Apple devotes homepage to memory of Nelson Mandela

Apple has dedicated its homepage to the late Nelson Mandela. It has replaced all the usual product and company information with a large black and white photo of the former South African President, fighter against apartheid and philanthropist, who is widely regarded as the Father of the Nation. Apple executives also shared their thoughts on the great leader's passing last week at age 95.

CEO Tim Cook's personal Twitter account read, "Amazing human being. Champion of freedom and human dignity. He set an example for all of the world. RIP Nelson Mandela. We miss you already." Senior VP for worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller chimed in on his Twitter account with ,""Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement." His Excellency Nelson Mandela, 1918 - 2013 #NelsonMandela." 

World AIDS Day & Giving (RED)

By Sonya Davidson

You may have heard some of the buzz around the recent (RED) Auction at Sotheby's in New York -- a collaboration between Sir Jonathan Ive, designer Marc Newson and Bono. On the auction block were high-end, one-of-a-kind items with design and innovation in mind. An incredible amount of over $12.8 million was raised from the event with all proceeds going to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in Africa. 

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New Apple patent focuses on Lytro-like refocusable camera

The Lytro camera was an exciting and novel device that allowed photographers and people viewing images online to focus their digital images after they were taken. Expensive and hard to find, the Lytro camera really failed to turn a great idea into a profitable business. Apple has recently secured  a patent for a similar refocusable camera that might give future iPhones the ability to shoot images and refocus later on depending on what aspect they'd like to highlight. Nokia's Lumia 1020 already has a similar application called Refocus which works very much the same way (i.e. images posted online can be refocused by viewers). Since iPhones have consistently been among the most used cameras, this feature will expand their functionality. Hope they make it to market sooner rather than later.

Source: Appleinsider

The Apple Beat: OS X's disc free OS recovery is rock solid

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

I recently had to rescue my wife's ageing first-generation MacBook Air from what looked like impending disk failure. We decided to move her system files to a newer machine with more updated hardware and a biggler hard drive. Then I realized I no longer had the installer disks that came with the devices.

After a brief moment of panic, I remembered that Apple hasn't been including installer disks for the past few years and that any system restoration could be done via OS X Recovery or via  the cloud. I'm old school in the sense that I've always felt the need to have backup copies of operating systems for computers I use. Specially since in the past, these have been useful to boot from in order to repair or reinstall troubled computers.

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