Call me cynical, but when I saw the latest ad in the “If it’s not an iPhone, it’s not an iPhone” series Thursday afternoon, I felt a little uneasy.
Sure, there’s over a million stores you can use Apple Pay in, but if this ad is to be believed, they’re all the same corporate-owned stores you’ll see in every mall across the US.
Ugh.
Check out the Apple Pay video below.
“I guess I’m known as that firmware-poking guy,” says Hamza Sood, the young hacker who most recently found a way to create and add custom watch faces to Apple Watch.
Cult of Mac chatted with the London-based 19-year-old via email to find out more about what makes him tick.
Taking iPhone video is usually a pretty manual affair. You try to hold your hands steady, but eventually some shudder creeps in. Trying to maintain a steady focal point can be tricky, especially if you’re filming a larger scene, like a concert or play.
You could use a tripod, but they’re big, bulky and require some setup. You don’t want to move around with a tripod.
Monopods, however, offer the stability and easy-panning joy of a tripod without all the fuss. Manfrotto’s monopod (the aptly-named 562B-1) is a solid, tall, adjustable, simply fantastic accessory to make all your videos, iPhone or otherwise, look much more professional.
Seminal magazine-style news aggregation app Flipboard is aiming to compete with Apple News by introducing a system that lets users rate stories and ultimately adjust the mix of their home feed.
“No matter where you are on Flipboard, if you see something you like and want to get more of it in your Cover Stories, tap ‘More like this,'” says the Flipboard website, “If you’d rather see less of something, tap ‘Less like this.’”
Looks like we’ve got some wear issues on the Apple Watch, especially the Space Gray ones. There are posts on Reddit and the Apple Discussion Forums that show both the Apple logo and actual text etched into the back of the watches peeling off.
Apple Discussions user dougie70w says that he bought his Apple Watch at the beginning of June “and the band started to peel part so bad that I replaced it with an after market metal band that I purchaced on Amazon.”
He’s got an appointment at a local Apple Store today and hopes that having Apple Care will let him get a replacement.
Closed captioning is useful to those with a hearing impairment to make the audio of videos accessible. Subtitles help those who speak a different language understand what’s going on in a film not in their original language.
You can enable these features on your Apple TV, but it’s not super-intuitive — there’s no single button to make it happen.
However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t easy. Here’s how to turn on Apple TV subtitles, even if you just want to watch a scary movie at night and have the sound turned down.
What the hell, internet? Apple Music, for all its growing pains and glitches, is a fantastic music streaming service.
It’s free unlimited music now, cheaper unlimited music later, and Apple Music is undoubtedly going to get better, especially if you’re already tied into Apple’s ecosystem.
If you take off before the trial period ends, you’re gonna miss out.
WhatsApp is a pretty popular messaging app that went from 200 million daily active users in April of 2013 to 800 million of them as of April 2015.
Unlike competitor SnapChat, however, WhatsApp will save every photo and video file sent to you to your Camera Roll. This could make for some embarrassing moments when you’re swiping through your photos to show mom your latest cat pictures.
It could also start to clog up your iPhone, really, with all that racy video your friends keep sending you.
To avoid these situations, you can disable the “feature.” Here’s how.
Ever try to go from home to the gym to the office to the party in the same day? If you have, you’ll know that move requires a lot of carrying capacity, typically across several bags.
Now try to do all that as an eco-warrior on a bicycle. You’ll want one big, waterproof bag that can hold your work stuff, your gym clothes and maybe a rain coat in case it gets wet out there. Stylish and useful, the Vitesse from WaterField Designs is a lovely, waxed-canvas messenger bag that will fit all that stuff.
If you travel a lot, iOS 9 and El Capitan have a hidden feature just for you.
Apple’s latest operating systems (both of which are currently in beta) offer a way to keep tabs on airline flights. Here’s how to access this hidden new feature.
This week, Apple has released a ton of new updates into the wild, including better-and-better versions of iOS 8, an iTunes that does Apple Music a bit better, and a Boot Camp that will let you run Windows 10 on your Mac. Try that on your Chromebook.
We’ve got a ton more, too, like killer tips and tricks for the public beta of iOS 9, a slick feature on trailblazer photographers who took selfies back in the day, and some ideas on how Apple Watch should track weightlifting sessions at your local gym.
All that and much, much more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine
(Note: Because of Cult of Mac’s recent redesign, some images are not displaying properly in this week’s issue of Cult of Mac Magazine. We apologize in advance — and we’re working on it.)
I wanted to find photos from my vacation a couple of weeks ago, so I figured I’d try out Siri’s new iOS 9 functionality.
“Siri,” I said, “show me photos from Hawaii.”
Dutifully, Apple’s updated digital assistant pulled up photos from my trip to Oahu a couple of years ago. They’re lovely, but I wanted more recent pictures.
“Siri, show me photos from Hawaii last week,” I said, reasonably.
As soon as I finished speaking, there they were. Siri had launched my Photos app on my iPhone and brought up the photos I’d taken while in Kona. Great stuff.
Here are some other ways you can get Siri to find the photos you want in the huge pile you have sitting on your iPhone.
“Welcome to Spotify, Mr. President,” tweeted the streaming music giant Friday morning. That’s right: The president of the United States just shared two vacation playlists — and he didn’t use Apple Music.
The two music lists, titled “The President’s Summer Playlist: Day” and “The President’s Summer Playlist: Night,” contain 20 songs each, showing an eclectic taste with a diverse artist representation, including the Isley Brothers, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding and (ugh) Coldplay.
Apple’s new Wallet app replaces Passbook in iOS 9, currently in public beta. Just like Passbook, when you wave your iPhone at an Apple Pay kiosk, it will only let you choose your default credit card and pay for the goods or services you bought.
In iOS 9 beta, you’ll also be able to choose any of your other provisioned credit cards from your Apple Pay account without even unlocking your iPhone or accessing the Wallet app.
Here’s how.
Bethesda’s runaway hit game Fallout Shelter is getting a well-needed dose of new stuff today, including several balance fixes, some new threats to your vault, and a handy robot assistant who can help you collect resources and scour the wasteland for you.
It looks like a small number of third-generation Apple TVs, the ones on sale right now, are being quietly recalled by Apple. There hasn’t been a public notice of an Apple TV recall, which could mean only a few units are defective.
If yours is among the faulty Apple TVs, chances are you’ll get an email offering to replace it — and Apple might even drop you an iTunes card for your troubles.
Worried about the security of your Dropbox files, even if you use two-step verification? Dropbox has your back now with a new USB key-based system to ensure that you are the only one able to access your files in the Dropbox cloud.
“Today,” Dropbox writes on its website, “we’re adding Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) security keys as an additional method for two-step verification, giving you stronger authentication protection.”
iOS 9 brings a bunch of battery-boosting features, most of which work right out of the box. But there’s one battery-saving feature you’ll have to enable yourself.
Called Low Power Mode, this new feature should prove super-useful when you need to eke out just a bit more time with your device — provided you’re not doing anything intense.
I’m always on the lookout for a better, more efficient, useful and stylish bag to carry my MacBook Pro, iPad 3, and various electronic accoutrements, including an external battery, noise-cancelling headphones, and a ton of different cables to power and charge everything in there.
I also like to add a paperback book, various papers and flyers (if I’m covering a conference) and room to drop in a little reporter’s notebook, a pen or three, and a digital audio recorder for interviews. Oh, and it helps to have an easy pocket to slip my iPhone 6 Plus and wallet in if I need to go through security at the airport.
The Kastel Donjon bag is a European-style messenger bag that meets all these needs in an attractive, useful way.
Apple Music has some amazing playlists created just for you, with humans behind the scenes making perfect mixes of music that fits your specific style and music tastes.
You can make your own playlists, too, and share them out to friends and family, but what if you want to see other people’s playlists? There’s just no way to pop on to Apple Music and see what playlists strangers are making.
Now, however, a new website called Playlist Hunt brings you the next best thing: a site dedicated to sharing and playing playlists by its members.
iCloud Drive is a Dropbox and Google Drive-type service from Apple that lets you store documents in the cloud, making it super easy to synchronize them between your iOS and OS X devices.
You can access it on your Mac with an icon that shows all the documents you’ve stored in iCloud in a folder-like structure.
Prior to iOS 9, in order to access these documents on your iPhone or iPad, you’d need to open an app that supported iCloud Drive on your device.
Not anymore. iOS 9 comes with its own iCloud Drive app, and here’s how to enable it.
Disappearing photo and video sharing app, Snapchat, has just updated to include a couple of great new features, including a data-reducing Travel Mode, an emoji button called Sticker Picker, and a way to see who’s viewing your posts, called Stories, in the app itself.
If you’ve been itching to get your hands on Apple’s latest public beta for iOS 9, you’re in luck. With new proactive features for Siri, public transit directions in Maps, and a supercharged notes app, not to mention new multitasking and keyboard features for newer iPads, iOS 9 is looking pretty great.
Plus, now that we’re getting closer to the actual Fall release, the iOS 9 beta (release 5) is probably more stable than it was when it first released to the public in July. Of course, all beta software can mess up your iPhone, so don’t apply it unless you’re willing to put up with possible glitches and maybe even a bricked iPhone.
If you’re good with that, though, here’s how to get the iOS 9 beta onto your iPhone (or iPad) right now.
This week in Cult of Mac Magazine, it’s time for Leander to bust out that famed “vision thing” he’s so great at with his informed take on the top five best Apple products of all time. Ever.
Then we’ve got a cat fight between two of the hot digital intelligences out now: Siri and Google Now, a ton of tantalizing details about Apple’s latest record-breaking earnings call, a peek at a leaked iPhone 6s front panel that seems strangely familiar, and a look at how invisible advertisement may be slowing your iPhone way down.
All that and more in Cult of Mac Magazine, freely available right now in the App Store.
Apple Watch comes with a limited number of functional, classy watch faces for you to use, but it totally lacks wacky, personalized watch faces for you to gloat over. If you’re searching for cool Apple Watch faces that stand out, there are plenty of options to explore.
Now a new collection of images shows how cool it would be if we had the ability to customize our Apple Watch faces the way we want. Note, though, that many of these would be impractical for telling time. As my co-worker Evan Killham said when he saw these ideas, “Where does the clock part go?”