lemonwade

As Apple faces increased scrutiny for hiring foreign firms to manufacture its products overseas, CEO Tim Cook says that the U.S.-based company is looking to bring more jobs back home.

In an interview on “Rock Center with Brian Williams” on Thursday, December 6, Cook said that a line of Apple’s Mac computers will be manufactured in the U.S. in 2013. He did not say which line would be made in America, nor did he address recent reports that customers had spotted new iMac computers with the words “Assembled in USA”, instead of “Assembled in China,” printed on the devices.

The announcement came as Cook and Williams sat in Apple’s sumptuous Grand Central retail store and chatted about the company’s products.

No one does Halloween quite like Hollywood! Read here about which stars dressed up as which characters.

Not long ago Netflix was a stockmarket darling. The California-based firm transformed the video-rental market by renting out DVDs through the post, and by streaming films and television shows over the internet. On October 23rd, though, it announced an 88% fall in third-quarter profits and its market capitalisation, $15 billion in July 2011, shrivelled to $3.3 billion.

Netflix has been a victim of its own success. For about $8 a month, the company woos subscribers with programmes and films that normally require a pricey pay-TV subscription. Consumers love it: the average Netflix subscriber watches more than five TV shows and nearly three and a half films per week, according to a report from GfK Media, a market-research firm. But this threatens the producers of the programmes that Netflix rents out. Broadcast and cable networks earn a great deal more from licensing deals with pay-TV companies than they do with outfits such as Netflix—some $41 billion in 2012 with the former, against $3.5 billion with the latter. So any sign that Netflix is hurting a broadcast or cable network’s bottom line quickly leads to higher licensing fees or curbed content sales.

Huff Post says: Apple’s new iPad Mini costs $130 more than the two other best handheld tablets on the market of similar size, Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD and Barnes & Noble’s NOOK HD. And while the price difference between iPad mini ($329) and Kindle Fire HD/NOOK HD ($199) is crystal clear, the justification for said price difference is, I am afraid, quite blurry.

Apple outed its iPad mini at an event on Tuesday afternoon, adding another high-quality device to an already-crowded 7-inch tablet market. The iPad mini is fast, well-built, and features hundreds of thousands apps from Apple’s excellent App Store.

If you’re shopping for a handheld tablet, you now have to decide between this new iPad mini, the Kindle Fire HD, the NOOK HD, the Nexus 7, and the “old” 2011 Kindle Fire, the price of which has been reduced to a tantalizing $159. Inded, it is a packed field: It’s like the 2012 Republican primaries all over again, except, unlike the GOP candidates, all of these tablets computers can count to three.

As you begin to shop, the first number that’s going to differentiate these tablets for you, I would think, is price: The iPad mini starts at $329, compared to $199 for the brand new NOOK HD, Kindle Fire HD and Google Nexus 7. That’s a $130 difference, a lot of money for those of us who don’t own horses competing in Olympic dressage.

The second thing you might notice — or, that you do notice, if you’re a numbers nerd like I am — is screen resolution and pixel desnity. Without getting too geeky on you, the NOOK HD and Kindle Fire HD feature much, much crisper screens than the iPad mini. For those that care: The iPad mini has a resolution of 1024×780, with 163 pixels-per-inch; the Kindle Fire HD has a 1280×800 resolution, with 216 pixels-per-inch; and the NOOK HD has a 1440×900 resolution, with 243 pixels-per-inch. In this case, higher is better, lower is worse; Apple’s screen doesn’t stack up, and it comes affixed to a device that is $130 more expensive than the competition.

As many gadget reviewers noted when the iPad 3 with Retina display came out, going from the iPad 3 back to the iPad 2 is like switching from HDTV to a non-HD feed. You’re spoiled by the extra resolution, and the supreme density of pixels, and when you switch back and forth between a Retina and non-Retina device, the difference is noticeable. The non-Retina device seems downright blurry or fuzzy compared to the Retina device.

Imagine there was a place where you could browse a vast selection of fiction and non-fiction books, a place a bit like a bookshop – only, instead of buying these books, you could just borrow them, for as long as you liked. And for free! (Sort of.) Sounds a bit like a library, doesn’t it? It also sounds a lot like the business model for Oyster, a brand new digital service that does for books what Netflix does for films, and Spotify for music: in return for a monthly subscription fee, users can borrow from what it calls “an ever-growing collection of high-quality published works,” and read them on their smartphones.

MIT students have designed a ‘wearable social media vest‘ that translates every virtual Facebook ‘like’ into a real hug. I think I’ll pass: don’t wanna be squeezed all day long.

Sure, everyone knows that Portland and Brooklyn are hip cities. But not everyone knows about the hipster neighborhoods within those and other cities. Well, now we have a list of the top ten hipsterhoods in the US. Forbes and Nextdoor.com came up with the list after putting together data on more than 250 neighborhoods in the biggest American cities.