Leander Kahney - page 11

The new Apple TV looks like the old one, but it’s a complete overhaul of the little black puck. It now comes with a full-blown App Store, a touch-sensitive remote and voice controls via Siri.

You can preorder it now, and it’ll ship Friday.

We got our hands on a developer model and have been playing around with it. We like it a lot. Setup is fun, the interface looks stunning, and the touch remote works beautifully. If the Music app is any indication, apps on this thing are going to be great. There’s just one little thing wrong. And it’s not little, actually. It’s big.

Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly about the 4th-generation Apple TV.

It’s with great sadness that I heard about the passing of Gary Allen this morning. I met Gary several times over the years and called and corresponded with him many times. He ran IFOAppleStore.com, by far the best website about Apple’s incredible chain of retail stores, a topic that proved a rich hunting ground, given its size, influence and global reach. Gary had an encyclopedic knowledge of Apple’s stores and his site — now sadly offline — was an incredible resource.

Gary was also known for traveling all over the word to attend store openings, often camping out the night before. He visited London, Paris, Tokyo, Istanbul, Beijing and many, many other cities. Some saw this as eccentric, but the point was not the store opening itself, but the chance to socialize with a bunch of like-minded people. To get some idea of his devotion to his hobby, check out his Twitter and Flickr feeds, still online and full of pictures from his travels.

I wrote a profile of Gary a few years ago that is now also offline, so I’m resurrecting it below.

The new Steve Jobs movie gets just about everything wrong, says the PR veteran who worked with the Apple CEO during the first Macintosh’s launch. From the situations to the dialogue, almost nothing’s accurate.

“How many things are not true in the movie?” laughed Silicon Valley PR vet Andrea “Andy” Cunningham during a phone interview with Cult of Mac. “Several hundred!”

But Cunningham said she loves the new Steve Jobs biopic anyway, because it captures the truth — a truthier truth.

I’m super-excited to announce that Cult of Mac is launching a gadget buyback program that promises to pay more for used and broken Apple devices than Gazelle, Walmart and even Apple itself.

As we enter the annual upgrade season, we’ve teamed up with a U.S. recycling company to offer what we believe is the highest-paying buyback program right here at buyback.cultofmac.com.

We pay cash for old iPhones, iPads, iPods and MacBooks. We accept both used and broken devices — even dead iPhones that have fallen in the toilet.

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple CEO Tim Cook is urging competitors to copy Apple in the fight against climate change.

Speaking today at the BoxWorks 2015 conference at Moscone Center here, Cook said Apple’s rivals should copy its efforts to run their operations entirely on renewable energy.

“We are very focused on the environment,” he said. “Climate change is real, and we should stop denying it.”

SAN FRANCISCO — Will Tim Cook do anything to steal Google’s thunder?

The Apple CEO is back at the Moscone Center, this time for BoxWorks 2105, the annual gathering of customers and developers for enterprise cloud storage company Box.

It’s a rare speaking gig for Cook, who tends to limit his engagements to just a few high-profile events a year. While big and successful, Box’s conference is hardly one of the marquee events on the tech calendar. Unless it falls on the same exact day Google is announcing new products at its big Nexus media event.

“He’s f****ing with Google,” said one analyst in the press room when asked why Cook chose this event.

Cook is likely to talk up the new iPad Pro and Apple’s enterprise efforts, which include partnering with IBM and Cisco. Read on to see what he says. We’re liveblogging the event. Cook will be onstage at 9 a.m. Pacific.

It takes years to understand the appeal of the unboxing video. On the face of it, they’re very silly. And yet unboxing is one of digital video’s most popular and enduring genres.

Who wants to see someone else opening the box of a brand new gadget? Wouldn’t you want to do it yourself?

And therein lies their appeal — the vicarious pleasure of seeing a stranger enjoy a gadget you covet.

With that, here’s our contribution to the genre: Cult of Mac’s first unboxing video. Watch in enraptured fascination as we take the iPhone 6s Plus from its box.

In what appears to be a first, Apple is providing free hardware for software developers.

Monday could be the lucky day for a limited number of developers who signed up for the Apple TV Developer Kit.

Not only will they get the new hardware six weeks in advance of it going on sale, they’ll get it for free, Apple has confirmed.

Wow. That was a big deal. For a mere “s” upgrade, Apple went way above and beyond with today’s big product showcase. Three major product lines have been not just upgraded, but reinvented, and finally there’s a reason to buy the one that has been languishing — the Apple TV, which is now a gaming console as well as an entertainment center.

Maybe I’ve drunk too much Kool-Aid, but I thought this morning’s presentation was one for the history books.

Apple just announced a pair of gold finishes for the Apple Watch; new wristbands in a line of fall colors; new bands from the fashion house Hermes; and that watchOS 2 will ship Sept. 16.

My family and I just got back from a too-short vacation in Italy, and we learned something important while we were there: Real vacations don’t have e-mail.

See, my wife was worried about us racking up unspeakably high bills while we were abroad, so we ended up almost completely disabling our iPhones for the entire trip. How we fared without them is the subject of this week’s Kahney’s Korner.

I am super-psyched to introduce you to a new app coming soon to iOS: the Cult of Mac Magazine app.

The new version of our magazine app will be published every Saturday. I think it’s a really great way to read all the stuff we publish here during the week.

For me, it’s the burning question of 2015: “Should I buy an Apple Watch?”

As editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, everybody’s always asking me if Apple’s smartwatch is a must-buy. The simple answer is there’s no simple answer, for reasons that might surprise you.

Welcome to the new Cult of Mac! You probably noticed that we’ve freshened the place up a bit.

We have a new, minimalist design that we trust is easy to read and a pleasure to visit. We have new fonts, cleaner navigation, improved photo treatments and stories that are color-coded by category (news, reviews, how-tos and so on).

We also have a new, modern code base, which we hope will be a solid platform for lots more exciting things to come.

This is a heads up that Cult of Mac has a major site redesign coming Monday. We’re flipping the switch this weekend. If anything goes wrong, you’ll know why!

Here’s what we’ve got planned.

What vaulted Apple from its humble Silicon Valley origins to the absolute top of the business world? From its first desktop computer in 1976 to today’s category-crushing Apple Watch, the company is intensely focused on creating technology that will delight the masses.

That vision is best exemplified by Apple’s five most important products, which I’ve rounded up in this week’s edition of Kahney’s Korner. Some made the list for reasons that might surprise you.

SAN FRANCISCO — Teddy Winthrop is forgetful, a trait he inherited from his dad.

His father implored him to get a Day-Timer, an executive planner that was wildly popular in the ’80s. But the young entrepreneur dismissed the idea — his personal organizer was his iPhone. And that’s when it hit him: The world needed a Day-Timer for the iPhone.

So he started a company, Edward Field, selling beautifully made leather iPhone wallet cases. It’s going well so far, thanks partly to experience he gained working for his brother, the brains behind American Giant, manufacturer of the “world’s greatest hoodie.”

It’s festival season and there’s a festival for everything – even one for Apple II users.

It’s called KansasFest and it has been going since 1989. It’s one of the longest-running computer festivals out there and the amazing thing is the Apple II was discontinued in 1992.

The endurance of this machine is the subject of this week’s Kahney’s Korner.

The iPad was once the future of computing. When it was launched in 2010, we all thought we were not going to be using desktop machine and laptops anymore.

But sales have been flat and declining for the last couple of years. It came out of the gate like a rocket and everyone bought one. The thing is, nobody has been upgrading them.

Learn about what I think are the reasons and a big change coming to iPads with this week’s Kahney’s Korner.

I’ve had the Amazon Echo sitting on my desk for the last couple of months and it’s an odd device – and I actually think it’s pretty great.

It’s a voice-controlled, speaker-cum-shopping tube that can go in your kitchen, living room or bedroom. You use it for simple queries like, “How’s the weather?” or “How is my commute? or “What is Barack Obama’s middle name?”

Listen to me interact with this device on this week’s edition of Kahney’s Korner.

So far, Beats 1 has been absolutely great. I’m a fan, and it’s been less than 24 hours!

Apple’s new global, 24/7 radio station is everything I hoped for — a discovery-oriented platform showcasing what’s new and what’s good. Of all the features of Apple’s big update to its Music services, Beats 1 is what I most looked forward to.

“Our genre is ‘great,'” explained DJ Zane Lowe on his opening show Tuesday. “That’s all we’re looking for.”

And that’s all I’m looking for too. In fact, I’m already obsessed with A$AP Rocky, who was played on Lowe’s show and I’d never heard before (yeah, I know I’m sad). A$AP Rocky is just one of half-a-dozen new artists I’ve tagged in iTunes for further exploration, including Beck, who I thought I hated.

I’m actually worried how I’m going to keep up. But isn’t this what radio is for?

I want to spare you some of the pain that recently greeted me after a night out with friends. I returned to my car to find the rear window smashed out and my backpack gone. It contained my brand new MacBook and iPad.

The worry, of course, was whether my backpack was in the hands of tech-savvy crooks, so I prepared for the worst.

What I learned over a long weekend about my own approach to security is the subject of this week’s Kahney’s Korner.

Amazon’s Echo — an odd voice-activated domestic hub — just went on sale to the general public. If you’ve got $200 to burn, I recommend it. It’s oddly great — and it gives you a glimpse of the future.

If Apple’s Siri-controlled HomeKit comes close, controlling your home by voice is going to be a lot of fun.

SAN FRANCISCO — If you watched the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote earlier this week, you’d think it was a big love fest. But there’s a section of the audience sitting there in a cold, cold sweat.

Attendees are mostly software developers, and some of them are very nervous that Apple will announce something that will ruin their business overnight.

“The WWDC keynote is terrifying for developers,” said Josh Michaels, an independent software developer from Portland, Oregon, who runs Jetson Creative. “The uncertainty is the worst part.”

Take ReplayKit in iOS 9, a new feature that records games and app videos without the need for any external cameras or hardware.

Sounds great, unless you are Everyplay or Kamkord, a pair of young companies that raised millions of dollars to record games and app videos in iOS.

“They’re f**ked!” said a game developer at WWDC who asked not to be named.

We’re down here at WWDC, fishing for ProTips. It’s rich hunting ground. WWDC is the world’s biggest gathering of Apple developers, the alpha geeks, experts par excellence. What’s a ProTip? A ProTip is a nugget of knowledge, a little bit of expertise from someone in the know — a pro.

Astro HQ is a two-person indie software company that launched its first app in February.

Run by two ex-Apple engineers — Matt Ronge and Giovanni Donelli — their app was successful. They’re now making their livelihoods from their software. They’re living the dream! Independent app developers!

They’re as rare as unicorns.

Only 0.01 percent of app developers are financially successful, according to a depressing survey by Gartner.

Ronge and Donelli did a lot of things right, including their own app marketing, which they say was key to their successful launch.

They did the app marketing themselves, with no prior experience, and a lot of what they learned was thanks to one book.