With yet another week in the past your host Joshua Smith is here to give you a wrap-up on some of the latest and biggest news features. Touch iD coming to the iPad, Apple to buy Beats by Dre and more iPhone 6 rumors are among just some of the featured stories in today’s rundown. Take a look at the video and be sure to return next week for another.
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This time on The CultCast: No, those rumored new EarPods won’t measure your pulse. Last week’s biggest Apple rumor was a fake made up by a guy on a toilet! Plus, why you shouldn’t expect new hardware at June’s WWDC; iPhone warns you when the NSA wants you for drug trafficking; Apple’s newest executive gets a HUGE payday; Katie Cotton, Apple’s long time PR lead and Steve Jobs confidant, calls it quits; Cupertino will take on Samsung with more Guerrilla-style marketing; and since you asked, we reveal the jobs we’ve always wanted on an all-new Get To Know Your Cultist.
Have a few LOLs while we catch you up on each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin!
Our thanks to Smile Software for supporting this episode! If you haven’t tried TextExpander from Smile software, you’re missing out on one of the most useful apps available for the Mac. With TextExpander, you’ll save time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently-used text and pictures. Try it out yourself for free at smilesoftware.com/cultcast.
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The smartphone wars are two company race and it’s not even close.
Apple and Samsung are dominating the competition so badly that a new report from Canaccord Genuity claims the two tech giants account for 106% of global smartphone profits.
Take a look at this chart:
Oh, you wacky Samsung-ites — will you never learn?
Samsung was somehow recently granted a design trademark for a “display screen with icon” and, wouldn’t you know it, it looks almost exactly like the icon Apple currently uses for Siri.
Apple has regained its crown as J.D. Power’s top tablet maker in the world, according to the company’s latest U.S. Tablet Satisfaction survey.
Samsung knocked the iPad off the top post last year, but after surveying 2,513 tablet owners Apple came out on top in 2014 with a score of 830, dominating in every category except cheapness.
The passionate affair burned for decades before Samsung came snapping celebrity selfies with Ellen at the Oscars and dishing out enough paid endorsements to finance the next Star Wars trilogy.
Apple plans to fight back with its own buzz marketer in New York to keep its products in the hands of the elite and glamorous. But Cupertino has never had a problem getting its products on the big screen and into the coolest TV shows — even though Apple swears it doesn’t pay a dime for product placements. Here are 18 of the most iconic Apple cameos to hit the screen.
For the second time in a row Samsung has been found guilty by a U.S. court of ripping off Apple’s patents, but according to the jury foreman in the latest Apple vs Samsung case, there wasn’t a single piece of evidence or testimony that sealed Samsung’s fate.
Jury members met with the media after being dismissed Monday morning, including ex-IBM executive and jury foreman Thomas Dunham, who said the revelation that Google agreed to protect Samsung from damages on a couple of patents in the trial was the biggest shocker of all.
Apple came out on top of its legal battle against Samsung in U.S. federal court last week, and even though the iPhone-maker was ordered to pay a small fee to Samsung, the jury came back to the courthouse in San Jose CA this morning to award more damages to Apple.
The federal jury awarded Apple $4 million in additional damages this morning, after it was discovered last week that one Samsung product violated one patent, but the jury failed to award damages.
The jury is done deliberating. The results are in. And Samsung is guilty. Again.
Weeks of legal sparring between Apple and Samsung has finally culminated this week in San Jose, as a federal jury just ruled that Samsung did indeed infringe on at least one of Apple’s patents while it only partially infringed on others.
Celebrities like Samsung phones, but they love marketing paychecks even more.
The wave of Samsung-sponsored selfies that started with massive retweets at the Oscars, has become one of the most popular viral campaigns in the history of the Internet as everyone from Ellen to Big Papi have been spotted snapping Samsung-selfies in exchange for a fat paycheck.
And Apple is totally jealous.
In a blatant attempt to steal Apple’s thunder, Samsung has announced a conference to take place on May 28 — promising to kick start “a new conversation around health.”
Why is this stepping on Apple’s toes?
Because the very next week is Apple’s eagerly-anticipated Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) — where Apple is expected to introduce the first stages of its new health-tracking family of innovations, beginning with the Healthbook feature for iOS 8, and likely to later expand to include the iWatch.
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Back in the early 80s Apple greeted the arrival of IBM PCs with a snarky full page newspaper ad reading, “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.”
In the past few years, however, Apple’s claws haven’t come out all that often when it comes to taking rivals down a peg or two.
In fact, most of the recent sideways swipes involving Apple tend to be other companies (normally Samsung) taking shots at Apple, rather than the other way around.
Well, the tables have turned in a new print ad which appeared in the UK’s Guardian and free commuter paper Metro today.
The Apple vs Samsung legal battle has been full of low points for both companies as they spare for global domination, but an email from Samsung’s VP of Sales fired off just two days after Steve Jobs’ death shows how heartless the war has gotten.
Shortly after Jobs’ passing in 2011, Michael Pennington, head of national sales for Samsung Telecommunications America, told company leadership in an email acquired by CNET that Steve’s death was the best opportunity Samsung was going to get to attack the iPhone.
Here’s the full email:
Apple is one of several tech giants to enter a voluntary agreement to add a global anti-theft “kill-switch” to their handsets from July 2015.
Other companies on board include Google, HTC, Huawei, Motorola, Microsoft, Nokia, and Samsung — while carriers have reportedly agreed to help “facilitate these measures.”
Apple’s support of the need for a kill-switch doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. The company added an Activation Lock with iOS 7, designed to make it tougher for thieves to use stolen iOS devices. The feature allows users to remotely locate, lock and wipe their iPhones if they are stolen.
Samsung has redesigned its SD and microSD cards with color coding that makes it easier to spot the difference between product lines – regular, Pro and Evo. Unfortunately, this is the wrong way to color-code cards.
Queue the spy music, cause on this week’s CultCast, our very own Buster Heine sneaks into Apple’s under-construction Arizona Sapphire Crystal factory and reports back what he’s found. Plus, WWDC dishes out golden tickets like they’re Willy Wonka; what you can do about HeartBleed; all that’s been revealed in the ongoing Apple V. Samsung trial; and you asked, so we answer: why we love Apple but would never want to work there.
Hem and haw your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin!
And our thanks to iFixit for supporting this episode. You’ve seen iFixit’s amazing tear downs of the hottest tech and gadgets, but did you know you can use their free step-by-step repair guides to fix virtually anything? Check them out at iFixit.com/cultcast, and save $10 off their excellent Pro Tech Toolkit with code “CultCast” at checkout.
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When you’ve got $158.8 billion in the bank, there’s not a huge amount you need to be envious of.
But while Apple is beating rival Samsung on both the quality of its products and adverts, it is perhaps losing out when it comes to the kind of big digital media strategies that really attract attention (and customers) — like Ellen DeGeneres’ famous Oscars selfie which Publicis CEO Maurice Levy recently valued at between $800 million and $1 billion.
With that in mind, Apple is reportedly changing up its marketing approach to invest more in digital marketing and social media support — adding four new digital agencies to its roster.
How do you convince a jury you’re owed $2 billion in damages? If you’re Apple you hire an MIT-trained economist to do it for you.
While the patent war between Apple and Samsung continues to rage, Apple on Tuesday called economist Chris Vellturo to spell out exactly why Apple is asking to be paid $2 billion in damages ($2.19B to be exact) from arch-rival Samsung for infringing on five of its utility patents.
Phil Schiller took to the stand yesterday for the second day of Apple’s latest patent trial with Samsung.
Schiller mostly rehashed the same defense he used when the two companies met in court last November, also over a patent dispute — namely that Apple was the company which took the risk developing the iPhone, and that Samsung’s copying has hurt the company.
“I believe it has caused damage for Apple in the marketplace,” Schiller said. “It has caused people to question some of the innovations we’ve created and Apple’s role as the innovator. That challenge is made harder in the copying.”
Round two of what might be the biggest patent trial in tech history will be decided by a plumber, a police officer and a store clerk. Those blue-collar types are among the 10-person jury finalized Monday for the latest legal battle between Apple and Samsung.
“Jury picked,” tweeted San Jose Mercury News reporter Howard Mintz shortly after jury selection concluded. “Plumber, teacher, cop, secretary, store clerk, county worker, etc. Not [a] sniff of a tech geek to decide $billion patent trial.”
The most shocking revelation to come out of jury selection for the latest Apple-versus-Samsung trial isn’t that the Silicon Valley jury pool is loaded with people connected to one of the two companies. It’s that one potential juror claims ignorance when it comes to Apple’s nearly ubiquitous tablet.
“I’m kind of a dinosaur,” said one potential juror Monday. “I don’t even know what a iPad is.”
Apple and Samsung have become very acquainted with one another in the courtroom. Every since Apple’s crushing victory against Samsung in 2012 over patent infringement, the tech giants have been duking it out through a seemingly-endless string of appeals. The culmination of 2012’s verdict is a second trial that begins today in San Jose, California.
Much in this trial is the same as the last: Apple and Samsung are both accusing each other of copying patented ideas, and there are billions of dollars on the table. But enough has changed to make the outcome of this second trial unguessable.
Apple and Samsung are headed back to court today for round two of their billion dollar patent lawsuit that will see the two companies pointing fingers and slamming down arguments on who copied whose patents.
We’ve seen enough evidence to have our own opinion on Samsung’s copying ways and now thanks to this Thai cartoon it all becomes perfectly clear why Samsung just can’t help itself.
Samsung is back at it with a new ad that makes fun of the iPad. But this time the Korean company decided to go after all of its competition in one fell swoop; the Microsoft Surface and Amazon Kindle are also called out.
The whole ad consists of the same recycled arguments (you can’t do two things at once on an iPad, etc.), and there’s the usual flair of weirdness Samsung seems to be so fond of in its TV spots. My favorite exchange:
“So, your Samsung looks better than my iPad because it has got more pixels.”
“Right.”
“But mine has got the Retina thingy.”