Apple has always been big in the educational market, but it’s something the company has pushed more than ever under Tim Cook — albeit with sometimes mixed results.
The dream of having schools fully embrace the Apple ecosystem certainly sounds pretty far off, however, when you hear that one school district in the U.S. is still reliant on almost 30-year-old Commodore Amiga 2000 computers to automate its air conditioning and heating systems.
Say it ain’t so, Grand Rapids, Michigan!
Some were outraged about the $10,000 cost of the Apple Watch Edition, but will people really race to see one of the glittery timepieces get obliterated by powerful neodymium magnets?
Oddball YouTube stress-tester TechRax clearly hopes so, because he recently plonked down the money to carry out just such an “experiment” in his quest for views. Check out the resulting video below.
Seriously, how does this guy get his money?
Is trouble brewing for Apple’s forthcoming Spaceship campus, set to be opened by the end of 2016?
According to a recent report, Apple’s initial contractors for the project — DPR Construction and Skanska USA — are parting ways with Apple, and will be transitioned off the build over the next several weeks.
It’s the weekend, which means that Cult of Mac is ready to bring you a roundup of the last week’s best new app releases and updates for iOS and Mac.
From the week's best new iOS shooter, to a significant live-streaming app update to Twitter, to a gorgeous new Mac Twitter client, we've got what you need to make your next week an 'appy one
Pun fully intended!
Given how secretive Apple is, it’s no surprise that we know relatively little about the role of Jony Ive’s designer BFF Marc Newson, who works on so-called “special projects” for the company.
In a recent interview, however, Newson spilled a few beans about his work at Apple — including the fact that it consumes about 60 percent of his time, and is a job he hopes to hold “indefinitely.”
Who can blame him?
A new report published today by Adobe demonstrates that, when it comes to both pay TV and the devices people choose for consuming digital media, Apple trounces the competition.
Having once dismissed its own Apple TV offering as just a “hobby,” the powers-that-be in Cupertino are likely to want to rethink that statement following the news that its set-top boxes doubled their share of premium video viewing quarter-over-quarter during the last year — overtaking Roku in the process.
Apple has confirmed that the Apple Watch is coming to a slew of new countries, as well as Apple Stores, this month.
Beginning Friday, June 26, customers in Italy, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and Taiwan will finally be able to throw down their cash for Apple’s debut wearable device by visiting the Apple Online Store or dropping into their local brick-and-mortar Apple retailer.
And that’s not all.
Jawbone’s fitness-tracking devices were among those booted out of the Apple Store to make room for the Apple Watch, but according to Jawbone’s senior product manager Jason Donahue, they’re about to make a return.
Donahue revealed this tidbit during a presentation in Japan earlier today, during which he told the press that the new UP2 fitness band is expected to hit Japanese Apple Stores in early July — and U.S. Apple Stores even earlier than this.
Hidden in HomeKit documentation published today is the intriguing confirmation that Apple TV will serve as the digital hub for Apple’s new home-automation setup.
It’s a reminder of just how seriously Apple now treats the set-top box that it dismissed as a “hobby” a few years ago.
Apple is likely to use next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference to announce the availability of Apple Watches in its brick-and-mortar retail stores, according to a new report. The announcement is said to be planned either as part of the WWDC keynote or directly afterward.
Apple’s next-generation iPhones may receive quite the resolution boost — with a new report coming out of China claiming that the forthcoming iPhone 6s handset will boast a Full HD display, while its larger sibling the iPhone 6s Plus will feature a dazzling 2K display.
If true, this would allow the iPhone to better compete against some of the high-end flagship Android handsets, which routinely offer 2K or “Quad HD” displays.
It’s a bad week for simple messages capable of bringing down entire apps. Following on from Apple’s Messages-crashing “Unicode of death” code, a nasty bug has been discovered in Skype, which promises to crash the software every time you attempt to sign in.
Thankfully, the bug doesn’t appear to have any effect on Skype for Mac, although it does work on the iOS version, as well as the Windows and Android versions.
And getting rid of it’s not easy.
Rumors about Apple making a return to the 4-inch form factor for future iPhones have been doing the rounds since late last year.
While they seem to have quietened down as of late, however, a new report injects some life into the story by claiming that Apple display panel maker AU Optronics is one of several companies involved with manufacturing 4-inch iPhone panels — for a device which could ship as early as Q1 2016.
The home of the future arrived today and, while not exactly a whimper, it wasn’t much of a bang either.
Where are the smart voice-activated refrigerators? Where are the Jetsons-style gizmos that have us firing up our Apple Pay, and convince us that Apple is taking home automation seriously?
While there’s nothing wrong with what we got, it was the same predictable range of smart light bulbs, thermostats, and other gadgets that techies have had for years.
And after a year of waiting, we want more. Much more.
Almost a year since Apple unveiled its home-automation platform HomeKit, the first compatible products were officially announced today — allowing you to start building that Jetsons-style smart home you’ve always dreamed about, operated via Siri using your iPhone, iPad or even Apple Watch.
Among the first wave of HomeKit offerings are smart lights, thermostats, and home sensors for tracking air quality, temperature, smoke, humidity, air pressure, energy, and water consumption in your house.
Check out the full list below.
Apple has expanded its “Shot on iPhone” print ad campaign with a batch of videos showing off the kind of beautiful footage it’s possible to record using the latest iPhone.
Instead of calling in the pros to film spectacular sights, the ads focus on serendipitous slices of everyday life, such as a ladybug on a twig or a sparrow eating from a person’s hand. As with the “Shot on iPhone” print ads, the spots were crowdsourced from regular iPhone users.
And you know what? Considering that each one is just 15 seconds long (with five seconds being the Apple logo and the “Shot on iPhone 6” tagline), they’re actually pretty darn great!
According to Jony Ive, the Apple Watch project was first touted shortly after Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. But what would it have been like had Apple’s legendary co-founder lived to see the arrival of Apple’s debut into the smartwatch market?
To give us an idea, one dedicated Apple fan cut up and reassembled old “Stevenote” speeches to piece together an Apple Watch ad narrated by Jobs himself. Considering that it relies on old sound bytes about unrelated products, it actually works.
Check it out below. Bonus points if you can work out where each of the quotes originally came from!
New technology dreamed up by Apple would allow users to control an interface by simply striking a pose. This would work by having Apple devices generate a depth map for identifying “a head and at least one arm of the humanoid form” from any image in which one appears.
A way to switch on our next Apple TV by waving a hand or turning your head toward the screen? Yes please!
When people talk about Apple’s Irish operations, it’s normally negatively, regarding questionable tax practices. But the company operates a 4,000-person factory in Cork, Ireland, that builds iMacs — and it’s the only Apple-owned manufacturing facility in the world.
The Irish Examiner recently got a peek inside the secretive Apple manufacturing plant in Cork. Check out some photos below.
The Typo Keyboard is dead. Long live… well, other iPhone 6 cases, we guess.
In a rare win for BlackBerry, the company today announced that it has come to an agreement with Typo, the Ryan Seacrest-funded company behind the BlackBerry-style iPhone keyboard. The agreement means that Typo will cease selling its keyboards for any device under 7.9-inches in size.
Being an Apple manufacturer is a pretty lucrative market if you can get in on it, which is why it’s no surprise to hear that Apple’s existing partners are constantly fending off challenges from upstarts promising to do whatever they can do — only cheaper and better.
According to a new report, Japanese manufacturers are currently making a concerted effort to secure more orders from Apple, which currently deals mainly with companies based in Taiwan and China.
If the Japan-based companies do manage to muscle-in on the Apple supply chain, it could result in iPhone manufacturing becoming even more of an international affair than it already is, while also having a potentially massive impact on existing Chinese iPhone makers.
Apple’s plans for its relaunched Beats Music streaming music service, rumored to be revealed at next week’s WWDC, took another step forward this weekend.
A new report suggests that Apple is currently in talks with Drake, Pharrell Williams and David Guetta for them to come on board as guest DJs for iTunes Radio. As three of the biggest names in music, having these artists on its roster would give Apple a massive selling point in its upcoming streaming music war with rivals like Spotify.
Have you ever thrown away something you regretted later on? If so, you have something in common with the San Francisco Bay Area woman who recently junked a vintage Apple-1 computer — one of just 200 surviving machines created by Steve Jobs and the Woz way back in 1976.
Fortunately the ultra-rare desktop was recognized by a member of the recycling firm she left it at. They sold it to a private collector for $200,000, and now want to track down the unwitting donor to give her the 50 percent they say the company owes.
Unlike my brethren in Cult of Mac’s shiny San Francisco HQ, I’m British — which means that weather is a minor obsession which dominates the majority of my waking thoughts and conversation.
There are a number of different meteorological apps for Apple Watch, but Weather Nerd is maybe my favorite: offering detailed notes on rain ("10 minutes away”), forecast comparisons with the previous day, and far more. Oh, and its forecasts are super-precise, too.
Download: Weather Nerd ($3.99)
Okay, so it’s not really Apple news, but — honestly — who could complain about a robot cheetah on a Friday afternoon?
Given Google’s disappointing lack of killer robots at its oddly boring I/O keynote yesterday, MIT has fortunately stepped up to the plate by unleashing a new video of its metallic quadruped autonomously leaping hurdles like some kind of horse Terminator.
Check out the video below. Then start running.