Cult of Mac

Wall Street investment banking icon JPMorgan Chase & Co. is giving iPads to every associate in its global investment banking division, according to a company e-mail obtained by Bloomberg News. Employees receiving the devices will get to keep them free of charge as long as they remain at the unit until the pilot program ends on May 1, 2011, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

Industry analysts viewed the move as a significant victory for Apple in its quest to wrest control of the Enterprise communications submarket away from Research in Motion, Ltd., whose Blackberry handheld devices have been a ubiquitous companion of “serious businesspeople” for more than a decade.

Redsn0w by DevTeam allows you to jailbreak your iPhone 3G/3GS device, to get complete control over it (see why you should jailbreak here). Currently, redsn0w version 0.9.6b5 allows you to perform a tethered jailbreak to your device that has already been upgraded to firmware 4.2.1, which means you need to use redsn0w every time you boot the device, otherwise all your jailbreak data gets wiped.

In order to unlock, you must upgrade to an earlier iPad baseband, which would mean that you can update/restore using a custom firmware file only and not a stock firmware file, otherwise, the restore will simply fail. Also, it’s not reversible and by doing this, you will be voiding the device’ warranty.

Please note that this tool will NOT work if you older iPhone 3GS, unless you use the unofficial Pwnage bundle first. (On the older iPhone 3GS, serial number, fourth and fifth digit should be either 40 or less.)

Ultrasn0w is a full fledged software unlock solution for iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS having baseband version 04.26.08, 05.11.07, 05.12.01, 05.13.04 or 06.15.00 and iPhone 4 having baseband version 01.59.00 (check Modem Firmware version under Settings –> General –> About). Unlocking the phone enables you to use it with any carrier in the world.

This means if you have older firmware, you can now upgrade to a stock 4.2.1, jailbreak using redsn0w or upgrade to a custom 4.2.1 using Pwnage Tool and still have the ability to remain unlocked.

Redsn0w by DevTeam allows you to jailbreak your iPhone 4 device, to get complete control over it (see why you should jailbreak here). Currently, redsn0w version 0.9.6b5 allows you to perform a tethered jailbreak to your device that has already been upgraded to firmware 4.2.1, which means you need to use redsn0w every time you boot the device, otherwise all your jailbreak data gets wiped. However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.

The flocks of kids I always see clustered around iPads whenever I walk into an Apple Store suggest that kid + iPad = best new toy ever. Only problem is,  really young kid + iPad also = anxious parent.

Griffin thinks it has a case + app combo to fix that. LightBoard is a shatter-resistant polycarbonate case that fully encloses the iPad (Including the screen, but with cutouts for the speaker and headphone jack) and doubles as a table. Then the free LightBoard Trace app superimposes traceable drawings through a piece of paper laid over the screen and held in place by a clip on the case.

LightBoard is available through Griffin’s website for $40.

For Mac users awash in social networking (and that’s like saying “for NASCAR drivers with the ability to make left turns”), today’s release of Flock‘s completely revamped browser — which, like its predecessor, is heavily integrated with social networking sites — should be exciting news.

It’s been a long wait for Mac users, as the browser completed its transformation from a Mozilla to a Chromium 7 skeleton. The new Flock arrived on Windows last summer, and Flock’s blog claimed an October release for the Mac version, with no word since then. But it’s here, it easily integrates major social networks right out of the box (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even LinkedIn) — and it’s fast.

We’ll take a closer look at Flock in our upcoming browser comparo. Stay tuned.

Will the iPad kill — or save — the newspaper? Countless observers have argued both cases. I come to bury these notions, not to praise them.

The newspaper industry is suffering through a painful transition, characterized by layoffs, closures, mergers and the abandonment of mission and even dignity in the quest to maintain relevance to advertisers.

The “iPad-will-destroy-newspapers” crowd assumes that paper is the problem. Paper is expensive, slow and bad for the environment. Because the iPad delivers news cheap, fast and without the conversion of trees into trash, the public will choose iPad-based news, which will kill off newspapers.

The “iPad-will-save-newspapers” people, on the other hand, see the wide range of news-reading apps as the newspaper’s salvation. There’s some logic to this, given that the iPad is a theoretically superior advertising platform. But that’s not going to happen.

We start off with a deal on an Otterbox Commuter Case for the iPad. The case, in black, includes access to all the tablet’s buttons ad ports plus features a screen protector. Next is an iMac Core i7 bundle, that includes a 2.8GHz quad desktop computer with 27-inch screen and three years of AppleCare. We wrap up our spotlight deals with the latest batch of freebies from the App Store, including “Orient,” a location orientation assistant.

Along the way, we’ll also check out a 93 percent off deal on iPhone 4 cases, a 50 percent off deal from ZAGG.com, and more. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

Only Apple knows what new hardware features the iPad 2 will boast when it comes out in April 2011, but one thing everyone can agree on is that it will have FaceTime support by way of at least one camera module.

Now Digitimes is claiming that they know who is going to provide the lens modules for the iPad 2, and no shocks here: they say it’s Largan Precision, who also apparently supply the 5-megapixel lens module in the iPhone 4.

This fleshes out an earlier report that Omnivision would be providing the actual camera sensors, as well as another Digitimes report on the iPad 2 from last week, which rather improbably claimed the iPad 2 would have a USB port and a Retina Display… neither of which are likely.

Although it pays off in compactness, the MacBook Air’s locked down, proprietary construction makes it one of the least self-serviceable or upgradeable computers out there. Heck, you can’t even upgrade the RAM: it’s soldered onto the motherboard.

If you’re brave enough to crack open your Air, about the only thing that will actually prove replaceable to most mortals will be the Toshiba SSD drives, which is what prompted Taiwanese company Photofast to start selling 256GB SSD modules that offered a 30% boost to your Air’s read and write speeds.

Unfortunately, it looks like Photofast’s MacBook Air SSD business has been shut down by Apple, who apparently threatened the company’s >a jref=”https://www.9to5mac.com/38937/apple-makes-photofast-stop-sales-of-speedy-256-gb-macbook-air-ssds?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+9To5Mac-MacAllDay+(9+to+5+Mac+-+Apple+Intelligence)”>standing as a member of Apple’s own MFi program, which allows them to make officially licensed Apple accessories.

It’s sucky, especially if you wanted to double your 11-inch Air’s for cheap (as I did), but in all honesty, my butter fingers are probably better off not cracking open my Air’s guts. Apple’s probably done me a favor here.

To help spread the word about God, a Christian group is now appealing to Steve Jobs.

Apple pulled an app called the Manhattan Declaration from the iTunes store last week after outcry and over  7,000 signatures on an online poll that the content was an anti-gay and hate-mongering.

The Manhattan Declaration is an over 4,000-word statement of beliefs signed by over 400,000 people described as “a call to Christian conscience” crafted in 2009. The app version, which includes a four-question poll on same sex marriage and abortion, launched in mid-October.

Apple products scored highly in a computer magazine’s annual reliability survey, “smoking the competition” in all categories, including desktops, notebooks and smartphones. RIM was the cellar-dweller in the handset category, scoring “worse than average” on every ease of use question.

“Can Apple do no wrong?” asked PCWorld, on releasing the results of the Reliability and Service Survey. “Indeed, 2010 was a remarkable year for the world’s highest-valued tech company,” the magazine declared.

Is the iPhone becoming passe? That’s the belief of one analyst predicting Google’s Android will surpass both Apple’s handset and Nokia in 2011. “The iPhone was last year’s device and now people are looking for something different,” the IDC analyst told Bloomberg.

Android’s move shouldn’t come as a surprise; Apple’s handset had just a one percent lead (24 percent versus 23 percent) over the Android platform in the third quarter of 2010. The Samsung Galaxy S, with 14 percent of all Android-based shipments, is seen as delivering an iPhone-like experience with a lower price, according to the research firm’s Francisco Jeronimo.

Mark your calendars. Chair Entertainment and Epic Games’ much-anticipated Infinity Blade will be hitting the App Store on December 9th.

The game will cost $5.99 as a universal app playable on the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch (Third and Fourth Gens) and the iPad.

Imagine entering a large, circular war room in the deepest, most hidden bunker of Cupertino headquarters, modeled similarly to the one in Doctor StrangeloveAfter shaking hands with Peter Sellers doing his classic Steve Jobs impression, you’d cast your eyes up at the enormous map on the wall, and as you looked upon it, you’d see countries around the world suddenly light up.

Those lights, though, wouldn’t indicate nuclear explosions… they’d represent the megaton blasts of the iPad launching over the past two days in Taiwan, Denmark, Portugal, The Czech Republic, Sweden, Poland, Nortay, Hungary, Finland and South Korea. Later this week, Brazil is also slated to get the iPad.

Of course, you’d never get into such a room. As General Woz Turgidson would be sure to point out, it would be a serious breach of security. I mean, you’d see everything. You’d… you’d even see the Big Board.

Apple’s North Carolina data supercenter is soon to go live, but it will sadly have to do so without the man most largely responsible for its creation: Apple’s Global Data Center Director Oliver Sanche passed away of a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day.

Here’s a great way to fulfill your hunger for new and entertaining ringtones for your iPhone.

RingtoneFeeder is an inexpensive paid subscription service from which you will download short songs, sounds, and other unique audio files that you can use as ringtones. Subscribers will receive two new ringtones weekly on Tuesdays via iTunes on their computer.

This one’s got us raising an eyebrow: an app that figures out not only the distance to an object, but its speed — for a buck.

From the app’s press release:

Employing the device’s three-axis gyro and basic trigonometry establishes distance. Speed and laps are measured using the motion sensing of the video camera, timing the interval between the object entering and leaving the frame. The app is compatible with iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, and iPod touch 4.

We’re assuming that though SpeedClock is compatible with the 3Gs, it must deliver somewhat less-accurate results on it as there’s no gyro. We’re also assuming the app isn’t all that accurate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the app requires the user to guesstimate the distance from the iPhone to the object. But who knows, maybe one day the tech’ll get there; somehow the idea of state troopers aiming iPhones instead of radar guns seems somewhat more cuddly.

Thanks to the inclusion of WebSocket support for the iPad’s Safari browser in iOS 4.2, the doorway for collaboration through the web between the iPad and assorted devices has been flung open.

One of the first apps to take advantage of the iPad’s new trick is $10 SyncPad, which presents users with a faux whiteboard to scrawl notes on, then lets other users of the app scribble on that same whiteboard over the Internet, with the results showing up in realtime (well, almost — the developer, Davide Di Cillo of development company 39 Inc., told us it updates a little slowly, but that the problem’s been fixed in the latest update, which is waiting for Apple’s approval).

There’s no limit to the amount of collaborators, although each has to have (of course) the app and an Internet connection; the iPad-less can view the whiteboard through a web browser for free, but have to make do without being able to add input for the time being — although Di Cillo says they’re working on a fee-based version that’ll allow collaboration via a browser as well. There’s also a view-only free version of the app for the iPad.

Hewn from the trunk of — well — some sort of tree, then sanded down and oiled and hand rubbed and buffed with the bottom of a virgin angel, BlackBox sells these lovely sheathes for MacBooks of all variety for $129 a pop… except, alas, the MacBook Air, which could do with the reinforcement.

It is Cyber Monday, the online version of retailers’ Black Friday. To mark the event, Apple and others are marking down their products. First up is the mothership, which announced 30 percent off on select items purchased at the Apple Store. Next is ZAGG, which began a 50 percent off sale sitewide. Finally, the iPhone App Store has marked-down several applications for the iPhone and the iPod touch, including “Perfect Photo,” photo-editing software.

Along the way, we’ll also look at some hardware bargains ($885 for a MacBook Air, $200 for an iBook G4, $199 for a 32GB iPhone 4), as well as deals for your iPad and Mac. As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

The Dev Team has just announced that they have been successful in attaining carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, which is now available through Cydia.

Same old, same old, I know. But what’s more interesting is how the Dev Team managed to unlock these old devices: by patching in a vulnerable baseband from the first iPad firmware!

While you were either sleeping off the turkey or watching a game, some industrious Apple analysts were busy surveying the Black Friday landscape. The results: iPad sales were hotter than grandma’s pumpkin pie. After Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster and his team watched Apple retailers for seven hours he came away with this conclusion: the iPad is “the Mac of the masses.”

Strictly in terms of sales, 8.8 iPads were selling each hour, compared to 8.2 Macs, according to Munster. Despite comments like “the 11-inch MacBook Air has been flying off the shelves” from retailers, Mac sales were down compared to 2009, when Apple retailers sold 8.3 computers per hour for the day after Thanksgiving.

Whenever it arrives, it looks like Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily won’t be the only iPad-only magazine around: British billionaire and part Virgin Airways owner Richard Branson is also planning on launching a new iPad publication called Project, and it’s likely to be revealed as early as tomorrow.

Did you miss out on that incredible $399 iPad deall TJ Maxx was using to lure customers into their stores this past Black Friday? You might be in luck: a new deals site has just gone online, and their goal is to deliver 32GB WiFi iPads to their customers for a hundred bucks off the standard price.