In case you missed it, Apple stole the spotlight this year at SXSW by launching iPad 2 in a temporary popup shop right in the heart of Austin.
I had heard that Apple was opening a popup store at a secret location during SXSW, but the location wasn’t a secret for long.
Long lines, big signs, high fives—even dancing ensued once the twitterverse got wind of the popup’s location. It was a crazy fun time, so if you haven’t seen it yet, check the video and let your eyes behold the insanity of this brilliant iPad launch.
PS, excuse the video’s abrupt ending, my camera ate some of my video bytes.
Microsoft is killing the Zune player after five years of unsuccessfully trying to compete with Apple’s iPod.
The Zune is being discontinued thanks to weak ongoing sales, Bloomberg reports. It will not be refreshed when current units sell out.
When the Zune was introduced in 2006, in mold-breaking brown nonetheless, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer predicted the player would one day overtake Apple. But it failed to even crack the top five MP3 players. According to NPD, Apple had 77% market share in 2010.
“MSFT abandoning Zune last sign AAPL totally dominated portable music for the last decade,” tweeted industry analyst Michael Gartenberg. “Sony, Samsung, Dell all failed to move needle.”
Gartenberg also predicted that tablets will be the next Zune.
Pundit Paul Kedrosky said: “My main reaction to news that Microsoft is going to stop selling Zunes is … Microsoft still sold Zunes?”
Instead of selling hardware players, Microsoft will shift its focus to putting Zune on smartphones running Windows mobile OS.
With its world class design, Microsoft’s young hip image, and ground-breaking advertising like the spot below, is it any wonder the Zune failed to take off?
Just like CBS I don’t know if this is real or fake. However, it is interesting and intriguing. The video shows a man who uses his iPhone, a video transmitter, and a repeater to hijack video billboards in Times Square. In a sense it looks like he’s hacked the video feeds going to these video billboards displayed in Times Square.
He starts off with small video billboards at ground level and eventually works his way up to a giant CNN billboard high above the middle of Times Square.
Real or fake? Tell us what you think by leaving a comment.
Rocker Jon Bon Jovi says Steve Jobs is “personally responsible for killing the music business” with iTunes.
In an interview with The Sunday Times Magazine, Bon Jovi says kids no longer enjoy the “magical” experience of buying and enjoying LPs because of digital downloads. He hates to sound like an “old man,” he says, but it’s all Jobs’ fault:
“Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it. God, it was a magical, magical time. I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now people are going to say: ‘What happened?’. Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.”
I’m an old man too, but I’ve never enjoyed music more. I much prefer my fantastic Sonos music system than my old record player. I do recall the excitement of buying a new LP every week. I doubt I’d get the same excitement these days, but that’s not Steve Jobs’ fault.
As for killing music, I’d say Bon Jovi has done more on that front than Steve Jobs.
Incidentally, Bon Jovi sits on a White House panel with Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell Jobs. Both are members of the White House council for Community Solutions. Might be awkward at the next meeting.
Way back in 1978, Apple Corps successfully got Apple to agree never to enter the music industry in court… a ban that Apple was obviously successful at whittling away at, slowly but surely, over the next twenty odd years. That culminated in a 2007 settlement that resulted in most of Apple Corps’ trademarks being given to Apple, Inc… a settlement that ultimately led to the release of the Beatles catalog on iTunes back in late 2010.
Curiously, though, one Apple Corps trademark that Apple never got was for Apple Corps’ distinctive and fruity logo. That’s now changed, with Apple having applied for Apple Corps’ Granny Smith apple logo with the European Treademarks Office on March 11th, 2011, covering everything from computer hardware, online social networking services, musical instruments, games, clothing, advertising and broadcasting.
In trademark disputes, gaining control over your opponent’s official logo is what is called a fatality. After twenty three years, it looks like the dispute between Apple Corps and Apple is over once and for all.
Back in September, Apple filed a patent that would make the audio jacks in their iOS devices even smaller, using deflectable pogo pins instead of cantilever beams to extend into the jack’s cavity and conduct audio and electricity to your headphones.
It was an interesting patent, but Apple’s patents have a tendency to never materialize. This one did, though: according to Kevin Fox of Mozilla Labs, the iPad 2 is the first Apple device to use the new pogo pin audio jack.
We start another week of deals with bargains for the iPod touch, iPad 2 and iPhone 3G. First in the spotlight is an 8GB iPod touch for just $199 from the Apple Store. Next is silicone and TPU cases for Apple’s latest iPad 2, starting at $5.99. Last in the spotlight is a 16GB unlocked iPhone 3G for $338.
Along the way, we also check out a sliding bluetooth keyboard case for your iPhone 4, a case for your iPod touch, and software for your Mac. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
Check out this video of the iPad 2 playing Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade on a 50-inch LG HDTV running at 1080p, thanks to the new iPad HDMI adapter. That’s a ten-dollar game looking just as lurid and beautiful in high-definition as a $60 Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 game.
If you’ve ever used and loved the “Archive” function in Gmail or MobileMe, then found yourself missing it while using Apple’s own Mail application, this simple free plugin is a dream come true.
It’s an Archive button for Mail, and you can guess what it does. Instead of having to mess around with filing messages into folders, a single click will throw them into the archive. It even comes with its own ready-made keyboard shortcut (Command+Option+S), to make archiving even faster and easier.
When you need to find something specific, use Mail’s own search, which is quite up to the task of hunting through enormous archives (I’ve used Mail in this way, as a backup for my Gmail account, for years now).
(You’re reading the 33rd post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more, or grab the RSS feed.)
Speaking to Jim Dalrymple over at The Loop, Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller says that demand for the iPad 2 has been “amazing.”
How amazing? Amazing enough that they’re admitting that there are supply shortages and they can’t produce them fast enough… at least by implication.
“We are working hard to get iPad 2 into the hands of every customer who wants one as quickly as possible,” said Muller.
Analysts are saying that Apple could have sold as many as a million iPad 2s over the weekend, based upon estimated shipping times online and the long lines outside Apple Stores for the iPad 2s launch.
This isn’t the first time Apple has admitted that they just can’t make iPads fast enough to satisfy demand: at Apple’s EOY earnings call in February, Apple COO Tim Cook admitted that he thought they could have sold even more iPads in 2010 if they’d been able to build more them.
Still trying to get an iPad 2, but unwilling to wait the current four weeks wait by orering online? Reports suggest you’ll have a chance to buy an iPad 2 tomorrow morning, if you get to an Apple Store early.
A new iPad app for Cosmopolitan magazine, expected to debut later this week, drops the pretense that women read it for the articles: it features an interactive sex quiz with men groaning and lots of pics of shirtless guys.
Fashion bible Women’s Wear Daily got their hands on the magazine app featuring hot hunks and steamy sex advice to find that the $2.99 new app, called “The Showcase Edition,” contained only two articles.
Instead, there’s an interactive feature, already a favorite with magazine staffers, called “Decode His Bedroom Sounds,” which promises to help women understand what a “load moaner” really means — and whether she’s got one — by emitting what was described as “unholy sounds.”
The consensus on Wall Street is that Apple had a gangbuster weekend, some estimating the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant sold up to three times as many iPad 2 units as the first-generation tablet.
“We would not be surprised to see Apple sell closer to 1 million iPad 2s in the opening weekend,” Wedbush Securitities’ analyst Scott Sutherland (no relation to this reporter) told Reuters Monday morning. Sunday, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster estimated between 400,000 to 500,000 of the new tablets were sold by Sunday night.
Want to grab an iPad 2 but didn’t manage to get one over the weekend? Word on the street has it that Apple will be opening its Retail Stores one hour early on Tuesday to sell people a new shipment of iPad 2s.
While no official announcement has been forthcoming from Apple, anecdotal reports from shoppers across the country trying get an iPad 2 this morning, say they were told by retail staff that even if the Apple Stores were re-stocked today, the iPad 2 would not be sold until tomorrow and for this reason, the Stores would open early for dedicated iPad 2 sales. We have confirmed this with three retail stores.
In other words, if you want an iPad 2, it sounds like it’s a fool’s errand to spend a lot of time running back and forth between Apple Stores today, looking for a new shipment. Instead, prepare to wait in line first thing tomorrow morning. Could we have a mini repeat tomorrow morning of the long lines we saw on Friday?
The iPad 2 might cost the same as the first-gen tablet… but several components used to make it have actually increased in price: most notably, the price of the iPad 2’s touch display and the cost of manufacturing its new, dual-core A5 SoC.
The biggest component cost increase is for the touch display, which shot up almost $32 in price to $127, compared to the first-gen iPad’s $95 touch display.
John Gruber over at Daring Fireball said something recently that made a lot of Apple’s more seemingly incredible business decisions make sense to me: Apple wants to cut out the middle men by becoming the only middle man anyone using an iOS device needs to go through.
If you keep that in mind, it makes today’s latest news about Apple’s NFC ambitions make more sense. Reportedly, Apple has told carriers that the iPhone 5 won’t have NFC, as Apple is reportedly “concerned about a lack of a clear [NFC] standard.”
If you are a recent Mac switcher and were a fan of Aero Peek on Windows 7, you way be concerned that you are going to be missing out on some handy features in OS X. Well, fear not. Mac OS X has a easy to use feature as well, called Exposé. Exposé brings many of the features you may know from Aero Peek, and integrates them with Mac OS X. In this video, I’ll show you how to use Exposé.
Vito Technology, developers of the wildly successful iOS astronomy app Star Walk celebrates the company’s 10th birthday this week with an update to its more recently released geography app, Geo Walk 3D World Factboook — and especially for Cult of Mac readers — an iPad2 giveaway.
Geo Walk is one of those apps that, while engaging and interesting enough on the smaller iPhone screen, finds new life and greater dimensions of engagement when used on an iPad.
Just marvel at the engineering behind the iPad 2’s Smart Covers. Between them, the iPad 2 and its Smart Cover contain an incredible 31 magnets.
Apple has made extensive use of magnets in the past – to hold a remote control to the iMac, for example, or keep the lid of a MacBook closed. But it has never used so many magnets in a product, or so elegantly.
The 31 magnets in the iPad 2 and the Smart Cover:
clip the Smart Cover to the side of the iPad
Keep the Smart Cover attached to the screen when closed
ensure the Smart Cover retains its triangular shape when folded into a stand
instantly wake the iPad and put it to sleep when opened and closed
It’s really quite mind-boggling. iFixit has the details.
Did you get an iPad 2 after waiting in line Friday and Saturday? A prominent Apple analyst reported Sunday night New York City and Minneapolis Apple fans found only empty shelves. For those Apple tablets sold, the majority – 70 percent – went to new iPad owners.
“We believe this shows Apple is expanding its base of iPad users, which is critical to maintaining its early lead in the growing tablet market,” Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster said. Munster, who directed surveys of 236 line-waiters, estimates Apple sold 400,000 to 500,000 iPad 2 units – almost all in one day. That compares with the 300,000 first-generation iPads sold over its first weekend in 2010.
A common complaint by Android users is that iOS isn’t customizable. Well, jailbreaking removes that “issue,” and opens up a whole new world. Once jailbroken, users get access to thousands upon thousands of beautifully designed themes, a lot of which are being converted to an “HD” version for retina display support. A lot of recent themes feature HTML5 lockscreen animations, which are really quite spectacular. Hit the jump to check out 15 really cool themes.
One of the first things I wanted to try out on the iPad 2 was the cameras. I found them to be nice to have for convenience and Facetime calls, but less than adequate for photography. Let’s face it they suck at photography when compared to my iPhone 4 and Canon G12. The iPad 2 won’t be replacing either of these anytime soon. I think that is okay, because I don’t see myself wandering around trying to catch that special moment in time wielding an iPad 2. After all it is kind of big, right?
However, the cameras are there and I might as well make the best use out of them that I can. So I launched iTunes and I looked at the iPhone and iPod touch camera apps within my app library and installed some of them onto my iPad to test.
Well that was fast! Just 2 days ago, the iPad 2 was released, and it’s now jailbroken. In the picture above, you can see a white Verizon WiFi+3G iPad 2 running Cydia. The jailbreak itself comes courtesy of @comex, the man behind JailbreakMe.com. Continue reading for more information!
Everyone out there that wants a white iPhone it looks like you can keep all your hopes and dreams alive, because Phil Schiller from Apple, Inc. says that you’ll be able to get one soon.
Eric Anderson, asked Phil, via Twitter about how he could obtain a white iPhone and Phil replied, “The white iPhone will be available this spring (and it is a beauty!). ”
What kind of iPhone? iPhone 4? iPhone 5? Will it work on GSM or CDMA networks?
It seems peculiar that Apple would release a white iPhone 4 model with the iPhone 5 allegedly around the corner. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
