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Steve Jobs was right: Tablet sales set to topple the PC market

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iPad

At the Wall Street Journal‘s D8 conference back in 2010, Steve Jobs predicted that tablets such as the iPad would eventually overtake the personal computer for the majority of people. Five years after he made that prediction, it seems as though it may be set to come true.

According to research firm Gartner, worldwide shipments of tablets will top the PC market by next year — with traditional PCs and laptops shipping a combined 317 million units in the year, while tablet shipments will top 320 million. This year, tablets ship in the region of 256 million, against 308 million PCs.

All hail the king: iPhone 5s is the world’s most popular handset

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Sources in Apple's Chinese supply chain think the iPhone will shrink again next year. We're not convinced. Photo: Apple
Sources in Apple's Chinese supply chain think the iPhone will shrink again next year. We're not convinced. Photo: Apple

According to new research from market intelligence firm ABI Research, the iPhone was the world’s most popular smartphone in Q1 2014, leaving competitors in the dust as the top-selling handset globally.

Despite ripping off ideas, paying celebrities to endorse their products, and having a confusing matrix of dozens of smartphones on the market, Samsung was unable to capture the no. 1 spot from Cupertino — with Apple’s flagship iPhone 5s 16GB coming in at the premier position.

How Siri’s ultimate killer feature could be remembering

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Photo: Apple
Photo: Apple

Siri does many things, not all of them as well as others. But one thing she’s really great at is reminders: Tell Siri to remind you to call your Mom on her birthday every year, and you’ll never have to worry about it again.

While Siri is great at reminding you to do things, though, one thing she can’t do is remind you to remember things. But there’s no reason she can’t, and it would make an absolutely killer feature.

Stumptown shooter stalks the sexy and the strange

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Olsen's notes for Cardiac:
Olsen's notes for Cardiac: "Strobist: 550ex and Vivitar 285 with a red gel placed in the boxes. WL1600 with a strip bank to the left and above camera. Triggered via pocket wizards."

Grab a camera when the zombies come. They won’t eat your brains — they’ll strike a pose.

It’s a trick photographer Luke Olsen learned when he was surrounded on the streets of his hometown. His shots from the Portland Zombie Walk showcase the lean and mean side of his stylish but macabre portraiture.

The organized chaos of events like the zombie walk offers comic relief from formal photography sessions filled with intricate lighting, staging and models. Any opportunity to capture inspired lunacy is technically practice, but Olsen gravitates toward flash mobs to cut loose with his camera-wielding compatriots. He’s thrown himself into the thick of SantaCon, the infamous alcohol-fueled rampage that grew from absurdist San Francisco street theater into a national headache. The moribund Portland Urban Iditarod, where teams of costumed runners dragged tricked-out shopping carts from bar to bar, has also been shutter fodder.

“It’s a great deal of fun to wander into a large event with a group of friends, shoot the event and reconvene later to see what everyone got,” says Olsen. “It’s like The Bang Bang Club, just 100 percent less deadly.”

Apple celebrates LGBT rights in new ‘Pride’ video

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Back on June 29, thousands of Apple employees and their families marched in the San Francisco Pride Parade, coming from all over the world to support LGBT rights and to celebrate Apple’s commitment to equality and diversity. Tim Cook and Apple environmental adviser Lisa P. Jackson were two of the prominent Apple employees to attend, while Apple gave out $1 iTunes gift cards to onlookers at the parade.

Tim Cook looks to diversify board of directors as Apple’s focus widens

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Tim Cook leaves the stage at the end of the 2014 WWDC keynote. Photo: Roberto Baldwin/The Next Web
Tim Cook leaves the stage at the end of the 2014 WWDC keynote.
Photo: Roberto Baldwin/The Next Web

The spotlight on Tim Cook isn’t going away anytime soon, especially when Apple has yet to unveil any of the new “product categories” he promised would come this year.

In a new profile by The Wall Street Journal, Cook’s efforts to shape and mature Apple are detailed, including the fact that he is “actively seeking” new members for the company’s board of directors.

Cook has been consistently bringing in fresh blood to help him lead Apple, like former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts. It makes sense for him to also expand Apple’s board, were the current leadership is very engrained in the history of Apple under Jobs’ leadership.

All the tiny new tweaks added in iOS 8 beta 3

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iOS8

 

After taking a three week break Apple has released the refinements for iOS 8 in its newest beta available to developers today. Most of iOS 8’s major features were announced at WWDC, but Apple has been slowly and refining the UI of the new OS ahead of its fall release.

Major new features don’t make an appearance in today’s update, but Apple has added a number of setting toggles, tiny UI tweaks, new wallpapers, and flipped the switch on iCloud Drive.

Here’s a rundown of all the new tweaks and features added in iOS 8 beta 3:

Steve took our Jobs, says Finnish Prime Minister

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stevejobsvid

Most of us couldn’t have been any more excited for the iPhone and iPad. Then again, most of us aren’t the Finnish Prime Minister.

Speaking to Swedish financial newspaper Dagens Industri, Prime Minister Alexander Stubb has accused Apple’s late-founder Steve Jobs of crushing his country’s job market with two innovations that caught Finland completely off-guard.

“We had two pillars we stood on: one was the IT industry, the other one was the paper industry,” Stubb said — noting that both were affected by the arrival of Apple’s smartphone and tablet combo in the mid-2000s.

Don’t wait for Handoff — these 5 apps sync seamlessly today

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iOS 8’s Handoff feature looks totally rad. Imagine starting off a task on your Mac and then being able to continue where you left off on your iPhone or iPad without waiting. Just pick up the device and everything has already synced.

But wait! There’s no need to imagine this, because you can already do it right now, and you don’t even need iCloud. Handoff looks truly useful, and will blur the lines between our devices more than ever before, but let’s take a look at some apps that already work seamlessly between platforms.

True Blood is an unapologetic killer with ‘Fire In The Hole’

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Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO
Sookie is the bait in this trap. Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO

True Blood’s seventh and final season continues tonight with the third episode of the season: “Fire In The Hole.”

Death comes to us all, and that’s no empty promise with this series. Reverend Daniels calls it out: “Death is a dark and blinded motherf-cker, whether you see it coming or you don’t,” he tells Sam Merlotte.

This week’s episode is all about love. Sookie’s unequal love for Alcide, Pam’s love for Eric, Sam’s love for his lost fiancee and unborn child, Reverend Daniel’s love for Lettie May, and Andy’s love for his daughter Adilyn. All the characters act out of love and sometimes lust, but even the good guys are going to need more than blind faith in each other to survive.

Spoilers below, so consider yourself warned.

Crystal Baller: Siri gets a neural-boost, and 5 new crazy iPhone rumors

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apple-crystal-ball1

We get slammed 24/7 with new Apple rumors. Some are accurate, most are not. To give you a clue about what’s really coming out of Cupertino in the future, we’re busting out our rumor debunker each week to blow up the nonsense

This week we’ve officially entered peak iPhone 6 rumor season. We’ve heard everything from possible launch dates, new names for the iPhablet, and engineering tricks Apple might use to shrink the iPhone 6 to minuscule proportions. There’s also some whispers of Siri getting and upgrade and new iWatch features, but you’ll have to step up to our crystal ball to find see which of these are bangers, and which are bound to be duds.


iPhone is the #1 smartphone in U.S. market share

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Apple Loyalty
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Photo: Cult of Mac

The iPhone is far and away the most popular smartphone in the U.S., according to a new report by research firm ComScore. According to ComScore, 169 million cellphone users in the U.S. use smartphones — representing around 70 percent of all mobile users.

Of these, Apple can lay claim to 41.9 percent of users, while runner-up Samsung has captured 27.8 percent of the market. After Samsung, the numbers drop dramatically to 6.5 percent for LG, 6.3 percent for Motorola, and 5.1 percent for HTC.

Celebrate the 4th of July with these patriotic books, movies, and music

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Independence Day is finally here, which means your extra-long weekend is probably stuffed with BBQs, pool parties, and explosions so big you could see them from Mars.

We're out enjoying the celebration America's birthday, but between all the partying and family fun, we've got a selection of our favorite patriotic books, music and movies queued up for everyone to enjoy over the weekend. Here's the patriotic media will keep our 4th of July celebration rocking hard into the weekend.

Your favorite not in our list? Drop us your top 4th of July hits in comments


Alleged iPad Air 2 images show Touch ID and no lock button

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ipad-5-covers

Could this be the next generation iPad Air? New pictures showing up on the Japanese online news site ASCII Plus depict what appears to be a mockup of Apple’s forthcoming iPad Air 2, including images of it next to the current iPad Air model.

The images show a tablet that looks around 1mm thinner the current iPad Air, and features the expected addition of Touch ID, which has been the basis of multiple previous rumors.

iPhone owners are wall-hugging loners in newest Samsung ad

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It’s the iPhone’s battery life that gets attacked in Samsung’s newest TV ad for the Galaxy S5. With the tagline “don’t be a wall hugger,” the ad depicts iPhone owners in desperate need of a charge at the airport. We’ve all been there, sadly.

Galaxy S5 users walk about without a care in the world showing off the device’s powering saving mode (which basically makes it a dumb phone) and swappable battery. The ad itself is another attempt to make Samsung’s product look better than Apple’s by slinging mud, and it comes across just as petty as it did the last dozen times.

How WWDC students made an app that turns iPhones into a surround sound system

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Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

While sitting in on a session at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last year, Nick Frey, Chris Galzerano, and Veeral Patel got an itch to make something. As part of iOS 7, Apple had introduced “Multipeer Connectivity,” a framework for communicating with nearby devices.

Frey and his friends were at WWDC on student scholarships given by Apple, a tradition that provides the opportunity for hundreds of grade school and college students to attend the expensive conference for free each year.

Nearly a year later, the result of their shared itch is Audibly, a nifty iPhone app that can chain together iPhones to create a wireless sound system.

Almost half of UK smartphone web traffic is generated by iPhones alone

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UK_Mobile_Traffic_by_Manufacturer-ChitikaInsights

iPhones represented 48.9 percent of the UK’s smartphone-based web traffic in Q2, according to a new study by Chitika.

While Samsung came in at the expected second place, its percentage (22.8 percent) was much closer to BlackBerry’s (16.8 percent) than it was to Apple’s. The rest of the numbers were made up of HTC, Nokia, Sony, Google and Motorola handsets.

This is likely to be disappointing for the South Korea-based Samsung, which has recently been investing heavily in marketing its smartphones in the UK — including a “rebranding” of London’s Heathrow airport’s Terminal 5 in order to promote its latest Galaxy S model.

Yesterday Cult of Mac revealed that Samsung’s new Galaxy S5 smartphone was outsold by both the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c during the month of May: the first month Galaxy S5 was on sale in the country.

New Mac Pro sits pretty in this custom desk

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All photos: Takara Maru, used with permission.
All photos: Takara Maru, used with permission.

The new Mac Pro, with its sleek cylinder design, has gotten a bad rap. While it’s light-years from the bulky, ugly first-generation Mac Pro and “built for creativity on an epic scale,” this ingenious machine, which Apple sells for between $2,999 and $3,999, looks like a common waste receptacle.

The much-trashed design recently got some love from architect Takara Maru, who carved out a spot on this sleek walnut desk for it. Some might joke that it’s to shield users from the Mac Pro’s looks, but really the aim is to reduce clutter on the desk surface so Maru can focus on home design.

Picturelife 3 should be your new super-awesome online photo library

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The iPhone version is one of the best photo apps I've used. Screenshots Picturelife.
The iPhone version of Picturelife is one of the best photo apps I've used. Screenshot: Picturelife

Remember Picturelife? It was one of our top picks for online photo storage when Everpix bit it, and now it has been upgraded to version 3.0. The highlights are a new $15 per month unlimited plan, which is really truly unlimited and can be shared with up to three other family members, plus an all-new, redesigned iOS app.

Things in the online photo world are definitely heating up again. iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite will bring exciting new features for photographers and a recent update to Adobe Creative Cloud gives shutterbugs even more options for editing and storage.

But Picturelife has some pretty cool tricks up its sleeve to make it a worthy competitor to the big guns. Here’s why it deserves a shot at becoming your new super-awesome online photo library.

Future iPhones could intelligently modify security settings based on location

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Screen Shot 2014-07-03 at 12.12.28

Future Apple devices may be able to dynamically modify user interface elements, security levels, and other types of behavior based on location, according to a new patent application published Thursday.

Referred to as “Location-sensitive security levels and setting profiles based on detected location,” Apple’s application describes a setup in which both the hardware and software of your iPhone, iPad, and whatever other mobile devices Apple releases in future can seamlessly work together to automatically adjust various UI and device behavior settings.

5 fantastic movie futures we’d love to live in (plus 5 we’d hate)

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Pick any version of the show (except possibly Star Trek: Voyager) and you’ve got a sci-fi future we’d love to live in. Unlike a lot of sci-fi, Star Trek has always tended toward a utopian vision of our future selves in which racism, sexism, ageism and, in Captain’s Picard’s case, jokes against male-pattern baldness are all relics of the distant past. There’s also intergalactic travel, a ton of colorful aliens in existence, and the holodeck to unwind on after a hard day’s work. Oh yes, and we get to wear spandex jumpsuits to our heart’s content.

Pick any version of the show (except possibly Star Trek: Voyager) and you’ve got a sci-fi future we’d love to live in. Unlike a lot of sci-fi, Star Trek has always tended toward a utopian vision of our future selves in which racism, sexism, ageism and, in Captain’s Picard’s case, jokes against male-pattern baldness are all relics of the distant past. There’s also intergalactic travel, a ton of colorful aliens in existence, and the holodeck to unwind on after a hard day’s work. Oh yes, and we get to wear spandex jumpsuits to our heart’s content.


9 astonishing Apple ads you probably missed

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steve-jobs-apple-think-different

From sledgehammer-tossing freedom fighters to misunderstood teenagers at Christmas, Apple’s TV commercials have hit us with some truly iconic imagery over the years. But when a company has been around since the 1970s, it’s no great surprise that a select few ads would slip our collective memory.

After scouring through hundreds of big-time commercials and tiny TV spots that promoted Cupertino’s products over the years, here are our picks for the Apple advertisements that time forgot. All of them are worthy of a second look — and almost all of them for the right reasons.

Picture-perfect strategy: Why killing Aperture means Apple will rule the cloud

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An aperture. Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
Apple and Adobe make major moves to change the way we manage our photographs. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Ubiquitous cloud storage and editing solutions for your photos are like buses: You wait ages for one, and then two come along at once.

Both Apple and Adobe are going all-in on allowing you to view and edit your photos on any device. Adobe has done this by bringing its Lightroom desktop app to mobile. Apple is doing it by ditching iPhoto and Aperture and starting again with the upcoming Photos app for iOS.

While the approaches are different, they both look rad. And they’ll drive a fundamental shift in the way we manage our photos.