Posts tagged with "apple"

Game on Santa: Best Buy Wants to Put Apple Products Under your Tree this Holiday Season

Apple Store? What Apple Store? You only need to visit your local Best Buy, America’s most well known consumer electronics store and Apple authorized reseller. Best Buy is going all out this Holiday Season with their “Game on Santa” commercials, this one in particular featuring mom as she shops for the latest Apple products. The latest in the series features FaceTime on the iPad 2 along with a variety of other products on one Best Buy’s Apple tables, with an employee reminding the viewer that they’re a one-stop shop for iMacs, MacBooks, and just about anything else you’d find in one of those fancy Apple Stores. We sell Apple stuff too!

The scene then cuts to Christmas Eve as Santa drops in, mom decidedly looking victorious having beat Santa at his own game. If Best Buy’s representation of a good Christmas is accurate, there’s going to be some seriously happy kids come Christmas morning.

Best Buy can’t give you Apple’s self-checkout shopping experience or expertise from someone at the Genius Bar, but if a jam-packed Apple Store isn’t a good idea of your good time, then Best Buy makes an OK pit-stop to pick up Apple accessories. At the very least, the Game on Santa commercials are entertaining, and you can catch Best Buy’s Apple focused promotion after the break. Gifts Under $100 isn’t bad either.

[AppleInsider via TUAW]

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Apple Shares the Fun With New iPod touch Commercial

With the white iPod touch announced, it’s about time Apple time showed off their shiny new “phone without the phone”, giving the likes of Game Center, FaceTime, and iMessage well deserved close-ups in a brand new shell. Picture perfect in every frame, the new white iPod touch will be a hot gift for anyone who wants to stay connected with their friends with free iMessaging or take advantage of all the great apps that iOS has to offer. Thin and lightweight with a respectable video camera for quick home movies, I certainly miss its portability and thinness now that I have an iPhone. Share the fun this holiday season with an iPod touch, too-tight jeans, and a catchy tune that’ll have you dancing and bobbing in your office chair. Apple’s latest commercial can enjoyed on YouTube, or past the break!

[via Macgasm]

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MacStories Interviews: Ryan Rigney

MacStories Interviews was a series of interviews with well-known developers, bloggers, journalists and geeks that we published late last year. We’ve revived the format to interview Ryan Rigney, author of  Buttonless, a new book about iOS games that is launching on December 13th. We’ll have a full review of the book when it is released, but in the meantime we thought it would be interesting to hear more from the author himself.

MacStories: Hey Ryan! Could you introduce yourself to the readers who haven’t heard about you or haven’t read any of your work before?

Sure! I’m a freelance writer who has written for a number of gaming outlets, most notably GamePro, PC Gamer, and Gamasutra. I’ve mostly written about iOS gaming, but I’m also a big console gamer so I’ve done a good bit of writing about those types of games as well. Just this week GamePro published my review of Minecraft!

MacStories: So tell us a bit more about your new book, Buttonless. What made you decide you wanted to write this book?

Over the past few years I’ve been so focused on iOS and written so much about iOS games that it’s become something of an obsession. I’ve reviewed hundreds of iPhone and iPad games, interviewed scores of developers, and purchased far too many apps. I pretty much came to the realization that I possessed enough experience and knowledge to write a book, and then began brainstorming ideas. It took a while for me to figure out that I wanted to put so much of the focus on “the stories behind the games,” though.

MacStories: Did you find it difficult finding a publisher willing to help you write this book given it is such a new industry that may appear very “niche”?

Actually, A K Peters/CRC Press was the first publisher I approached. In my pitch, I shared with them a bunch of numbers that I had stumbled across––how many hundreds of millions of iOS devices are out there, and how many people are buying these games. The truth is, it’s really not a niche. iOS gaming is now the most popular form of portable gaming, and it’s only getting bigger. Maybe if I had tried to write a book about 3DS games, the publisher would have needed more convincing haha!

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Apple Looking To Recruit Senior-Level Executives For iCloud Services

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal today, Apple has been looking to recruit senior-level executives “with backgrounds in Web-based software” to bolster the talent pool at Apple for iCloud and their other cloud and web based services. Curiously, the report also notes that Apple is also considering new iCloud apps that will “reduce the need for people to carry around numerous devices at once”.

The company doesn’t have specific Web-centric positions in mind, and it is looking broadly for talent to fill director-level positions and above, including senior executives if they find a candidate that is a good fit, this person said.

As the article notes, Apple has been hiring a number of lower-level staff for their web and cloud offerings since 2010 - including poaching web engineers from companies such as Quantcast and Yahoo. This move also follows on from Eddy Cue’s recent promotion to the role of Senior Vice President Internet Software and Services after leading Apple’s iTunes, App Store, iBookstore and iCloud offerings.

[The Wall Street Journal via MacRumors]

Apple Posts New iPad 2 Advert: “Love”

Apple has tonight uploaded a new iPad advert to their YouTube channel. This latest advert, “Love”, follows the general style of their previous iPad 2 adverts — with a strong narrator intertwined with people using the iPad, highlighting an emotional connection. This advert highlights the emotional connection between people using the iPad for things that they love doing. There are shots of a basketball coach using an iPad to show his team a strategy, a group of friends in a band using the iPad to control levels, a person painting a landscape with an iPad, a person creating a home movie with iMovie on the iPad and a young child learning about dinosaurs on an iPad.

For some, it’s a life long passion. For others, its something discovered yesterday. We all have things that speak to us, they drive us to get up early, and stay up late. Getting lost in the things we love has never felt quite like this.

Jump the break to see the advert for yourself and jump over to Apple’s website or YouTube channel to see more of their iPad adverts.

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Apple Announces Holiday Sale For This Friday, Across The World

Update: Apple has now confirmed the “One-Day Shopping Event” is also occurring in the US this Friday - but it makes no mention of the sale also taking place in its retail stores, suggesting this is an online-only affair.

Apple has begun placing banners on its online Apple Stores across the world, indicating that it will be holding a sale this Friday - on the yearly “Black Friday” as it is known in the US. The banners, found on the store page, inform us that this “special one-day Apple shopping event” is this Friday, November 25.

Mark your calendar now, and come back to the Apple Online Store for the special one-day event. You’ll discover amazing iPad, iPod and Mac gifts for everyone on your list.

The banner has gone up on the Australian, Italian, UK and a number of other international stores. No mention has yet been made on the US store, but it is expected to also receive the banner in a number of hours. In the US the Black Friday sale is expected to also take place inside Apple’s retail stores - no mention of the sale in retail stores is made on the Australian or Italian notices.

Ron Johnson: “What I Learned Building the Apple Store”→

Ron Johnson: “What I Learned Building the Apple Store”

Apple’s former VP of Retail Ron Johnson, now CEO of J.C. Penney, wrote a guest blog post for Harvard Business Review analyzing the unique factors that contributed to the success of Apple’s retail stores. He says key to the experience was that employees didn’t want customers to buy more, but simply to get what they needed.

People come to the Apple Store for the experience — and they’re willing to pay a premium for that. There are lots of components to that experience, but maybe the most important — and this is something that can translate to any retailer — is that the staff isn’t focused on selling stuff, it’s focused on building relationships and trying to make people’s lives better. That may sound hokey, but it’s true. The staff is exceptionally well trained, and they’re not on commission, so it makes no difference to them if they sell you an expensive new computer or help you make your old one run better so you’re happy with it. Their job is to figure out what you need and help you get it, even if it’s a product Apple doesn’t carry. Compare that with other retailers where the emphasis is on cross-selling and upselling and, basically, encouraging customers to buy more, even if they don’t want or need it. That doesn’t enrich their lives, and it doesn’t deepen the retailer’s relationship with them. It just makes their wallets lighter.

Johnson, who joined Apple in 2000 and was head of retail operations until 2011, left Apple’s retail stores with average revenue per store at $10.7 million and overall revenue in Q4 up 1% at $3.6 billion.

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djay For Mac Adds ‘Harmonic Match’ And iCloud Support

For those of you who are DJs or just enjoy listening and mixing music, the latest version of Algoriddim’s Mac App ‘djay’ might interest you. Now at version 4.0, Algoriddim is claiming that this is the biggest update to the app yet. The big headline new feature is ‘Harmonic Match’ a new system that allows users to “create perfectly matched mixes with a simple click”.

With the introduction of Harmonic Match, djay automatically detects a song’s key and allows to match it to songs of the same key within your iTunes music library. It allows you transpose songs into different keys, and even sort your entire music library by key, perfect for creating studio quality mash-ups of your songs.

Beyond Harmonic Match, djay 4.0 also features a new audio engine that allows high quality Audio FX on the fly, precision scratching, visual waveforms and a host of other more advanced features. A particularly useful new feature in djay 4.0 is the support for iCloud, which means cue data and other metadata can by synced across the Mac, iPad and iPhone versions of the app. Another nice touch is support for the multi-touch trackpad where a user can “use rotate gestures to adjust the EQ, or two fingers to scratch the record and operate the crossfader”.

djay for the Mac is available on the Mac App Store for a special launch sale price of  $19.99. Jump the break for a promotional video, as well as a full list of additions and improvements in djay 4.0.
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The Insanely Great History of Apple→

The Insanely Great History of Apple

Pop Chart Lab created a poster about the history of Apple products:

The world’s most comprehensive mapping of Apple products, this print shows every computer released by Apple in the last thirty years, from the original Mac through the MacBook Air. Products are sorted according to type, including the connections between various form factors which have arisen as Apple has invented–and reinvented–insanely great products.

18-inch x 24-inch, only 500 copies are available. Starts in 1983 and goes all the way down to the iPhone 4S. Nice work of art for Apple aficionados, and also a useful timeline to have on your wall. [via The Loop]

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