The iPad has been a staggering success for Apple since its inception in 2009, but if it wasn’t for one loud-mouthed Microsoft employee, the tablet may have never been born. Steve Jobs decided that he would create the device after listening to a Microsoft employee boast about a Windows tablet over dinner. When he got home that night, Steve said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet really can be.”
Almost all mic-equipped canalphones that can be had for about $100 use moving-coil drivers to produce sound, as is the case with all the previous IEMs in this review series. But the Ultimate Ears 600vi ($120) are different — this set employs a single tiny armature in each ear. Armatures generally allow for a more neutral sound with better definition than their moving-coil brethren, and that’s exactly the case with the 600vi. In fact, this set uses pretty much the same excellent drivers as in the now-discontinued, $180 SuperFi 5vi we reviewed early last year.
And yes, apart from the V-Moda Vibrato, the 600vi is $20 more than the other earphones in this review series — but we think the extra Jackson is worth it.
Friends sometimes tell me I have a hollow leg, but they don’t really mean it: they just mean that my rampant alcoholism is frequently imperceptible. If it were literally true that I had a hollow leg, I’d probably be tempted to do something crazy with it… like, say, run an Apple Dock Connector up through it and turn my upper calf into an easily accessible iPhone dock.
That’s why I’m so green with envy reading this Telegraph story about Trevor Prideaux, a British man born without a left arm who modified his prosthetic to be a smartphone dock. The only problem? He crammed a Nokia in there, not an iPhone!
Six weeks before it officially goes on sale, Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire is shaping up to be the biggest tablet launch ever… and Cult of Android has the numbers to prove it.
A verified source within the Seattle based online retail giant has provided Cult of Android with exclusive screenshots of Amazon’s internal inventory management system Alaska (Availability Lookup and SKU Aggregator).
These leaked shoots show that orders for Amazon’s Android-based tablet are racking up at an average rate of over 2,000 units per hour, or over 50,000 per day.
In the five days since Amazon put the Kindle Fire up on their official site, over 250,000 tablets have been preordered. If this level of consumer demand for the Kindle Fire continues, Amazon will have 2.5 million preorders for the device before it officially goes on sale on November 15th.
Those numbers make the Kindle Fire’s launch likely to be the biggest tablet launch in history, beating both the iPad and iPad 2 in first month sales.
Having acquired the movie rights to Walter Isaacson’s authorized Steve Jobs biography earlier this month, Sony is now looking for a writer that can deliver Steve’s story to the big screen. At the top of the company’s wish list, according to a report from The LA Times, is Aaron Sokin, the writer behind The Social Network.
Steve Jobs’s quest for perfection was pursued down to the smallest details. It made him the father of some of the greatest products and interfaces in computer history.
As Walter Isaacson’s new biography on Steve Jobs makes clear, though, it could also sometimes make him nightmarish to live with… the sort of obsessive who could make even the most mundane seemingly household decisions into maddening, endless debates.
One thing you can be sure that Apple will improve with every iteration of its iPhone is the device’s camera. The original iPhone packed a 2-megapixel camera that wasn’t all that great at taking photos; things got significantly better two generations later with the iPhone 3GS. The 5-megapixel camera in the iPhone 4 received a ton of praise, but its 8-megapixel successor in the iPhone 4S is even more terrific.
So terrific, in fact, that the developer behind the hugely successful Camera+ application for the iPhone, Lisa Bettany, says the device “outshines” many of the high-end compact cameras currently on the market.
Apple’s iPhone 4S has been a huge success for Sprint since its launch on October 14, breaking both opening day sales and activation records. For many customers, however, life with the latest iPhone on Sprint isn’t all that fun, with painfully slow data speeds throttling the iPhone’s capabilities when away from a Wi-Fi connection. According to the carrier, however, its data speeds match those offered by its competitors.
Steve Jobs was a man who adopted many mentors in his life, but one of his mentors deserves more than a passing look: Robert Friedland, a charismatic, free love wacko who dealt LSD and had his own free love commune on the same apple orchard that inspired Steve for the name of his company. It was also where Steve allegedly got his “reality distortion field” from.
Walter Isaacson’s much anticipated biography of Steve Jobs is releasing today, and we’re already busy poring through it, gaining new insight into the life and philosophies of Apple’s volatile, sometimes enigmatic co-founder.
Throughout the morning, we’ll be live updating this post with some of the best revelations, funniest stories, most interesting quotes and most enjoyable tidbits of the biography.
Apple is set to launch a new pilot program that will allow customers to make orders through its online store and then collect their purchases from their local Apple store, according to a new report. The program has reportedly been given the name “Sherwood” and will cover any product available online, including custom-build computers, third-party accessories, and products which have been gift-wrapped an engraved.
iPod 10th Anniversary: To celebrate the iPod’s 10th anniversary on Sunday October 23, we’ve been running several special features which we hope will allow our readers to look back at Apple’s most iconic product with fun and fondness.
Over the last ten years, the iPod has gone from a single device designed to hold your MP3s to a family of devices that have literally revolutionized the music industry.
As part of our iPod 10th Anniversary Celebrations, we put together this family tree infographic so you can look back at all of the iPods that have come before, and helped get us to where we are now: the future of digital music.
Feel free to repost this graphic, but if you do, please make sure to link to Cult of Mac. Thanks!
Maybe you’re not going to buy a pair of earphones based on the way they look; maybe you’d rather spend your moolah on a pair that came with exquisite performance. What if you could have both? In spades? Here you go: With their deep, bone-tingling bass and blue-blood looks and manners, the Klipsch Image S4i earphones ($100) is the Prince…of Spades.
We’ve seen a number of rumors surrounding a MacBook Pro refresh in recent weeks, and just as expected, the latest models hit the Apple online store this morning. In addition to increased storage for some models, there are speed improvements across the board with faster Intel Core i5 and i7 processors.
Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus has reportedly left Apple just days after his sophisticated voice-recognition technology made its debut on the iPhone 4S. It was an ‘amicable’ departure, according to sources, that will allow Kittlaus to focus on “new entrepreneurial ideas.”
I arrived at this party pretty late — I’m probably the junior member here at the Cult of Mac, as far as Apple adoption goes. I haven’t discussed it directly with the entire staff, but I’m almost certain everyone else here had been using Steve’s gadgets long before I started.
My wholesale defection from PC to Mac finally happened in 2005, when I walked out of the Stonestown Galleria Apple Store, beaming, with a 12-inch iBook G4, never to return to the world of Windows. But the journey began two years earlier, when I met and fell in love with my first Apple product.
Yes, it was an iPod.
A decade ago Apple introduced the iPod, and with it a new method for controlling music playback: a scroll wheel with buttons around the perimeter. The interface was novel for a portable music player, which usually used more traditional buttons in a linear or grid layout.
The scroll wheel was the brainchild of Phil Schiller, Apple’s Director of Marketing. He realized that users would have to navigate large lists of songs, and that a wheel offered an intuitive, dynamic solution.
The original iPod, just a decade old today, was little more than a hard disk with earbuds. But this humble little gadget launched five revolutions that made consumer electronics what it is today.
In fact, everything Apple is today sprang from the iPod seed. From Apple’s revenues to design influence to the fundamental business and distribution models that glue the industry together, the iPod started it all.
So put in those white earbuds and click “play.” Because if you love consumer electronics, you’re about to hear how the iPod started it all.
Review by Kelly Keltner
Let me begin this review by saying, while I’ve found some love for certain models, I don’t really care for most canalphones: They’re uncomfortable, and while I love the idea of plugging a foreign object into my ear and having that object deliver magical sounds just like an owl delivers a Howler, I usually wind up being disappointed with either the sound or the fit. So, with that in mind, it was time to try the Etymotic mc3 ($100).
This set, with a three-button remote on the cable and four sets of super-sealing, deep-seating eartips (two flanged, two foam), was now tasked with being tested by me. May the Force, that I’ll probably have to use to shove them into my ears, be with them.
Gene Munster must be having an orgasm right now: in an interview for his upcoming bio with Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs said he had finally ‘cracked’ the ‘integrated’ TV problem.
Don’t read too much into this, though. Jobs may not be talking about the iTV, and just the plain AppleTV.
We’re all looking forward to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, which will be released on Monday, October 24. But if you’ve been keeping an eye on the news over the past couple days, you’d have already seen some interesting stories from the book.
One of those details Steve’s initial opinion on third-party apps for the iPhone. In the beginning, Steve was opposed to third-party apps, and wanted developers to create web apps that could be used through the device’s mobile Safari web browser. According to Apple board member, Art Levinson, “Jobs at first quashed the discussion” of allowing apps on the company’s debut smartphone.
Apple has today opened up iPhone 4S pre-orders through its online store for an additional 22 countries, where the Cupertino company will launch the device a week today, on Friday, October 28.
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The Cupertino City Council has released a touching video tribute to Steve Jobs that was created by city employees. The video was posted to the City Council’s YouTube channel today, and includes footage of Steve at council meetings pitching the new Apple campus, in addition to a number of photographs.
Everyone wants to be an amazing photographer now days. That’s the reason why Apple updated the iPhone’s camera right? Unfortunately, taking breathtaking photos isn’t as easy as buying the new iPhone 4S and taking random pictures of the sun behind trees changing colors with the season. Don’t worry though, Cult of Mac is here to help you take your photography skills to the next level.
Whether you’re wanting to make a serious dent in the photography universe, or just trying to impress your friends on Instagram and Facebook, we got three amazing apps that will pour life into your photos. Best of all, the Mac Photo Effects FamilyPack Bundle gives you five licenses of FX Photo Studio Pro and five copies of ColorSplash Studio so you can spread the joy and give a couple copies to your friends so their pictures can look great too.
So what all is in this bundle worth $215 that you can get for $35?
I’ve got a passcode lock on my iPad 2 so that it cannot be accessed by individuals who weren’t given permission to play with it. However, I also use an Apple Smart Cover, and thanks to a security flaw in the iPad’s iOS software, my passcode lock is now useless, because anyone can use my Smart Cover to gain entry to my iPad.