Cult of Mac

Before the iPhone 4, the worst that could happen to the back of your handset in a clumsy drop is a few dings or scratches, but the new iPhone’s all glass back makes the accidental spill twice as hazardous as it was before by doubling the glass surface area that can be cracked, splintered or shattered in a fall. Add antenna attenuation issues into the mix and a case becomes a better investment than before, but some people simply prefer the pristine look of an uncovered iPhone.

This iPhone 4 accessory is an interesting solution to the problem of Apple’s latest smartphone’s fragile backplate. In essence, it’s a just $14.

[via Technabob]

With the launch of the Mac App Store set to occur in mere months and with Apple already encouraging developers to prepare to submit applications to Cupertino in November, it was only a matter of time before the App Store for Mac guidelines leaked out in full thanks to some anonymous NDA-breaking developer.

It’s a long list, which you can see in total after the jump, but there’s a few standout restrictions which are sure to raise some eyebrows. ReadWriteWeb has an excellent overview of the more notable ones. We’re particularly puzzled by Apple’s seeming aversion to RSS readers on the App Store, as well as their specific mention of a policy ban against all Russian Roulette simulators.

Steve Jobs is feeling pretty smug after yesterday’s unveiling of the new and svelter than ever MacBook Airs… so smug that he spent the hours after yesterday’s Back To Mac event openly ridiculing the morbidly obese laptops of the journalists present.

The exchange was reported by Forbes’ Brian Caulfield, who reported that after yesterday’s Back To Mac presentation, Steve Jobs loped up to him and pointed one trembling finger at the morbidly obese Dell M1210 Caulfield was writing a story upon and began to laugh at its fatness.

With about a third of iPad owners, the App Store is a rare destination. A survey released Thursday finds, among other information nuggets, that 32 percent of iPad owners have yet to download a single app – not even free ones. This could be disheartening to Apple and others, who see the iPad as an integral part in the Cupertino, Calif. company’s strategy of integration.

Another group, 63 percent of the participants in a Nielsen Co. survey, is the audience likely to adopt Apple’s new App Store Economy. These iPad owners purchase their games, read books, do finances – even plan their vacations on the iPad. With an App Store for music, video, books, the iPod, iPhone, iPad and now the Mac, these self-confessed early-adopters will accept Apple’s vision of the future.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs took the stage for the Back to Mac event and finally put the kibosh on the idea of touchscreen iMacs. He made some excellent points: namely, that multitouch really requires a horizontal configuration instead of a vertical one, making it only a really pleasant-to-use experience on a device like a tablet or smartphone.

Makes sense to us.If you’re just dying for the touchscreen iMac experience, though, why not transform your iPad into a semblance of one with the PadDock, which will turn your iPad into a tiny approximation of a 10-inch iPad. It contains built-in speakers, 360 degrees of rotation and the ability to charge and sync your iPad while it’s connected.

I mean, look: the PadDock is really just an iPad speaker dock with a novelty shape. That’s cool, but you may well not want to spend $100 on it, especially since the iPad in a vertical docking configuration is going to be subject to the same ergonomic difficulties Steve Jobs says is stopping Apple from bringing multitouch to the displays of their laptops and desktops. But take a good look anyway,because this is the closest to a touchscreen iMac you’re going to get this short of a really ingenious Hackintosh.

It’s now possible to jailbreak your AppleTV thanks to PwnageTool and greenpois0n, but there’s not much to do with that jailbreak until developers get cracking on their apps. Luckily, it seems that development for jailbroken AppleTVs is already well under way. A small team of developers over at nitoTV have already written the first native AppleTV app.

It’s not much, really: just a simple weather app for now. Barely even a widget in scope. The point, though, isn’t in the scope: it’s the proof of concept demonstrating that developers can actually run apps on the AppleTV instead of just playing around in the command line.

AT&T, Apple’s exclusive iPhone provider, Thursday posted third-quarter results of $31.6 billion and a record number of iPhone 4 subscribers. The Dallas, Texas-based carrier announced 5.2 million iPhone activations, up from the previous record of 3.2 million. Almost a quarter of those were from new AT&T customers.

“This was a terrific mobile broadband quarter,” said chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson. “A record number of customers signed new two-year contracts and integrated device sales outpaced our previous best by a wide margin,” he added. AT&T said it gained 2.6 million net subscribers, up 30 percent from a year ago.

Limera1n and greenpois0n have made it possible to jailbreak your iOS 4.1 device for almost a couple weeks now, but if you’re like me, any jailbreak not officially released by the iPhone Dev Team under the PwnageTool moniker is worth an eyebrow arch of circumspection.

Good news, then: the Dev Team have finally released PwnageTool 4.1 for Mac OS X, which used a combination of geohot’s contentious limera1n exploit, Comex’s PF kernetl exploit and the Dev Team’s own pwnage2 exploit.

The previous generation MacBook Air was thin enough to slice a birthday cake or a loaf of bread as an ample library of YouTube videos proved at the time of the notebook’s release. It was so thin, in fact, that though I thought the laptop was functionally useless for real world use in that its wimpy specs and abysmal battery life, it would have been my go-to laptop for use in a post-apocalypse setting: simply file along the edge of the unibody enclosure and the first generation MacBook Air would have made a dandy makeshift machete, perfect for slicing the jugular of a gasoline-crazed motorcycle psycho or lopping off the top of the skull of a flesh-hungry zombie.

The latest MacBook Air is even thinner than its predecessor, and therefore continues the trend of being an excellent survivalist’s laptop. In fact, the new MacBook Air is actually thinner than the blade of an axe, even at the axe’s sharpest point. Yowza. Don’t knock it off the table and onto your toes.

Here’s my question: how long it will take a third-party accessory manufacturer to start selling a heavy, snap-on axe handle for the Air? I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

Though much of the buzz in the wake of today’s “Back to the Mac” event has been about the pair of sleek new MacBooks Air that Steve whipped out during one more thing (guilty as charged), the most revolutionary announcement was the Mac App Store. In one slide, Apple flipped the way people buy software for PCs on its head. Big ad budgets will soon be less important than a good relationship with Apple.

There’s a lot to debate about the Mac App Store (which we’ll do from now until a few years after its launch), but I want to touch on something no one is talking about yet: it makes Apple the greenest computer company on the planet.

Steve Jobs has a penchant for ruthlessly killing off old technology. Throughout his career, Jobs has been celebrated for ditching dying technologies in favor of new: the command line (first Mac), the Floppy Disk (first iMac), SCSI drives, serial ports, dial-up modems, and FireWire on hard drives and iPods.

With Apple’s event yesterday Steve Jobs, went on a killing spree. Here’s eight technologies he gave the kiss of death to:

Sign seen in an electronics store in Surrey, Canada: Please Do Not Touch the iPod touch.  Straight from the “People Unclear on the Concept” Department.  Kafka would be proud.

Although one could argue that with Apple’s ongoing fetish for Shiny, Tiny objects, soon No One will be able to Touch the iPod Touch.

[via Ellen]

Yesterday we posted some first impressions of the Mac App Store by a list of some of the finest software developers around. Overnight we’ve had more responses from more superb developers, so here for your reading pleasure are their initial thoughts about the Store and what it means for their business.

Overall the mood is positive, but uncertain. There are still many questions to be answered. Almost all the devs we’ve spoken to are keen to get started, but not quite sure yet how they’re going to make it all come together.

(And to all the developers who took part, providing comment for this post and yesterday’s, Cult of Mac would like to say a big, big thank you. You people rock.)

So now we know that OS X 10.7 Lion will be released next summer, and that many of its features will be based on the loop of feedback Steve Jobs described: the Mac influenced the iPhone, which influenced the iPad, which is now influencing the Mac once more.

Or to put it another way: expect lots of iOS-style controls, widgets and designs in Lion.

If you looked closely at the demos in yesterday’s presentation, you might have noticed one or two little details that offer hints of what’s to come.

This bit from yesterday’s event made me laugh out loud.

This was about 30 minutes in, and Randy Ubillos was showing us the new iMovie ’11 and its built-in trailers. Impressive movie soundtrack music blared out.

Randy turned to the crowd and said: “For the music, we went to London, to Abbey Road studios, and made original recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra.”

He dropped that in so casually, but just think about it for a moment.

For the sound effects used in one feature, in one application that lives inside a larger suite of media apps, Apple hired an orchestra, a conductor, a composer, Abbey Road studios, and all the paraphernalia that must have come with them. Caterers, hotels, management, hangers-on, producers, heaven knows who and what else.

That’s what you do when you have $50bn in the bank.

Apple has released the following updates in order to support iLife ’11 more effectively: ProKit Update 6.0.1, and Aperture Update 3.1. In addition to those updates Apple has also release Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3 in order to better support ava SE 6 to 1.6.0_22.

The updates were made available earlier today. Just launch Software Update on your Mac to download and install these now.

Click the read link below for details on these new updates that were provided by Apple.

Crap! You just popped for a new MacBook Pro two weeks ago, and now Apple goes and releases the superfabulous iLife ’11, meaning you’ve gotta fork over another $49 for a copy (or $79 for the five-computer Family Pack), right?

Nope! Apple is letting recent Mac buyers upgrade from the previous version of iLife for $7, so long as they bought the Mac(s) on or after Oct. 1; same deal applies to anyone buying a Mac now or in the future without iLife ’11. Bummer: The $7 upgrade is only available online, so you’ll have to wait for it in the mail — or wince as you pay for a $49 copy from an Apple Store, if you’re in a hurry.

I hate to crow, I really do, but we nailed it on the MacBook Air rumors.

Just look at our mockup above, which we published on Monday, and the real deal. It’s pretty uncanny, especially as the designer, Don Draper, mocked it up based on a description from a source. Of course, Apple is very consistent with its design language, which makes things easier. We got the color of the screen bezel wrong and forgot to include the headphone jack. But still — just look at it.

We got most of the specs right too.

Despite a massive lion lurking in the background of the press invite for today’s event, the big news didn’t have much to do with OS X 10.7 (now officially “Lion”); instead, the big news was about the new MacBook Air pair, the Mac App Store, FaceTime for Mac — and iLife ’11

In fact, iLife almost stole the thunder from the later “one more thing” MacBook Air announcement. And for good reason: There’re some really impressive features included in this round of what is quite possibly the best software suite to ever come standard on a manufacturer’s entire product line.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M1r-xsFw0Q

We’ve been playing around with the new beta release of FaceTime, and while it’s slim on features, we’re fairly pleased with the app considering it’s still in the beta phase. So far FaceTime for Mac is a simple replication of FaceTime from iOS, but it’s simplicity is what I like about it so far.

So this is what happens when you open FaceTime on your Mac, use it to call FaceTime on your iPhone, and then point the camera on one towards the camera on the other: infinite FaceTime!

Coming soon: infinite FaceTime inside infinite screensharing. Go on, I dare you.

This dream is collapsing. As long as we’ve got the timings right, we can ride the wake-ups all the way back to the real world.

Feast your eyes on the sleek new curves on the Macbook Air. Apple has definitely made one of the most beautiful notebooks I’ve ever seen. This new thin and light unibody notebook will definitely be an eye catcher.

Click the read link to see more images.

So there’s going to be an App Store for the Mac, just like the App Store we’re all used to on iOS.

What do OS X developers think of this?

I got in touch with a bunch of devs to ask them what they make of it. Many of them are still reading through the official documentation, and some of the questions they ask below may well be answered there. But here are some of their very first impressions…

Buster Heine: The new MacBook Air has a nice wafting odor of sex coming from the design (except for the metal bezel), but the specs and pricing are a bit disappointing for me. I’m not a rich businessman on the go, so I don’t think I’m in the target demographic of the new MBAs.

From a practical standpoint, the 13-inch is irrelevant. I’m really attracted to that beautiful 11.6 inch unit with a $999 price point, but there’s no point in replacing my 13′ Macbook Pro for an underpowered machine that is a few pounds lighter.

The new Macbook Airs confuse me. They seem designed to be a secondary computer, but if I already have an iPad + keyboard, an iPhone, and a MacBook Pro, there’s no point in buying it because it can’t handle everything a MacBook Pro can, and it’s too expensive to be an amateur’s computer. If Apple can bring down the price on the new units I might be tempted, but for now I’ll be resisting the urge to buy the new Apple gear, no matter how sexy it looks.

This is the software reinstall disk for the new MacBook Air. Cool eh?

Here’s the details of what’s on it, according to Apple’s knowledgebase article: