Cult of Mac

When the iPad was first announced, Apple promised that the process for signing up for 3G service would eschew the iPhone’s Mephistophelean contract with AT&T. Instead, it would be simple, allowing end users to sign up and cancel their 3G service on a month-by-month basis.

If these screenshots of the iPad’s Settings panel are anything to go by, Apple’s been just as good as their word here. It’s hard to imagine, in fact, how signing up for 3G could be any simpler: you don’t even have to deal with AT&T.

Apparently, all you do to sign up for 3G is open up the iPad’s settings, plunk in your credit card information and then specify your order size: 250MB of data per month for only $14.99, all-you-can-gobble for $29.99. Simple! And if you sign up for the 250MB plan, you’ll get three alerts — 20 percent, 10 percent and empty — to let you know when you’re running low on data and affording you the option to top up with some more.

This is about as painless as it gets. I just hope international telecoms follow AT&T’s lead here and keep it simple, stupid. There’s just no room in my budget for yet another two-year data contract at this point.

[via Gadget Lab]

Our Monday giveaway is looking pretty good! This week we’re giving away eight apps aimed at keeping you entertained to six random Twitter Tweeters.

Make sure you follow @cultofmac on Twitter and tweet this to be entered to win a sweet app bundle of fun:

All the true gamers go to @cultofmac for Monday Giveaways! #cultofmac

Contest ends today at 8pm EST and we’ll announce the winners on Twitter tomorrow. Here’s the app bundle with description excerpts from the App Store:

We all know the wait for the iPad, at least in the U.S., will be over on April 3, right? Wrong. True connoisseurs know they need to wait until June 1, when Mervis Diamond Importers will unleash the hideous and despicable Diamond iPad on the world. It’s a bejeweled and bedazzled monstrosity boasting 11.43 carats worth of diamonds to make your magical technology device far more ugly and way more likely to cut your fingers as you watch a movie or read a book on it. All for the low price of $20,000 and your dignity.

For the truly elite only. Do you have enough cash and little enough common sense to go for it?

Mervis via Gizmodo

If – like me – your fridge is black, then these shiny iPhone app fridge magnets from Jailbreak Collective will look very smart indeed displayed on the door.

Just 13 bucks gets you a set of these icon almost-replicas. I say almost because if you look carefully, you’ll see they’re not identical to the Apple originals. But they’re close enough.

Only problem is, they look so smart on a decent black background that it’ll be a shame to spoil the effect by using them to hold shopping lists, receipts, and all that other fridge/paper junk you use fridge magnets for.

Might be worth getting an extra fridge just for these then.

(Via geek.com.)

Soft Sailor is a tech blog I’ve not encountered before, but today I stumbled across a very odd post indeed. Published just yesterday, it recommends downloading something a little bit unusual: Internet Explorer 5.2.3.

Which is only, let’s see now… about seven years old.

The author Dragos Pirvu writes:

“Although it’s not that popular on Mac computers, Internet Explorer is also available on Apple’s Mac OS X platform and it’s doing a fairly good job.”

And what’s more:

“Although it does have some security leaks, some Mac OS X developers are still using Internet Explorer to create CSS files and others.”

So that’s it. While the rest of us have needlessly upgraded to all this new-fangled stuff like Safari and Firefox, it’s the CSS devs who have faithfully – yet secretively – kept IE5 alive as a CSS editor. Who knew?

If you’re in the market for an iPad — and you know you are, because it’s killer — you’re probably wondering which model to buy.

Naturally, you’re looking at the cheapest $499 iPad, which has Wi-Fi only, but you’re thinking you might also want 3G. After all, you can pay-as-you-go for data, and who knows when you might need it? And what about storage?

I’ve though it through, and concluded that most people should buy the 32GB iPad with Wi-Fi + 3G, including the wireless keyboard. Here’s why:

We close out another week we three hardware deals. First up is a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with a 22-inch screen and lots of extra goodies from ExperCom, including 8GB of RAM and three years of AppleCare – all for $1,399. Next up is a deal on a MacBook powered by a Core 2 Duo 2.26GHz processor, along with 4GB of RAM and a 640GB hard drive. Lastly, we have an iPod Classic with 120GB of storage for $189 from the Apple Store.

Along the way, we check out more deals on an Airport Extreme router, the latest batch of App Store Freebies and other items aimed at Apple fans. As always, details on our featured items, as well as many other products, are available on the CoM “Daily Deals” page coming up right after the jump.

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review Air Assault, Bad Apples, Fire Drop Free, Ghost Capture – Free, Heli Rescue, Internet Radio Box, Sunday Lawn, synthPond Lite, Tiki Totems, and Titanic Rescue.

This week, Consumer Reports published the results of their latest tech support survey, and no surprise here: Apple came out as the number one company in both laptops and desktops.

As usual, Consumer Reports asked 7,000 subscribers about their satisfaction with tech related dealings with various companies. At the end of the day, Apple scored 86 points out of 100 in laptops, and 87 points out of 100 in desktops. What’s amazing is that second place didn’t even come close to challenging Apple’s tech support dominance: in the laptops category, Lenovo was 23 points behind, and in the desktops category, Dell was 55 points behind.

Good for Apple, but if anything, this is just confirmation of what we knew already: if you control both your hardware and your software, you’re going to have better luck responding to customer problems.

U.S. bookseller Barnes & Noble claims to be unconcerned about the iPad’s threat against their own e-reader, the Nook. Indeed, they are so excited about the possibilities of the iPad that they are now promising iPad owners that they can expect to download their own free Barnes & Noble e-reading software just around the time of the iPad’s launch, which will allow individuals to buy any of more than a million eBooks as an in-app purchase.

In truth, it makes sense: the Nook’s not really doing much business, and the iPad is going to be huge. Unlike the closed ecosystems of other e-readers, Barnes & Noble can launch all feet in and essentially parasite off of the iPad’s success.

The question is: will Apple allow Barnes & Noble and Amazon to open competing e-book stores? I tend to doubt it: Apple’s taken strong stances in the past against the duplication of functionality, and they are going to want to keep a stranglehold on the iPad e-book marketplace, the same way they control the iPod’s music and video marketplace. The more booksellers on the iPad, the better from a consumer perspective… but I really worry that Apple’s going to stamp down hard not just on commercial e-reader apps, but fantastic existing apps like Stanza.

Did you buy an iPad when Apple began pre-sales this morning? If so, you weren’t alone. Indeed, Apple may have sold 20,000 iPads per hour, leading one commentator to suggest the Cupertino, Calif. company was earning $10 million per hour on its new tablet device.

The estimate comes from Andrew Erlichson, CEO of Phanfare, a photo share site. Erlichson said he purchased two iPads and noted the order IDs.

Still confused about which iPad to pre-order? In collaboration with handsome Wilson Rothman, Gizmodo’s lovely own Rosa Golijan put together this handy, haiku-ified iPad buying guide which — while thoroughly tongue in cheek — more or less lines up with my own feelings on the matter: if you’re buying the iPad WiFi, there’s little reason to invest in more than the base model, while the 32GB iPad 3G will likely be the least regrettable purchase in the tablet’s first generation over the long term.

For years, the letter ‘i’ has been a goldmine for Apple; apply the letter to an ordinary object and you have lines outside your door waiting to buy the gadget. Apple may have to find another letter now that an Australian trade court sided with a handbag maker.

IP Australia, the government board that watches over trademarks, rejected Apple’s claim on the letter, noting the Cupertino, Calif. company didn’t prove “a person of ordinary intelligence and memory” would assume that just because a product carries the letter “i”, it was the brainchild of Steve Jobs. Although the case revolved around a laptop bag named DOPi — iPod backwards — the IP Australia judge, or registrar Michael Kirov (a self-proclaimed Apple fan) said that wasn’t enough to block sales.

Though a few early adopters have noted that the confirmation emails for pre-ordered iPads are slow, it looks like the in-store pick up option should be fun with some kind of launch fete in the works.

Via AleVH of Tech info team

The outcome of Apple and Nokia’s dueling patent infringement lawsuits could wait until mid-2012 for a verdict from the international trade court. The two companies swapped lawsuits in 2009, alleging the other with infringing key technologies.

The three-year timespan for the U.S. International Trade Commission sets the stage for what Reuters has characterized as “the spectre of a prolonged legal struggle.” In January, when the ITC launched a probe of Apple practices, CoM noted the legal battle could span three years. A month later, the ITC announced it had begun investigating Apple’s claims against the Finnish cell phone giant.

As we predicted, the iPad went on pre-order in the US this morning in the Apple store after a nail-biting world blackout.

Are you going to reserve yours today or wait? Which one are you getting? Buying your customer limit (2) at once?

Let us know the whys and wherefores of your purchasing decisions in the comments.

[polldaddy poll=”2841120″]

The Apple store is back online, US customers can pre-order up to two iPads each for April 3 delivery.

Updates on what else is new on the store to come.

The Apple store went down at 11:01AM GMT. We’ll post an update when it’s back online. If our crystal ball readings from the past are reliable, when it goes back on line, you could be the first to pre-order an iPad.

In the mean time, wild speculation abounds — since it looks like Apple stores worldwide are all down and only US customers can order iPads — add yours in the comments.

Via isapplestoredown

There must be a special space reserved at the table in Valhalla for any designer able to make a fat brick look hot; if that’s true, then there’s a seat reserved right next to Jonny Ive’s for the Vers 1.5R’s designer (and yes, both design heaven and design hell are Scandinavian. Don’t believe me? Take a look at an IKEA catalog; now, go experience a 1980s-era Saab).

Update 2: Apple is sending out emails confirming the 5.30 AM PST/8.30 AM EST time, according to TidBits and others. Emails were sent to customers who signed up for pre-order info (I signed up but didn’t get the message for some reason).

Update: Reader Bob Penn says the staff at his local Apple store insists that pre-orders begin at midnight. I for one will be staying up until the witching hour just to see.

Pre-oders for the iPad start at 5.30 AM PST on Friday March 12, Apple PR told TUAW. That’s 8.30 AM for East Coasters.

Better set your alarm clocks.

All models of the iPad will be available for pre-order, but only the Wi-Fi model will ship on April 3. The 3G model won’t be available until late April.

At long last, the Welcome to MacIntosh documentary (which we’ve mentioned here a few times) is now available to watch online, for free. .

UPDATE: Seth at 9to5Mac is now backtracking. While he says he’s received multiple tips that Mac Pros will be updated, he thinks the MacBook Pros tip might have been fake. “Shame on us,” he says.

Our friend Seth Weintraub at 9to5Mac thinks MacBooks and Mac Pros will be updated within a week. Seth received a tip that Apple’s pro desktop and portable line are being refreshed in the next few days — maybe as early as tomorrow, but more likely next Tuesday.

A refresh of the Mac Pros is already widely-rumored. The desktops are expected to be refreshed next week with the Intel Core i7-980x, a six-core screamer. But maybe new MacBooks are in line also? The new MacBook Pros will get Intel i5 and i7 processors, just like the current line of higher-end iMacs. The basic 13-inch MacBook Pro will have an Intel i5 processor, while the 15-inch and 17-inch MacBooks will have quad-core i7 processors.

If true, these machines will be screamers.

In February, MacRumors readers claimed to have found a GeekBench benchmark from a Core-i7  M620 MacBook Pro running an unreleased version of Mac OS 10.6.2. Current MacBook Pros score in the 3700-4000 range. However, this result is to be taken with a very large pinch of salt: forum readers say they’ve been planting fakes.

Either way, DO NOT BUY A MacBook Pro or Mac Pro for a while: updates are imminent.

The Menu Bar sits at the top of your screen at all times. Let’s take a moment to get to know it. It’s worth doing, because the Menu Bar is going to be one of your best friends.

When you used Windows, you were used to see menus inside each document window. File, Edit, all that stuff – every window had those menus built-in.

On the Mac, those menus do broadly the same job. They’re just in a different place.

We near the end of the week with a number of Mac-related deals. First up is a Mac Pro Quad-Core Xeon running at 2.66GHz for $2,149. Next up is a passel of newly reduced App Store items, including our favorite: “Where’s Waldo? The Fantastic Journey.” Finally, we wrap up our top trio with a 64-inch Sharp AQUOS 65-inch LCD HDTV.

As usual, details on these and many other deals (like the 24-inch Apple Cinema Display) are available from the CoM “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

As a Mac gamer, I thought the recent announcement of the Steam digital games delivery service coming to Mac was very exciting. Even if Steam never becomes as popular on the Mac as it is on the PC, it will bring us, at the very least, some great Valve titles like Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead and Portal.

But best case scenario? Steam on Mac gets just the same vibrant games economy that the PC version enjoyed. But to do that, developers need to be on board.

Luckily, it looks like at least two game developing studios are going to take the plunge. Gas Powered Games, who created Supreme Commander 2 and Dungeon Siege, plan to develop for Mac in all products going forward, saying that porting games to the Mac is relatively easy since they’ve got identical internal architectures, unlike the PowerPC days. Unfortunately, that sounds to me like they’re talking about using CrossOver to make their ports. DICE is also now talking more seriously about bringing their Battlefield series of games to the Mac as well.

The big risk here is that developers will choose to use CrossOver or other DirectX wrappers to do their ports, which is the last thing the Mac gaming scene needs. I hope Steam leads to developers seriously devoting time and resources to OS X game development… not just an expansion of the lazy porting we’ve seen over the last few years.