Cult of Mac

This is unlikely to gobsmack anyone, but with a new iPhone right around the corner, the days of the $99 iPhone 3G are likely numbered.

According to Boy Genius Report: ” We’ve heard that Apple has stopped shipping iPhone 3G 8GB units to AT&T stores and orders are not being placed for the device.”

The most obvious interpretation of this is that the iPhone 3GS will plug the place previously filled by the 3G as the entry-level AT&T iPhone… a guess that seems to be strongly evidenced by Wal-Mart’s recent decision to slash the price of the 16GB 3GS to a mere $97.

The Elgato EyeTV HD DVR is easy to recommend to Apple fans who are serious about video: it’s whole raison d’etre is to make it as easy as possible to transcode your high-defenition television content to watch on your MacBook, iPhone or iPad.

As a DVR, the EyeTV allows you to plug it into your satellite or cable box and record shows in high-definition H.264 video, which can easily be converted to iPad or iPhone optimized files when you plug it into your Mac’s USB port. If that’s too much work for you and you expect to watch a show on your iPad over your HDTV, you can opt to record in iPad or iPhone mode.

Even better? If you don’t want to physically sync your EyeTV media to your iPhone or iPad, you can just stream it over 3G or WiFi with the EyeTV app.

The Elgato EyeTV HD is available now at your local Apple Store for just $199.

The MacBook Air is likely to get a speed boost soon, thanks to freshly shrinked versions of Intel’s Core processors.

Today, Intel announced the expansion of their processor family with six new chips designed for ultraportable notebooks, promising to make MacBook Air sized notebooks thinner and lighter while yielding a 32% performance bump over the last generation of ultrathin Intel chips.

These new mobile Core processors are based on the same 32nm chip design as the standard Core i5 and Core i7, but offer 15% power efficiency and the ability to be packed into machines with a 30% thinner form factor, without giving up features like Hyper Threading or Turbo Boost.

Right now, over 40 OEMs are promising to release new ultrathins using Intel’s mobile Core CPUs. Apple’s not listed among them, but Cupertino’s not going to let Intel spill details of a new MacBook Air for them. Expect a hardware refresh sometime in the coming months.

It’s that time again for us to show our philantropy to our loyal readers and give back in the form of some sweet applications. Today, we’ve got some great iPad and iPhone apps to give out. This week, we’ll be doing something a little different when it comes to giving out the app codes. We know that you all have questions as experience Mac users and as newbie Mac users. We know this, because our writers and editors get emails every day with your questions, but unfortunately, we can’t always get back to you with answers. We want to organize a better way for you to get your questions answered by our own Mac geniuses and other readers, so here’s how the giveaway is going to work.

1. Become a fan of our Facebook page.
2. Click on the “Discussion Tab” and then click on “Start A New Topic”. Here’s a quick link for those of you that are already fans. Discussion Tab
3. Post a question or discussion topic about Mac Hardware, Mac software, iPhone/iPad apps, or anything else Mac related that has been a burning question deep within your soul.
4. Our Mac genius will come into the discussion throughout the week and will answer some of these questions, and some of the best topics will be featured in upcoming posts
5. Extra brownie points for those Facebook users that comment on other topics other than their own.
6. We’ll randomly select Facebook users and give you one of the following codes listed below. We’ve got about 50 app codes to give away (10 of each app), so get talking!

**Must be 18 years old to enter the giveaway, and these codes are only good in the United States iTunes app. No purchase is necessary.**

Special thanks to Brian and Appular for helping provide the app codes to giveaway. Got a new iPhone app that you just developed? The iPhone/iPad app marketplace is HIGHLY competitive, and you need competent professionals to help you market it. Appular can help you get your app the exposure it needs. Contact them today if you’re a seasoned or aspiring Mac app developer.

When people first started playing with the iPad, a common comparison was to the interactive, tablet-like book (, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion) featured in best-selling author Neal Stephenson’s steampunk sci-fi novel A Diamond Age, so it seems like a natural fit that Stephenson will soon be coming to iPad with an app of his own.

The project’s called The Mongoliad, a wonderfully stupid title that sounds like a gag from the lost sequel to John Barth’s Sotweed Factor. But the idea is sound: Stephenson and a few fellow authors including Greg Bear and Nicole Galland will be releasing a set of serialized stories to the App Store, presenting “an ongoing stream of nontextual, para-narrative and extra-narrative stuff” that will allow readers to interact and create their own stories in the Mongoliad universe with some “pretty cool tech.”

Though details are scarce and while Stephenson’s product could be nothing more than some fancy e-books, this is worth being excited about. Stephenson’s fiction has long luxuriated in the magical possibilities of technology, and I’m eager to see if what he comes up with in code is just as future-thinking as what he creates in prose.

We start off another week with a deal on an iBook G4 machine running at 1.33Mhz for $300. Also on tap: a number of iMacs, starting with a 3.06GHz 22″ model for $999. We round out or top trio with the latest batch of App Store freebies, including “LightWriter – Photography Effects.”

Along the way, we’ll also check out other bargains, including an iPhone/iPod external battery and software for your Mac. As always, details on these and many other items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

If you’re a fan of Flight Control HD, you’ll love Harbor Master HD for the iPad from Imangi Studios. It shares the same principles as Flight Control, although instead of planes you’ve got boats, which you must guide to their corresponding colored docks by drawing their route with your finger, ensuring the boats do not make contact with each other along the way.

The way in which Harbour Master is different to Flight Control is that once you have guided a boat to its dock, you must wait for it to unload its cargo before you can guide it back off to sea. This adds just enough complexity and challenge to the game to prevent it being too simple and boring.

Along with speculation that Verizon may sell the new iPhone expected to be announced at next month’s WWDC, comes rumors of the most tenuous nature that Sprint might also be part of Apple’s widening use of American carriers. Adding the iPhone to its stable of cell phones would certainly boost Sprint’s stature, but is it more than just chatter? Now comes “rumblings” that Sprint may have an iPhone ready later this year.

This is where readers should put their trays in the upright position and obey the flashing “rumor alert” signs.

Not sure you’d have to be an Apple fan to buy this rattan love seat for your summer lollygagging, but it probably helps.

Spotted by Eirik Nilsen, it retails for about $1,500 (9,900 Norwegian Kroner) at Coop Obs Bygg in Stavanger, Norway.

If rumors of a Verizon iPhone in September (or a Sprint iPhone later this summer) are true, AT&T is going to have a hard-time keeping iPhone customers on their network after their exclusivity is up. One great way of keeping subscribers would, of course, be to offer better rates and improve their service… but since this is Ma Bell we’re talking about, they’ve just decided to try to almost double the price of Early Termination Fees from $175 to $325 to keep their existing customers locked-in.

To be fair, this is already the price of Verizon’s ETF… so AT&T is really just trying to make it equally difficult for subscribers to walk away from a contract as Verizon already is. Short term, however, it makes it a lot more expensive a proposition for customers to abandon ship for their competitors.

On their part, AT&T is saying the timing of the price increase isn’t related to Verizon getting the iPhone. Yeah, yeah. We’ll believe that only if a CDMA iPhone isn’t announced at WWDC.

Holly Golightly probably wouldn’t wear her iPad in a front pocket pouch, but in a pinch it may be better than a toting a bulky bag.

As much as we’re crazy about the iPad, carrying it around is still kinda awkward — remember the condom case? — but an Australian company has come up with an intriguing solution.

The iDress positions itself as kind of a chic, kangaroo iPad pouch, a cute to-the-knee number in black cotton sateen, perfect for when it comes time to put down your mouse and pick up a glass of prosecco, if their marketing speak is to be believed.

With Apple’s factory leak in China seemingly spurting iPhones by the palletful into Vietnam and other south-east Asian countries, it’s looking less and less likely that, hardware-wise, Jobs will have anything to surprise us with when he officially unveils the fourth-generation iPhone in four weeks. We know what it looks like, we know its hardware, we know its operating system… heck, we even know what colors it comes in, black and white.

But just in case you weren’t quite convinced by the white faceplate that leaked last week comes these better shots of a fully assembled white iPhone. It could still be fake, of course, but it takes a special kind of incredulity to disbelieve that Apple, after all these leaks, just wouldn’t release the next iPhone in white, of all colors. Either way, guess we’ll know for sure at WWDC.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs will deliver the keynote address at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference June 7 in San Francisco. The announcement by the Cupertino, Calif. company unleashed further speculation Jobs will unveil a new version of Apple’s iPhone. At the 2009 WWDC, Apple introduced the iPhone 3GS.

The consumer electronics giant noted the 2010 WWDC sold out just eight days after tickets became available. The conference, running through June 11, will focus on Application Frameworks, Internet & Web, Graphics & Media, Developer Tools and Core OS. But many onlookers instead are looking to a potential dust-up between Jobs and his well-known ire for Google’s Android and Adobe Flash.

“Watch out Android, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is preparing Apple’s response, and we suspect things could get pretty personal,” predicted 9to5Mac.

Dismayed enough by AT&T’s woeful service that you’re considering hiring a shyster? The Worstphoneever website offers up a helpful class-action lawsuit generator against AT&T that uses your actual call drop data to tell just such a shyster just how bad (and actionable) your service actually is, and help him sue Ma Bell on everyone’s behalf.

The site works by searching for baseband crashes as recorded by your iPhone’s log files, automatically uploading them to the service, saves them to a database and tabulates them. Once Worstphonever has enough data, the site makers claim that they will file a class action lawsuit on behalf of their users, “running Apple and AT&T through the ringer” while giving users a “slice of the action.”

Not that we’d recommend this. There’s obvious privacy concerns associated with uploading your iPhone logs to a third-party, and while AT&T’s service can be atrocious, suing Apple over it just seems sleazy.

Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty Monday morning raised her target price on Apple to $310 a share, up from $275, and also increased her prediction for iPhone sales in 2011 to 61.5 million device, a 25 percent premium on Wall Street consensus.

Huberty told investors her more bullish predictions are based on the following insights: The iPhone continues to gain market share, while the Cupertino, Calif. company continues to experience greater-that-expected demand for its new iPad. Also contributing factors: there is still room to grow in China and the once reluctant corporate market is beginning to open up to the iPhone.

Yes, the iPad is good. But you haven’t seen the full potential of the iPad hardware until you jailbreak it.

Jailbreaking may seem like something your shady neighbor or geeky cousin does, but you can do it too!

I’ll walk you through the easy process of jailbreaking your iPad to unleash its full potential.

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Having long hated Apple’s Get a Mac campaign, I was surprised to find myself getting sentimental as I watched this three-minute tribute to the whole Mac vs. PC saga, as put together by OneMoreThing. Minimize Justin Long’s lugubrious smarm and what you’re left with is the core strength of the campaign anyway: John Hodgman’s consistently winsome and hysterical performance as the PC. That core strength, though, always seemed directly opposed to the message: PCs suck. It’s just so hard to hate PCs when their avatar is this awesome. Either way, it’s nice to see Hodgman get one last hurrah: this is a man who earned his paycheck for the last five years. Hurrah!

As you might recall, I reviewed Cadence for iPhone several months ago. I found it a useful app and a fun way to browse your music collection by tempo, not title. It did, however, have a near-killer flaw: a setup process that consumed hours as it added (with lots of errors) tempo data to the entire iTunes library.

The creators of Cadence have released a new version that resolves these problems by connecting the app to EchoNest to just grab tempo information over the air. You simply go into the settings on iPhone, ask it to grab info, and after a few minutes, you’re good to go. Having used Cadence for more than six months, I can say with some confidence that it’s most useful in a party setting, when you’re not sure what you want to hear, but you know the mood you want to bring about. Bear that scenario in mind when contemplating the new, elevated $4.99 price tag.

It’s available now in the App Store.

I have been enamored with Urban Tool ever since I stumbled upon their booth at Macworld. The Austrian company sells a range of super-hip gadget bags, slings and holsters that are as unique as they are hip. Their bags have a modern and sleek look to them.

The company recently released a pair of carriers just for the iPad, the PocketBar and the SlotBar. They are not to be missed. Go ahead, release your inner hipster.

Raise your hand if, like me, you think iPad apps like Netflix are far too blithe about letting users indulge their every movie-viewing whim, allowing access to videos whenever they damn-well please.

Put your hands down. You’re not like me at all. But I know there are movie purists out there for whom cinema is an experience, rather than just two hours spent killing time while waiting for a significant other’s root canal to finish.

For the purists, then: Cinema for iPad, a $3 app that screens movies on its own schedule, with a virtual “theatre lobby” that lets users discuss the movie they’ve just experienced. Once the app is purchased, the movies are free, but we’ve no clue what the developer‘s tastes are like, or how frequently the movies are rotated.

We’ve raved about Hippo Remote Pro so enthusiastically, one would think it were made of gold-pressed latinum; that’s because it’s probably one of the (if not the) best soft-remote app currently available for the iPhone.

And now it’s better: Its developers have added a heavily customizable gamepad function — cool for watching the life being sucked from that annoying Blood Elf rogue on a 52-inch HDTV while laying about on the couch with a mojito (or a rootbeer float, if you’re so inclined/underaged). Of course, that’s in additon to the trackpad function and oodles of application-specific profiles for Hulu, Plex, Chrome, and the rest it already comes with.

Hippo Remote Pro is $5; there’re also Basic ($2) and free versions, but neither of those include the gamepad.

We close out the week with a trio of software deals. A new crop of App Store freebies were released, including “Message in a Bottle Pro,” a random messaging application. Also on tap is the iPhone/iPod touch game “JetBall,” a brick breaker. Finally, whether you want to work or just handle life’s daily tasks, there is a deal on the appropriate Apple application package. Either iWorks ’09 or iLife ’09 are $41.

As always, details on these and many other items (such as an iPhone/iPod dock extender) are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

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It looks like the final curtain has closed on Apple’s award-winning “Get a Mac” campaign launched in 2006.

Apple has pulled the ads from the company site, the page now redirects visitors to “Why You’ll Love a Mac.” (Nostalgics can still find them on YouTube, though.)

The last ones, released in October 2009, were surprisingly clever but Mac man Justin Long speculated in an interview last month that the ads had run their course:

What’s the status on those Apple commercials?

JL: You know, I think they might be done. In fact, I heard from John, I think they’re going to move on. I can’t say definitively, which is sad, because not only am I going to miss doing them, but also working with John. I’ve become very close with him, and he’s one of my dearest, greatest friends. It was so much fun to go do that job, because there’s not a lot to it for me. A lot of it is just keeping myself entertained between takes, and there’s no one I’d rather do it with than John.

Are you sad or glad to see them go? Which one was your favorite?

Via Mac Rumors

Is Apple the IBM of 1984? That seems to be the implication Google wants mobile consumers to draw through a new ad and comments made at the Internet giant’s I/O conference. In a slap at Apple and the iPhone, a Google executive said his company saved consumers from a ‘Draconian future.’

“If Google did not act, we faced a Draconian future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice,” Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra told the crowd. The words were eerily like another anti-Apple message made last week by Adobe’s founders.

The drumbeat continues as Google takes on Apple in yet another realm Cupertino once thought secure. The Internet giant plans to take on iTunes, adding music downloads to its Android Marketplace.

At first, owners of Android devices will need to visit Google’s Web shop to purchase and download tunes to their cell phones (and later tablets, potentially). Unclear is when the music download service will become directly available through Android-based handsets, according to TechCrunch.