Author: John Brownlee

Apple’s got to keep the ever-mounting demands on its Siri servers down somehow, so here’s a new one. If you ask her something too long, Siri will respond with trite quotes upon the power of brevity, such as this one by William Strunk of Strunk & White fame: A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, […]

With Apple stock seemingly in free fall, a new report suggests that Apple is going to announce a plan to return additional value to shareholders as soon as this spring, either by increasing the existing dividend or by buying back stock from investors. Says Quartz: Apple’s zeroing in on a dividend or buyback was in […]

Hot on the heels of a hack over the weekend that compromised Evernote users’ emails, usernames and passwords — and resulted in the company initiating a password reset on all accounts — Evernote’s hurrying through a new two-factor authentication process, which would allow you to authorize your account in a variety of ways, like entering […]

Any chemical that can dissuade a bear from using your ribs like emory boards is potent stuff, which is why this story of an Apple Store robbery up in Vancouver is so horrifying: three perps busted up a Genius Bar and started indiscriminately spraying people with bear mace. According to a brief report in The […]

Cult of Mac’s vote for the best all-around fitness app for the iPhone is Runkeeper, and it just got a fantastic new update that makes your running preferences more customizable than ever, including a brilliant new ‘night color’ mode which makes the display easier on the eyes, even if you are not a night runner. […]

One of the best games of last year — XCOM: Enemy Unknown — is coming to the Mac, allowing Mac gamers for the first time to tactically repel a full-on invasion of the planet Earth, one turn at a time. Developed by Firaxis Games and published by 2K Games on the PC and Consoles, XCOM: […]

Want to hear a good argument for the possibility of Apple launching an iRadio service? According to a couple ofnew report, 2012 is the first time since 1999 that piracy is down, and the music industry has actually grown. And music streaming services like Rdio and Spotify can take all the credit. The first report […]

Hot on the heels of Oracle’s own update, Apple has released a Java for OS X 2013-001 software update for download that addresses the software vulnerability that compromised a number of their employees’ computers. From the update notes: Java for OS X 2013-001 delivers improved security, reliability, and compatibility by updating Java SE 6 to […]

Following today’s big story that a number of employee computers within Apple were compromised following a zero-day Java exploit, Oracle has just released update 15 for Java 7 and update 41 for Java 6. While there’s no specific mention of what has been updated, there’s excellent reason to believe it fixes the vulnerability that compromised […]

iOS 6.1.2 is out now, quashing some battery life and Microsoft Exchange issues… but is it safe to update if you’re a jailbreaker? Right now, the answer to that question is a qualified no. If you want to keep your jailbreak, you shouldn’t update yet, but according to Team Evad3rs member Planetbeing, iOS 6.1.2 will […]

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – When Steve Jobs first unveiled the 9.7 inch iPad back in 2010, he made a specific point of telling how many endless hours, how many prototypes had been rejected determining the perfect size for an onscreen keyboard. 9.7 inches, he claimed, was the minimum device that you could accurately and […]

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – I honestly believed I’d seen pretty much everything in iPhone cases. I’m existentially bored with them, like if Camus wrote about tech writers. So it was notable to me as I walked through the iLounge Pavillion today that a small booth of cases actually caught my eye and for just […]

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – There’s nothing that isn’t Bluetooth-powered at CES. We saw a Bluetooth-enabled fork the other day, and today, we saw a pack of Bluetooth-enabled stickers. Really. Unlike the stickers of Hello Kitty and She-Ra: The Princess Of Power that Buster and I shrewishly compete to collect, however, the Stick ‘N’ Find […]

Expecting to (eventually) jailbreak iOS 6.0 on your A5 or A6 powered device? Don’t update to iOS 6.1 when it lands. Apple has ratched up the security features in the first major point release update to the latest version of iOS, making it significantly more difficult to crack than iOS 6.0. According to iOS hacker […]

With Apple having recently updated the iPad after a mere seven months, there’s been talk lately that instead of Cupertino’s schedule of annual updates, they might be moving to a bi-annual update schedule instead. It doesn’t take a genius, then, to trace the newest rumor to mere speculation: according to a hit-or-miss Japanese Apple blog, […]

When we see companies shamelessly ripping off Apple’s brand, designs and trademarks, we usually think of any number of tiny Chinese knock-off makers (or Samsung). Now, though, the Brazilians appear to be getting in on the action, as a Brazil-based electronics maker is now planning on launching a new line of Android smartphones that they […]