Despite recent reports detailing the mistreatment of factory workers assembling Apple products in China, there’s still a huge demand for jobs at the Foxconn factory. Thousands of people lined up for hours outside a recruitment agency in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou in the hope that they would be chosen to build iPhones at the Foxconn factory.
Apple has issued what it describes a “significant” update to its Final Cut Pro X software today, adding a number of features that many users missed with the initial release. Those features include multicam editing, XML support, advanced chroma editing, and more.
Starting April 5th, T-Mobile will begin capping the Domestic Roaming Data Allotment. Unlike their data throttling, once a user goes over their designated allotment,they will simply be cut off from data altogether, until they return to the T-Mobile network or connect via WiFi. While this change is unlikely to affect the majority of us (when’s the last time you used data while roaming?), T-Mobile will send out warnings via text message when your domestic roaming data allotment has reached both 80% and 100%.
Having obtained the licenses necessary to launch its new iPhone 4S on the China Telecom network earlier this month, it was only a matter of time before Apple’s deal with a second Chinese carrier came to fruition. China Telecom subsidiary Beijing Telecom has now issued a press release confirming that it will launch the iPhone 4S from as early as the end of February.
Replacing retail genius Ron Johnson wasn’t an easy task for Apple. The company has been seeking a replacement since he announced he was leaving to become CEO of JC Penney back in June. But it seems it has now found its man, after announcing that John Browett, who has been CEO of Dixons Retail in the U.K. since 2007, is the new Senior Vice President of Retail.
Autodesk makes industry-leading software for animators, architects and industrial designers, so maybe the fact their Pixlr-o-matic app is a stunning, gasp-worthy photo-effects tool for the iPhone (and iPad) shouldn’t be surprising; what is a surprise, though, is that it’s free.
If you think about it, it’s pretty convoluted having a separate data plan for both your iPhone and iPad when you could just pay your carrier a lump sum and share a data allowance between the two. Verizon and AT&T certainly think so: they said as far back as June last year that they were investigating shared data plans.
Now, just a couple months before the iPad 3 is expected to debut, Engadget has gotten a tip that suggests that Verizon is getting ready to roll out shared data plans sometimes soon, allowing one account holder to share a data pool between multiple devices for just a $9.99 fee.
I have some amazing news for our friends over in the UK. T-Mobile UK has announced that they will be bringing the UK its first mobile phone plan to offer consumers the freedom to make unlimited calls, send unlimited texts, and use as much mobile internet as they want – with no fair use restrictions. This is a breakthrough plan for the UK and one I wish all carriers would adopt. The Full Monty plan will kick off tomorrow and will be available via T-Mobile stores, online, telesales and in-direct partners.
Meet the HP Envy 15, a laptop that Engadget says “unapologetically copies the MacBook Pro” but “stumbles in several critical areas” including being heavier than the MacBook Pro and having a worse display, touchpad (pictured), keyboard and battery life.
Completely shameless, no? It’s the tech equivalent of The Third Man’s Harry Lime selling counterfeit penicillin on the post-war Viennese black market. Accept no substitutions.
[via Reddit]
ADR Studios is the Italian design company behind the iPhone SJ, a sultry concept design for the iPhone 5 featuring an edge-to-edge capacitive touchscreen, 10 megapixel camera, A6 processor, and a polycarbonate body that’s about as light as you can imagine.
It’s a design that’s not realistically going to happen, but we’ve been a little obsessed with it for the last month or so. We feel similarly about ADR’s new iWatch2 concept: Apple’s never going to make a device that was so exclusively and unapologetically a wristwatch, but if they did, man, I wish it would look like this.
Becoming an Apple engineer could well be one of the most exciting careers currently available in the technology industry, but don’t expect to working on the iPhone 5 during your first week. It seems the Cupertino company is so obsessed with secrecy that new employees are made to work on “fake” devices for months, until they can be trusted not to leak them.
There are those faithful who will never surrender their little white Apple earbuds. To them we say: Wear proudly. But for the rest, for those who don’t want to deal with sub-par sound, earbuds flopping around and having to hunt for foam covers, come with us — and we’ll show you a world of possibilities.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — Gregory Wyatt is a fast-talking coroner with a touch of gallows humor and a soft spot for cases involving kids. Wyatt is also the only “official” Mac user out of about 10,000 state workers. As the coroner for Sacramento County, Wyatt heads up a staff of 34 who investigate about 8,000 deaths a year and perform 1,000 autopsies.
“I’m also my own Mac support guy. The only reason I can do that is because they work,” Wyatt said during a talk titled “Apple in Life & Death: The REAL CSI.” Outgoing and confident, he joked he was “not used to speaking to people who speak back.”
Apple is on the brink of becoming the poster child for worker abuse. Journalists and rights organizations are starting to draw attention to the enormous contrast between Apple’s quarterly billions in profits, and the desperate plight of abused workers in China.
And the closer you look, the uglier this issue gets. And it threatens to damage Apple’s long-term prospects for continued growth and success.
Here’s the problem, and also what Apple can do about it.
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Want to know about everything you’ll get in the Mac SuperBundle? Head over to Deals.CultofMac for the full scoop and to make your purchase.
Laaaaaaaaaaadies and Gentlemen, welcome to Friday Night Fights, a new series of weekly deathmatches between two no-mercy brawlers who will fight to the death — or at least agree to disagree — about which is better: Apple or Google, iOS or Android?
After this week’s topic, someone’s going to be spitting teeth. Our question: Should The iPhone Allow You To Easily Swap In And Out Batteries? A lot of Android phones let you swap in and out batteries if you’re low on power, but Apple’s never done so. Is this just another example of Apple hardware oppression, or do they have a good reason?
In one corner, we have the 900 pound gorilla, Cult of Mac; in the opposite corner, wearing the green trunks, we have the plucky upstart, Cult of Android!
Place your bets, gentlemen! This is going be a bloody one.
Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at Macworld on January 9, 2007, to thunderous applause. The revolutionary phone — a product that has now made Apple the top smartphone manufacturer in the world — then went on sale June 29, 2007, to long lines of eager customers and fanboys.
Several years later, Jobs announced that the iPhone’s software would be called “iOS.” These two names, iPhone and iOS, have not only become a part of Apple’s core, but also staple, household names worldwide.
Most people don’t know, however, the story of how Steve Jobs took both names from an enterprise/infrastructure company by the name of Cisco. Took? Well,
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — If you want to create great photos from your iPhone, start by shooting everywhere. Including the dentist’s office or out the window of a friend’s bathroom.
Photographer Jonathan Marks has snapped his evocative pics in both those places, plus waiting at a traffic light and at a Whole Foods parking lot. He shoots and processes everything directly on his iPhone, thanks to a handful of key apps.
Counterintuitively, for the fourth year running, the winners of 148Apps annual “Best App Ever” contest have just been announced at Macworld / iWorld 12012. And my girlfriend’s going to be positively giddy, because the app that she’s spent most of the last year grinding her fingers down to the bone playing has won: Halfbrick Studio’s Jetpack Joyride!
Following a lengthy New York Times report published earlier this week, detailing the harsh reality behind the mistreatment of Chinese factory workers, Apple CEO Tim Cook has responded to his staff with an email that brands the report “patently false and offensive.”
Cook revealed he is “outraged” by the report, and reassured his team that “we’ve made a great deal of progress and improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers.”
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — The inaugural edition of the Original iPhone Film Festival (OIFF) gave out awards to small-screen Steven Spielbergs.
OIFF founders Corey Rogers and Matt Dessner were on hand to talk about common iPhone filmmaking problems, like getting release forms and copyright snafus. (If you want to take your iPhone videos from crappy to snappy, check out our exclusive interview with some great tips from Dessner.)
Whale Trail is a popular sidescroller that originated from the Apple App Store. The game can best be described as Tiny Wings meets Angry Birds on acid. Whale Trail is a colorful, charming, quirky and addictive game — not to mention one of my personal favorites.
As we’ve already told you, Whale Trail recently launched on the Android Marketplace. I got to sit down with the head of the company behind Whale Trail to talk about the pros and cons between developing for Android and iOS.
It looks like Valve threw a few extra coals into their engine after hearing about the 3rd party Steam app that was released earlier this month. They were not going to let any other app take their steam and so they have now released the official Steam app onto both Android and iOS. I’d like to say users are ecstatic, but there seems to be a catch.
The hope of a new Apple product on the horizon tends to make tech blogs a little fanciful, sometimes even delusional, so it’s hard to fault Techno Buffalo too much for their “exclusive” report that an Apple-made OLED HDTV with Siri functionalities — the much talked about iTV — is coming out “this April, or possibly May at the latest.” Hey, we all get carried away from time to time.
That said, TechnoBuffalo’s report isn’t too be trusted. In fact, it’s total bullshit. Here’s why.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD / iWORLD 2012 — Talking on stage about her love of technology and gadgets, New Yorker writer Susan Orlean rhapsodized her iPad, and told how she converted her husband to Apple technology.
A self-confessed geek, Orlean told how the iPad solved all the problems she had with working and traveling with technology. She had a Danger Sidekick, but would go nuts taking notes on it. She finds her MacBook too heavy to carry all day.
She also not afraid of losing or damaging her iPad. “I can it take with me to take notes but it won’t have my life on it if it gets lost or stolen,” she said. “It solved all of my problems.”
And her favorite app?