Apple rumors are an interesting breed. No other company garners the same level of speculation and anticipation that Apple receives.
The rumor mill is always churning, especially leading up to a major Apple announcement, and sometimes rumors fly so fast that it can be hard to make sense of it all. In case you were wondering, this clever infographic shows how the typical Apple rumor forms over time.
Apple is working on a new type of drive that combines the best aspects of both traditional platter-based and flash storage. According to a recent patent published by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, Apple has some innovate ideas up its sleeve for a SSD/HDD combo drive.
Following the news that Disney is introducing a series of iPad games that interact with physical toys, Lego is also introducing its next generation of games with the “Life of George” iPhone app.
The game consists of classic Lego bricks, a free iPhone app, and a mat that basically acts as a green screen. The player tries to create the image shown on the iPhone app in Legos on the mat before time runs out.
Remember Psystar? The small company used to put together computers running OS X to then sell on the cheap. Apple won a permanent injunction against Psystar back in 2009 that prohibited the company from selling any unauthorized computers running OS X.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirms that Psystar did indeed violate Apple’s Mac OS X copyrights, and that the ban on sales will be upheld.
If you’re expecting to see iPads with a “Assembled in Brazil” marker engraved across the aluminum back starting next year, think again. Brazilian officials are now claiming that “crazy demands” by Foxconn could totally nix the $12 billion deal, keeping iPhone and iPad manufacturing firmly rooted in Asia.
Right now, it’s looking unlikely that the next iPhone will be a true new design, a real iPhone 5. Instead, it looks almost certain that Apple will announced the iPhone 4S on Tuesday instead… an upgraded device that looks almost identical to the iPhone 4.
That said, the sheer volume of reports that say that Apple has been working on a thinner, teardrop shaped iPhone with a bigger screen are hard to ignore, and many industry folks’ best guess is that that device will come in 2012. And here’s what it will look like.
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.