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Staples Appears Set to Begin Selling Apple Products in U.S.

Last week, MacRumors received word that office supply retailer Staples would soon begin offering Apple products for sale. While the company has offered Apple products in international markets for some time, it had long been unsuccessful in striking a deal for the U.S. market.

We were unable to confirm the claim at the time, but 9to5Mac now reports that Apple products have begun appearing on the Staples website in the United States as part of an Apple Mock Up section. The section includes a number of products, including the Apple TV (listed at a remarkably low price of $49.99) and iPad Smart Covers, all marked with "Test" in the item description.


While the products listed on the test pages are limited to accessories with the exception of the Apple TV, our original source had claimed that Apple's full lineup of Macs, iPads, and at least the iPhone 5 would be coming to Staples in the United States. No specific timeframe for an official launch of Apple's products at Staples beyond "in the coming months" has been shared.

Apple Releases iOS 6.1 Beta 5 To Devs

Apple has released its fifth beta for iOS 6.1 to registered developers. Since the fourth beta was set to expire Monday, we were expecting Apple to seed a new release yesterday or Monday. Instead, the company has uncharacteristically seeded the new software on a Saturday. iOS 6.1 beta 4 was seeded on December 17th, 2012.

Everyone has been expecting the final iOS 6.1 GM build to arrive any day now, but Apple is still obviously pushing out betas. When the GM version does come out for devs, then a public release is not far behind.

A beta version of iOS has never gone past 7 beta revisions in years, and each version is usually about a month apart. That would put 6.1 on track for hitting beta 7 sometime around March, which happens to be around the time that Apple usually holds a press event.

Thanks: Sentry

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Grab It While You Can: MAME Arcade Emulator Returns To The App Store In Disguise

The iCade was made for this.

Back in 2011, an app called iMAME surfaced in the App Store that allowed you to run thousands of classic arcade titles by sideloading the games onto an iOS device. Apple has never really allowed emulators in the App Store, and iMAME was swiftly pulled.

Now another app has crept into the App Store that allows you to emulate old games. It likely won’t be in the App Store long, so get it while you can!

The app in question is a free game called Gridlee that was released in the App Store yesterday. On the surface, it allows you to play the unreleased Gridlee 80s arcade game, but if you dig down deep, you’ll find a hidden feature: the ability to emulate all kinds of classics using the MAME4iOS platform.

Some TouchArcade forum members looked through the iOS app’s directory and discovered a ROM folder. And sure enough, you’re able to sideload old ROMs and play other games within the Gridlee app. The MAME platform the app is using is actually more advanced than what was in iMAME. There’s iCade integration to let you play the games with physical arcade controls on your iOS device.

One forum member went a little nuts and installed dozens of games, including Aliens, Contra, Donkey Kong Jr., Galaga, PAC Man Jr., Phoenix, Pitfall II, and a whole lot more. To install your own, you’ll need to hook your iOS device into your Mac, open up iExplorer, navigate to the Gridlee app’s ROM folder, and drag the individual games in. A good collection of MAME ROMs to try out is available here. Not every game is guaranteed to work.

Make sure to download the Gridlee app before it’s gone if you want to play around with the hidden emulator. Apple is sure to catch on to this one soon.

Source: App Store

Via: TouchArcade

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Nose Jobs: The Story Behind The Most Incredible Steve Jobs Photo You’ve Never Seen [Feature]

Nose Jobs, © 1989 – 2013 Tom Zimberoff (all publication rights reserved)

Buck’s of Woodside doesn’t just serve eggs or coffee or toast. It serves you biomechanical sharks and surfing crocodiles. Sometimes, it even serves you up a photograph of Steve Jobs so incredible, so deserved of being considered iconic, that you simply can’t believe that no one has ever even heard of it. But for twenty-three years, no one has.

Breakfast at Buck’s

Buck’s of Woodside: Silicon Valley’s weirdest wonder cabinet of a restaurant. (Photo: http://bit.ly/WX6QBp)

Buck’s — a must-see way station on any pilgrimage to Silicon Valley — is more than just the famous flapjack house where venture capitalists and tech moguls come to ink the deals that shape our digital age. It’s a museum of Americana, seen through the lens of Silicon Valley; a wunderkammer where you are just as likely to find a framed California GOOGLE license (caption: “I was too dumb to buy the stock but I bought the plate.”) as you are a correspondence between Buck’s and the Kremlin attempting to iron out a deal to buy the corpse of Lenin. (Moscow insisted any deal would have to be made in person.)

I was at Buck’s not to meet with the Valley’s fiercest moguls, but for breakfast. Having been brought to San Francisco to meet my girlfriend’s favorite aunt, I was now awkwardly walking around Buck’s squinting at the walls over my perturbed fellow diner’s heads, all at the command of that sweet, smart general of an octogenarian who had let it be known (in so many words) that any bozo who didn’t truly appreciate Buck’s was too much of a bozo to date her great niece.

Too iconic not to be known, the equivalent of that photo of Einstein sticking his tongue out…

That was when I found it. The best photograph of Steve Jobs I had ever seen. It showed the enfant terrible himself in his wilderness years, sitting in front of the Rosetta Stone, playfully grinning at the camera through a pair of Groucho Marx glasses.

Over the years covering the Apple beat, I’ve seen pretty much every photograph of Steve Jobs there is. I’d never seen one like this. Not only did it show a playful side of Steve that I had never seen, but it seemed somehow too iconic to not be known; the Infinite Loop equivalent of that photograph of Einstein sticking his tongue out. I couldn’t believe a photograph like this could be hanging in obscurity on the wall of Buck’s when Apple could have just as easily slapped “THINK DIFFERENT” on the bottom of it and made it known to every Mac lover on the planet.

I had to know more.

The Story Of Steve Jobs’s Builder

It’s odd that a photograph of Steve Jobs would be hanging in Buck’s to begin with.

Jamis MacNiven, chasing flapjacks.

Steve Jobs never ate at Buck’s, despite the fact that the restaurant’s owner, Jamis MacNiven, once worked as Jobs’s builder. Of course, it’s because of MacNiven’s history with Steve that there was no love lost between them.

“I knew Steve when he was 24. This is before he had polished his meanness into an ultra sharp, obsidian blade of cruelty,” MacNiven told me over the telephone.

When they were both younger men, MacNiven had worked on restoring Steve Jobs’s first house in Los Gatos, right around the time Apple was going public. For a builder or a designer trying to work with Jobs, it was a maddening experience.  Jobs couldn’t even make a decision on the color of paint. According to MacNiven, Jobs “had almost this Asperger’s like quality, where if two things seemed almost equal, he simply couldn’t pick one… he’d get furious at the paralysis he felt when things were not obviously superior to other things.”

“There is a majesty to not cluttering your life with a lot of stuff,” MacNiven admits. “But Steve was the kind of guy who would choose to sit on the floor because there was no couch good enough.”

Steve Jobs sitting on the floor in the house Jamis MacNiven helped him restore. Photo: Diana Walker.

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Eventually, this pickiness ended up causing a rift between MacNiven and Jobs, and Jobs famously avoided Buck’s after MacNiven opened the diner in 1991. Before they fell out, though, MacNiven, Jobs and their respective girlfriends went out to celebrate Jobs’s birthday at the well-known restaurant Frankie, Johnnie and Luigi’s in Mountain View.

A standard pair of Groucho glasses.

At the dinner, MacNiven’s girlfriend handed out Groucho glasses to everyone for some fun and laughs. The group gamely put the glasses on and started to mug, but the birthday boy would not. Instead, he stared distastefully at the Groucho glasses in his palm, and balked. When pressured to put them on, he raised a a stink, then sulked.

“He just didn’t want to put the Groucho glasses on,” MacNiven told me, laughing.

It was a small thing — typical Steve — but the strange little tantrum over the Groucho glasses stuck with MacNiven, and so when a friend forwarded him an email from a photographer friend at the end of 2012 that showed a picture of Steve — the man once so unwilling to sully his dignity in a fake nose, eyebrows and moustache — playfully mugging it up like Groucho Marx, he had to have a print.

So he reached out to the photographer.

Next Page: The Story Behind The Photograph!

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First Reviews of Ashton Kutcher’s ‘Jobs’: Entertaining But Safe, "Fails to Think Different", Apple Fans Will Be Very Mixed

Following the premiere of Ashton Kutcher's new film Jobs at the Sundance Film Festival, a number of publications have posted reviews of the flick which is scheduled to arrive in theaters nationwide on April 19. The first video clip of the movie was released earlier this week.


Cinema Blend:
A biopic about a great man that's way too aware of his greatness, jOBS tells us a lot about the genius of Steve Jobs, but doesn't show us much of anything that actually reveals it.
The Next Web
But, overall, jOBS works. The lead actors are likable and appear to have put serious effort into getting the spirit of the characters right. The film looks (mostly) good aside from some of what could likely be ascribed to budgetary constraints. And though the director is a tad indulgent here and there, it doesn’t take away from the overall feeling of ‘decent’ that I came away with.
The Verge
As expected, there are some liberties taken with Apple’s story and even / especially the representation of some characters — but the emotional resonance of Steve Jobs himself is convincing. It’s not revisionist history, and it’s not some greater parable about the human spirit. Jobs is a point-A-to-point-B story about a uniquely innovative thinker and ruthless businessman — one that had a notable and meaningful impact on the world. It’s a good film, but it’s also very “safe” — a familiar story that doesn’t try for a bigger picture.
CNET
Others will write of the things "jOBS" omits, gets wrong, or simply avoids. My primary disappointment was in how shallow the film felt, given the extensive historical record. In the early days Jobs' co-workers had to wrestle with a man who smelled bad, who cried often, who yelled constantly, who missed deadlines, who overspent his budget by millions. He did it in service of products we love and use daily, and yet his obsessions took a toll on those around him. He also inspired others to do the best work of their lives, pushing themselves further than they ever imagined they could go. There is great drama to be found in all that, but it is not to be found in the saccharine "jOBS."
Other reviews are available from The Hollywood Reporter, Slashfilm, Indiewire, and the Salt Lake Tribune.

Fully Functional MAME Emulator Appears in App Store [iOS Blog]

TouchArcade notes the appearance of an arcade game called Gridlee in the App Store.

Gridlee is a 1983 arcade game that was never officially released, but the code was later released for free for non-commercial usage in 2001. The App Store app uses MAME 0.139u1 (MAME4iOS) to provide the emulation engine for the game. MAME is a popular arcade machine emulator that will run thousands of arcade games if you have the original ROMs.

When launching the free app, users are greeted with the Gridlee game. TouchArcade readers, however, quickly noticed that additional ROMs could be copied into the App's ROM directory (without jailbreaking), revealing the fully functional MAME emulator.
When word of this hit our forums, readers were quick to pull out iExplore and begin digging about the app's directory structure looking for a ROM folder. Well, it's in there, and sure enough, if one copies other MAME ROMs into that folder, the Gridlee app starts up with the standard MAME4iOS ROM listing, allowing for a great many games beyond just Gridlee to be played on the iPhone or iPad in this Universal app.

The story is similar to the iMAME Emulator that was released into the App Store in December, 2011. Apple quickly pulled that app a few days after its release. While a number of individual emulators do exist on the App Store, Apple has been more restrictive about these open emulators, presumably due to potential legal issues.

Gridlee is a free download on the App Store. [Direct Link]

iPad Mini Ship Times Drop to 3-5 Days on US, Canada, Australia, China, Hong Kong Apple Online stores [iOS Blog]

iPad Mini ship times have dropped to 3-5 days at a number of Apple Online Stores around the world, including the U.S., Canadian, Australia, New Zealand, Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Japanese outlets. This was first noticed by iPhoneinCanada.ca.

The most notable exception to the shipping time improvement is the European stores, which have a 2 week lead time.


During its first quarter conference call, Apple executives noted that the iPad mini was constrained for the entire holiday quarter. The company believes it can achieve supply/demand balance on the mini by the end of the March quarter.

Apple Adds ‘App Store Notes’ to Featured Apps

Apple has quietly added a new notes feature to its curated apps in the iOS App Store. Apps chosen for Editor's Choice and App of the Week now come with App Store Notes, which offer a quick description of the app. For example, here’s the new note feature for Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes:
Clash of Heroes has it all: epic storytelling, a wonderful blend of style and substance, and a spectacular battle system. This strategy-puzzler is genre-defining and an absolute must-play effort from the creators of Sword & Sworcery EP.
The App of the Week, Gesundheit, which is currently offered for free in the iPhone App Store, features a similar description. Some other apps, such as those found in the "New and Noteworthy" and "What's Hot" sections of the App Store also have App Store Notes, though not all of the apps in those sections have the new notes.


Six of 24 New and Noteworthy apps on the iPhone have notes, while the rest do not. Only two apps, Temple Run 2 and Momonga Pinball, on the What's Hot have notes included.

App Store Notes might be trickling out to all of Apple's selected apps, or may be reserved for those that are the most popular. At this point in time, it is unclear what criteria Apple is using to determine which apps are furnished with notes, or if it is a feature that will roll out to all curated apps. The new app notes are only visible in the iOS App Store, and do not show up in the desktop version of iTunes.

Best Buy Offers $200 off MacBook Airs For 2 Days [Mac Blog]

Best Buy is having a Winter Doorbuster Days sale on Friday, January 25 and Saturday, January 26, providing discounts on several products. Most notably, the retailer is offering $200 off on select MacBook Airs.

Both the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air models are discounted, giving the entry level 11-inch Air with 4GB of RAM and a 64GB SSD a price tag of $799.99. The base model 13-inch MacBook Air, sporting 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD is $999.99.

Additional configurations with more storage space are also available, and the 13-inch MacBook Air with a 256GB SSD is $1299.99, while the 11-inch 128GB model is $899.99.

The sale is available both online and in stores, and while the 11-inch $799.99 variant is sold out online, it is possible that it is still available at retail locations.

Best Buy is also offering 30% off of all OtterBox cases and a free $20 gift card with the purchase of a 16GB iPod nano.

iPhone 5S Said to Feature Upgraded Rear Camera, iPad Mini Update Targeted for October

Following up on his report from earlier today about Apple's plans for the full-size iPad and iPhone, iLounge's Jeremy Horwitz has a new article sharing additional information on Apple's mobile device plans. The information comes from a "trusted source" and discloses product code names for the various devices as well as plans for an upgrade to the rear camera system for the iPhone 5S.
The iPhone 5S is still months away from mass production, but our source suspects that the star feature will be an upgraded rear camera—perhaps featuring Sony’s 13-Megapixel sensor, plus the aforementioned flash upgrade—along with a processor bump. Current prototypes are codenamed N51 and N53, with July mentioned as the target date.
The source indicates that the code name for the fifth-generation iPad is J72, while the second-generation iPad mini has a code name of J85.


The report indicates that the second-generation iPad mini is unlikely to appear until October of this year, roughly the same timeframe as for the next full-size iPad. Sources have scant information on the actual device, but suggest that it is likely to retain essentially the same form factor as the current model and add a Retina display. A move to a Retina display without increasing the physical size of the device would almost certainly necessitate a change in the display technology such as the adoption of new IGZO panels.

Some previous reports had indicated that the iPad and iPad mini could see updates as soon as March as part of an effort to accelerate the product development cycle, but iLounge's claims of an October launch are more in line with a recent report from frequently accurate KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.