Cult of Mac

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB11hiwupKM&feature=player_embedded

This is a total fake, for a number of reasons: the date on the unlock screen isn’t the same as the one on the calendar, and the apps obviously activate themselves before the guy doing the supposed iPhone 4S actually touches them.

Got to say, though, this is still one of the better YouTube fakes we’ve seen, and we’re guessing the boys at ECA Games are responsible, given that their unreleased stunt motorcycle game Rock(s) Rider is prominently featured in the app. Well done, scoundrels!

Yesterday, Amazon announced what is likely the first and only true alternative to the iPad in the Kindle Fire, a $199 Android-based tablet smartly tied into Android rich cloud ecosystem of games, apps, books and video on demand.

No matter how you slice it, the Kindle Fire is the first tablet to really understand that most of what makes a mobile device isn’t just hardware or an off-the-shelf operating system, but a library of easily-accessed contents. It’s not just the apps, it’s the movies, it’s the music, it’s the magazines, it’s the ebooks. And Amazon is going to provide these things for $300 less than Apple does.

So now that all the dust has settled, we want to know what you think: does Apple have anything to worry about from the Kindle Fire, or is this less a fire than a bunch of smoke?

[polldaddy poll=”5544143″]

Let us know your answer in our poll after the jump, and feel free to expand upon them in the comments.

Slate’s Michael Agger wrote a nice post this week, musing on the way Apple changed the way we scroll with the introduction of Lion just over two months ago.

It got me wondering: how long did it take people to adapt to the new rules of scrolling?

Ever since Apple released Lion as a download from the Mac App Store, boxed software has been on the endangered species list. Now, the Cupertino, Calif. company tells educators only two titles will be available as boxed software.

I have some exciting news: we’re launching a new software hub at deals.cultofmac.com.

Starting today, we’ll be bringing Apple fans the best deals in cutting-edge software and apps. We’ll be offering all kinds of deals: free app codes; 72-hour sales on premium packages; and bundles of the best apps — all at savings of 30% to 90% off retail.

We’re kicking off today with the smash-hit mail app Sparrow. It’s one of the highest-rated email clients on Mac OS X, and we have it for just $6.

For the first time, Apple is using one of its retail locations to announce a new product. Although next week’s iPhone event happens in Cupertino, Calif., the tech giant will stream the goings-on to London’s Covent Garden Apple store.

According to 9to5Mac, the next iPhone isn’t just popping up in AT&T’s inventory system: it’s in Apple’s too, and it’s confirmed to pack a dual-core A5 SoC.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cSSiCghAdU&feature=player_embedded

The Swiss are known for their neutrality, so who better to try to negotiate a peace deal between Android and the iPhone? The result: this cute little video by the folks at Swiss broadcasting corp Swissinfo, which references movies as wide-ranging as Transformers, Braveheart, The Phantom Menace, Titanic, Ghost and The Bodyguard to urge the Android Army and the iPhone iPhalanx to put aside their silly differences and make love, not war.

[via AppAdvice]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU7iCNIumpc

While the possibility of an iPhone 5 with an all-new design has been quashed in recent rumors, case makers in China are still confident that Apple will have a surprise up its sleeve come October 4. So confident, in fact, that you’ll be surprised at how many iPhone 5 cases are already available.

Acer, the company that saw the iPad devour its Netbook market, is whistling past the graveyard again. This time, the Taiwan-based PC maker forecasts consumers will turn from tablets to Ultrabooks in 2012. Such talk could go into the same category of the Mayan calendar foreshadowing the end of the world.

We’ve been awaiting Facebook’s iPad app since Zuckerberg finally changed his mind on the whole thing, and we know it’s ready because we’ve already used it, so why don’t we have it yet? Well, apparently it’s been held up because of some “internal back-and-forth between Apple and Facebook”, but it’s now ready to launch, and will do so imminently — along with Project Spartan.

A China Unicom executive has just confirmed that Apple’s next iPhone will be 4G-capable. But surround air quotes around 4G, because we’re not talking LTE: we’re talking 21Mbps HSPA+ technology. In other words, marketing 4G.

Although Samsung continues to supply parts for a range of Apple devices, making Apple the Korean company’s largest customer, the pair don’t seem to have the best relationship these days. They are currently involved in a number of legal spats which has seen Apple accuse Samsung of copying the iPhone and iPad with its Galaxy range of smartphones and tablets, but before the courtroom battles began, Steve Jobs gave Samsung the chance to put things right.

File Vault 2 in Mac OS X Lion is very useful and it has improvements over its predecessor that I really like. One of those improvements is that you can now use it to encrypt external drives this even includes USB thumb drives which are easily lost.

What many analysts earlier presumed to be a shot across Apple’s bow, after Wednesday’s unveiling of Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, could actually torpedo the chances of inexpensive Android devices to challenge the iPad. Android tablets, unable to match the iPad’s features and design were hoping to undercut Apple’s pricing — that is until news of the Fire’s $199 price tag.

Sharing an iPhoto or iTunes library between two users is a common request, but Apple doesn’t make this easy. Home Sharing will distribute purchased media but does not allow you to manage a single shared library. Here are some Apple recommended options:

I have my iPhoto library located in my /Users/Shared folder. My wife is an Admin and I am an Admin and both login apps are linked to it. I have gone as far as selecting the permissions to read and write for everyone, but there are still videos she can’t watch and when she imports items they don’t save to the library. Importing can only be done from my login.

Can you detail the exact method for sharing?

We’re just putting this out there: a tipster just sent us a picture of what he claims is the packaging label barcode for the iPhone 4S, coming in white with 16GB of storage. According to the label, the part number will be MD239F/A. All other information that could be used to identify the device has been obscured.

Is it real? We don’t know. It would certainly be trivial to Photoshop. That said, if this is real, it confirms that the iPhone 4S is Apple’s official product name for the next iPhone, and unlike the iPhone 4, it’ll come in white from the get go.

Your Mac comes with QuickTime Player, which does a great job of playing a lot of video content. Lovely.

But if you spend a lot of time doing stuff with video, you’ll know there are times when QuickTime lets you down. There are formats it just won’t play, even if you have Perian installed (which was number 4 in our list of 50 Mac Essentials).

When those moments arise, VLC will come to your aid.

Chinese police in Shanghai have arrested a gang of five people for making and selling fake iPhones on the black market. Unlike the other fake iPhones we’ve seen, however, these ones were made using a selection of real iPhone parts.

If you’ve got a new Thunderbolt-capable Mac and you’ve got it hooked up a 24-inch Cinema Display, you’ve probably encountered a bit of flickering every now and again. I know I have, and so have a number of users on Apple’s discussion forums.

Thankfully, Apple has issued to firmware update to resolve the issue, but it won’t be coming via Software Update.

The back and forth between Samsung and Apple in the courts is getting ridiculous. For months, the two companies have been in the middle of a heated series of ‘copycat’ lawsuits, with Apple originally accusing Samsung’s Galaxy line of infringing on the Cupertino company’s patents and trademarks.

Whether or not Apple is right about all of its claims, it’s hard to deny that Samsung hasn’t received a little “inspiration” from Apple’s products.

Of all the Apple stuff I’ve ever owned, only an iPod Mini and my beloved 3rd-Gen iPod and maybe a few stickers have ever been stolen; I consider myself lucky. If MacBook Pros come with slots to keep them locked down, why not the iPad? Griffin says “why not, indeed” with their new TechSafe Case ($80).

Apple is known for quality. Quality products, quality design, quality talent — Apple has it all. Unsurprisingly, Apple also serves quality food to its Cupertino employees.

Apple’s main 1 Infinite Loop campus is home to a world class cafeteria called Caffe Macs. An Apple employee named James at Caffe Macs has spilled the beans on everything you could every want to know about Apple’s cafeteria, including lots of yummy food and a run-in with Steve Jobs himself.

Akitio’s pretty new alloy enclosure has a back full of inputs: eSATA, USB 3.0 and two FireWire 800 ports. There’s no way to jack in a Thunderbolt connection, though.

Review by Jordan Trimas

The JayBird Freedom JF3 ($99) Bluetooth wireless headphones are a successful attempt to build upon a paramount technological concept: take something good and make it great — or in this case, take a good pair of IEM headphones and ditch the cord. It’s like a musical bris without the rabbi — or the baby.