This week on The CultCast: It’s our epic final episode of 2016! We’ll wrap up the year with our hands-on review of the hotness themselves, Apple’s AirPods. Then … is Apple’s “Golden Era” drawing to a close? We discuss. And finally, ya’ll know we review a lot of products during the year — we’ll reveal our absolute favorite gadgets of 2016!
One of the best things about owning an Apple TV — staring at the hypnotically beautiful screen savers — just got a whole lot better.
Apple published 21 gorgeous new videos today that give Apple TV viewers a bird’s-eye view of fantastic cityscapes in Hong Kong, China, Dubai and other beautiful locales.
Apple plans to use a combination of drones, indoor mapping and other smart tech to improve its Apple Maps service, claims a new report.
Employing drones could help Apple catch up with industry leader Google. The search giant has routinely outpaced Apple on mapping technology ever since Cupertino entered the space with its (initially disastrous) Apple Maps in 2012.
You can find some incredible new gadgets on Kickstarter and Indiegogo that often go unnoticed. We’re rounding up some of the best every week to help them get the funding they need to become a reality.
This week, we’ve got modular drones that turn into all kinds of flying machines, a tiny white box that promises to improve your posture, a device that brings Amazon Alexa to your car, and the world’s first personal air conditioner.
This week on The CultCast: The reviews are in! We’ll tell you what praises and complaints reviewers have about new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. Plus: The one Touch Bar feature you’ll absolutely covet; why the new Designed by Apple in California book is an artifact Apple fans will love; Apple quietly rebuilds a library of its gadgets long past; how to get the best Black Friday deals; and we review the hawt new Mavic Pro drone by DJI, then crash it into a cliff.
Our thanks to Harry’s for supporting this episode. Harry’s super-sharp, German-made razors ship free right to your door and for way less than the drugstore razors. Learn more at Harrys.com and score a free shave set with code CultCast at checkout.
If you thought Apple’s new spaceship campus looks impressive during the day, just wait until you see it at night.
Apple’s stunning new HQ looks like it’s glowing in the latest drone videos that show construction is nearing completion. Landscaping is now underway on the campus with new trees popping up all over, along with walking trails for employees.
Check it out:
The battle for droning supremacy is heating up today after DJI revealed its tiny new Mavic Pro drone that will take on GoPro’s new Karma drone system.
Despite launching later, the Mavic Pro has a few advantages on the Karma though. It’s smaller, faster and smarter. And you’ll be able to buy it at your local Apple Store.
Apple’s still-unnamed “spaceship” campus won’t be completed until the end of this year, but it’s looking less and less like Tim Cook’s beautiful pile of dirt and more like a finished HQ every single day — as drone operator Matthew Roberts’ latest flyover video makes abundantly clear.
Check out the action below:
New drone footage of Apple Campus 2 reveals the impressive progress that has been made in recent months. The research and development center and many of the other buildings around the campus are now starting to take shape — and they look glorious in 4K!
Xiaomi, aka the biggest copy-cat in tech, has decided to stop ripping off Apple for a bit and instead set its sights on drone maker DJI by unveiling its first cheap knockoff drone, the Mi Drone. And it doesn’t look that bad.
The Mi Drone takes some obvious inspiration from DJI’s Phantom lineup, only its way more affordable. For about $460 you can grab the 4K flier, or if you’re cool with just 1080p video you can buy the cheaper model, priced around $380.
It’s not as portable as other drones we’ve seen like the AirDog, but it comes with 27-minutes of battery life and some killer features that could rival the Phantom 4.
Watch it fly below:
Now you can stream live from your drone when you take to the skies with Periscope, Twitter’s service that lets you broadcast live video, provided you have the app on iOS and a DJI drone.
In addition to live drone streaming, Periscope is also rolling out a new search function that will let you look for specific live streams and saved broadcasts. You’ll be able to search for topics or hashtags with the new system.
A save function, currently in beta, is also expected to arrive in a few weeks.
Seeing all the drones hovering around in the park and in the neighborhood making you jealous? Well you don’t have to miss out any more, with these three deals on drones that’ll get you in the game without breaking your bank.
The world’s most popular drone maker, DJI, has decided to team up Apple for the launch of its incredibly smart new drone by making it exclusively available for pre-order via the Apple Store.
DJI unveiled its top-of-the-line new drone, the Phantom 4 this morning, that comes with a new “Obstacle Sensing System” that makes it easier than ever to killer aerial footage with minimal piloting experience.
Apple is less than a year away from moving into its shiny new campus, but Tim Cook’s beautiful pile of dirt still looms large at the construction site in the latest 4K drone video that shows the progress on the spaceship.
The video shows Apple’s progress installing the largest piece of curved glass ever made, as well as the large white canopies that sprout out of the sides of the glass and metal facade. It also appears that the roof over the auditorium in the heart of campus has been installed.
Check it out:
Swiss freeskier Nicolas Vuignier has created a crazy new photography rig that can create matrix-like slo-mo video, only you don’t need a drone or a bunch of GoPros to pull it off. You just need some string and your iPhone.
Vuignier posted an incredible video of his contraption in action, which he calls the Centriphone. The project has been two years in the making and it looks totally worth it. The device works like a sling that twirls around you to capture 360 views that look absolutely gorgeous in slo-mo. Toss in some powder and half-pipes and it’s an adrenaline junkie’s dream toy.
Watch the Centriphone in action:
Flying a tiny drone, especially for first-timers, can be a tense experience — trying to avoid flying into walls, trees, tables, one’s own head. While adding more drones to the mix is a lot of fun, it just multiplies the difficulty, that is unless you have this Ultra-Stealth Nano Drone. Among a bunch of cool features, it sports a system of eight frequency points allowing it to fly in packs, while keeping safe distance from its neighbors. It adds a whole new dimension to drone-ing, and right now it’s only $19.99.
Meet one of the smallest drones in its class to also sport a camera for shooting photo and video. It also keeps the best qualities of quadcopters, with omni-directional controls perfect for the dips, dives, and barrel rolls of modern day barnstorming (probably a gingerbread barn, but still). It’s a feature-rich flier that you don’t have to be rich to play with — right now this drone and a bonus 2 gigabyte micro SD card are just $34.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.
Bargains happen all the time, but it’s not every day they apply to truly innovative products. From car locators to multi-device chargers and camera-packing mini drones, these are some great deals on some of the coolest gear and gadgets out there. Take a look at what we found:
Drones may be big news at CES, but only one can make a splash.
Chinese hardware company Taihuoniao Shenzhen has developed what it says is the first consumer drone for exploring all those big bodies of water that cover most of the Earth.
LAS VEGAS — Learning how to fly a drone isn’t easy, and accidents happen all the time. Wouldn’t it be great if your drone could just fly itself?
AirDog does just that. In fact, the only way to fly AirDog is to use its incredible auto-following technology that keeps the camera aimed at you during the entire flight Cult of Mac met up with the makers of AirDog at CES 2016 for a mountain-biking demo in the desert to see how the drone uses LiDAR and other tech to capture spectacular aerial footage on the fly without any human intervention. We came away ridiculously impressed.
It looks like the new hotness in drone technology — which many of us associate with quadcopters — is wings. Parrot, the company most well-known for its AR Drone and various mini-drones, is bring an all-new entry into the drone space: the Disco fixed-wing drone.
If you’ve ever wanted to fly your own remote-control plane and haven’t gotten into the technology yet, this just might be your time.
2016 is here and that can only mean one thing: It’s time for CES.
The world’s biggest consumer electronics show, CES 2016, is getting underway this week in Las Vegas, which means nerds and all the companies that make the gadgets they love are instinctively flocking to the desert oasis like the salmon of Capistrano.
This year’s show promises to be bigger than ever, with all the latest tech trends on full display. Cult of Mac will be on the scene all week long bring hands-on looks at the coolest and weirdest gadgets CES has to offer.
Here’s what we expect to see at the show:
Just when you thought it was hard to achieve a first in flight in this day and age, a city near Las Vegas has broken ground on what is believed to be the first commercial drone airport.
The Aerodrome, a non-profit in unmanned aircraft education, has partnered with Boulder City, Nevada to develop the droneport. The 50-acre site about 28 miles from the Las Vegas Strip is already partially operational but won’t be complete until 2018.
Several thousand drone pilots registered their aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration within the first 24 hours, but glitches in the system briefly shut it down after takeoff.
The FAA said the new mandatory online registration had to be shutdown for troubleshooting but would reopen Thursday.
We were too busy taking our own pictures in 2015 to notice that something about photography had changed.
This was the year the photo moved. It shed its flat, two-dimensional constraints and showed a life once left to the imagination.
The movement could be slight, as in Apple’s Live Photos, a new feature on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus camera that records a snippet of video before and after the frozen moment to add an extra dimension.