Luke Dormehl - page 293

Ahead of Apple’s March 9 event, the Apple Watch has popped up in another non-tech magazine, boasting some fashion shots of it being worn by a male model. The magazine is East Touch, a Hong Kong-based Cantonese magazine aimed at (predominantly female) readers between the ages of 20-30, and covering mainly celebrity, fashion and entertainment news stories.

This is just the latest fashion publication to feature a look at the Apple Watch, following shortly after the devices was profiled with a multipage spread in the March issue of Vogue.

A previously quiet town in California, today Cupertino is synonymous with Apple in the same way that Redmond is with Microsoft, Compton is with rapper and Beats founder Dr. Dre, and Gotham City is associated with Batman.

A fascinating new article for the Columbus Dispatch reveals the double-edged sword of being a town so closely tied in with the rise-and-fall fortunes of a single company. While it’s certainly great when times are good, it also means that a major stumble could have major repercussions for the 58,000-person city Steve Jobs grew up in and called home.

With the long-awaited “spaceship” Apple Campus 2 set for completion in 2016, Cupertino’s reliance on Apple is only going to increase over the coming years. And one thing’s for sure: the once sleepy city needs Apple a whole lot more than Apple needs it!

After China, India is the next big frontier for Apple: with a massive 1.2 billion citizens, and an impressively growing smartphone market that is far from saturated.

So far Apple has had great success in the country, as the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have sold roughly twice the volume of previous generation iPhones, and Apple has even proved willing to take a short-term hit on the earnings front to get more iPhones into people’s hands in the long run.

But one company isn’t happy about the iPhone’s success in India — and it’s doubling its efforts to get Apple barred from using the popular smartphone name in the country altogether.

Whether Apple is actually building a car, or it’s just a controlled leak to show that the company has more planned after the Apple Watch, isn’t known yet. What is sure, though, is that Apple is now legally covered if it wants to slap its name and logo onto an automobile.

Using its regular law firm Baker & McKenzie in Zurich, Apple recently expanded its corporate description to not just include the current array of watches, smartphones, tablets and computers, but vehicles, too. And Apple’s lawyers aren’t taking any chances, either. Apple aircraft, anyone?

Former Apple retail boss Ron Johnson is taking on a new mission: helping online retailer Nasty Gal move into the brick-and-mortar retail space.

According to Re/code, Johnson is leading a $16 million investment in the ultra-chic brand, which started out in 2006 as an eBay store, and has risen to bring in more than $100 million in annual revenue. Johnson will also be joining the company’s board of directors, while simultaneously acting as the CEO of his as-yet-unlaunched e-commerce startup, Enjoy.

Last year around 1.4 Million U.S. households reportedly threw in the towel on Pay TV and embraced the cord-cutting revolution. And it seems that the idea of consuming media in non-traditional ways starts young, with Nickelodeon this week announcing its plans to launch a subscription video service aimed at preschoolers.

Called Noggin, the service takes the form of an iOS app set to launch on March 5. Costing just $5.99 per month, it will be advertising-free, and will boast a range of kids’ shows, such as “Blue’s Clues” and “Little Bear” that are not currently part of Nickelodeon’s assorted TV networks.

There is a pretty set pattern that happens whenever Apple enters a new industry: evidenced everywhere from iTunes to the iPhone to the (rumored) Apple Car.

First of all, the established old guard dismiss Apple as a tech company that knows nothing about their business, then starts to panic when it realizes what it’s in a fight it may well lose, and then finally follows Apple down whichever path it is going.

Having initially dismissed Apple’s debut timepiece, Swiss watchmakers are now squirming as the Apple Watch’s April launch date creeps ever closer. First off, TAG Heur admitted it was working on a smartwatch and now fellow Swiss watch company Mondaine has revealed it is doing much the same.

It may be a desperation move on the part of Mondaine but, hey, as desperation moves go, it’s a pretty gorgeous one!

In one to file under “N” for “Never happening,” mobile phone company Ericsson has filed seven new lawsuits asking the U.S. International Trade Commission to block Apple products, such as the iPhone, from selling in the United States.

The lawsuits allege that Apple is infringing on up to 41 patents, related to user interfaces, battery saving, and operating systems. Kasim Alfalahi, Ericsson’s chief intellectual property officer, claims that the company has offered Apple a license for the technology, but has been turned down.

Chances are that the majority of people reading this won’t be looking for a way to make the Apple Watch more expensive.

With a rumored price in excess of $10,000 for the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition, most of us would have to take out a second mortgage on our house before we could dream of picking up the watches on the higher end of Apple’s wearable collection.

For some individuals, however, solid gold just isn’t enough — which is why luxury design company Brikk today announced its plans to increase the decadence by offering diamond-encrusted Apple Watches for sale. Somewhere, you just know that Kanye West is picking up his blinged-out iPhone 6 Plus and getting ready to make an order!

Everyone loves action figures, right?

With the rarer offerings regularly carrying price tags that put them out of reach for most allowances, however, they’re no longer exclusively for kids. With that in mind, here’s Cult of Mac’s list of the must-have figures with price tags to match. Featuring everything from pro wrestlers to sci-fi characters, we’re sure you’ll find something to tempt you.

Play nicely, now!

For a long time, Apple Maps was a laughing stock. Then it started getting better. Apple ironed out the glitches, began updating Apple Maps every day, and introduced Flyover, which gave you a 3-D view of major cities as they would look from the sky.

Now it’s taken that technology one step further in an effort to win the mapping war versus Google: Apple Maps is going real-time.

Thanks to a new update, London’s Big Ben clock tower will now show the real time, while the iconic London Eye will rotate. Those are the only real-time updates we’ve spotted so far, but Apple is reportedly looking to add more moving elements to cities over the following year.

On the consumer side, Apple couldn’t be hotter in China: not only taking the top spot for smartphone sales in the country for the first time ever, but also beating out the likes of Gucci and Chanel to be named China’s favorite luxury brand.

It is on the more official side of the equation where Apple is struggling, however. In what commentators are calling a response to widespread Western cyber-surveillance, the Chinese government has dropped Apple products from its list of approved state purchases.

The Apple Watch reveal back in September was big on excitement, but short on details. Among those things that Apple failed to mention was whether or not Cupertino’s new smartwatch will be able to withstand liquids — making it suitable for, say, swimming or washing the dishes.

While we still don’t have a final, definitive answer on what is and is not advisable with the Apple Watch, Tim Cook shed a bit of light on the mystery during a Q&A session with staff at the Kurfürstendamm Apple Store in Berlin, Germany, where he is currently visiting. Cook said that that he wears his Apple Watch “even in the shower.”

From minor controversies like Antennagate to being kicked out of his own company and then returning triumphantly, Steve Jobs got out of plenty of tight squeezes in his life.

Now that he’s gone, it seems that that same spirit of near-misses and daring triumphs is left to Venus, Jobs’ 256-foot, $120 million super-yacht.

Having visited Montenegro, Palma, Gibraltar, Horta Azores and many other exotic locations since Jobs’ death in 2011, the yacht recently had a close call while passing through a bridge in Saint Martin, an island in the northeast Caribbean, approximately 185 miles east of Puerto Rico.

Check out the video after the jump.

Apple has been ordered to shell out $532.9 million to a patent troll after apparently infringing on intellectual property with iTunes features related to data storage and managing access through payment systems.

The fee was awarded by a Texas court, and was positioned between the $852 million Smartflash was seeking in damages and the $4.5 million Apple had argued for.

It was recently Chinese New Year, and to celebrate, thousands of people flocked to a well-known Buddhist temple in the country’s Guangdong province to make offerings.

One Apple super-fan apparently decided to eschew cash donations for something far more valuable, however: his new iPhone 6 Plus.

A shot of the man depositing the super-sized Apple smartphone in the temple’s donation box was featured in Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post. The saddest part? His generous offering was rejected.

Tonight, history is made as Modern Family becomes the first major TV show to ever air an episode shot almost entirely using Apple products — ranging from the iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2 to MacBook FaceTime cameras.

But while Apple products are famously easy to use, the episode itself contained numerous challenges: taking more than three months to complete, and a variety of nifty filmmaking tricks. To find out more details, BuzzFeed News reached out to the show’s executive producer and co-creator, Steve Levitan, to get some added insight about the challenges of making this unusual show.

The behind-the-scenes video is available to watch online, or download via iTunes.

When you’re a company the size of Apple, sometimes you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Having recently paved the way for racially diverse emoji by adding them to both Mac and iOS, Apple is now being attacked for the shade of yellow used for its Asian faces, which some critics claim is borderline racist.

Call it Newton’s third law of Apple analysts: For every extreme reaction one way, there is an equally extreme reaction the other.

In this case, what that means is that while some doomsayers are happy to write off the Apple Watch as the worst thing Apple has done since building its own smartphone, taking on the music industry with iTunes, [insert actual bad decision], others go in totally the opposite direction and predict a landslide victory in Apple’s favor.

Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research falls somewhat into the latter category. His prediction? That the Apple Watch will have 100,000 apps ready to go when it launches in April, and that 42 million units will have sold by the end of December.

It may sound like the definition of #firstworldproblems, but some residents of New York’s Upper East Side aren’t happy that they’re about to get a gorgeous new Apple Store on their doorstep, according to a petition.

In fact, they’re mad as hell — and they’re not gonna take it anymore!

The question of when European iPhone owners can expect to start using Apple Pay may be answered sooner rather than later. Visa Europe has announced that it is putting in place the infrastructure to allow contactless payment terminals to support the “tokenization” service used by Apple Pay.

The technology will be in place by mid-April, after which Apple could theoretically introduce Apple Pay anytime it wishes.

People hoping that Apple will drop the Samsung albatross from around its neck for the forthcoming iPhone 6s may be disappointed.

According to a new report coming from the Asian supply chain, Samsung has come to an agreement with Apple to supply new 20nm LPDDR4 DRAM memory chips for the next generation iPhone, expected this September. Samsung will reportedly provide half of the chips Apple needs for its next iPhone, and has no problems upping the order if more are required.

Had he lived, today would have marked the 60th birthday of Steve Jobs, who was born February 24, 1955.

While most of the tributes to Jobs will no doubt highlight later events in his life — the unveiling of the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone or the iPad — I instead wanted to mark the occasion with one of the lesser-known Jobs videos: his first television interview, recorded around the time the Apple II was making waves.

If you never thought you’d see the day when Jobs would geek out over seeing himself on a television screen, check out the video after the jump.

When you’re one of the closest things the programming world has to a rock star, you might assume that — when the time comes to pass your godly coding powers onto the next generation — you’d hand your offspring a brand new iPad and a crash course in the likes of Swift: the insanely popular state-of-the-art iOS language unveiled at last year’s WWDC.

Try telling that to John Carmack! The legendary coder behind the smash hit games Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake (today working at Oculus VR) recently shared a picture of his young son’s home computer lessons. Carmack’s choice for suitable hardware and software? BASIC on the 1984-era Apple IIc.

He’s kicking it old-school!

iTunes might currently be flagging compared to rivals like Spotify, but it seems that Apple has some big ideas to bolster its music services — and unlike many companies in Silicon Valley, they’re not going to be based solely on better algorithms.

In a new job posting, Apple makes clear that it wants to lead the way when it comes to specialized employees who know their music. In particular, the company is seeking an editorial producer, based in London, with a background in both music journalism and pop culture.