Way back in early 2012, Cult of Mac reported on the way that genius artist rap singer Kanye West had raised the ire of Apple fans by claiming that he was “[picking] up where Steve Jobs left off.”

Since then he has repeated the statement on several occasions — telling the New York Times in 2013 that, “I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means,” and describing himself as, “undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump.”

A New Zealand father-and-son duo tracked down their stolen iPad using the device’s “Find My iPad” function.

After enjoying a meal in a restaurant in Nelson, New Zealand, Chris and Markham Phillips returned to the parking lot to find their car had been ransacked — and cash, glasses and an iPad were missing.

“As despair and disgust begin to kick in, we remember a newly installed tracking application on both the stolen iPad and the retained iPhone,” son Markham told a local reporter. “We fire up the app [and] the iPad icon pings onto the map.”

Joining the likes of iTunes Radio, Pandora, Spotify, and Rdio, Beats Music — the music subscription service spearheaded by Jimmy Iovine — launches today, 21 January.

Combining human curation from “the best music experts” to algorithm-based automated recommendations, Beats Music will offer access to over 20 million songs via unlimited, ad-free streaming for $9.99 a month on all the usual platforms — including iOS and Mac.

The Bpen is a clever gadget indeed. It takes something almost useless — an iPhone stylus — and turns it into something useful: an iPhone stand. It even works as a car mount, and yet can still be used as a stylus. And as a regular pen. How is this unholy magic achieved? Let’s see…

Man, do I feel clean today. No, it’s not the fact that I quit drinking two summers ago. Nor that I stopped smoking a few years before that. Nope. I feel clean because I finally deleted iPhoto from my Mac. It’s gone, never to spin up the fans again because it’s detecting faces with the accuracy of a demented uncle, nor to inexplicably flip away from the album I’m viewing every single time I switch to another app, however briefly.

I don’t even need Apple’s worst app (worse than iTunes I say) for Photo Stream any more, becasue now I have the $4, 6 MB MyPhotostream to take its place.

VLC, the versatile play-anything video app that I have installed on every Mac I’ve had admin access to in the last half decade, has gotten a great update in its iOS incarnation. VLC for iOS not only looks better, but will now grab video from Dropbox and Google Drive.

iOS 7.1 takes another slow step closer to launch with the release of beta 4 to developers. As ever, the release notes are scant, so it’ll take some digging to really find out what has changed. There’s on bit of good news though: the Messages app should no longer lie to you about messages failing.

One of the things I like most about iOS 7 is the two different colors of keyboards, but unfortunately, they only come in monochrome: black or white.

Enter Fancy. A new jailbreak tweak, Fancy allows you to color iOS 7’s UI any pigment you want, from having a sea green Notification Center to a blood red soft keyboard, and much, mucj more.

Fancy is compatible with the iPhone 5, 5c, and 5S, iPod Touch (5th Gen), iPad (4th Gen) & iPad mini. It’s available from the ModMyi Cydia Repository for $0.99.

If you want iOS 7 to drink some of the electric kool-aid, this is the tweak for you.

Via: iClarified

When Steve Jobs first debuted the original iPhone back in 2007, he promised the audience a device that was three major devices in one: “a widescreen iPod with touch controls,” a “revolutionary mobile phone,” and “a breakthrough Internet communicator.”

At the time, those three things seemed pretty impressive, but if anything, Steve Jobs the Showman was underselling himself. In fact, if you look at this 1991 circular from Radio Shack (which now does quite a bit of business selling the iPhone), Apple’s smartphone is pretty much fourteen devices in one.

Way back in November, we reported that Apple would start repairing broken iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s screens in-store soon, but while Apple has happily repaired iPhone 5 screens in-store for sometime, the iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s have been holdouts up until now.

There’s good news and bad news. The iPhone 5s? Still can’t be repaired at an Apple Store. But the iPhone 5c is a different story. CNN was able to confirm with Apple that screen repairs of the iPhone 5c are available as of Monday (today!) for theprice of $149. If you want to avail yourself of the service, just stop by your local Apple Store.

Source: CNN

If you’ve wanted to order a Mac Pro at any point since it was unveiled in December, you’ve faced a long wait, with shipping times almost immediately slipping to February.

A month later, and you’d think things would be getting wrong, but you’re wrong. On Apple’s online store, Mac Pro shipping times have slipped another month to March.

Generally speaking, even when Apple launches a product with constrained supply, it gains momentum on manufacturing and is soon able to meet demand within a month’s time. The new Mac Pro, though, remains in scarce supply over a month since launch.

Is that the true cost of Made in USA?

Source: Apple

When Apple unveiled the iPad Air back in October, they curiously decided to keep the iPad 2 around for another generation at a $399 price point… the exact same price as an entry-level iPad mini with Retina Display.

In theory, Apple’s idea here seems to have been to price the vintage iPad 2 at a sub-$400 price point so as to have a cheaper 9.7-inch tablet available for educational institutions, budget shoppers and the like. But it looks like no one’s really all that interested, with only one customer in twenty opting to buy an iPad 2 in the latest quarter. Despite this, though, average price of a purchased iPad fell for the second year in a row.

Apple’s entire beef with Samsung is that the Korean electronics maker keeps on shamelessly ripping off the design of their devices, so is anyone surprised that the latest roadblock in the Apple vs. Samsung case has to do with an anti-cloning clause that Samsung is trying to be tricky about?

42. Thanks for all the fish. Milliway’s. Famed author Douglas Adams is known for many things, including his legendary Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series. But did you know Adams was not only a die-hard Apple fan, but the last message he ever posted online was essentially a love letter to OS X?

Mega Jump 2 is a game about jumping. Forever.

iOS 7 came with a new look and feel, including the font used across the system. It’s a little thinner than earlier versions of iOS, so it might be a bit tricky to read, especially on the small iPhone screen.

You can always increase the size of text dynamically, but if you just need a little boost to the readability, try enabling Bold Text.

There was a rumor early this morning that iOS 7.1 beta 4 was coming to developers to tomorrow, but it looks like it’s here now. Apple just made iOS 7.1 beta 4 available to developers as an OTA update. You can also grab it from the Dev Center.

Along with the iOS 7.1 beta 4 release, there’s a new beta for Apple TV as well. We’ll update you with all the new changes once we get it downloaded on our devices. Feel free to yell at us on Twitter (@cultofmac) if you come across anything yourself.

In the meantime, get to downloading. Here are all links:

Apple will hold its quarterly earnings call next Monday, which means analysts are beginning to weigh in on how many iPhones Apple sold during the holiday quarter. Although Apple’s new sales with China Mobile didn’t make it into the quarter, Apple still had a ton of pent up demand to go along with a set of new phones, plus its was the holidays. All those conditions should make for a perfect storm of sales, and so far top analysts are predicting Apple sold a record-shattering 55.3 million iPhones.

On Friday, January 24, 2014, the Mac turns 30 years old. As we look back on three decades of Macintosh, there are some stories that have largely avoided the light of day for some time. One of these tales involves the production of the Macintosh Business Plan back in the early 1980s.

The tale was told by Mac design team member Joanna Hoffman to Bruce Damer, curator of the Digibarn Computer Museum. In 1981 Apple was beginning development on their new product lines, Lisa and Macintosh, and Hoffman was helping develop the business plan. She presented multiple drafts for Steve Jobs to review, but Jobs repeatedly kept sending her the plan back saying he didn’t like it.

After a few rounds of this Hoffman realized that it was not the contents of the business plan that Jobs objected to but rather the appearance of the document itself. What he was reviewing looked just like every other business plan, nothing special. Jobs wanted the pages of the Mac business plan to look like the screen of the computer they were creating – WYSIWYG graphics, fonts, and pages with menus and submenus for section headings. The problem with this request was that Apple did not yet make any computers or printers which could produce the document Jobs desired.

Night Sky Guide 3D+ — Reference — $1.99

Alright, this one’s really cool.

Sometimes, I’m outside at night (fewer bees then), and I’ll see something in the sky and think, “Is that a planet, or should I call NASA and tell them that we’re all probably about to die?”

Night Sky Guide 3D+ will save me a lot of embarrassing phone conversations with scientists. It uses your iOS device’s GPS and compass, so you can just hold it up and it’ll show you a notated view of the patch of sky you’re facing.

So it was just Jupiter. Sorry, NASA operator.

Night Sky Guide 3D+

Barrels have been a staple of video games at least since Donkey Kong used them in his vain attempts to ward off a small, mustachioed man with a penchant for jumping.

What’s the deal with barrels? Is it that they’re easy to draw? Or fun to destroy? Or is it that their size and purpose provide a wealth of possibilities, their wooden or metal frames metaphors for the endless potential that lies within all of us, just waiting for someone to pry off the lid and share our special gifts with the world? Or something else less ridiculous?

Whatever the reason, barrels are awesome, and Tap & Blast, a fun aerial platformer of sorts out now for iOS devices, flipping loves them.

If you’ve been looking for a way to get professional high-definition results with your photos at lightning speed on your Mac or PC, then look no further. Cult of Mac Deals has your solution – and at a price that’s not going to break the bank, either.

HDR Darkroom 3 is the first HDR software with comprehensive color space management. The developers have created color space management tools with a short learning curve so you can take your photography game to a whole new level. And you can get HDR Darkroom 3 for only $34.99 during this limited time offer.

Apple has reportedly seeded its fourth iOS 7.1 beta build to testing partners ahead of a possible developer release tomorrow. The update is said to include “various fixes” for keyboard issues and problems with the Contacts app, as well as some more changes to the user interface inside the Phone app.

VLC, a popular third-party video player for iOS, today received a major update that introduces a swanky new design and lots of new features. The app now looks right at home on devices running iOS 7, and it has the ability to stream videos from Google Drive and Dropbox. You can even download videos from UPnP media multimedia servers on your local network.

Apple has chosen LG Electronics as its sole manufacturing partner for the iWatch, according to a new report from Korea. The device is expected to use the same curved OLED display technology LG recently debuted with its G Flex smartphone, and production could begin during the third quarter of this year.