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.
UPDATE: I added a short statement from stylus-maker Adonit below.
SAN FRANCISCO — Tim Ritchey is an expert in iPad styluses — the pressure-sensitive digital pens that draw with pinpoint accuracy on an iPad.
Ritchey works for Adonit, a company that makes a line of Bluetooth styli for the iPad. His job title is “OS architect.” He knows his stuff.
In the middle of a session at this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, he heard something that prompted him to send a panicky note to his colleagues in Slack, the popular messaging system.
“Oh shit!” he said.
Steve Jobs famously pledged that Apple would never ship an iOS device with a stylus, but there’s mounting evidence that the company is working on a new and bigger work-oriented iPad that will come with a stylus.
A couple of big clues dropped this week at WWDC.
Cult of Mac is at WWDC and AltConf fishing for ProTips. It’s a rich hunting ground — it’s 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.
It sounds counterintuitive, but for many iOS developers, the easy part is getting people to download their app from the App Store. The hard part is getting people to use the app. Ideally, developers want them to use the app regularly. They want them to get into the habit of using it.
How do you do that? Sally Shepard, an app consultant who spent many years working with big publishers, has a great little tip.
SAN FRANCISCO — Game developer Brianna Wu’s life became the inspiration for an episode of the hit cop show, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
While she was kinda flattered, she wasn’t entirely pleased. To get Law & Order: SVU‘s attention, your life has to be messed up one way or the other.
“There’s no good way to be on Law and Order,” she joked.
Every other year Apple releases an “S” version of the iPhone. Later this year, we’ll see the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. The “S” models generally deliver modest improvements — better cameras, better networking, faster chips. But the basic design remains the same. The “S” suffix means the same, but better.
And so it goes with this Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. In terms of announcements of import, WWDC 2015’s kickoff was an “S” upgrade. It built on the spectacular announcements of last year, but didn’t break huge new ground.
And that’s OK. “S” upgrades are often underrated.
Please, please, please let Apple’s Beats 1 radio station be good.
Of all the announcements at Monday’s WWDC keynote, that’s the one I personally am most excited about. When it launches June 30, Beats 1 will be a 24-hour global radio station run by three DJs from three different cities around the world.
I’m a music junkie. I listen to music radio all the time, especially Radio 1, the BBC’s flagship radio station in London. To be honest, a lot of it sucks, but a lot of it doesn’t. It allows me — an expat Limey living in California — to keep tabs on Britain’s awesome musical culture.
And that’s what I’m hoping for — that Apple’s billions will privately fund a radio station that’s like the BBC’s publicly funded Radio 1 — on a global scale.
Apple hinted at such ambitions in the launch video played during Monday’s keynote. Done right, it could be the great music discovery mechanism the entire music industry’s been looking for.
Named after a giant granite cliff in Yosemite National Park, Apple’s latest version of OS X looks pretty good, with new ways to manage windows and better performance. Most importantly, it’s now easy to mute annoying audio in open browser windows!
Unveiled during the Monday morning keynote at Apple’s big WWDC programmers’ conference, Apple’s OS X version 10.11 is called “El Capitan.” It will be available to the public as a beta in July and a final release in the fall.
OS X El Capitan looks pretty nifty. It has several new window management features — including a split-screen mode — that make it productivity nirvana!
Here’s a recap of everything that was shown off Monday.
Update:We’re back! We were finally able to get hold of someone at Facebook and get our Facebook page back. Many thanks to everyone who tried to help and offered support. We contacted someone at Facebook through a reader in Chicago, who happens to work for a big newspaper. He had a contact in Facebook’s media team and called her up. Within minutes I received an email asking for details, and two minutes after that it was fixed. In fact, it was shocking how quickly the situation was reversed, given that we’d been wrestling with it for almost 24 hours — many thanks to the Facebook insider who fixed the problem for us. However, my thesis still holds — Facebook is a locked vault. If you don’t know someone who knows someone who works there, you’re SOL. Oh, and no word on what happened. I asked them, but no reply as yet.
Much to our horror, Cult of Mac’s Facebook page got hacked Monday and turned into a spam site. The hackers have locked us out and we’re finding it impossible to regain control.
We’re trying desperately to contact Facebook, but the company offers no customer support whatsoever. There are no online submission forms, no support email addresses, and the phone automatically hangs up on you if you call. It’s impossible to raise a human being over there.
It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. But during this ongoing nightmare, I’ve discovered something important about Facebook and the kind of tech companies it represents.
Apple is such a strange and secretive company, the news that Jony Ive has been promoted is instead widely interpreted that he’s on his way out.
The Telegraph revealed Monday that Ive has been promoted to Chief Design Officer and freed from the day-to-day running of Apple’s Industrial Design studio.
This was greeted with speculation that Ive is actually stepping back. He’s taking it easy, many theorized, easing into semi-retirement. He’s already halfway out the door, and will soon move back to the United Kingdom, seems to be the consensus among pundits.
I think this is Kremlinology in the extreme. And a little perverse. Apple is often obtuse, and sometimes disingenuous or even dishonest, but I think this news should be taken at face value.
Apple has characterized the move as a promotion, and it is. Ive has been moved up into a rare position that gives him a ton of freedom. He now has the breathing room to be what he really wants to be: a pure designer.
In fact, the promotion allows him to take on an even stronger and more Steve Jobs-like role. We will see more design work from him, not less.