Particularly as Apple extends its tentacles overseas into new markets like China and India, many pundits have suggested that Cupertino needs to make low-cost iPhones to compete with lower-end Android devices.
So will it? According to Apple’s product marketing executive Greg Joswiak the answer is a resounding, emphatic “hell no!”
It’s not like bagging a burrito at Taco Bell takes a long time, but the fast-food chain’s hot new mobile app makes ordering unbelievably fast and frictionless.
The app promises that you’ll be able to order anything off the menu, pay for it, and have it prepared for you when you arrive. Not quite revolutionary, but a deliberate stab at modernizing the drive-thru experience. Order from your iPhone, and you get to skip the line.
It’s not every day that I get to write about Taco Bell, so I jumped at the opportunity to give it a test drive. Here’s my experience with the Taco Bell app from start to finish:
The top awards for the 50th Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards have been announced at London’s Natural History Museum. More than 42,000 entries from 96 countries were submitted this year, making it the biggest event in the history of the awards.
There were many incredible entries, but the one that really grabbed us was the beautiful photo you see above, taken by Marsel Van Oosten, an extraordinarily talented photographer from the Netherlands. It shows a Japanese monkey submerged in water, using an iPhone.
Tim Cook gave a rare public interview on Monday night at the Wall Street Journal’s new tech conference, WSJD. The Apple CEO touched on a range of topics, including Apple Pay’s success, a big potential partnership, why the iPod classic was discontinued, and more.
Here are the biggest takeaways from Cook’s comments:
The user interface for iOS hasn’t changed much since the introduction of ‘iPhone OS’ back in 2007. Sure, Jony Ive has added some tweaks over the last few years, but you still swipe around between rows of tiled icons.
Apple’s UI for the Apple Watch though is radically different that iPhone, with circular app icons on a homescreen that can users can zoom in and out of to find their apps easier, so Lucas Menge decided to take the pretty bubbly design and bring it to the iPhone. The results are pretty amazing and bring an entirely new look to the iPhone homescreen.
Check out the full demo below:
Do you take pictures of all your meals to share with your friends on Facebook and Instagram? Wish there was a way to share even more of it with your FOMO-ing virtual friends?
Well, you can’t share the taste, or the smell, but 3DAround is an upcoming iOS app that lets you share the food you’re eating in all of its three-dimensional glory. And you can do it with other things too.
In the past, using the Messages app on a Mac could be an irritating experience. And what if a friend dared to send a green-bubble text from an Android phone? When texting from your Mac, messaging those friends wasn’t possible until now.
In today’s Cult of Mac video, find out how to enable Text Message Forwarding between your iPhone and Mac. With iOS 8.1 and Yosemite installed, enjoying this seamless feature is just a few short taps and clicks away. Find out how to do it all in this speedy tutorial.
Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV to catch all our latest videos.
It turns out that the rumored app that Facebook has been working on isn’t an anonymous chat app, but rather a platform that lets you create your own chat room right on your iPhone.
Basically, Rooms is an iPhone app — soon coming to Android — that lets you make tiny message boards to post photos, videos, and text to. You’ll create a different username and identity for each Room you create or visit, and you’ll let other people join via a QR code you can generate and share via the internet or in real life.
Head developer Josh Miller told The Verge, “We’re not trying to build the next Snapchat — we’re trying to build the next WordPress.”
Your iPhone can make payments, control your smart home, and track your health — and soon it might be able to control your car, as well.
A new patent published Thursday describes a way of using the iPhone’s geo-location capabilities to intelligently monitor and control certain car functions, based on “geofences.”
Likely pairing with Apple’s vehicle-based OS, CarPlay, the patent notes how your car could be tracked in relation to your iPhone — with appropriate signals, sent using Bluetooth LE, to execute functions like locking your car and arming its alarm when you are a certain distance from the vehicle.
The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus may be Apple’s best-selling iPhones in history, racking up a massive 10 million+ sales in their first weekend alone, but how does this massive success translate into numbers going forward?
Ahead of today’s Apple earnings call, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has taken a shot at forecasting how the rest of the year may play out, in a research note to investors. His guess? All in, Apple can expect to sell between 56.7 million and 62.7 million iPhones this quarter.
If Munster’s on the money, that means unit sales of the iPhone could leap between 25 to 45% compared with the previous quarter last year. Not bad, huh?
Tim Cook called the iPhone 6 the fastest-selling smartphone in history during yesterday’s Apple event. It’s set a new high-water mark for the most first-month orders ever, and if you need any more evidence, just look at this line outside the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City today.
It’s been a month since the iPhone 6 launched and the line is still down the street. Unlike a month ago, Asian resellers can’t be blamed for the length, as China just got its fingers all over the bigger-than-big displays this morning.
Apple didn’t announce how many iPhones it sold in the first month – although we might find out during Monday’s earnings call – but with 32 countries accepting orders in the first few weeks, and another 36 getting it this month, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are poised to be Apple’s biggest cash machines ever.
In a game where you can build anything you want, it was only going to be so long before someone constructed an iPhone in Minecraft.
Even with that said, however, the version of Apple’s iconic handset which one player put together is impressive; being not just a block-based reconstruction of the iPhone’s outward appearance — but a slavish recreation of the iPhone UX, complete with iOS apps.
You know you hate showing up to the Halloween party with that lame generic pirate costume. We all do, but we all end up doing it.
Then there’s those of us who want to make the coolest, most unique costume ever. But we never do, because, let’s face it, we just don’t have the time.
Your solution, then, just may be these amazing just-add-iPhone costumes from Digital Dudz. You buy the mask or shirt, download a free app, and you’re suddenly the best costume at the party. Check out the video below to see how it all works.
People blame Apple for the craziest things: from crafting metal devices that bend if you apply enough pressure, to giving out free albums, to — now — crashing national economies.
Today’s “gate” incident (Finnishgate?) comes from Finland Prime Minister Alexander Stubb, who blames the iPhone maker for bringing down two of his country’s biggest exports: Nokia and paper.
“The iPhone killed Nokia and the iPad killed the paper industry, but we’ll make a comeback,” Alexander Stubb told an interviewer for CNBC.
It’s that time of the week again — all of Cult of Mac’s best news stories and features, compiled in one place to peruse easily on your iPad or iPhone. This week we’ve got heartfelt remembrances of Steve Jobs, some products we’d like to see updated along with the coming new iPads, a look at upcoming Twin Peaks in our modern era, and some hard lessons learned in running the top iPad magazine. Plus, some great new apps to look at and a reminder that the iPhone 6 continues to sell like, well, iPhones.
Dig into Cult of Mac Magazine October 10 Edition, Free on iTunes
Current rumor suggests that the next iPad Air will be even thinner than the last one.
And as we know from the release of the last iPhone, when something’s thinner… well, it’s likely to get bent.
So what will happen if Bendgate comes to the iPad? Our favorite concept designer Martin Hajek imagines the next iPad Air if it proves as pliable as the iPhone 6.
There are more images after the jump. What do you think?
Quick – grab your iPhone and take a picture of something nearby — the remote control on your coffee table, a pair of Warby Parkers, anything, really. Now take that photo and turn it into a fully editable vector graphic that can be used by a host of drawing and artistic programs across your iPhone, iPad and Mac, all via the magic of Adobe’s Creative Cloud.
That’s precisely what Adobe Shape CC does, one of a host of new apps available on your iOS device to make capturing the real world much easier than ever before.
Here’s a quick video rundown of how it works.
If you’ve always wanted to own a dilapidated bungalow on Detroit’s East Side, but all you have is an iPhone 6, today is your lucky day: A Motor City homeowner is so desperate to get rid of his house that he’ll trade it to you for an iPhone 6.
Just about everything in the brick colonial listed for sale needs to be demolished, but the house does feature a basement, garden and city views from the second-floor balcony. The seller of the house lives overseas, and after failing to sell the home for months, he’d gladly accept the greatest smartphone on Earth as payment for his nearly worthless property.
Take a look of the 3-bedroom, 1.5-bath residence below:
As a prototype iPhone 6 on eBay shoots above $100,000, the seller is just dying to hear from Apple.
Although the company might cancel the auction, as it has done with several secret prototypes in the past, the seller is such an Apple fan that he’s more excited about hearing from Cupertino than collecting $100,000.
“I don’t think the bids are real at this point,” the seller told Cult of Mac. “I’m excited about Apple getting in touch because I have loved their company for so long and this is just such an amazing opportunity.”
The seller’s name is Alex. He’s 24, lives in Los Angeles, and works in sales and marketing. He unintentionally purchased the prototype iPhone for his mother.
The iPhone 6 received rave reviews when Apple unveiled it at the Flint Center last month, but not many people have been eager to talk about it’s shortcomings, until now.
In today’s Cult of Mac video we breakdown the biggest disappointments iPhone 6 users have griped about since the device went on sale two weeks ago. What should Apple improve to make the phone better? Find out what the next generation iPhone still needs and more in this informative video.
Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV to catch all our latest videos.
Andy Rooney once quipped that anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong.
With that sentiment in mind, a new Kickstarter campaign is in the process of raising funds for a fantastic project: a fully reversible, nigh-unbreakable USB Lightning charging cord for your iPhone. Check out the video after the jump.
Even with the recent improvements to iOS 8’s handling of photos you take with your iPhone, it’s still kind of a pain in the butt to sort through and delete the ones you don’t want to keep.
The developers behind Flic, a fantastic new photo app, decided they’d had enough and built a better app. This one works a lot like Tinder, a dating app that uses a swipe to sort potential dates.
If you’ve ever had to sort through a ton of photos on your iPhone, you’re going to love Flic. Getting through all your photos is speedy and efficient.
“I just went on my honeymoon,” developer Brandon Evans told Cult of Mac, “and I think I had 400 pictures to go through. It only took me, like two minutes to go through using Flic.”
Naturally, you hope your new iPhone will stay in mint condition until you’re ready to upgrade or resell. But the fact is, if you cringe at the possibility of a $200 repair bill for a broken screen, it’s time to think about getting an extended warranty.
You’ve got several options: AppleCare+ is available for purchase with new hardware, and mobile carriers and third-party warranty providers sell plans with different perks. You should also check out your personal insurance provider if you’ve got one. Some homeowner’s and renter’s policies offer protection plans for personal belongings, and you might already be covered. The deductibles tend to be steep, but it’s still worth giving your insurer a call to know your options.
Deciding on a warranty can be tricky, so we’ve done the hard work for you.
Popcorn Time, the service that allows users to stream movie torrents, today makes its debut on iOS. It’s available only to jailbroken devices — there’s no way Apple would have approved it for the App Store — and it can be obtained through Cydia via a dedicated Popcorn Time repository.
An iPhone 6 bend test left a German tech magazine with bigger worries than a needlessly broken smartphone: The publication was reportedly banned from future Apple events and told it would no longer receive the Cupertino company’s latest products for review.