Cult of Mac

An new police app takes the game of cops and robbers to a different level: concerned citizens – plus hooligans, miscreants and various and sundry – in Surrey, U.K. can now see where the police are.

“Did you feel that?” That was the question many were asking on the east coast a couple of hours ago. A 5.8-magnitude earthquake sent tremors through New York and the New England area this afternoon, with the epicenter located in Virginia.

9to5Mac has obtained a photo of Apple’s evacuated flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Once the quake hit, Apple employees and customers were evacuated to Central Park while the store was checked for damages.

Hopefully no one was harmed during today’s earthquake. Stay safe out there, folks.

We told you yesterday that Apple had released an update to Lion in Software Update. Version 10.7.1 of Lion fixes several bugs and compatibility issues.

Lion has just now been updated to version 10.7.1 in the Mac App Store, and this news indicates a system for how Lion updates will most likely be pushed to users from now on.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Sprint will offer Apple’s iPhone come this October. Currently, the iPhone is only available on AT&T and Verizon. An AT&T/T-Mobile merger is currently in the process of being approved by the FCC, so that leaves Sprint as the lonely, iPhone-less kid in the corner.

According to a new report, Sprint will soon be able to share in Apple’s ‘magical’ smartphone when the iPhone 5 is launched in October.

Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 5 alongside a cheaper, possibly retooled iPhone 4 in the coming months, with industry reports indicating a September or October launch.

According to Apple’s manufacturing partners overseas, Apple is drastically ramping up iPhone production for the second half of 2011, with an estimated 58 million units expected to ship. With the continued sales of iPhone 4 models alongside whatever is announced this Fall, it looks like the last two business quarters of 2011 will be record-breaking for Apple.

Samsung and Apple have a tenuous “frenemy” relationship (mostly meeting in court) over handsets and tablets, but now the two companies could compete in a third market: notebooks. The South Korean PC maker has its eye on snapping-up HP’s computer manufacturing, propelling Samsung to No. 1.

Faced with lawsuits around the globes, Samsung’s counting on a surprising witness to help them prove that their Galaxy Tab 10,1 didn’t rip off the design of Apple’s iPad: long-dead director Stanley Kubrick!

Thirty two years ago, a UK office furniture manufacturer called Hille International wanted a new design for an office chair, something that would pry loose the white-knuckled fingers of American design duo Charles and Ray Eames from their death grip on the office furniture market.

The line of chairs that resulted was called the System Supporto, and not only is it a masterpiece of design… it is Apple designer Jony Ive’s favorite kind of chair, widely used within Apple. According to our own source, it probably even inspired the design of the MacBook Pro!

We’ve written earlier this year how the iPad is replacing the cash register at smaller shops. Now retail giants such as Lowe’s and Home Depot are dumping the traditional till for the tablet.

Having previously requested ownership with no success, Jay Freeman, known to the jailbreaking community as Saurik, the creator of Cydia, has now filed a lawsuit in a bid to obtain the Cydia.com domain from its current owner.

If you want to offer a tablet not powered by iOS or Android, you might want to cool your heels until the next decade. Apple’s iPad and various Android-powered tablets will control 90 percent of the market through at least 2017, researchers announced Monday.

Delta was the first U.S. airline to deploy the iPad, with 22 devices replacing weighty flight bags for a number of its pilots. Now United Airlines is also taking Apple’s device to the skies, but with a slightly larger roll-out that will see 11,000 of the tablets handed out to all United and Continental pilots.

Following the launch of the new Mac mini earlier this year, the guys over at iFixit performed their customary teardown and revealed that the eradication on the system’s optical drive leaves room for a second hard drive. In order to make installing your own a great deal easier, iFixit has launched an awesome little kit that provides everything you need for the job.

The beat goes on for Apple as the tech giant continues to increase Mac sales amid declining PC demand. The release of a new MacBook Air and the long-awaited Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” software pushed U.S. Mac sales 26 percent higher during the first portion of the three-month September quarter, Wall Street experts say.

Despite a rumored delay to the launch of the third-generation iPad, Apple is continuing to piece together its iPad 3 supply chain, which is now said to include three primary LCD makers that will supply the device’s much-anticipated Retina display.

Although we could use gestures to navigate in earlier versions of Safari Mac OS X Lion shipped with Safari 5.1. The new version of Safari added a new two-fingered gesture for navigating through browser history.

Further information surrounding that rumored ‘budget iPhone’ continues to surface as we approach the launch of the fifth-generation device, and according to two sources for Reuters, it could be in the form of a cheaper 8GB iPhone 4. Surely that gets your mouth watering?

Since launching the CDMA iPhone for Verizon back in February, Apple has been producing two models of the iPhone 4: one for AT&T, and one for Verizon. A dual-mode iPhone 5 with support for both CDMA and GSM networks seems like a no-brainer next time around, then, and according to at least one iOS app developer, the device is all but confirmed by logs that show a dual-mode device in testing.