Many smartphone and tablet users, whether on the iPhone or Android, prefer to jailbreak or root their devices in order to better customize them. But not all device makers agree with these practices, and jailbreaking and rooting have been frowned upon. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a blog post on Thursday that it wants to keep these procedures legal, as “jailbreaking is not a crime.”
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Jony Ive hasn’t always been the tech design colossus that he is today — in fact, it turns out that his highly acclaimed design chops had very humble origins at Apple. Business Insider has published an excerpt from Leander Kahney’s book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products that details Ive’s first time heading up an Apple design project, in this case the Newton MessagePad 110 that was a sequel to the first-generation Newton that infamously failed to set the tech world on fire in the early 1990s.
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In recent years, the Facebook News Feed has devolved from a streamlined way to keep up with your friends into an endless list of advertisements, quizzes and links. It can be all but impenetrable to those unwilling to comb through it for the updates they actually care about, but Facebook is introducing new features for the News Feed which will give you the ability to control what you see.
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We’ve often observed that Verizon, while offering terrific service and coverage overall, does things that make it seem like it thinks very little of its customers’ intelligence. Ars Technica has noticed that Verizon is once again behaving in a way that makes it seem that the carrier thinks its own customers are just not all that bright.
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After many reports claimed that Apple will launch a redesigned 12-inch Retina MacBook Air model at some point in the first half of 2015, a new report from Taiwan’s Industrial and Commercial Times seems to indicate that Apple might launch the lighter, fanless laptop by the end of 2014.
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AT&T on Friday afternoon announced a major deal that, if approved, will see the United States’ No. 2 wireless carrier become a major player in Mexico as well. The company announced that it has reached a deal to acquire Mexican wireless service provider lusacell from Grupo Salinas for $2.5 billion. The deal includes all of lusacell’s spectrum licenses, network assets and retail stores. lusacell currently serves 8.6 million subscribers and, according to AT&T, its network covers 70% of the population of Mexico.
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Artists have been leveling their complaints against Spotify and similar services for years, but few have enough clout to remove themselves from the world of streaming music entirely. After all, some money is better than no money, right? Not for Taylor Swift. This week, she became the latest artist to publicly denounce Spotify and remove all of her albums from the service.
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Although Android 5.0 Lollipop will be made available in the coming months for many Android devices released over the past two years, there are several older devices that aren’t slated to get the upgrade. If you’re someone who still owns an older device and you just don’t feel like upgrading to a newer one just yet, then you may want to check out some of the AOSP Lollipop ROMs being built by some XDA Developers that could bring Lollipop to older devices such as the Galaxy Nexus and the Galaxy S III Mini.
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There’s nothing funny about a company going bankrupt in and of itself, but we have to admit the dispute between Apple and its now-bankrupt sapphire supplier GT-Advanced Technologies is actually pretty amusing simply because it’s so strange. In the first place, we found it a bit funny when Apple said it was “surprised” that GT decided to file for bankruptcy since it was apparently a withheld Apple payment that sent the company into a downward spiral. Now 9to5Mac has highlighted some more strange details of the feud between the companies that allegedly show how Apple employs comically brutal negotiating tactics with suppliers.
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Steve Jobs lived a fascinating life, one which has been documented repeatedly by writers and filmmakers since his passing, but despite all the stories and all the footage which has already been released, there are still artifacts from Jobs’ life which have yet to be uncovered. Nearly thirty years ago, when Steve Jobs was let go from Apple, he started a new company: NeXT Computer.
He gave Doug Menuez, a documentary photographer, unlimited access to the company. Thirty years later, Menuez wrote a book about his experience.
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