Cult of Mac

The professional photographer’s dream of using Aperture on the run with his iPad may finally be within reach.

On the day of Apple’s 10th Retail Store anniversary, not everyone’s celebrating: in fact, a small but vocal group of Apple Store employees is working hard even now to unionize in response to what they term unfair treatment and compensation.

We start the day off with two MacBook deals. The first is a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook for $400. Next is a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo-powered MacBook Pro for $1,049. We wrap up the deal spotlight with the rooCase for the iPhone 4. The package includes a screen protector and stylus.

Along the way, we also check out a number of iPad accessories, as well as software for your Mac. As always, details on these items, plus many others, can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

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Tuned is an innovative new game for the iPhone that offers music lovers an endless number of entertaining music quizzes from just about every genre there is. The unique thing about this game is that it takes its music from the song previews in the iTunes store’s top charts, so even if you don’t have a single track of your own stored on your device, you can still enjoy the quizzes.

Take a trip through this iPad-controlled abode – where the owners set the thermostat, spy on loved ones, set the alarm and watch movies thanks to Apple’s magical device.

More signs that your iPad may be the future of print. Online bookseller Amazon announced Thursday e-books are outselling paper versions. While the announcement focused on the Kindle, the news also gives reason for Apple to celebrate its own e-reading plans, including iBookstore.

Underwhelmed with Apple’s new smartcover for the iPad, the folks over at Tuff Luv in the U.K. decided they would show Steve Jobs how it’s done.

So they sent him the above case in hemp.

Your iPad or iPhone sitting idle may be costing you money. That’s the message from a class-action lawsuit charging AT&T with overcharging Apple customers up to 300 percent.

Ten years ago today, on May 19th, 2001, Apple opened the first Apple retail store at Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. A decade later, there are 323 Apple Stores around the world, with 85 outside of the United States, servicing over two hundred and twenty five million customers per year.

To celebrate the Apple Store’s 10th, we decided to throw together a gallery of some of the most visually striking, noteworthy and downright weird Apple retail stores around the world.

That new MacBook Pro of yours, may be more Apple than originally thought. Although Intel was credited with the Thunderbolt trademark on early 2011 Apple laptops, it now appears that Apple may have beaten them to the bunch and snuck in their own trademark application a year ahead of time. Is this cricket?

We give out a fair share of free stuff via Twitter, and while today is no exception we’ve decided to spice things up by having a Twitter Trivia Giveaway. If you’d like to win a free Spiderpodium Tablet by Breffo we’d be happy to have one sent to you as long as you play by the rules.

Despite Google’s position as one of the biggest advertising companies on earth, if you’re a company looking to promote your product, buying ads for an Android device is a pretty dicy proposition when you could buy them on an iOS device instead.

With all the deals getting inked and all the right hires in place, Apple is increasingly ready to jump iTunes into the cloud… possibly as early as next month’s WWDC. But how exactly will it work?

Oh, Research In Motion! Can you for one moment stop making your would-be iPad killer suck even harder than it already does?

Panned critically at debut, RIM recently had to recall over a thousand half-baked units. Now reports indicate that a recent patch has made PlayBook performance even worse than it was before.

Apple’s plans to launch a super-speedy LTE-enabled ‘4G’ iPhone later this year have reportedly been scuppered by a delay in manufacturing the chips, however, when the device does launch in 2012, it’s heading to China Mobile.

As this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference approaches, it seems Apple’s plan to bring us a magical cloud filled with a never-ending collection of music called ‘iCloud’ is getting its final touches. Sources say a licensing deal with music label EMI is now in place, but what about the other labels?

It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for since the iPad first launched in April 2010. It’s the reason we all stood in line for a day to get our hands on one. And it’s the reason why the iPad has been such an overwhelming success all over the world. Yes, I’m talking about Playboy magazine… which is now available on your tablet.

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There are a lot of perks that come with jailbreaking your iPhone 4, and this latest tweak is one of the coolest things we’ve seen in a while. RecognizeMe is a jailbreak tweak that allows user of the iPhone 4 to unlock their devices via a facial scan.

According to a report on local television station KHOU Channel 11 you just might get more than you bargained for after your next trip to a local Apple Store in Houston, Texas. According to authorities in Houston there have been at least six Apple customers in Houston who have been followed home and robbed at gunpoint.

The smooth little black pebble above from XtremeMac is a new combo charging/bluetooth-streaming option called the InCharge Home BT ($80). Pretty simple concept: Plug it into a wall outlet, then hook it up via the 3.5 mm jack to any speaker system and bango, you’ve given the system Bluetooth streaming capability, which means you can stream music to your speakers from any iDevice or Mac; then use the USB port to charge stuff (comes with a USB t0 30-pin connector and a 3.5 mm jack cable). There’s also an auto version called, naturally, the InCharge Auto BT ($80) that XtremeMac says allows hands-free calling, so we’re assuming it’s equipped with a microphone.

Mophie’s new Juice Pack Plus for the iPhone 4 (both versions) is just one millimeter thicker than Mophie’s flagship Juice Pack Air — but stuffs 25 percent more battery into that sliver. The $100 Plus is the most massive battery ever produced by Mophie and comes with all the fancy frippery of it’s lighter brother (rubberized casing, LED status indicator, standby switch and what Mophie calls an “Acoustic Sound Enhancement,” which we weren’t sure actually did anything in our test of the 3GS version of the Air).

Liking the purple? Better get a jump on ordering; only 3000 of those were made. If you miss out, there’s still cyan, yellow, magenta or good ‘ol black-on-black to pick from.

During the pre-review back-and-forth with Jerry Harvey’s vaunted audiophile-focused lab — the flagship creation of which are the JH Audio JH16 Pro in-ear monitors being reviewed here — I asked them offhandedly how a set of IEMs with eight drivers in each ear (that’s right, almost unbelievably, eight tiny armatures and a crossover are cocooned within each earpiece) would compare with something akin to the single-driver-per-ear Etymotic hf2’s we liked so much. The answer came back: Don’t be daft.

Can a $99 second-gen Apple TV operate under heavy load as a web server? With the death of the venerable XServ line, one hosting company is going to try to find out.

San Francisco-based Cult of Mac staff and any others of our far-flug correspondent crew as can get here look forward to meeting readers and WWDC attendees at a cocktail reception on Thursday, June 9 from 6pm – 9pm during Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference.

Think recent reports that Mac malware is a very real threat are just another example of security researchers crying wolf? Think again.

An AppleCare support representative says that not only are call centers being inundated with reports about the MacDefender malware, but that Apple employees who help customers remove it from their computer can be fired.