Passwords are easy to forget. They’re even easier to steal. Now Yahoo has unveiled a new scheme to make permanent passwords as outdated as Morse code.
Yahoo is rolling out its “on-demand” email passwords that utilize phone notifications so you’ll never have to memorize a password again. It works kind of like two-factor authentication, except you don’t ever have to type in your primary password.
Apple has released the fourth beta of OS X 10.10.3 to both developers and the public this morning, less than a week after the company seeded the third beta.
The new beta is pretty much identical to the third beta released last week, but adds a fix for the new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air that prevented it from working with those machines previously.
It’s that time of year when office work comes to a standstill for weeks thanks to the NCAA’s annual celebration of sweat, leather and nylon nets. The brackets have been set and teams are en route to play the 67 basketball games that will take place over the next few weeks, with Kentucky being the undisputed favorite to walk away with a perfect season.
Thanks to the glories of technology, you can follow all the action this year even if you don’t have a cable subscription. With the right combo of apps, you can get expert insight into your favorite Cinderella team, watch every game — and maybe even pick the perfect bracket.
Dominate March Madness this year with these apps for Mac and iOS:
Beats Music is due for a big redesign come WWDC. Hopefully that means a native Mac app is on the way, as well as a web player that doesn’t use Flash.
While we’re waiting for Apple to trash its use of the web plugin Steve Jobs loathed, Chris Aljoudi has solved the problem with a brilliant Safari extension that brings Beats Music playback to your browser using HTML5.
Alex Gibney’s documentary about Steve Jobs debuted at the South by Southwest film fest in Austin this weekend, and the first reviews have called film a “coolly absorbing, deeply unflattering portrait of the late Silicon Valley entrepreneur.”
Eddy Cue took to Twitter this morning to blast the Oscar-winning director’s film, saying he was “very disappointed in Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.”
Here’s what Cue had to say about the documentary:
Apple is making some big changes to emoji with the inclusion of racially diverse characters in iOS 8.3, but the company has been hiding an emoji secret under our fingertips for years.
A startling emoji discovery was made this week by Peter Miller, who realized that the poop emoji is almost identical to the ice cream cone emoji — minus the cone and plus a splash of color. On Android, the poop and ice cream icons are pretty different, but it looks like whoever created Apple’s has been regurgitating old designs to save time.
You’ll never look at ice cream the same again. Sorry.
Apple is placing a lot of its hopes for the future on the Apple Watch, but a new survey indicates Cupertino is looking at a big uphill battle.
More than 50 percent of Americans say they think smartwatches are a passing fad.
One of the biggest selling points of the Apple Watch might be that it will free you from the attention-sucking clutches of your iPhone. A new study by the Transport Research Laboratory in Wokingham, UK, found that using your Apple Watch while driving is significantly more distracting that your iPhone 6.
Safety advocate firm SmartWitness is calling for a ban on smartwatches after the study discovered that drivers reading a text message on their smartwatch take more than a half second longer to respond to an emergency than someone reading on a smartphone.
Apple placed another app that can’t be deleted on everyone’s iPhones with the release of iOS 8.2. For now, the Apple Watch companion app is just a useless tease if you don’t have an Apple Watch yet, but iOS developer Hamza Sood has cracked it open and given us a preview of what the app will look like once you get your watch.
Sood tweeted some interesting tidbits about the app, revealing its beautiful dark theme along with details about the settings, how to add friends, mute notifications, and other interesting features.
Take a peek inside the app below:
Apple’s design team went to extreme lengths when redesigning the new MacBook to be more portable than ever. The most drastic move was to toss out the fan and extra ports for a super-tiny logic board.
The new MacBook logic board is two-thirds smaller than any board Apple’s designed before. It’s the highest-density Mac logic board yet, but really, it’s more like a super-iPhone or iPad logic board. Put side by side with the iPhone 6 logic board, the new MacBook logic board is barely twice its size.
This comparison image might shock you:
The battle of Mac versus PC is raging strong, thanks to the new MacBook. While Apple fans are still debating whether they really want Jony Ive’s minimalist gold notebook, rival PC markers have been quick to shoot down Apple’s latest innovation on Twitter.
ASUS, Lenovo and Dell all took shots at the super-thin MacBook, quickly pointing out that while terraced batteries and gold paint are nice, these notebook companies have been selling even thinner laptops for over a year now.
Take a look at their tweets calling out the new MacBook:
A new beta build of OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 has been seeded to developers this morning alongside the release of iOS 8.3 beta 3. The new update is available in the Mac Dev Center or via a software update, and comes two weeks after Apple released the second OS X 10.10.3 beta to developers.
The biggest new feature added in today’s beta is the inclusion of a new set of developers APIs that work with the Force Touch trackpad in the new MacBook and Macbook Pro. The new APIs will allow developers to add a new dimension of control and interactivity to their apps.
Here’s some of the new features developers can add:
Apple has released the third iOS 8.3 beta to developers this morning. The free download is available both in the iOS Developer Center, and as an over-the-air update for developers still running iOS 8.3 beta 2.
The release notes for iOS 8.3 beta 3 don’t mention any new features, however previous beta’s have included a new emoji pane, as well as racially diverse emoji. Two-factor authentication for Google was also added in the first beta, along with numerous bug fixes.
We’ll let you know what new features we find as soon as the update is installed on our device. Until then, you can grab a direct download from the links below:
We’re still waiting for the unbelievably gorgeous 12-inch MacBook to ship, but our friends at iFixit have already done a teardown on the updated MacBook Pro, revealing the secret sauce behind the new Force Touch Trackpad and Taptic Engine that both new Macs share.
The teardown shows that the Pro’s new trackpad is supported by four spring mounts and a panel that isn’t likely to be present on the 12-inch MacBook. It does have the same Force Touch engine, which is really just a bunch of wire coils wrapped around a ferromagnetic core to create the clicky vibrations.
Check out the full gory details below:
Tablet sales are on the decline, and the iPad is “the weakest leak,” according to the latest report from International Data Corporation.
The organization has scaled back its five-year forecast for tablets, expecting market growth to come to a near standstill. With 234.5 million units expected to be sold in 2015, the tablet market will only gain a modest 2.1 percent year-over-year.
The new MacBook is the biggest revolution to hit the laptop line in a decade, yet it’s not without its haters.
A mobile processor. One USB-C port. A 480p front camera. And a $1,299 price tag. “Just who the hell at Apple signed off on this thing?!” some fans might be asking. Well, thanks to some very rare footage of an Apple “engineer” speaking about the design process of the new MacBook, we finally know what was going through Jony and Tim’s heads when they signed off on production.
Whether you love or hate the new MacBook, you’ll laugh your ass off as the engineer tells a Spanish TV host all about the hilarious process.
Tim Cook eased some of our worries about Apple Watch’s battery on Monday by revealing you’ll get at least 18 hours of use from it. But if you’d like a wearable that looks just as good, and comes without the battery problems, Hini Mizushima has the perfect creation for you.
The slow crafter Mizushima created a wonderful ‘Super Low-Tech’ Apple Watch engineered to keep up with an active lifestyle with snap fasteners. The ultralight wearable doesn’t actually tell time, but it’s sure to turn heads just as quickly as the gold Apple Watch Edition.
Take a closer look:
Apple is diving into the luxury market for the first time ever with the exorbitantly expensive gold Apple Watch Edition. The pricey new timepiece has been met with criticism from Apple fans and haters a like, but according to Condé Nast, Apple is now a powerful player in the luxury industry and wants Jony Ive and Marc Newson to tell them all about it.
Jony Ive and Marc Newson will open the first ever Conde Nast Luxury Conference in Florence Italy in April 2015. The design duo will appear with event host, Vogue International editor Suzy Menkes, to discuss “21st century definition of luxury and their collaborative work to date.”
Apple is suffering one of its worst iTunes outages ever today as users across the globe have been unable to access the App Store, iBooks, iCloud and iTunes for more than eight hours this morning.
In an official statement released by the company, Apple has blamed the ongoing outage on a DNS error, saying “We apologize to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning. The cause was an internal DNS error at Apple. We’re working to make all of the services available to customers as soon as possible, and we thank everyone for their patience.”
The people of the Internet are not patient however, and have flooded Twitter with gripes about the 8 hour long outage. It’s not just the App Store and iTunes that are affected either. Apple Pay has been rendered worthless and Apple Stores have had to pull out their old credit card machines like it’s 1999.
Here’s a sampling of some of the best Apple outage tweets:
A Chinese workers’ rights group released a new report today that sheds light on the deplorable working conditions in factories that assemble the iPhone 6. According to China Labor Watch, on February 3, 2015, Pegatron assembly line worker Tian Fulei died while assembling the iPhone 6.
The hospital labeled the cause of death as “sudden death,” but fellow workers say Tian worked long overtime shifts day after day, which gave his family reason to believe that Tian died from overwork.
To smooth things over, Pegatron reportedly offered the family a measly $2,400 as compensation for their son’s death. Tian’s family of farmers couldn’t afford to pay for an expensive independent autopsy to prove the death was work-related. Eventually they took Pegatron’s next offer of $1,277 for his untimely death.
Nerds and regular folks across the globe paused yesterday while Tim Cook unveiled Apple’s newest products. While everyone else was busying talking about the Apple Watch and new MacBook, your favorite brands were trying to get in on the buzz with a tweetstorm of puns and jokes.
Makers of everything from Twinkies to Miller Lite were ready to go viral with their witty tweets. Most fell flat, but there were a couple clever ones mixed in with the noise.
Here are the hottest Apple Watch-related tweets from social media marketers looking to cash in on Apple’s cachet:
Because of Apple Watch, Jony Ive thinks Swiss watch makers are screwed. Even Swatch’s inventor agrees. But Switzerland’s top athlete isn’t sold quite yet.
When asked whether he think athletes will embrace Apple’s wearable, 17-time Grand Slam champion Roger Federer said he’s interested to check out Apple Watch, but he doesn’t use “those type of things” and doubts “it’s going to have a big impact on the Swiss watch industry.”
“I don’t quite understand how much you need to know about all of these little things—about how much energy you burn, about how much spin you put on the ball,” Federer told CNBC. “I think it might be interesting to some people, but at the end of the day I believe in hard work.”
Watch the full interview below:
Apple has one of the most iconic logos in pop culture. Go into any coffee shop and you’ll be assaulted by an array of glowing MacBook lids and shiny iPhone screens, but it turns out that drawing the Apple logo from memory is shockingly hard.
A new study conducted by UCLA researchers found only one out of 85 undergraduate students could accurately draw the iconic logo from memory. If you’re think maybe they just weren’t familiar with the Apple logo, you haven’t been to a college campus in a while.
The difficulty of drawing Apple’s ubiquitous logo actually tells us something about human memory and how we form a ‘gist memory’ of objects and symbols we become too familiar with.
The new MacBook is one of the most impressive pieces of technology Apple has unleashed in five years. It boasts a Retina display, USB-C, butterfly-hinged keyboard, Force Touch trackpad and terraced batteries. All crammed inside a body that’s smaller than the MacBook Air, made possible by a new fanless processor.
Despite being an unapologetically gorgeous piece of hardware, the new MacBook’s biggest weapon — the fanless processor — is also its greatest weakness.
Apple has placed the new MacBook in a category most people shouldn’t even consider buying, and that’s OK. The new MacBook isn’t for you and me, it’s for the future.
The new MacBook is gorgeous, insanely thin, revolutionary and pressure-sensitive. It’s also missing one killer feature: a glowing Apple logo.
The shining bit of trade dress has been a pop culture icon ever since Apple released the PowerBook G3 in May 1999. However, it looks like Jony Ive’s design team is ready to sacrifice the glowing Apple beacon in the name of thinness. You’ll still find a light-up logo on the MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros, but it was never meant to be on Apple’s new golden beauties.
Take a look at the back of the new 12-inch Retina MacBook:
