Tag: Apple

Let’s leave the term microtransaction out of this

Apple has told you before in the past that there is no such thing as porn on their glorious and devoutly holy iPhone, especially in their App Store.

Rick Snee has told you otherwise.

What neither side has told you is that there a special function in the iPhone that you haven’t been told about. It’s not the Find iPhone, it’s not the Find Friends, it’s Find Prostitute! No, really, and China doesn’t exactly seem to be too keen on it. Feeling lonely at night? Need a special service that you could tip a little extra at a massage parlor? Siri might be able to help you out.

Downgrades are the new upgrade

In most of the world, the iPad has become a new standard in the business world. People use it as a launching point for presentations, show demo videos on screens larger than their phone and play Angry Birds when they should be doing their job. But not in all of the world, no. Some parts of the world, well, progress has become slightly halted. Or even reversed.

In (not-so) Soviet Russia, iPad doesn’t replace typewriter, typewriter replaces iPad!

Seriously. The Federal Security Service paid over 2 million spacebucks toilet squares rubles (which comes out to approximately $67,000) just to exchange working iPads with modern typewriters.

In all of my life, that’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d be typing.

You Missed It: Steve and Company edition

10/5/11: A religious holiday for the Cult of SteveJust when you thought it was safe to go back to the waters of SeriouslyGuys on a Friday evening, DUM-DUM! I strike! As noted last week, Bryan McBournie is on vacation this week. His whereabouts are unknown, but we’re pretty sure he’s not at your kid’s playground in an unmarked white van. After all, there’s a much better chance that he’s right behind you and holding a knife above your neck at this very second. As such, you’re stuck with me. If you were busy protesting a street in Manhattan with a surprising lack of walls, odds are you missed it.

iMiss the guy already

Steve Jobs, creator of all things good at Apple, passed away on Wednesday. According a press release, the man went off into that great big sunset in the sky peacefully and surrounded by friends. It’s not hyperbole to say that Jobs was a pioneer in helping our world interact the way it does on a financial scale thanks to iTunes. No jokes here, kids. We’ll be classy about it, as we don’t actually hate Apple products (in fact, this was typed on one).

But who will take care of all the rowdy friends?

The relationship between Hank Williams Jr. and the opening song for Monday Night Football has been torn asunder, all due to comments made by Williams comparing President Obama to Hitler. Sports radio and podcasts are all wondering what the new intro will be. Suggestions I’ve heard range from the pre-Williams intro, a duet between Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, Jon Bon Jovi and Rihanna. In my defense, I listen to the Tony Kornheiser Show.

Unclean! Unclean!

Sickness is in the air! An outbreak of mumps has hit the UC Berkeley campus and a student at Denton High School tested positive for tuberculosis (in an area where a TB scare has already hit). Seeing as how bad things always happen in threes, SG will now predict that the next outbreak of communicable disease will be located at Radford University. We don’t necessarily want to call the health and well-being of our alma mater into question, but we have a hint that sometimes, you can’t change the history of a school.

Hindsight and dialysis are 20/20

We’ve talked to you before about the Cult of Steve. They’re a fairly extreme group of people who must have the newest Apple device or software, come Hell or high water. And for full disclosure purposes, I own a (soon to be) 3-year-old Macbook, an iPhone 3G and my iPhone 4 came into my hands a day before it went on sale nationwide. Nonetheless …

… there is no got-damn way that I’d sell my organs for an i-device. However, I’d willingly sell someone else’s organs to get an iPad 2.

Sadly, I’ll have to look somewhere other than Shanghai as a teenager’s almost beat me to it. A 17-year-old sold one of his kidneys to buy the Apple tablet. So, how did the decision turn out for him?

Apparently, not too great. According to the article, he only ended up with a laptop and an iPhone, not quite the i-device he wanted. Oh, and a bad case of buyers remorse. Maybe he’ll get lucky and only contract iAbetes!

Maaaaaybe there shouldn’t be an app for that

Apple’s been under a lot of fire recently. First, they get sued by one company; then, they decide to sue another company. It’s just not roses in Cupertino at the moment. It’s okay though, as they’ve got something to solve, at the very least, your problems as theirs are a bit more difficult.

Are you gay? Do you have an iPhone? Do you not want to be gay anymore?

Then friend, Apple’s got the app for you! Now, mind you, the creators of the app are completely within their rights to make it. On the other hand, nnnnnnnnnnnh.

Apple not in the pesticide business … yet

This time it isn’t an employee falling off a roof or out of a window. This time, it’s pesticide.

Foxconn, the world’s largest manufacturer of electronics, is responsible for assembling the Xbox 360, the PS3, the Wii, the iPhone and more. Another thing it’s famous for: the death of its employees by suicide, along with “alleged” pressuring by industry giants regarding their products.

After 250 workers at the company’s Chennai, India plant were hospitalized, Foxconn had no choice but to shut the facility down. Workers experienced what has been described as “sensations of giddiness and nausea”. According to Foxconn, this “may have been caused by the routine spraying of pesticide at the production facility.” Whoops.

Out of the 250 hospitalized workers, 28 are still in the hospital. The plant is responsible for mobile phone parts.

For Bryan McBournie, it might be more prudent to exclaim, “Where Is Your Clean Air Now?”

He spits in the face of capitalism

The trade-up: everyone’s vaguely familiar with the concept. Here’s a quick explanation-I give you a hot dog. You give the hot dog to a homeless man for his pen. You give that pen to an accountant for a shoelace. You give that shoelace to a nuclear physicist for his clipboard. Eventually, after numerous trades, you end up as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or something along those lines. It’s a formula that’s been used many times in different mediums-kids’ stories, cartoons, I’ve even seen it used as a story on a cooking show. But rarely is it ever heard of in real life.

Until now.

Stephen Ortiz, a teenager in California, was given a phone by a friend, free of charge. He took the gift to the cesspool of the internet Craigslist. The phone led to an iPod Touch, the media player created by the company that is the bane of Bryan McBournie led to a dirt bike, and the transportation of teenagers in 80’s movies led to another a Macbook Pro. Eventually, Ortiz landed himself a Porsche.

As someone who works in a auto related industry, 17 year old Stephen’s lifelong dream is a nightmare for his parents.

You Missed It: Job interview edition

I read a lot of news throughout the week. It’s part of my job, and I naturally want to stay up to date on the important subjects affecting the world. Admittedly, I avoid most celebrity news, because, well, I just don’t care. But I have to ask, who the hell is Justin Bieber, and where was he six weeks ago? It seems like he’s been on magazine covers, new stories, and random events all of a sudden. And he’s very popular with creepy older women. If you were busy resigning as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, odds are you missed it.

The bench gets steamy
President Barack Obama selection Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justice John Paul Jones Stevens on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court this week. Kagan has also served as dean of Harvard Law School, but has no actual judicial experience. This has led many in the Republican party to claim Obama picked her simply because of her looks.

Send in Chuck Norris
Yet another iPhone prototype was bought, filmed and reviewed by a tech blog this week. This time, it happened in Vietnam. In a video, the phone is disassembled by someone who has long fingernails. Following in the calm, measured response Apple had to the Gizmodo leak, when the company pressured cops to break down an editor’s door, Steve Jobs is asking the U.S. military to invade Vietnam.

Angry white men
Executives from BP and Transocean, the operator and owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, along with Halliburton, all blamed each other for the accident on April 20 and the ongoing oil spill during a congressional hearing. Lawmakers didn’t are, they blamed all of them anyway. Next up in the You Should Have Done Better hearings: Lebron James.

You Missed It: Five hundred thousand penny edition

Guess who’s baaaaack? That’s right, Bryan McBournie is off on vacation, which means you’re stuck with me for this week’s edition of YMI. He’s off in glorious Florida at the moment. I’m not. Now, I’m not saying that you should hunt him down and ruin his vacation, but if you do see him, it wouldn’t exactly be a crime against nature to tell him that the Pats suck. If you were busy implementing a silly social media function all over the internet, odds are you missed it.

The Bay area just can’t handle their alcohol

Nothing says internet sensation like the newest Apple product, and boy, was the internet abuzz this week. A programmer at Apple managed to lose the prototype to the newest iPhone model at a bar. Said prototype was then found by a random patron and subsequently sold to tech website Gizmodo, who, after some time, had to send the prototype to Apple. Easy come, easy go, right? Tell that to the rumored six million hits that Gizmodo experienced on just Tuesday alone.

It’s not real if it’s not true

Even though the 2010 schedules just came out, it’s a bit too early for Bryan Schools to do his predictions. Nonetheless, you might not want to put all your eggs in the Saints’ basket: quarterback Drew Brees has been selected to be the cover athlete for Madden 11 and possible occupant of the Madden Curse. Brees claims that a curse can’t happen if he doesn’t let it, while other possible candidates for the game cover, Jared Allen and Reggie Wayne, simply breathed humongous sighs of relief.

This is the stuff that boggles my mind

Larry King and current wife Shawn Southwick were set to get experience the trials of a divorce (it’s about that time of the year for him) but have appeared to call it off. The reason for it to happen? It wasn’t rumors that she was boinking a youth baseball coach (as those were confirmed by the coach), but by the rumors that King was boinking Southwick’s sister. HUH? HE’S 76 YEARS OLD AND AT DEATH’S DOOR WITH EVERY SECOND THAT PASSES! HOW, NAY, WHY WOULD WOMEN BE ATTRACTED TO HIM AT ALL?

This guy will end up as President

INTERNET RAGE!!!!!!!11111

That’s apparently what was felt all across the massive series of pipes and tubes recently when a young man purchased an iPad on Saturday, destroyed the item with a baseball and then put up video of him doing so on YouTube. Is Justin Kockott a man that feels great vitriol for Apple, much like our own Bryan McBournie?

No.

“I wanted to be the first one to do it before other people did it,” Kockott told the newspaper.

“It was just something to do.”

Oh, don’t mind that thunderclap-like sound, as it’s just me slapping my palm against my face. Well, at the very least, he’s probably seen the videos of popular stuff being broken, as where else would he get the idea to do so? As such, he had to have known that such an act may see a bit of … overzealous behavior from the Mac faithful for his video, right?

“I knew some people would hate it, but I didn’t think that many people would hate it,” he said.

“A lot of people are leaving really bad comments (in the YouTube comments section).”

And my younger brother wonders why I tend to complain about teenagers. As the resident Apple user at SG (note: I need more pretentious berets and black clothing in my wardrobe), I suppose that I should feel slightly angered toward him for doing such a thing-but really, I can’t. This sort of thing has been happening for year with almost every new piece of technology as soon as it comes out. What am I supposed to feel? I think a better question is where has a 19 year old managed to get at least 1500 dollars in order to afford three iPads? I certainly never had that type of money at his age. Heck, I don’t have that lean green now! Anybody wanna spare a dime for a brother in need?