Luke Dormehl - page 304

It’s been pretty much a year since ground was broken on the “spaceship” Apple Campus 2, and things are progressing at a rate of knots.

In a new photo provided by Apple, and posted by the city of Cupertino, the company’s $5 billion campus can be seen taking shape. The image is a reminder of just how big the campus is set to be, since it will house a massive 13,000 employees — or the equivalent of 35 fully-filled Boeing 747s. Tim Cook has called the campus Apple’s “home for innovation and creativity for decades to come.”

The city of Cupertino’s website makes note of a schedule for the project, noting that earthwork is set to continue until the middle of next year, while construction on the building itself will be completed by late 2016.

NFC payments might be easy, but up until now it’s fairly safe to say that they’ve never been cool in the conventional sense. Hoping to change that perspective is a new TV spot by Chase bank, which shows Apple Pay being used by super-cool indie band Bleachers.

The ad shows the indie band travelling around Los Angeles, buying items with their iPhones. In a sense, it’s a bit similar to Eddy Cue’s recent Apple Pay demo, except instead of being a middle-aged man buying Frozen toys, it’s a rockin’ pop band buying custom guitars, cool haircuts and nachos.

Check out the ad after the jump.

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is one of the most reliable analysts out there as relates to upcoming Apple products. Having called various things correctly in the run-up to the iPhone 6’s release (such as Apple’s sapphire manufacturing issues), he’s now forecasting numbers for the handsets over the holiday season — And they’re big!

In a new report to investors, Kuo predicts that Apple will sell a giant 71.5 million iPhone 6 and 6 Plus units over the 3-month holiday period. By comparison, one year ago the company sold 51 million iPhones during that same period.

Kuo’s research note also touches on several other topics, including the future of the iPhone 4s and 5c, as well as early speculation about the iPhone 7.

Apple has announced plans for its “biggest fundraising push yet” for this year’s World AIDS Day on December 1 — with a dedicated new section of the App Store, and plans to donate a portion of all sales on two of the year’s busiest shopping days.

“Apple is a proud supporter of (RED) because we believe the gift of life is the most important gift anyone can give,” Tim Cook said in a statement. “For eight years, our customers have been helping fight AIDS in Africa by funding life-saving treatments which are having a profoundly positive impact.”

“This year we are launching our biggest fundraising push yet with the participation of Apple’s retail and online stores, and some of the brightest minds in the App Store are lending their talents to the effort as well.”

So how can you help?

Depending on whether or not you can fulfil what is asked of you, being an Apple supplier sounds like it’s either the best or worst experience imaginable.

In the wake of the crashing and burning of Apple’s former sapphire supplier GT Advanced Technologies, some of Cupertino’s other contractors have pitched in with their take; filling the Wall Street Journal in on a few of the lessons they’ve learned along their roller coaster rides with Apple.

The two biggest take-homes? Don’t make promises you can’t keep, and don’t rely too much on Cupertino.

Whether you’re shopping for your sweetie or trying to find something for your mum, picking presents for the important women in your life can prove daunting. Cult of Mac is here to help with this list of the top 10 gifts we’ll be buying for the fairer sex this year.

From clothes to quirky tech, we’ve got you covered.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of my favorite dystopian sci-fi novels, and according to Hollywood magazine Deadline, it’s about to be brought to the screen courtesy of the Jason Bourne movies’ director Paul Greengrass.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, Nineteen Eighty-Four tells the story of a surveillance heavy future (well, technically the past at this point) in which an everyman named Winston Smith rebels against an all-knowing government in an age of omnipresent surveillance and perpetual war.

The patent-holding consortium Rockstar — which includes Apple among its members, alongside Microsoft, BlackBerry and others — has reached a settlement with Google.

In a lawsuit filed last October, Rockstar alleged that Google was infringing on 7 different search-related patents, which had been acquired by Rockstar in 2011 following the bankruptcy of networking products supplier Nortel.

Rockstar outbid Google to acquire the patents, for which it paid $4.5 billion. Some reports put Apple’s contribution as high as $2.6 billion.

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Foxconn is set to spend $2.6 billion building a new factory in Taiwan exclusively to create displays for Apple.

Equipment installation for the factory is likely to begin next month, with the aim of starting mass production of panels by the end of 2015. The factory will require hiring an addition workforce of 2,300 people, and is going to be built at Innolux’s Kaohsiung Science Park campus in Southern Taiwan.

Foxconn currently has factories in China dedicated to assembling iPhones and iPads, but this will be the company’s first designed entirely with the goal of producing Apple components to go inside the devices.

Apple may build smoke detectors into future Macs and iOS devices, according to a patent application published Thursday.

As users move toward the smart home, courtesy of services like Apple’s HomeKit, the idea is that Macs, iPhones and iPads could intelligently monitor for signs of a fire and trigger various mechanisms accordingly.

This could mean sending users a text or email alerting them of the danger, calling 911 for emergency assistance, or even activating fire suppression equipment.

No matter what the reason, or who was at fault, the collapse in Apple’s relationship with former sapphire supplier GT Advanced Technologies came down to one thing: the latter company wasn’t able to meet Apple’s terms.

Now photos published by the Wall Street Journal show some of GTAT’s sapphire errors, made just days before Apple signed a deal for the company to produce sapphire displays to be used in next generation iPhones. The 578 pound sapphire cylinders — known as boules — featured multiple flaws, which rendered the majority unusable.

While Apple certainly pushes its manufacturers hard to seemingly achieve the impossible on tighter and tighter profit margins, the picture that emerges from the WSJ article is of GT as a chaotic company, struggling from the very start to fulfil Apple’s expectations.

Just as Steve Jobs had to go through some frustrating years of failure before returning to Apple to turn in around, so too is the Aaron Sorkin Jobs biopic experiencing its fair share of setbacks.

Following the recent news that Christian Bale has, err, bailed on the project, now Hollywood magazine Deadline is reporting that the movie is being put into turnaround by its studio, Sony Pictures. Turnaround refers to a deal whereby the rights to a particular movie are sold from one studio to another in exchange for the cost of development, plus interest.

Exactly why the film is supposedly being dropped by Sony isn’t known, particularly since the Sony-owned Columbia Pictures did so well both critically and commercially from Sorkin’s previous true tech drama, in 2010’s The Social Network. It may, however, have something to do with schedules.

My Cult of Mac colleague Killian is obsessed with the actor Tom Hanks to an almost worrying degree.

I’ve never been to his home before (Killian’s, not Hanks’ — although I’ve not been there either), but I like to imagine that it’s full of Forrest Gump and Castaway posters, with the focal point being a single lock of the actor’s hair kept in an airtight jar. Surrounded by candles, with an iPod dock playing the soundtrack to The Da Vinci Code on repeat.

At any other time of year this would seem irrelevant, were today not the occasion upon which Hanx Writer, a typewriter app created by actor and typewriter fan Hanks, went universal on iOS.

Having been an avid Sim City player going back 20+ years, I will never not be excited about a new game in the franchise.

EA has just released a new trailer for its upcoming SimCity BuildIt worldwide launch, and it has to be said that it looks pretty darn fantastic.

Letting you do all the building, demolition, micro-management and, err, UFO survival the game series is known for, the mobile-only title incorporates full 360° controls, which means that you can explore your beautiful 3-D city from an angle you want.

Is there anything more punk rock than spending loads of money on in-app purchases for iPad games? If your answer is a resounding “yes, of course there is,” prepare to argue with former Sex Pistols screecher John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon.

Speaking with the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper, Lydon claims he spent “10,000 f*cking pounds” (around $15,600) during a two-year app-buying bender on his iPad.

“I got into Game of Thrones, Game of War, Real Racing, and I just wanted to up the ante,” he said, making downloading apps sound like the new version of throwing TVs out of hotel windows. “[L]ike an idiot I didn’t check myself. I’ve been checked now. But there’s a kid in me, see? A bit of my childhood was taken from me and I’m determined to bring it back.”

Apple plans to repurpose its factory in Mesa, Arizona, following the spectacular implosion of its relationship with sapphire manufacturer GT Advanced Technologies.

A report from Bloomberg cites Mesa City Manager Christopher Brady as the source of the information. Apple, for its part, has said that it wants to focus “on preserving jobs in Arizona” and will continue to “work with state and local officials as we consider our next steps.”

“A million dollars isn’t cool,” says Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker during one scene in The Social Network. “You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.”

If that’s the case, then people are going to need to come up with new words to describe Apple, because according to some of Wall Street’s best and brightest, the company could hit a trillion dollar valuation as early as next year.

Cupertino has its chic Apple Watch, Redmond has its Microsoft Band, and now Intel has unveiled its own female-friendly take on the wearable phenomenon with a $495 smart bracelet — which will allow users to receive and respond to text messages, emails and other notifications.

Called the MICA, the fashion-conscious bracelet boasts a sapphire 1.6-inch, 256 x 160 OLED curved screen on the inside of the wrist. As with the Apple Watch there are multiple styles available — ranging from black and white water snake skin, Chinese pearls, Madagascan lapis stones, South African tiger’s eye, and Russian obsidian.

The only time Apple publicly acknowledges the jailbreak community is when, semi-tauntingly, it lists the people responsible for finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in iOS that have now been patched.

In the aftermath of its just-released iOS 8.1.1 update, Apple adds a mention to its security logs of the China-based PanguTeam, who discovered three vulnerabilities fixed in the latest update of Apple’s mobile OS.

Although tech watchers have known about Apple Pay for some time now, for a large percentage of the general public the concept of NFC transactions is still new — and potentially scary.

Hoping to change that perception, Eddy Cue made an appearance on KTLA’s Tech Report yesterday, where he took host Rich DeMuro on a “shopping spree” to show off Apple’s “new way to pay.”

Want to see one of Apple’s top executives buy oatmeal and Frozen toys using his iPhone? Well, now you can.

One way you can tell a technology is becoming mainstream is when it starts to have brushes with the law. We saw it in the 1980s with the first computer hacker trials, more recently with the appearance of Google Glass, and now with fitness trackers — courtesy of a personal injury suit taking place in Canada.

In what is thought to be the first ever case of data from a wearable device being used in court, a female Calgary plaintiff is using information gathered by her Fitbit device to demonstrate that her activity levels have dropped dramatically following an accident.

The data is being analyzed by a third-party analytics firm called Vivametrica, which will make its findings known to the court.

The iPad is great for making music, but the lack of physical keys can be a drag for keyboardists. That shortcoming prompted Adam Kumpf to hack together a miniature piano attachment for the tablet using nothing more than wooden clothespins, aluminum foil, a few pieces of stiff cardboard and some rubber bands

Total cost? Less than $5.

Despite his creation’s humble DIY origins, Kumpf thinks the idea of iPad add-ons has the potential to take touchscreens to the next level.

“There’s an innate desire that users have to go beyond what the screen can usually do,” the 31-year-old MIT graduate tells Cult of Mac. “I strongly believe that there’s a world of accessories relating to capacitive touchscreens that’s just waiting to be explored.”

Apple has apparently put its faith in Samsung to build the A-series application processors for its next generation iPhones and iPads, according to a new report coming out of Korea.

As of recently, Samsung was competing with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to build the chips, which carry a contract said to be worth “billions of dollars.”

Unlike conventional memory chips, application processors reportedly count as logic chips and are said to carry much higher margins. From 2016, Samsung will supply 80% of the APs used in Apple devices, while TSMC will provide the remaining 20%.

Apple has announced that its China App Store, the second biggest in the world, is now accepting UnionPay as a payment option for customers.

As the most popular payment card in China — with over 4.5 billion cards issued to date — the move will make it simpler and more convenient for Apple users in China to purchase apps, since customers can now easily link their Apple ID with a UnionPay debit or credit card.

“The ability to buy apps and make purchases using UnionPay cards has been one of the most requested features from our customers in China,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, is quoted as saying in Apple’s statement. “China is already our second largest market for app downloads, and now we’re providing users with an incredibly convenient way to purchase their favorite apps with just one-tap.”