iPhone - page 193

That like-new iPhone 5s in your pocket? Obsolete. How about that smartwatch or fitness band you’ve been carting around on your wrist for the past six months? Old news. If you whip out your leather wallet and try to pay with a rectangle of plastic — at least at the corporate stores Apple works with — chances are you’ll be looked at like an old fogey.

Apple has, once again, thoroughly owned the mobile category, expanding the ways we communicate, live and transact business in our daily lives.

This domination of the smartphone, smartwatch and mobile payment categories, as revealed in today’s big iPhone 6 and Apple Watch event, has us ready to hand over another load of cash to the Apple mothership, and gladly. As usual, there were some surprises — some awesome and some not so much — but here are the main takeaways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gwoLjYIeIw

Available in many major cities, Zipcar is this wonderful service that allows you to rent a car by the hour with your smartphone. In my neighborhood, there are half-a-dozen Zipcars parked, just waiting to be scooped up for a quick Ikea run or jaunt to the grocery store. It makes owning a car largely superfluous, at least if you live in a city with good public transportation.

But even though I live in an area with a lot of Zipcars, it’s still hard to find one that is unused on a busy Saturday or Sunday afternoon. But now Verizon has a plan on how to compete with Zipcar, and it’s a doozy: they’re going to allow anyone turn their own car into a Zipcar, rentable by iPhone or other smartphones.

Just when you thought you’d heard everything, allow me to introduce the “Selfie Brush.”

There have been plenty of wacky phone cases over the iPhone’s lifespan, but until now the idea of crossing an iPhone with a hairbrush remained the stuff of mad scientists. Until now.

Appearing shortly before the long-awaited iPhone 6 announcement, the Selfie Brush iPhone case is designed to (no surprise here!) helps its users take better selfies by tidying themselves up beforehand for “professional results.”

We’re mere hours away from Apple’s September 9th special media event at The Flint Center, and as expected, the company has added an “Apple Events” channel for those planning to watch on the Apple TV.

Fans without an Apple TV can watch a livestream of the event on Apple’s website, provided they are running Safari 5.1.10 or later on OS X 16.6.8 or later.

The event kicks off at 10 a.m. Pacific today, and we expect to see the public unveiling of both the iPhone 6 and iWatch.

Cult of Mac will be covering the event live from the Flint Center, so stay tuned for our moment-by-moment coverage. It’s going to be a blast!

Martin Hajek has developed a recipe of sorts for crafting stunning 3-D renderings of future Apple products that get shared around the Web and even used in advertisements while the world awaits the Cupertino company’s big reveal.

“My inspiration comes from real-life Apple products, combined with a good dose of internet rumors, a dash of common sense and imagination sprinkled on top,” the 39-year-old told Cult of Mac. “What I do is quite simply ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ — with the giants in question being Jony Ive and his design team.”

Apple’s secrecy surrounding its upcoming products is legendary (notwithstanding one memorable breach by the Pentagon). Everyone wants to know what insanely great products Apple has up its sleeve, so the company goes to great lengths to protect its secrets. Workers prepping for today’s big event have had their phone cameras plugged with tamperproof tape so they can’t leak anything spied before Tim Cook takes the stage.

Apple’s most-anticipated — and likely most-eventful — product introduction since the iPad is set for later this morning. It will undoubtedly be Tim Cook’s biggest moment yet as Apple’s CEO, with the company reportedly ready to unveil new products from what has been described as its most exciting product pipeline in a quarter century.

Anticipation among the Apple faithful couldn’t be any higher. Endless speculation and massive expectations about finally laying eyes on the long-awaited iWatch got us thinking about other memorable announcements from Apple’s 37-year history.

While you wait for this morning’s 10 a.m. liveblog from Apple’s big event, relive some of Cupertino’s past glories. Here are our picks for the 10 biggest Apple announcements of all time.

Although it has been widely reported that the 5.5-inch iPhone won’t come out until months after the 4.7-inch model, both sizes are now expected to ship on the same day later this month.

Trusting the Internet can be one of the silliest things you can do, especially when it comes to private matters. While what you do within the comfort of your own circle deserves to stay within its parameters, sometimes things don’t play that way.

Some celebrities found that out the hard way this week when their “personal” photos were hacked from their iCloud accounts and leaked online. With the world frantically sharing the photos left and right, this has turned all eyes toward Apple and the security of its cloud operation.

Apple fans hoping to get elevated with Bono and The Edge at the Flint Center will be disappointed to hear the band’s spokespeople have squashed the rumor that U2 will play at the iPhone 6 event.

Rumors began bubbling on the internet this week that U2 would release its album by preloading it on the iPhone 6. Reports also claimed that Apple’s mysterious white box outside the Flint Center for the Performing Arts in Cupertino is really a giant soundstage for U2 to play on.

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While China is where a lot of Apple’s focus has been in terms of expanding into new territories, India is also a fast developing smartphone market where the Apple brand is doing very well.

According to a new report, Apple has sold more than 1 million iPhones in India since the start of the current financial year — representing a significant milestone for a company that wasn’t considered to be a serious contender in the South Asian market until relatively recently.

Although the sales data was not released, research agencies put the figure at 1.02 million between October 2013 and August 2014, with a total of 1.1 million units projected by the time the fiscal year ends on September 30.

I’ll admit it — I’ve got a thing for these waxed canvas and leather bags from Waterfield. I’ve ended up using the impeccably designed Staad backpack and the classy Nintendo 3DS case long after my reviews of them were published. These bags and cases from the San Francisco design collective are warm, inviting and just get better with age and use.

Let’s face it, though: Sometimes you only want to carry your laptop and a couple of accessories, and that’s it. Waterfield’s latest design, the MacBook Outback Solo, is a minimalist sleeve made of the same strong canvas material and rich, thick, buttery-smooth leather as the other bags in the line. It can be paired with a carrying strap that turns the sleeve into a messenger bag. While our very own Charlie Sorrel called the iPad version of this bag a man-purse, I’m thinking of this more as a shoulder-saving device — the fewer things I end up having to carry, the better.

This little sleeve is perfect for exactly that.

Blame for the flood of celebrity nude photos that hit the Internet has been rotating from the pervy hackers that ripped the pics, to Apple, to the creator of iBrute, but while the FBI and Apple continue to investigate the source of the leak, there’s one tool that has gone unmentioned: the police forensic tool that made it all possible.

One of the key elements behind the iCloud nudes leak is a piece of software created by Elcomsoft that allows attackers to impersonate a target’s iPhone and download its entire iCloud backup, and you don’t even have to be a cop to get it.

Banksy, the U.K. street artist who doesn’t shy from making commentary on social and technology issues with his graffiti street art, published a new sketch with a terrifying reminder that your iPhone has basically become a parasitic extension.

In a separate piece of graffiti art posted on Twitter, Banksy had a subtle message against corporations like Apple, Nike, Coca-Cola, and others.

Take a look:

While we don’t yet know what kind of battery life the iPhone 6 is going to have, it’s always good to have a way of charging your smartphone when you’re out and about.

With that in mind, the city of Seoul in South Korea has announced that it is building a series of outdoor recharging ports along manmade stream, the Cheonggyecheon, in the city’s downtown region. Rather than drawing from the city’s regular power grid, the chargers will instead draw their current from various hydroelectric turbines which are embedded in the stream itself.

Apple will show off the iPhone 6 to the world in less than two weeks, and like always, an executive in an untucked dress shirt will explain why it’s the best iPhone ever.

If you pride yourself on knowing Apple history, then we’ve come across a cool summary of each iPhone launch to date. The six-minute video hits the highlights from each iPhone event since 2007.

Though the iPhone 5s has been very successful, its minor updates from the iPhone 5 have left me wanting more. In fact, I’ve created quite the wish list for the next-generation iPhone.

We’ll know soon enough exactly what the next version of this revolutionary smartphone will look like: Apple recently confirmed a press event for September 9. In today’s video, I’ll show you my top six wishes for the iPhone 6 — and look at just how close some of these could be to coming true, according to all the latest leaks and rumors.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.

The drive toward mobile health has seen more and more research into the possible medical applications of smartphones. The latest comes from a team of researchers at the University of Washington, who have developed an app capable of diagnosing jaundice in infants simply by taking their picture.

Many of us want to invest, but don’t know how to start. Acorns is a new, free to try app that makes investing as easy as using your debit card and rounding up the change to the nearest dollar.

The price-slashing continues. How on the heels of Walmart cutting the price of the iPhone 5s to $79 and the iPhone 5c to $0.79, T-Mobile will take up to $50 off the price of any iPhone, starting today.

Verizon Wireless announced today that it is preparing to roll out Voice over LTE (VoLTE) support to its millions of subscribers over the next few weeks, just ahead of Apple’s planned release of iOS 8 which is rumored to bring VoLTE support to the iPhone for the first time.

The addition of VoLTE will allow Verizon customers to send and receive voice calls over the faster LTE network, rather than using old technologies like 3G, resulting in high-definition voice calls as well as video.

Apple may be on the verge of releasing its most generously-sized iPhone yet, but the company is always on the lookout for new ways of providing screen real estate to its users.

A new patent published today by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show how Apple is investigating “Electronic devices with flexible displays,” featuring a flexible display layer overlaid on top of buttons, switchers, speakers, microphones and other components which feature in iOS devices.

Apple is still reliant on Samsung for many of the iPhone’s internal components, including the fabrication of its almighty A-series processors, but in an effort to secure more processor orders from Apple, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is already ahead of schedule with production of the next-generation A9 processor.

When my 2001 Subaru Forester died on the side of the highway a week or so back, I was not excited about trying to find a replacement.

Buying a car is right up there with heading to the DMV, going to IKEA and attending your ex’s next wedding. It’s depressing. And inevitable. The load of anxiety-ridden, “hurry up and wait” BS that has marred my every interaction with car dealerships both new and used is overwhelming.

So it was with glee that I bypassed all that crap and used my iPhone, email and Twitter to buy myself a new car. Let me explain.