Cult of Mac

Christian Louboutin, whose signature red-soled stilettos shod Carrie Bradshaw in Sex in the City, is a big fan of an iPhone-controlled toy.*

Apparently, HTC thinks that iPhones aren’t ‘cool’ anymore because parents use them. HTC US president Martin Fichter said in an interview today at the Mobile Future Forward conference in Seattle that kids and teenagers don’t want iPhones anymore because ‘dads’ have them.

Now that Samsung has denied that they are eying webOS as a potential platform for its mobile devices, HTC could end up being the one to purchase Palm’s former OS to compete against Apple’s iOS.

Not only would HTC buying webOS make sense financially, but it would also position HTC in a unique position to combat the growth of iOS in the mobile market.

Although all of Apple’s devices lately have been heaving with robust English numbers — the iPhone 4, the iPad 2 — Apple’s has never been afraid to pluck another language’s numerals if it sounded good. Who can forget Cupertino’s dabbling in Latin with the Apple II?

So who’s to say the iPhone 5 will be the iPhone Five? Such must have been the thinking behind Scoopertino’s latest gag, a press release announcing the iPhone Cinco, Apple’s latest and greatest device with a revolutionary snooze button and an incredible new Find My Sombrero app.

If you’ve got one of the 2011 MacBook Airs and have been waiting to umbilical it by Thunderbolt to one of Apple’s massive new 27-inch Cinema Displays, Apple’s just pushed live the software that will tell your notebook just how to do so.

A little heads up on the state of the official Steve Jobs biography: MacRumors has confirmed that the book is getting longer — 208 pages longer to be exact.

Since the former Apple CEO’s resignation, there’s obviously more material that belongs in an official biography. The bio, by Walter Isaacson, is still slated for a release on November 21st. Publisher Simon & Shuster’s has already made the book available for preorder on Amazon.

Brick-and-mortar game retailer GameStop has confirmed rumors that they’re going to start accepting trade-ins of iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads, alongside Android devices.

Any Apple device will simply be cleaned up, restored to its factory settings and resold, good as new. But guess what they want to do to the “open” Android devices? Riddle them with their own in-house crapware! Why build a tablet, after all, when you can just rebrand someone else’s?

Mac sales are showing continued growth in the most recent business quarter of 2011, according to a new report from esteemed analyst Gene Munster.

As noted by market research firm NPD, Apple’s Mac sales are up 22% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2011. Strong sales are mainly attributed to the introduction of the new MacBook Air and Mac Mini models released in July.

The $299.99 Parrot AR.Drone can be used for more nefarious purposes than one would image. The RC helicopter is controlled by an iPhone app, and hackers have found a way to turn the Parrot AR.Drone into an aerial WiFi hacking device.

What’s the name of the network that makes all of this possible? You guessed it: SkyNET.

Teenagers have been known to go to extreme lengths to get rid of their zits… everything from slathering their face in a quivering mask of Clearasil each night to scrubbing their visages in the ground up pits of apricots.

Rubbing an iPhone all over their greasy little faces, though, in the hopes that an app they downloaded will help zap their zits? That’s just desperate, but from now on, the FTC will no longer let unscrupulous app developers prey upon our nation’s zitheads. Hurrah!

Another of iTunes’ famous hold outs has finally woken up to the reality of the music business: singer-songwriter Bob Seger has finally given a thumbs up to Apple to start selling his songs.

In an odd bit of trash talk aimed at itself, AT&T replied to a Department of Justice objection to the acquisition of T-Mobile USA, the Dallas-based carrier saying T-Mobile is tiny and unlikely to be upgraded by its German parent. Additionally, AT&T said it has spent $30 billion upgrading its network between 2008 and 2010 and customers are still complaining.

Have you noticed the prices of iBooks increasing? It’s not a mystery that publishers now view electronic versions of their hardcover editions as a way to save money. Turns out publishers are adopting Apple’s “agency pricing” model, a move making cheap iBooks on your iPad or iPhone as rare as dime store novels.

Imagine iCloud’s ‘Documents in the Cloud’ feature fuzed with Dropbox. Or MobileMe’s iDisk only a million times faster and more reliable. That could have been one of the features launching alongside iOS 5 this fall, with reports Apple made an $800 million bid for Dropbox.

Continuing this morning’s rumors that the so-called iPhone 5 is nothing but a phantom, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has rushed over to Apple Insider and spilled more details about what his supply checks are showing: an iPhone 4S that is largely identical to current models, and even features the same amount of RAM… a mere 512MB.

While we all patiently await the release of iOS 5, Apple’s assemblers could be getting a gold master release from September 23, according to one analyst — just in time for a mid-October launch of the long-awaited iPhone 5.

New signs the iPhone 4 more than a year later is still hot in the minds of consumers. Last week, we wrote that the iPhone 4 is the top-selling U.S. smartphone despite cheaper Android alternatives. Another analyst tells investors the Apple handset shows ‘unexpected strength’ although the iPhone 5 is on the verge of hitting shelves.

Design proposals and pictures of Apple’s upcoming ‘spaceship campus’ have had us in awe over that jaw-dropping design and sheer magnificence, but as we learned last week, not everyone wants Apple’s spaceship campus to land. Over the weekend, LA Times’ architecture critic took a stab at ‘Apple Campus 2.’

Apple has added a restriction to the Applications folder on your start-up disk that versions of Mac OS X didn’t have before the release of Lion. The new restriction prevents you from moving apps out of the Applications folder, but this tip will show you how to get around that.

We’re all huge fans of the iconic glowing Apple logo that lights up every time we open up our MacBooks, so wouldn’t it be nice to have the Apple logo on the back of our iPhones do the same? Thanks to Andy and Chris at the U.K.-based iPatch iPhone & iPod repair specialists, you can have your iPhone 4 modded to boast a glowing Apple logo every time your screen lights up.

Does your Mac’s desktop look like this? Or like this? If so, you need help. More to the point, you need Clean.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkEYzS8zHok

If you’ve plowed years of hard work into maintaining an iWeb blog, you must be concerned about what will happen to your site with the impending death of MobileMe just around the corner. But thanks to this handy conversion tool from RAGE software, you can transfer it all to WordPress within minutes.

As originally noticed by iFans, NBC has finally updated its iPad app with the ability to watch full-length TV shows, including titles like The Office.

The app is free in the App Store, and the same content that’s available on NBC.com is also available on the iPad, thanks to the latest update.

Apple has issued a new OS X beta to developers with full iCloud integration. OS X 10.7.2 Build 11C55 is available to developers right now, and iCloud seems to be fully baked into the release for the first time.

Previously, iCloud betas had been available as separate downloads to be used in conjunction with beta OS X Lion developer builds.

Ever since the switch to OS X Lion, there’s been a few little tweaks in the Finder that have annoyed me. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t like change, but either way, I went about looking how to fix these problems. In this video, I’ll show you how to fix little annoyances you may have found with the Finder in OS X Lion.