Macgasm

Smartyman data has spoken: If you have an iPhone, you probably won’t stop using it. According to a survey by UBS, 9 out of 10 iPhone users (well, 89 percent of them, which is like 8 iPhone users plus one who’s unusually short) will keep their iPhone once they get it. Interestingly, the next runner up is HTC who could only eke out 3 regular + 1 short Android user worth of (39 percent) retention. Sadly (but not surprisingly), RIM’s product retention took a swan dive from 5 Blackberry users + 1 chubby Blackberry user (62 percent) to a lean 2 + the fat guy (32 percent).

(more…)

Western Digital dropped new products today, and curiously, they are branded “For Mac”. The new members of the My Passport family, My Passport Studio and the aptly named My Passport for Mac, both come formatted for Mac and play nice with Time Machine out of the box.

(more…)

Just when we thought we had seen the end of meaningless iPhone 5 rumors, an analyst has decided that it’s time to start talking about an LTE iPhone 6 for 2012. The iPhone 5, or iPhone 4S, or both, haven’t even shipped yet. Heck, they haven’t even been announced.

Here’s the deal: Wedbush Securities’s Scott Sutherland has gone on the record claiming that an “LTE iPhone in 2012 with a ‘materially improved user interface,’ will be released in, well, 2012.

(more…)

Apple has begun an interesting pilot project in which employees of the San Francisco store will be lent an iPad 2 to hold and kiss and love. The plan is to help employees become familiar with iOS 5, popular apps and the process of just getting around on the “magical” device by letting them take a loaner home with them for a week. At the moment the pilot is limited to only the San Francisco store, but if Apple likes the results then this program could migrate to other stores and possibly involve more devices (such as the much-discussed but still-unannounced iPhone 5).

(more…)

The Day Maker from Yanko Design is a cute little idea that replaces a nicely toasted slice of 12-grain with Apple’s flagship phone. When you go to sleep, this toaster-sized clock/alarm/iPhone-charger uses your phone to recreate “the most inherent human morning routine of popping the toast for breakfast, this concept captures the essence and is bound to make mornings more pleasant for gadget-freaks like us!” How do you use it? It’s easy.

• Set your phone alarm

• Insert phone into one of Day Maker’s cradles and push down to charge and set unit

• When the phone alarm goes off, the spring-loaded cradle will ‘pop’ the phone up

• Either remove the phone from Day Maker, or activate sleep by pushing the phone back down

• Repeat until ready

The Day Maker can be ordered from Yanko Design for… well… actually it’s nearly impossible to find the price for this thing or a way to add it to your cart. After 10 minutes, I gave up. Anyone else figure it out?

The shelf sits empty in the iOS 5 beta. Newsstand is present on homescreens but it is curiously unavailable to all beta-testers. Clicking the icon reveals an iBooks like interface with a nice little message, “You can download magazines and newspapers in the App Store.” That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.

As it stands now, newspapers and magazines make a mess of your homescreen and clearly Apple has plans to tidy that up a little bit in the very near future. But, the new-age Newsstand from Apple may be facing a fight from a conglomerate of French newspapers and magazines. Instead of fighting Apple on their digital subscription policies one by one, they’ve teamed up to negotiate together as one big group according to Reuters.

The negotiations include some of France’s most influential newspapers and magazines, including “L’Equipe, Le Figaro, Les Echos, and le Nouvel Observateur. According to Reuters, the companies are currently negotiating their inclusion in the Newsstand application set to release next month alongside iOS 5, but they are all refusing to join the program unless Apple makes some key concessions, rumored to be tighter control of their subscription demographic information for readers as well as a cheaper commission for Apple.

(more…)

If you like your portable hard drives fast — and let’s be honest, who doesn’t? — then you may want to check out the newly minted LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series.

LaCie is now selling the Thunderbolt series at both the Apple Retail Stores, and online at Apple.com. The series comes with either typical SATA drives or SSD drives. The drives come in 1TB, 2TB 5400 RPM options, or a 240 GB SSD alternative. The external enclosure also comes with two ports so you can daisy-chain the devices together.

Prices are strangely absent from the release and website, and the PR links through to the Apple store seem to still be broken, but rest-assured, these drives are real, and you’ll be able to get your hands on them very soon.

LaCie 250GB Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series SSD $899.95

LaCie 500GB Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series SSD $1495.99

We’ll update you on the HDD model pricing when it’s available, although to get the speed benefits you would need to get the SSD model.

Hattip to Marilyn Halpin for sending this bad boy to me in an email!

Adobe, desperate to say their multimedia products are on the iPhone, are telling the world that they’ll be bringing console-level gaming to iOS with Air 3. Declaring the one-two punch of Flash Player 11 and Air 3 as the “game console of the web,” allowing fully 3D games to be played in your web browser over the Internet in the same way that your computer or console would.

(more…)