News - page 2009

According to sources for The Wall Street Journal, Apple’s third-generation iPad will come packing an impressive 2048 x 1536 Retina display, and is set to launch in early 2012.

In a bid to rid New York City stores of shoddy counterfeit goods, Apple has reportedly cracked down on a number of businesses that are selling fake accessories — seizing items found in its raids and demanding that companies change their names if they’re too similar to that of the Cupertino company itself.

It isn’t a secret that SMS messaging has always been a ripoff since cellular companies charge excessive fees to transport a tiny insignificant amount of data on their network. Now AT&T is going for your money by killing off their $10 messaging plan that includes 1,000 text messages and what do you get? You get the shaft.

AT&T will stick it to you by allowing you to choose from AT&T’s new “streamlined” messaging plans: $20 for unlimited messaging or go without a plan and pay $0.20 per SMS message.  We’d like to call it what it is — a big scam and one you should refuse to accept.

This sounds like what people who don’t live in California think people here do on dates:  take a stroll around the Apple retail store in Palo Alto, then have some sushi and a little conversation.

Except that this isn’t a date, it’s the meeting of two businessmen. The Wall Street Journal recounts how Peter Bell decided to court iAd chief Andy Miller away from Apple in an afternoon they spent hanging out together.

Wondering why HP is nuking its PC business from orbit, despite being the biggest PC maker in the world? Wonder no longer.

Reports about Best Buy and Walmart returning huge numbers of unsold TouchPad tablets to Hewlett Packard appear to be strikingly true.

Speaking on a conference call right after dropping the bombshell that HP is killing its webOS phones and tablets, HP CEO Leo Apotheker admitted that his company’s iPad competitor is not selling at all, despite hefty price cuts.

The company hoped the TouchPad would quickly establish itself as the number two to the iPad, Apotheker said, but it hasn’t made a dent at all.

Wow, this took me completely surprise: mere minutes after confirming that they were in talks to spin off their PC business, HP has totally thrown in the towel on their mobile strategy. They’ve just announced that they are shutting down their WebOS Device business.

Unreal. That’s just a month and a half after releasing the HP Touchpad, which was supposed to relaunch webOS as a serious contender to Apple’s mobile OS crown. Now HP’s just killing off that side of the business in total.

In a move similar to when IBM sold off its PC and laptop business sold it to Lenovo, HP is reportedly on the verge of spinning off its PC business in order to focus on cloud-based software and enterprise services.

That means the world’s largest computer maker may be about to exit the game entirely, and small wonder: Apple’s been beating them to a bloody pulp. Making Windows PCs is a low margin game, and Apple’s pretty much the only company in town that isn’t experiencing negative growth.

Want a free iPhone? Don’t care that it’ll be two generations old in just a month or two? Rush on over to Best Buy Mobile on Monday, August 22nd and you can get an iPhone 3GS completely free with “two-year activation.”

The Best Buy Mobile offer has all the hallmarks of an inventory clearance to me, which seems to insinuate that BBM doesn’t exactly think the iPhone 3GS will continue in its role as the entry-level iPhone.

Who’s ready to bite the bullet?

[via Technobuffalo]

It’s been theorized for a while that Microsoft would try to ape Apple’s success with the Mac App Store when they release Windows 8, but until now, it’s just been conjecture. Now here we are, on the other side of the rumor.

“So you just shake the accelerometer and Sarah Palin’s breasts start bouncing? LOL! Gross!”

– President Obama to Vice President Joe Biden at the Outer Oval Office on Saturday, July 16th, 2011, according to the White House Flickr feed. Via 9to5Mac

Anyone got any better ideas about what Obama might be saying to Biden, and more importantly, what iPhone app they’re using? Let us know in the comments.

Following the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s decision to allow airlines to use tablets as electronic flight bags, Delta has become the first airline to issue iPads to its pilots for in-flight access to equipment manuals, flight charts, and Wi-Fi.

Another day, another lawsuit involving our favorite Cupertino company. This time Apple is the defendant, with Software Restore Solutions filing a complaint that claims Apple copied its technology with the Disk Utility tool built into the Mac OS X operating system.

A couple of weeks ago, id Software said that if they got 100,000 likes on their Facebook page, they’d release the on-rails iOS version of their upcoming next gen shooter, Rage, free for a week. Well, they’re at 100k likes, so go grab yourself a free game. You can grab Rage HD here and Rage here.

For those of you with a MacBook, an iPhone and an iPad, check out this new iSurge Travel Charging Station from Energizer. It’s an all-in-one charger for all your Apple gadgets that allows you to charge 6 of your devices all at once.

Send a lot of texts and looking to get your first iPhone? AT&T just became a less compelling option, as Ma Bell will be eliminating their $10 a month texting plan on August 21st.

Open up the App Store on your iPhone and you’ll find a plethora of apps that introduce augmented reality to your iPhone, but for now, that’s the only way you can get it. Apple is yet to make augmented reality a native feature, but a recently discovered patent application suggests the technology could one day appear in the built-in Maps app for iOS.

One thing you hear a lot from people who think that Apple has no case against Samsung for ripping off the iPhone and iPad’s designs is that the design of a touchscreen smartphone or tablet is “obvious.”

Well, sure, obvious once Apple did it. But check out what tablets looked like before the iPad: they were all Windows laptops with styluses. Now look at them: slates of glass all designed to be directly interacted with through your fingertips, like a frame into media.

[via Mac Rumors via OP]

Apple’s plans to build a new retail store — complete with a glass roof — on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California, were approved at the Santa Monica Planning Commission meeting last night — apparently without question.

Grand Theft Auto III is the very reason I purchased a PlayStation 2 all those years ago, and even to this day it remains one of my favorite games. Imagine my delight, then, when I woke to find it in the Mac App Store this morning.

If you owned an Apple notebook before 2006 when the MagSafe method of charging was introduced, you’ll know that if someone tripped over your power cord, they often took your computer down with them. Now we have the MagSafe, we don’t have to worry about the fool in the coffee shop who isn’t looking where he’s going, because your power cord just pops out with a slight tug.

According to a new Apple patent, MagSafe technology could also be heading to iOS devices to safe them from clumsy feet.

Somewhere, as Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries is playing n the background, squadrons of Parrot AR Drones face off against Griffin’s new Helo TC somewhere over the Atlantic (since Parrot is based in France and Griffin in Tennessee, I figured that’s where they’d probably meet up).

This is one time where the bridesmaid wore white, sort of upstaged the bride and nobody minded.

Besides the Lion USB keys, the only thing new that came about after the Apple Store crashed offline for hours all around the world earlier today? On the Mac Pro page only, you can share the model of Mac Pro you want to select on either Facebook or Twitter.

Totally bizarre. Presumably Apple will roll this out to other Apple Store pages, but it seems like a pretty strange and useless addition to us.

Edit: Apparently, it’s on the iPod Classic page now too. Huh.

This week, Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer took part in a conference call hosted by Gleacher & Company, an investment firm. No surprises here: someone asked Oppenheimer what Apple thought of the $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google.

Oppenheimer’s response? Classically understated. “$12.5 billion is a lot of money.”

You should probably read “too much money” into that statement for Apple’s snide opinion on the matter.