A recent report from The Wall Street Journal gives an inside look at Tim Cook’s influence as Apple’s new CEO during the past couple of weeks. Cook has been known as the mastermind behind Apple’s incredibly efficient operations for years.
In the wake of Steve Jobs’ death, Cook has already begun to do things differently than Jobs, and he is proving to be a very different type of Apple CEO.
Do you remember Microsoft’s top secret Couriet tablet project? It was a dual screen, book-like tablet first leaked well before Apple unveiled the iPad, created by J. Allard, the mind behind Microsoft’s fantastic Xbox console.
It’s a concept that has aged well, mostly because it’s one of the only tablet designs around that isn’t just trying to rip off Apple’s idea of what a tablet should be wholesale. It’s still, in fact, brought up as an example of how Microsoft could have competed with Apple in the tablet market from the get go.
So what happened to the Courier? Why wasn’t it released? It all came down to the fact that Bill Gates had an “allergic reaction” to the project because it didn’t run Outlook.
GarageBand is one of the best apps you can show off on your iPad 2 to convince even the most ornery skeptic, and it just got even better: with the 1.1 update, GarageBand is now a $4.99 universal app, and can run on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.
Apple has seemingly missed its iTunes Match launch date after promising at its ‘Let’s Talk iPhone’ event early last month that the new service would be up and running in the United States at the “end of October.” Developers who have been testing the service in beta are discovering today that the iTunes 10.5.1 beta has now ended, with no replacement in sight.
Samsung is currently drafting up a crafty plan to get Apple’s new iPhone 4S banned from Australia, and to help its case it is requesting “the source code for the iPhone 4S firmware” and details of the company’s subsidy agreements with carriers Down Under.
Over the weekend, we showed off Siri running on a jailbroken iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G thanks to the tireless efforts of iPhone hackers chpwn and Steve Troughton.
Clearly, Siri works just fine on lesser devices like the iPhone 4 and iPod touch, but despite this, chpwn and Troughton warned that we wouldn’t see an authorized release anytime soon. Now chpwn is clarifying why, and it’s just as the Dev Team warned us: Siri on non-iPhone 4S devices require piracy.
Apple’s Senior Vice President of Retail Operations, Ron Johnson, has officially left the Cupertino company to become CEO of JC Penney. His biography was removed from Apple’s website today and a successor is yet to be announced.
The App Store is yet to offer any third-party email clients, but that’s all about to change thanks to Google. The company is reportedly “on the verge” of launching a “fantastic” Gmail app for the iPhone that may have already been submitted to Apple for approval.
The official Apple Store app is already a useful tool if you have to sally forth into meat space, allowing you to schedule appointment times at your local Genius Bar, reserve items for pickup at your local Apple Store and the like.
Come November 3rd, though, the Apple Store iOS app is set to gain some cool new functionality: the ability to check your own purchases out at Apple’s physical retail locations.
It’s been three years since the last major design refresh of the MacBook Pro, and we’ve been hearing whispers for almost a year that the next major update would see Apple’s professional line of laptops take on some of the characteristics of the MacBook Air line: slimmer profiles, ubiquitous SSDs, no optical drives.
If those updates sound swell to you, good news. Inside sources say Apple’s already working on the skinnier MacBook Pro, and the new LCD displays have already been developed.
There’s nothing like wandering through the Outback, camping under the stars…with an iPad: It can help identify the constellation you’re gazing at, let you sneak in a few chapters from your latest read or track your odyssey. That is, if you can keep the thing juiced.
Solar power is the obvious choice, but there aren’t many portable solar panels with the ability to charge the iPad; add the requirement that the panel be truly rugged and your choices become very, very slim. Luckily, the Joos Orange solar panel ($150), the outfit’s first product, may be the only choice you’ll need to consider.
I’ve been a bit quiet lately while considering the possible reasons why my new iPhone 4S has the worst battery life of any iPhone I’ve ever owned. Normally by now I would have written some battery troubleshooting tips to share with all of you. However, this time around the problem is anything but normal and the usual tips aren’t helping. So I’ve been quiet about this.
I cannot say the same thing about Apple’s discussion forums since the conversation about battery life there is reaching epic proportions and the conversation is rather loud.
It might be about to get a lot quieter with this tip, which seems to be working for me.
A handy way to link up with friends? You bet. Evil? Quite possibly. Lame? That’s what a friend of mine thought. Find My Friends, Apple’s newest app, is a new location tool that can be used to great effect — or become one huge, scary headache.
Here’s an FAQ with all you need to know about navigating safely through the app.
The most wonderful time of the year isn’t Christmas, it’s Halloween. No other day on the calendar gives you an excuse to dress up like Han Solo and go out on the prowl in search of the sexiest version of Princess Leia you can find. A lot of our readers decided to celebrate Halloween with a tribute to their favorite computer company, so we asked our Twitter followers to tweet us pics their Apple inspired Halloween costumes and jack o’-lanterns.
If you have a picture of your Apple themed costume or jack o’ lantern and would like for us to include it in the gallery, tweet it over to us @cultofmac
Here are some of the best pictures from last night:
In iOS 5 Apple implemented a handy feature that lets you mark multiple emails as read. In the stock Mail app, multiple emails can be selected and marked quickly to save you the time and hassle of having to go through each individual message one by one.
It’s been a long year. You deserve to treat yourself, and your Mac, to some beautiful new apps to make life easier. No one wants to spend $350 on an app shopping spree though, so we’re here to get you the hookup on 10 amazing apps while saving you a quantified butt-ton of money at the same time.
This week Cult of Mac Deals and StackSocial are bringing you ten apps to make your Mac driven life a thousand times better. We’ve scored you a deal to that saves 86% off the original price. 10 apps for $49 instead of the advertised $366?! This is the biggest deal we’ve had yet. Here’s a run down of the ten apps that are included in our Fall 2011 Mac SuperBundle.
While Apple’s latest gadgets are a must-have for some, they’re not all that useful for iOS jailbreakers. The company’s new iPhone 4S, along with the iPad 2, cannot be jailbroken when running iOS 5. But thanks to the iPhone Dev-Team, it won’t be long before you’re using Cydia on them.
Your Mac’s home directory, or home folder, is represented by a little house in the Finder and is the default location for your documents, music, photos and other items on your computer. The name of the home folder is also your Mac account username, or “shortname” in UNIX parlance.
Since these items are related, the process for renaming the home folder and changing your username is similar to moving your home folder to another location such as a second hard drive. Here’s how it’s done.
Apple is pushing out more updates to computers released in 2011 to enable Lion Internet recovery. Initially this recovery feature was only available on the MacBook Air and Mac Mini when they made their debut in July. Recently, however, Apple made it available on certain model MacBook notebooks and this week it was released for early 2011 iMacs like the one I purchased in June.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m surprised that Apple enabled Lion Internet Recovery on my iMac. I thought they’d hold out and only offer it on a refreshed model as an incentive to upgrade.
Apple’s Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) was integrated into the company’s Mac OS X platform back in 2004, and made its way into QuickTime and iTunes software shortly afterwards. Today, Apple has released the audio codec as open source project.
We’ve seen a shedload of Steve Jobs tributes since he passed away on October 5, but when it comes to paying tribute with one of the devices Steve created, this is the most impressive we’ve seen so far. This iPhone 4 mod was devised by a Chinese student, and it’s a tribute Apple would be proud of.
No doubt, leather requires some sacrifice. Those who want their iPads wrapped with animal hide usually have to make do with considerably more bulk, less usability or less money in the bank account — or, most often, all three. But Sena’s new Florence iPad 2 case ($70) is a surprising exception.
We thought we’d put this Apple television business to rest as a pipe-dream, but then Steve Jobs’s biography came out, where he claimed he had finally “cracked” the TV problem. Now the rumor mill has started itself up again with renewed vigor, and the latest report from Nick Bilton over at The New York Times: his sources tell him that Jobs thought that the “industry was totally broken” a real Apple-branded television set “isn’t a matter of if, but when,” a “guaranteed product.”
If there’s one feature we’re all anticipating for the iPad 3, it’s a Retina display. We’ve become accustomed to high-resolution displays on our mobile devices since Apple first introduced the Retina display to the iPhone and the iPod touch, and we all want one on the iPad 3.
According to one report, the third-generation device will indeed boast a 2048 x 1536 resolution display, but LG and Samsung are struggling to produce enough of them to meet Apple’s demands.
There have been a lot of complaints on Twitter that most of the best bits of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs have already leaked. After reading sundry blog posts, news stories and tweets about Jobs’s life, is there anything left to read in the actual book?
Yes, there is. There’s plenty. Although the arc of Steve’s story is generally well known, Isaacson has added a ton of new detail to even the most well-trodden stories from Jobs’s life. Trouble is, a lot of it is about Jobs mistreating people.
Walter Isaacson’s book is an unflinching biography of a manifestly great man. But it’s not a fun read. In fact, sometimes it’s a lot like being locked in a room with a borderline sociopath. Powering through Isaacson’s bio will give you unique insight into how Steve Jobs changed the world, but it’s not necessarily a comforting one.