John Brownlee - page 6

Although it looks like Apple is about to turn the Apple TV into a PlayStation-killing video game console, it’s not the indisputable king of the hill of streaming media boxes right now. Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast … all have their advantages over the Apple TV except for one killer feature: AirPlay Mirroring, which allows the Apple TV to stream anything running on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

If you don’t have an Apple TV, you can’t use AirPlay Mirroring, right? Actually, you can — as long you have a Raspberry Pi.

Jay-Z’s Tidal hasn’t been much of a threat to Apple Music so far, but according to Tidal, that’s not stopping Cupertino from suing them. Over charity, no less!

A new report gives us our best insight yet into the radically improved Apple TV expected to be launched next month, including the fact that it will ship with a motion-sensitive controller similar to the Nintendo Wiimote — but a hell of a lot sleeker. And that’s just to start.

If you use Gmail – and let’s face it, most of us do – one of the biggest draws of using an external app, like OS X Mail, is being able to get Notifications when new emails arrive. Unfortunately, many email apps don’t support Gmail’s best features natively, like labeling, search or automatically filtered inboxes.

If you’d like to get Notifications when a new Gmail comes in, but continue to use the Gmail web app instead of a dedicated client, here’s how.

Think your iPhone is the most beautifully designed portable gaming console? Think again.

Let’s face it: the dock gets crowded. Even on the iPad, the short row of icons Apple gives us at the bottom of our iOS homepage is always too little.

You can fill your dock with folders if you want to cram more apps there… or you can download this neat little jailbreak tweak, which doubles the amount of icons you can put in your dock.

After years spent whining about how the iPod was killing the music industry, rock legend Neil Young pulled his albums from Apple Music and launched his own iPod killer, the Pono Player. It was a weird pyramid shaped device that specialized in high-resolution audio, sold through its own music store, which Ars Technica memorably declared a tall, refreshing drink of snake water.

Anyone surprised to hear, then, that even as iPod sales die, Young’s Pono Player is having trouble keeping pace with it?

You might remember that on Monday, AAPL stock had a bit of a bad day before rebounding. It wasn’t just a bad day for Apple stock, though: Fueled by fears of a total collapse of the Chinese stock market, the whole S&P 500 collapsed that day.

In the first 24 hours, only Apple rebounded. It’s proof positive of Apple’s fabled “reality distortion field.”

A new rumor says that the 4-inch iPhone 6c will be released in the last week of October, or the first week of November.

Look, we know you’ve taken your iPhone into the bathroom with you for number two. Everyone has. That doesn’t mean you should tell people about it. But a new app, charmingly called Pooductive, is for just that. It’s dedicated to facilitating meaningful, anonymous conversation on the toilet about… you can guess the topic.

If you have trouble finding your car in a busy garage, or always find yourself coming back to a lapsed parking meter and a ticket stuck under your windshield wiper, you’re in luck. A new Bluetooth sensor, in combination with an iPhone app, can make losing your car and racking up fines a thing of the past.

Instagram is great on the iPhone. It kind of sucks on the iPad. And it’s nonexistent on the Mac. But Photoflow aims to change the latter.

It’s a beautiful new Instagram client, just for the Mac. And while Photoflow won’t ever replace Instagram on your iPhone, it does supplement a lot of the app’s features for power users.

iOS 8.4.1 might have fine-tuned Apple Music, but some users are complaining about about battery issues after updating to Apple’s latest mobile operating system.

If you’re afflicted, the good news is that iOS 9 is right around the corner. The bad news? That doesn’t help you now, and iOS 9 will likely have its own host of bugs that Apple needs to address. Here are some tips to help you eke out as much battery life in iOS 8.4.1 as possible.

The game of jailbreak cat-and-mouse has never been quicker. Thanks to Chinese jailbreaking teams like Pangu, the slow, careful back and forth between jailbreak teams cracking open iOS, and Apple patching it, has hit breakneck speeds.

Case in point? A week after Apple released iOS 8.4.1, closing a security hole that allowed iOS 8.4 to be jailbroken, Pangu is already showing off a jailbreak solution for it.

Apple may be interested in putting hydrogen-powered batteries in future iPhones, extending battery life up to 7 days per charge. Best of all? You’d charge your iPhone through the headphone jack.

There are thousands of colors an App Store icon can be … so why does it so often look like developers only had half a box of crayons to choose from when we look at our iPhones?

But App Store iconography may be more colorful than it seems at first. Don’t believe me? These color wheels show exactly how dominant certain colors are in the icons of the most successful apps.

Hamza Sood – the same hacker who managed to bring Flappy Bird to the Apple Watch as a native app – has just hacked Apple’s wearable to do something just as cool: run custom watch faces.

Your Apple Watch tells you to stand up periodically to maintain your health. It’s a small feature, but it’s actually one of the Apple Watch’s killer apps.

If you don’t have an Apple Watch, though, you’re in luck. There’s a new app in town that does the same thing.

Maybe it’s just me, but Finder is one of the default Mac apps I find most annoying. Even though Apple introduced tabs to the default experience a few years ago, Finder still makes it harder than it should to move files from one folder on your computer to another.

Commander One, a Finder alternative for OS X 10.9 and above, makes Finder better for power users. It adds the ability to drag and drop files between two folders displayed in side-by-side panes, not windows or tabs. But there’s more to it than just that.

Suckers slowly pop the cork on a bottle of champagne. Pros saber it off, exploding bubbly everywhere. But what do you do when you don’t have a sword? You pull out your iPhone.

Despite many theoretical improvement, lithium ion batteries remain a very slowly progressing technology. Moore’s Law keeps on helping our gadgets better at conserving batteries, but the batteries themselves aren’t keeping pace with Moore’s Law when it comes to increasing capacity.

But a new innovation by a team of forgetful researchers might change all that: they’ve figured out how to quadruple a li-ion battery’s lifespan.

We previously reported that it was looking like the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus would be released on Friday, September 18th. Now, German carriers are echoing the date.

Attention: jailbreakers and would-be jailbreakers!

TaiG, the Chinese jailbreaking team that has been thanked in Apple patch notes for exposing iOS vulnerabilities, has just released a new jailbreak tool for Mac that will allow you to run unsigned code on any iOS 8.4 device. Hurrah!

GeekBar – a generally reliable Chinese site behind a series of schematic and parts leaks about upcoming Apple releases – has published new images of what they claim is a fully-assembled display for the iPhone 6s.

We’ve seen before that changing from Chrome to Safari can make a big difference on your Mac’s battery life.

But if you haven’t switched from Chrome or Firefox to Safari yet, this fact might change your mind: If you’re a MacBook user, you’re losing an average of one hour of total battery life by using anything but Safari.