John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth! Photo: François Dourlen
Ever wondered what your favorite movies and shows would be like if the characters had iPhones?
The work of French photographer François Dourlen sort of touches on that subject, but with a subversive, whimsical twist that sees characters like Die Hard’s John McClane crawling out of microwave ovens, or the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings movies topping an industrial tower.
You can leave your iPhone behind on Apple Watch runs. Photo: Apple
The beautiful Apple Watch spokesperson Christy Turlington-Burns has been running a blog on Apple.com for the past three weeks, detailing how the Apple Watch has helped her train for the London Marathon.
It’s mostly puff stuff, but her latest entry has one interesting tidbit: the Apple Watch can apparently track many of your fitness levels even without an iPhone in range. She goes into more detail about how.
You don't need special hardware for laptop gestures. Photo: Gizmodo
We’ve been waiting seemingly for years for the Mac to get gesture recognition. Accessories like the Leap Motion have tantalized us with the possibility of aftermarket solutions, while secret Apple patents have hinted at future Macs with Kinect-like possibilities. Heck, Apple even purchased the company that designed the Kinect’s technology back in 2013, yet we’ve still seen nothing.
Turns out we might not need to wait for Apple to release special hardware for a gesture-controlled Mac. By making use of a very simple phenomenon in physics, Apple could actually enable gesture control in the Mac, iPhone and iPad … no hardware required.
The new MacBook Air has more graphics power than it appears at first. Photo: Apple
When Apple announced the new 2015 MacBook Air a couple weeks ago, there was at least a couple of disappointments.
First of all, for those of us who love the current form factor, power, keyboard, ports, and trackpad of the MacBook Air, there was no Retina Display in the 2015 model of the ultraportable.
In fact, the new MacBook Air’s Intel HD Graphics 6000 chip allegedly didn’t support Retina, with the maximum resolution it could pump out to an external monitor 2560 x 1600: a few million pixels below the 4K resolution necessary to make an argument for a desktop monitor being Retina.
It turns out, though, that Apple has undersold the graphic performance ability of the new MacBook Air.
Imagine surfing PornHub on this. Photo: Jeff Keacher
When the Macintosh Plus was released 27 years ago, it was the most powerful Mac on the market. It even contained a SCSI port, which opened the door to the Macintosh getting a modem. Eventually, there were even internet browsers released for the Macintosh Plus.
That got Jeff Keacher over at the Daily Dot thinking. What would it be like to plug a 1976 Macintosh Plus into the modern web? Surprise surprise — it was absolute torture.
If you thought Continuity was annoying before, just wait till it lands on your wrist. Photo: Rated WTF
We’re all looking forward to the Apple Watch, but there’s one thing I’m definitely not looking forward to: the ability to answer phone calls on my wrist. And this clever video shows exactly why.
Boot Camp just got a little worse on the latest MacBook Pros. Screenshot: Cult of Mac
First introduced in 2006, shortly after Apple transitioned the Mac to Intel-based chips, Apple’s Boot Camp multi-boot utility is the secret sauce that has allowed the Mac to be the best-selling PC on Earth.
The proposition Boot Camp offers to would-be Mac buyers is simple. If they buy a Mac, they can run any OS they want: OS X, Windows, or Linux. But if they buy any other laptop, they can never run OS X.
With the release of the latest MacBook Pros, though, Boot Camp just got a little less flexible. Apple has dropped support for Windows 7 from the 2015 MacBook Pro.
These 13 characters will kill your Chrome browser dead. Photo: VentureBeat
If you’re on a Mac, and use Chrome, and if you’re not sure if you have Assyrian turned on, definitely don’t click this link. Just doing so could cause your whole browser to crash, and the culprit is a 13-character snippet that couldn’t seem any more innocuous.
Future versions of Windows could update like MMOs. Will Apple follow suit? Photo: Neowin
These days, Apple has one of the better cloud infrastructures in the world. Even so, the sheer demand for a new version of iOS or OS X on release day can bring Apple’s network to its knees. Apple’s servers simply can’t keep up with the demand.
But Microsoft might have found a better way. In the latest version of the Windows 10 operating system beta, there’s an option to download app and OS updates from multiple sources: not just Microsoft’s cloud servers, but all local network or PCs on the internet.
In other words? The future of updating operating systems might be a lot like updating World of Warcraft.
When Dutch conceptual artist Martin Hajek heard that the next iPhone 6s might come with a rose gold option, he just had to see what it would look like. So he took his ultra-realistic renders of the iPhone 6s and the Apple Watch and dipped them in fancy rose gold.
The MacBook Pro's antireflective coating is starting to wear off for some customers. Photo: Digital Trends
MacBook Pro owners the world over are complaining that the antireflective display coating on their mid-2012 to mid-2014 models is rubbing off. And to our eyes, the problem seems bad enough to warrant a recall.
Photoshop 1.0, 25 years later. Screengrab: Cult of Mac
First released in 1990 for the Macintosh Platform, Photoshop 1.0 turned 25 years old last month. To mark the occasion, CreativeLive asked eight Photoshop professionals to try to do their jobs — on camera, of course — on the original 1.0 version of Photoshop.
Spoiler alert: they didn’t have an easy time. “Only one level of Undo? No live preview? Is this even real life?”
Christy Turlington Burns wants you to buy an Apple Watch. Screenshot: Cult of Mac
During last week’s Apple Watch event, Apple brought our 46-year-old Glamour supermodel Christy Turlington Burns to stand alongside Tim Cook and explain a little bit about how she’s using the Apple Watch to train.
After the event, Vogue caught up with Turlington Burns to talk to her in more detail about what it’s actually like to use the Apple Watch. And while there’s no new details, it’s still interesting to hear someone who is so influential in the fashion world have such a “gee whiz” moment about Apple’s new wearable.
Back in the good old days of jailbreaking, your first step before upgrading to the latest version of iOS was to plug your device into an app called TinyUmbrella and save your SHSH blobs.
What are blobs? Simply put, saving your blobs gave jailbreakers the possibility of downgrading their devices to a previous version of iOS. Unfortunately, with iOS 5, Apple caught up with the way jailbreakers were using blobs, making TinyUmbrella virtually useless.
Now that’s changed. Three years later, it finally appears that the blobby wind is blowing in the opposite direction, and a new TinyUmbrella beta has been released that once more allows jailbreakers to save their SHSH blobs.
A beautiful two-bedroom apartment, right above the Brisbane Apple Store. Photo: Gary Allen
How much do you love the Apple Store? Enough to drop $495,000 to buy an apartment right above one? Then boy, do we have the right real estate deal for you.
Apple put an unbelievable amount of care into crafting its smartwatch. Photo: Apple
No Apple fan is oblivious to the huge amount of science, technique, expertise and care that Apple puts into every product. Apple doesn’t design its products the way it does because it has to, but because it is compelled on a profoundly spiritual level to do so.
For the Apple Watch, Apple has taken that care to the next level. And if you want to see just how much artistry, skill, craft and passion has gone into creating the latest revolutionary Apple product, there’s no better way to spend the weekend than reading about the behind-the-scenes manufacturing process of the Apple Watch.
Amazon, coming soon to your Apple Watch. Photo: TechCrunch
Amazon is in the business of making it as easy as possible to spend money in their online store. It should surprise no one, then, that Amazon is already developing an Apple Watch app, which will let customers search for products and purchase them with a single click, all from a user’s wrist.
USB-C might be another Apple invention after all. Photo: Apple
If it seems weird to you that Apple abandoned Thunderbolt, its all-in-one connector created just a few years back, in favor of USB-C for the new MacBook, you’re not the only one. It is weird. But there might be a more straightforward explanation for that than you think: According to a new rumor, Apple effectively invented USB-C.
This is what the Dow would look like if Apple had joined in 2008. Photo: Bloomberg
The Dow Jones Industrial Average measures the strength of American industry based upon how 30 large, publicly owned companies in the United States have traded in the stock markets. Companies come in and out the Dow periodically, according to whether their fortunes are waxing or waning.
When Apple joins the Dow Jones Industrial Average next week — replacing AT&T, which has been on the index since 1916 — the Dow will be at a historic high (assuming nothing catastrophic happens between now and then). But if Apple had joined the Dow in 2008, that value would be even more historic. It would have added more than 4,300 points to the Dow.
The Apple Watch has kicked Nike and Jawbone off the Apple Store. Photo: Nike
The Apple Watch is coming, and this means it’s time for Apple to put all the crappier fitness bands it’s been selling all these years into the airlock and flush them into deep space.
No surprise, then, that Apple’s retail stores are no longer selling the Jawbone UP and the Nike+ Fuelband.
Derek Zoolander — the male model played by Ben Stiller who first appeared as a gag character in 1996’s VH1 Fashion Awards, and who later went on to star in 2001’s cult classic film — made a surprise appearance yesterday on a catwalk at Paris Fashion Week, where he stole some dude’s iPhone, then flashed Blue Steel all over Vine.
Apple Stores are the new department stores. Photo: Foster + Partners Photo: Apple
I haven’t been to a mall in ages, except to go to an Apple Store. Turns out I’m not alone. Apple Stores have replaced the department stores of yore as the main driver of mall traffic.
The iPhone 6s could be pink... but not this pink. Photo: Apple Photo: Apple
The Apple Watch’s Force Touch technology and rose gold finish might not stay exclusive to the smartwatch for long.
A new report from The Wall Street Journal says that when the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus come around, they’ll have Force Touch screens, and come in pink gold.
Eddy Cue spotted sporting an Apple Watch at a basketball game! Photo: CNET
Here’s a weird setting for an Apple Watch interview: CNET caught up with Eddy Cue, Apple’s head of Internet software and services, at a Golden State Warriors basketball game Friday. And Cue actually walked CNET through how Apple Pay will work on your Apple Watch, as well as how it will prevent thieves from stealing your watch and draining your bank account with it.