LAS VEGAS — CES 2016 is about to kick off. The world’s biggest consumer electronics show, which is held each January in Las Vegas, starts this week. At a press preview Monday night, we got a peek at some of the industry’s latest, greatest offerings.
Here’s some of the stuff we think is pretty cool. Check out a cocktail robot, a monster Wi-Fi router that promises to eliminate dead spots, and a fixed-wing drone that flies like a hawk.
Happy holidays everyone, however you celebrate it: Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, kickin’ Kwanzaa and a tipsy New Year!
We trust you’re in the company of family and friends, stuffing your faces and giving and receiving in the best spirit of the holidays.
Things are going be quiet around here for a few days while we enjoy a short break. We have a great Mighty Mac Freebies giveaway and several more “best-of-the-year” posts coming up.
We’ll be back in the New Year with a bang from Las Vegas! We have a crew heading to CES 2016, bringing you all the best in tech.
Meanwhile, take it easy on the eggnog.
Leander Kahney
Editor & publisher
This feature is adapted from my book, Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products. It offers a rare look inside one of Apple’s most secretive institutions: the Industrial Design studio.
Where do Apple’s great products come from?
For the last 18 years — since Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1997 — most of them have come out of Apple’s Industrial Design studio, a small and secretive group of creatives headed up by celebrated British designer Sir Jony Ive.
This post contains affiliate links. Cult of Mac may earn a commission when you use our links to buy items.
Very few outsiders have been inside Apple’s Industrial Design Studio, the amazingly creative product lab behind the company’s blockbuster hardware.
That may change this weekend, when 60 Minutes broadcasts a tour of the design lab. Apple’s lead designer, Jony Ive, gave journalist Charlie Rose a peek at the facility earlier this year — and his report airs this Sunday.
But you can take a tour of Apple’s secret Industrial Design studio right now. A virtual one, anyway.
The flagship speaker from Sonos has been revamped, redesigned and relaunched. The result is awesome.
The new Play:5 is a big, beefy speaker that sounds absolutely wonderful. It’s available in stores today, and although it’s not cheap, I’d recommend you go out and get one. Or two. Stereo is even better.
iPad Pro Diary, Day 2: I have a shameful confession to make. Even though I’ve been using an iPad and iPhone for years, I haven’t really been using them.
I do a few things that haven’t changed for donkeys. I read on the iPad all the time and send the odd email. I play songs on Sonos. I played Kingdom Rush a few times. I watched a Netflix video. That’s about it.
My iPhone I use more, but nothing heavy duty. Messaging, email, photos and maps. The odd phone call.
But now that I’m forcing myself to use the iPad Pro for work — to see if it really is a PC replacement — I’m discovering something unesxpected: That the iOS ecosytem is far deeper, more productive, and better integrated than I knew.
Not only is work easier on the iPad these days, it’s a lot more fun.
The iPad Pro is being hailed as “a new kind of computer,” but as some have noted, it’s really the top half of a new kind of computer. Missing is the bottom half — the keyboard.
Apple has a solution for that — the $169 Smart Keyboard, which turns the iPad Pro into a laptop lookalike. But there’s a fantastic alternative: Logitech’s Create keyboard and case.
Logitech’s Create has several advantages over Apple’s Smart Keyboard. First, it’s a keyboard and a case that turns the Pro into a proper faux laptop (Apple’s keyboard is half a case that covers only the iPad’s screen). Logitech’s keyboard has fantastic chicklet keys, versus Apple’s hated low-travel flat keys; and it’s backlit, an essential requirement for any keyboard.
All in all, Logitech’s $150 backlit keyboard turns the iPad Pro into a MacBook — but a MacBook with cool extra features like Touch ID and a touch-sensitive screen.
iPad Pro Diray, Day One: Instead of writing a long and boring product review, I’m going to try something new with the iPad Pro. I’m pulling a Tim Cook: I’m using it as my main and only machine for a while. I’ll be keeping a diary of how it goes.
In fact, I’m typing this on it.
The question everyone is asking — and it’s Apple’s pitch for the Pro — is that this a bone fide computer. It’s not a silly tablet any more. It’s a heavy duty tool for Pros — a jackhammer for creatives.
I’m going to find out…
I ordered the iPad Pro online at first light this morning and picked it up at the Apple Store in Stonestown, San Francisco, just as the store opened. Aside from the sticker shock — more than $1,326.49 for the iPad, Pencil and Smart Keyboard — I was surprised at how readily it is available. Seems like there’s plenty in stock, despite reports of short supply.
The iPad Pro is getting lukewarm reviews, but isn’t that what we always get from the professional reviewers? The same-old measured response that’s neither wildly enthusiastic nor harshly critical? It was the same with the iPhone 6s-es, the new MacBook, and the 6 Plus before that. “They’re not for everyone!” the reviews tended to say.
Well, bollocks! I’m excited about the iPad Pro. I’m as excited as I was about the first big-screen iPhone a couple of years ago. I think size does matter, and the bigger screen on these devices makes a huge difference.
But we’ll see. I just got my hands on it. Check out the video to see what’s in the box and my initial impressions.
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.
