News - page 1247

In a marketing campaign I can only assume is some kind of meta-parody designed to go viral, BlackBerry is offering a so-called “Trade-Up” program designed to get iPhone owners to jump ship to the new BlackBerry Passport.

From December 1 until February 13, disgruntled iPhone owners can “upgrade” to the BlackBerry Passport and receive up to $400 for their iPhones, plus an extra $150 (or $200 CAD) from BlackBerry. To take advantage of the “deal” customers must pick up their BlackBerry Passports from either ShopBlackBerry.com or Amazon.

Your iPhone can send data pretty fast over a wireless network, but it’s hobbled in at least one regard: the wireless antenna design can’t send data while receiving data at the same time. That means that the data speeds of your iPhone are potentially cut in half, just by the nature of wireless technology. But a new circuit could allow future iPhones to double their data speeds without making any other changes.

Apple is big on secrecy: both its own and its users’. Earlier this year, the company tweaked its software to ensure that even Apple would be unable to crack a passcode set by one of its customers.

“Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data,” Apple wrote on its website. “So it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8.”

Users have generally praised the decision, but government officials have been less than impressed — even going so far as to say Apple’s decision could potentially result in the death of a child.

While most people can see through this kind of scaremongering, the U.S. Justice Department isn’t giving up that easily. According to a new report in the Wall Street Journal, the DOJ is turning to a 225-year-old law called the All Writs Act to try and solve the problem of password-protected cellphones.

Corning’s relationship with Apple looked doomed earlier this year. Having manufactured the touchscreens for every iPhone since 2007, the Gorilla Glass bosses were all but sure they were being ditched in favor of synthetic sapphire crystal, set to be supplied by Apple’s hot new partner, GT Advanced Technologies.

But while Apple’s affair with GT has imploded spectacularly, Corning is back on Cupertino’s crush list after stepping in at the eleventh hour to create super-sized displays for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Now Corning is convinced its latest technological advance — Gorilla Glass 4, its toughest version yet — will banish sapphire suitors for the immediate future.

“Sapphire is a really, really nice material that’s very good for reducing scratches,” Dave Velasquez, Corning’s director of marketing and commercial ops, told Cult of Mac. “However, we feel very strongly that glass is the best material for touch panel cover glass. When you weigh up everything from cost to drop-testing, to the amount of energy that’s needed to make it, in our opinion Gorilla Glass is clearly the best material to use.”

Touch ID might have just made it to iPads, but Intel wants to go one step further: bringing enhanced biometric passwords to PCs, which it plans to do before the end of the year.

“Your biometrics basically eliminate the need for you to enter passwords for Windows log in and eventually all your websites ever again,” Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group at Intel, recently revealed.

The software, which will arrive courtesy of the Intel-owned McAfee, will allow PC users to replace the 18 passwords that the average user reportedly has with a combination of fingerprint, gesture, face and voice recognition.

You think you know Peter Pan’s story? Guess again, because director Joe Wright (Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice) has got an entirely new tale to tell.

Pan is the origin story of the boy who never grows up. He’s an orphan, left on a doorstep with a mysterious note from his mother. He’s secreted away to Neverland, where he mixes things up with Tiger Lily, Blackbeard (played by an almost unrecognizable Hugh Jackman) and a young, idealistic Captain Hook.

Check out the gorgeous trailer below for the full details.

It’s been over a decade since the last time Hollywood took us to the magical world of friendly and fun dinosaurs, but the first trailer for Jurassic World has been released, and from the looks of things, everything’s changed and yet nothing is different at all.

The park is open and humans are back on the menu. Chris Pratt is all over the first trailer, playing a genius paleontologists brought to the island to investigate the disappearance of a genetically-modified super dinosaur, created by Jurassic World’s air-head scientists, who obviously didn’t learn from the past three movies.

Watch the full trailer below:

AAPL shares sure have experienced a crazy roller coaster ride this year. Splitting 7-to-1 earlier in 2014, a fantastic run of product launches and announcements since then has driven Apple stock higher and higher. Earlier this month we noted that Apple was now worth more than the entire Russian stock market, and today it has hit a personal-best market cap of $700 billion.

This happened as Apple’s share price rose to the $119.65 mark, bringing it to a pre-split price of $837.13. For those keeping tabs at home, not only is this better than Apple’s last high point, when it was valued around $650 in late 2012, but it also represents a massive 50% increase since January this year.

We know that Apple is interested in giving the Apple TV Kinect-like motion sensing abilities — they bought the 3D motion tracking company behind the tech last year, after all — but who knows when, if ever, it will actually come to living rooms.

If you want to start waving your way through your Apple TV’s interface now, though, meet the Onecue. It’s a cool little gadget that grafts Kinect-like functionality into your home entertainment system.

T-Mobile has tried to make a reputation for itself lately as the most honest wireless carrier around… but the FCC just had to rap the so-called Uncarrier’s knuckles for lying to its customers about how fast their data connections were after they passed their monthly data caps.

Great Apple deals can be hard to come by on Black Friday, but here’s a nice exception: If you’re looking to get your hands on an Apple TV, Staples is having a killer deal, selling Apple’s set-top streaming media box for just $79, a $20 savings..

iCloud was hailed by Tim Cook back in 2012 as “not just a product. It’s a strategy for the next decade.” Yet these days, iCloud is something of a mess: Not only has it not gained significant features since launch, but a slate of very public hacks have made it a rare black mark on Apple’s security record.

What the heck happened? According to a new report, iCloud isn’t living up to its potential because, organizationally, it’s an orphan within Apple.

With Black Friday just a few days away, Apple has just debuted two new television ads for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus: one focused on how great the iPhone is at gaming, and the other showing off iOS 8’s impressive new Continuity features.

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are shattering all kinds of sales records, and that knock-on effect is starting to be felt elsewhere: The overwhelming interest in Apple’s next-generation handsets pushed iTunes App Store downloads to new heights last month.

How much of an increase are we talking about? In October, the top 200 free iOS apps hit a collective 7.8 million app downloads per day, according to new research from Fiksu, a Boston-based marketing firm.

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.

Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay on Steve Jobs has been in a seemingly perpetual state of flux for months. Multiple A-list actors and directors passed on the project, with Christian Bale most recently bowing out of the leading role after being all but confirmed by Sorkin himself.

Then the studio financing the movie, Sony, put it up for sale—a good sign that a project isn’t going smoothly in Hollywood. Luckily, Universal has swooped in to save the day.

Apple packed the biggest display it’s ever made onto the iPhone 6 Plus, and while its 1920×1080 resolution is great for streaming 1080p videos, it turns out that Apple also secretly added 4K video support without telling anyone.

The iPad Air 2, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus all support 4K video playback out of the box, thanks to the new A8 processor added this year. Apple doesn’t list 4K video playback as one of the A8 chips features, but the discovery was made by the developers behind WALTR, who posted proof of 4K video playback on the iPhone 6 this weekend.

The fourth movie in the Jurassic Park series is slated to terrorize movie screens a full year from now. In order to drum up some excitement for Jurassic World, then, Universal has created this tiny trailer to advertise yet another trailer for the upcoming blockbuster.

The new trailer for a trailer shows very little, with some dinosaurs, a bubble car, an inquisitive Bryce Dallas Howard, and megastar Chris Pratt looking determined. Check it out.

Americans are four days away showing how grateful they are for the biggest shopping day of the year, and to draw in more upgrades than ever, Apple is giving away $50 iTunes gift cards with the purchase of every iPhone and iPad.

Continuing its huge (RED) promotion announced yesterday, Apple will dole out (RED) iTunes gift cards in varying amounts to shoppers who pick something up on Black Friday. The deals aren’t much more impressive than last year’s meager offerings, but for the first time ever, Apple is including the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in the deal.

You can also get an iTunes gift card for buying a Mac, iPod, Apple TV, or Beats product. Here’s how much iTunes cash you’ll get for each:

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?

If you’ve installed a third-party keyboard on your iPhone or iPad running iOS 8, you might have noticed a strange omission: While you can communicate in animated GIFs or Klingon, you can’t dictate into any keyboard not made by Apple.

Reddit user 11011 sums up the puzzling situation nicely: “I can’t get myself to stick to alternate keyboards because I use dictation way too much and switching keyboards is a hassle.”

This week: the next iPhone might feature a massively improved camera; Uber’s super bro culture gets bad press, but we want to party with their brogrammers; why we’re not so jazzed on Apple Watch apps; Steve Jobs drowns the first iPod prototype to prove a point; and finally, what we like and don’t about the gadgets and Apple accessories we’re reviewing—it’s an all-new Under Review.

Chuckle your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the chuckles begin.

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