Starting April 10th you’ll finally be able to go into an Apple Store and try on Jony Ive’s first wearable, as long as you have an appointment. Those shopping for the regular Apple Watch and Sport models will get up-to 15 minutes of hands-on time at the Apple Store, but if you’re looking at the Apple Watch Edition, you’ll get to play with it twice as long.
How much is your smartphone spying on you? Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Smartphone users know that sharing personal data with apps can be part of the price of free apps, but when it comes to how frequently those apps give that data to third parties, the numbers will shock you.
A new study by Carnegie Mellon found that some smartphone users’ data is shared more than 5,000 times with third parties in a two-week period. Most people are totally clueless this is happening, but the study found that when people learn how much frequently data is being shared, they act rapidly to shut down the spread of personal info.
Disneyland is about to celebrate its 60th anniversary on July 17th, but before Walt’s playground become one of the world’s most popular tourist attractions, it was just an ugly patch of dirt outside L.A.
If you’ve ever visited Disneyland, it’s hard to imagine a time when the Matterhorn and Tower of Terror didn’t peak up above the Anaheim skyline while cruising up I-5, so Disney released a timelapse video of the park’s original construction that shows Disney’s Main Street popping up in the middle of nowhere.
Police in Somerset County Maine have finally apprehended a man wanted for charges of burglary after the suspect, 24 year-old Christopher Wallace, made a crucial mistake after weeks of evading the cops: he snapchatted his hiding spot.
A warrant for Wallace’s arrest had been issued in connection to the theft of propane and wood stoves that were recovered at his home in February. Wallace hid for weeks after it was made known publicly that authorities were searching for him. Eventually he got cocky posted a message of Snapchat that he was back home.
Friends tipped off the sherif’s department that he was at house, which quickly brought officers to his door. They didn’t find him at first, but then Wallace decided to double-down on the stupidy and posted that the cops were looking for him and that he’s hiding in the cabinet.
More tips came in and the cops eventually located Wallace and posted this celebratory message on Facebook:
This just keeps getting higher and higher. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
Cupertino claimed the title of world’s most valuable company earlier this year, but according to some bullish Wall Street analysts, Apple could soon become the world’s first trillion-dollar company.
In a note to investors today, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White increased his target price for Apple shares to $180, putting his estimations well above other analysts’ expectations. Apple shares’ value will increase 40 percent over the next 12 months, according to White’s report.
While Apple naysayers have pointed to slumping iPad sales and the unclear future of the Apple Watch as signs that Apple is weakening, White gives three key reasons why Apple is poised to break the trillion-dollar barrier.
iOS 8.3 is here. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
The fourth beta of iOS 8.3 was released to developers today, less than two weeks after Apple dropped the third beta.
Previous betas have added new features like racially diverse emoji, two-factor authentication support for Google, and an option to download free apps without entering your password. The second public beta of iOS 8.3 was also made available to participants of Apple’s public beta testing program.
Along with the iOS 8.3 betas, Apple also released Xcode 6.3 beta 4 with Swift 1.2. The betas are available in the iOS Dev Center or as an over-the-air update if you already have the third beta installed. The release notes don’t mention any major new features, but we’ll let you know what we find once it’s installed.
Apple TV is boosting up its channel lineup ahead of the company’s rumored launch of a stand-alone streaming service. Channels for TED Talks, Young Hollywood, and Tastemade were added to the Apple TV homescreen this morning, bringing viewers a new selection of cooking tutorials, celebrity TV shows, and educational talks.
TED Talks serves up a number of presentations given by intellectuals all over the world, focusing on a myriad of topics ranging from body language to how we discovered DNA. Young Hollywood offers users a range of celebrity-focused shows, interviews, and other programming all available for free. Aspiring chefs can find a bevy of cooking shows in the Tastemade channel that features food adventure shows, cooking shows, and also video city guides.
It’s been over three years since Steve Jobs died, however the hole he left at Apple and those closest to him still hasn’t been filled. Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli’s upcoming book Becoming Steve Jobs is full of anecdotes and events that showcase just how much Steve meant to his friends.
One such event happened in 2013, during Laurene Powell Jobs’ fiftieth birthday. Pixar CEO John Lasseter recounts in the book that he got there early and started talking to Tim Cook.
“Do you miss him? I really miss Steve,” Lasseter said, and then pulled out iPhone to show Tim that Jobs phone number and photo were still on the list.
Apple Pay has quickly become the most-used mobile wallet solution in the world, but finding businesses that accept it still isn’t all that easy. To help ease that pain, Apple launched a website today that offers free Apple Pay decals that participating merchants can apply to their registers and windows.
Twitter is testing auto-playing video. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Twitter is looking to take a swipe at YouTube’s viral video crown by adding a new feature that will automatically play videos in your timeline.
Starting today, some Twitter users in the U.S. on iPhone and iPad may see videos that start playing, whether you want them to or not. This goes for videos ads and users uploaded videos alike, as the company tests whether people are more likely to sit through a video if the action’s already started.
Woz, doing his part to help computers takeover the world. Photo: Apple
Tech pioneers like Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk have warned humanity of the dangers of AI for years, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he’s finally a beliver in the doomsday scenarios.
“Computers are going to take over from humans, no question,” Woz told the Australian Financial Review in a recent interview from his US home.
The man who sparked the personal computer revolution with the invention of the Apple II says ‘the future is scary and very bad for people’ because computers will eventually get faster than us and wipe us out.
iAddiction is real. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Separating kids from their iPhones and iPads can be a big struggle for most parents, but for one mom in Boulder Colorado, things got down right deadly after her daughter tried to poison her for taking away an iPhone.
Two charges of attempted first degree murder were eventually filed against the daughter, who mixed household bleach into her mom’s drinks trying to kill her.
Boulder County’s sheriff office detained the 12-year-old girl at a juvenile center after her mother noticed a bleach smell in her smoothie a few days earlier. Officers say the mom thought the daughter had just cleaned the glass and that there was a lingering bleach sent. Then she got sick.
Apple redesigned the LED backlights for the new MacBook keyboard, and it appears a similar update could be coming soon to the Apple Wireless Keyboard.
Several images of an updated keyboard appeared on the online Apple Store for the Czech Republic as well as an Arabic keyboard in the U.S. store. Some of the images of the keyboard have already been pulled, but the redesign adds toggles for brightness to the F5 and F6 keys, as well as a power button on in the upper right corner.
Will you read the news on Apple Watch? Photo: Apple
Developers are making a mad dash to finish their first Apple Watch apps before the wearable goes on sale in April. Yahoo is among those looking to make a big splash with must-have apps, and when it comes to bringing you the news, the company is hoping you’ll want it in bite-size chunks.
Yahoo’s Nick D’Aloisio sat down with Bloomberg today to talk about how digesting the news is going to change once you slap a tiny Apple Watch screen to your wrist. To bring long-form news to wearers, D’Aloisio says Yahoo Digest will focus on giving you the most salient pieces of a story, accompanied by little visual elements called atoms.
Watch Nick explain the news revolution Yahoo plans to unleash:
Countdown to your date with the Reaper. Photo: Rehabstudio
Tim Cook touted Apple Watch’s supreme timekeeping capabilities at last week’s Spring Forward event, but Rehabstudio plans to give wearers a unique look on time — by counting down to their death.
Life Clock is an upcoming Apple Watch app that’s like the reverse of an activity tracker. Rather than giving you a readout of actions you did in the past, Life Clock tracks all the positive and negative actions you take throughout the day to calculate when you’re going to kick the bucket.
AAPL shares are down the first day on the Dow. Photo: Cult of Mac
Apple officially joined the Dow Jones Industrial average today, placing the world’s most valuable company among historic brands like Coca-Cola, Boeing and 3M. But Apple’s first day with the big boys isn’t getting off to a great start.
Legendary designer Dieter Rams. Photo: Wikipedia Photo: Vitsoe/Wikimedia Commons
Braun’s lauded designer, Dieter Rams, has long been cited as an inspiration behind Apple’s classic design. Nearly everything Rams touched, from calculators tape recorders, radios, and even infrared emitters, have inspired Apple’s products, and according to Dieter himself, it’s a huge compliment.
In a recent interview with Fast Company, the prolific designer said if he had to do it all over again, he “would not want to be a designer.” However, if he were forced to take out his sketchpad and design a computer, it’d probably look just like Apple’s.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Apple TV’s big redesign has been rumored for over a year now, but the long wait might pay off big time, for shareholders at least.
By blowing up the cable industry with its subscription TV streaming service, Apple could add up to $30 billion in global annual revenue to its bottom line, according to projections released by Baird Equity Research.
ResearchKit is already living up to its promise. Photo: Apple Photo: Apple
Apple’s new open source platform, ResearchKit, could change our lives more than Apple Watch, and according to a report from Fusion detailing the inside story of ResearchKit, Apple may have got some outside inspiration for the project.
A lecture given by renowned medical researcher Dr. Stephen Friend was possibly the driving force behind Apple’s push into the industry. During a presentation at Stanford’s MedX conference, Friend asked attendees to imagine a future where researchers could run ten trials, with several thousand patients.
“Here you have genetic information, and you have what drugs they took, how they did. Put that up in the cloud, and you have a place where people can go and query it, [where] they can make discoveries,” Friend told the crowd, completely unaware that Apple’s newly appointed VP for medical technologies, Mike O’Reilly, was among those catching Friend’s vision for a medical research utopia.
“I can’t tell you where I work, and I can’t tell you what I do, but I need to talk to you,” O’Reilly told Friend after his presentation.
USB-C: The one connector to rule them all. Photo: Apple
There’s been a lot of talk that Apple invented USB-C, even though the company hasn’t made any official claims yet. The evidence is already compelling, but here’s another sign Apple had its hand in USB-C: It looks just like the company’s Cinema Display power cable.
Young Apple fans may not remember the unveiling of the original iMac that put Apple back on the map, but now you can experience what it was like to learn all about Jony and Steve’s candy-colored creation on the World Wide Web like it’s 1997 all over again.
Relive the thrills and horrors of what it was like the surf Apple.com back in 1997, thanks to the folks at Open University who created a series of GIFs that capture the the web of the late-90’s thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
Apple’s old website didn’t look too bad back then, especially s hideous compared to most websites at the time, which heavily featured crappy graphics, block graphic links, and clumsy navigation, Apple’s website stands out from the other options at the time.
Filming for the upcoming Steve Jobs moving got underway yesterday at the San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House for a major scene in the movie where Steve Jobs unveils the NeXT computer in October 1988.
The set was crowded as hundreds of people arrived to be extras in the picture, and Danny Boyle’s production crew tried to make the scene as authentic-looking as possible. They even put up fake NeXT posters around the opera house, showing Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs posing with the NeXT cube.
Keep your Apple Watch alive for longer with Nomad Pod. Photo: Nomad
It seemed like it took accessory makers forever to make battery pack cases for the iPhone, but companies are wasting no time with Apple Watch accessories, and the first portable battery for Apple’s wearable is already here.
Nomad introduced its answer for the Apple Watch’s battery woes with the Pod, a small portable power station for your Apple Watch that will keep it ticking well past the 18 hour battery life Tim Cook promised.
Is that an Apple Watch band box sitting on the table? Photo: Apple
Apple might have just leaked some packaging for the upcoming Apple Watch.
The Apple Jobs website received a nice update today — including a new image of what appears to be some of the Apple Watch packaging that will hit Apple Store shelves April 24. The boxes look too thin to hold the Apple Watch and its inductive charger, so they’re more likely just for bands, but we couldn’t help but notice they look just like Swatch’s iconic boxes.
'To Pimp a Butterfly' is here early. Photo: Interscope Records
One of the most highly anticipated rap albums of 2015 has landed on iTunes a week early.
To Pimp a Butteryfly, the follow-up to Kendrick Lamar’s highly acclaimed album good kid, m.A.A.d city is slated for wide release on March 23rd, but thanks to an error with iTunes pre-order, customers can access the hot new album right now.