg, the platform will act as an all-encompassing tool for finding the best things out there — whether you’re in need of a good massage or a slice of pizza.

The world’s largest carrier, China Mobile, has over 600 million wireless subscribers. 10 million of these customers have iPhones despite that fact that China Mobile is not an official Apple partner.

What’s even more surprising is that the iPhone isn’t currently compatible with China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA 3G network, meaning that these 10 million unofficial iPhone users are all limited to 2G data speeds.