The holiday shopping season is usually a huge boon for PC manufacturers, but according to the latest estimates from the International Data Corporation, shoppers have decided to skip the PC upgrade as a gift this Christmas.
Google Calendar is bringing your appointments and to-do list together with a new update that adds support for reminders. Calendar will display your tasks and to-dos alongside meetings and events so they’re harder to forget, and sync them across Inbox, Gmail, Google Keep, and Google Now.
Another week, another Cult of Mac Magazine – the best place to get your Apple fix in one place.
This week, we’ve got quick tips to speed up your iPhone and Apple Watch, our take on the stupidity of killing the iPhone’s headphone jack, new how-tos for Apple Music and Apple TV, a hilarious bit of Star Wars fever that Siri’s picked up, and the latest rumors about iPhone 6c and iPhone 7. That not enough? There’s tons more inside.
Here’s the rundown for this week’s cover stories:
The iPad lineup has seen a ton of changes since Apple introduced its first tablet in 2010. Not only have the form factors evolved ever so slightly, but the internal components have pushed the product line from a cool reading/gaming device into a powerhouse machine that can replace your laptop.
To see just how much iPad has progressed, EverythingApplePro created a speed test using every iPad ever made. It’s no surprise that the iPad Pro comes out on top, but the original iPad off a shocker by beating some of its successors.
Check it out:
Maybe you played with Lego bricks as a kid and moved into adulthood building with computer graphics, steal and concrete. Lego always promised it could inspire future builders.
Now the toymaker loved around the world is looking for someone who still likes to hit the bricks. Lego is looking for a master model builder for a new Legoland Discovery Center in Michigan and is holding a two-day tryout next month to find the perfect candidate.
Dropbox has announced that it is killing its Carousel and Mailbox apps in early 2016.
The company says it will use what it has learned from these products to improve its core Dropbox service, and to increase its focus on Paper, the tool that allows you to create new documents and collaborate on them in real-time in the cloud.
I’m not usually a big fan of third-party iOS keyboards because they’re often clumsy and perform worse than iOS’s default keyboard. But I like Slash Keyboard. It’s fast, it’s accurate, and it allows you to search for and insert nearly anything on the web – GIFs, stickers, YouTube videos, Foursquare locations, you name it — into an email or text message, without once changing screens.
It’s hardly speculation to suggest that, as soon as Apple is rumored to be entering a new area of production, every manufacturer with capacity wants to get in on the new opportunities.
The latest example of this is Japan Display, which is reportedly in the early stages of converting one of its factories in Ishikawa factory into an test production line to try and win iPhone orders when Apple switches to using OLED displays in the near future.
Given its slowing sales and the continued record smashing of its iPhone brethren, it’s easy to think of the iPad as the “also ran” of Apple’s iOS devices.
In fact, people continue to talk about the iPad an enormous amount — more than any other topic in tech, if you believe Twitter’s freshly-released list of 2015’s top trending topics.
Reports that iPhone 6s production may be slower than expected may be plain wrong, if you go by the record earnings one iPhone supplier recorded last month.
Catcher Technologies supplies the metal casings for the iPhone 6s. In November it recorded sales on $254 million — representing an increase of 1.4 percent from the previous month, and a massive 50.3 percent increase from this time last year.
There’s no doubting that Apple’s “Find my iPhone” feature can be pretty useful at times. But a recent story highlights the feature’s potential dark side — as a family was attacked after a group of people knocked on their door, erroneously claiming their lost handset was inside the family’s home.
We’ve heard plenty of conflicting reports about when we should expect a new smaller, 4-inch iPhone “c” from Apple, but Piper Jaffray’s resident Apple analyst Gene Munster suggests that Cupertino would be wasting its time by releasing a sequel to 2013’s iPhone 5c.
Why? Because, Munster claims, customers don’t really want smaller handsets at all.
The Japanese Apple Store in Tokyo’s upmarket Ginza district had to be evacuated and a promotional event canceled over the weekend after it received a bomb threat.
From a photography app with a difference to a math training app with human curation and a fantastic classic iOS puzzle game going free, we’ve sifted through this week’s most exciting apps to bring you the ones you absolutely need to download now.
Check out our picks below. Trust us, this is the way you want to spend Sunday!
Back in June, Apple’s Eddy Cue promised that iTunes Match – Apple’s song matching service that syncs local music files to the iCloud for streaming anytime – would soon phase out its 25,000 track limit in favor of 100,000 tracks.
Sadly, we haven’t heard anything more about that since. But Apple might now be soft-launching the higher 100,000 track limit.
If you’re a Verizon customer who wants to be able to make Wi-Fi calls on your Android or iPhone like your brethren over at Ma Bell, you’ll soon be able to. But if you’re on an iPhone, you’ll have to wait until 2016.
Though Apple spends far less on research and development than the competition, they out-innovate them all. How? Catch the discussion on this episode of The CultCast. Plus: iPhone 7 may ditch the beloved headphone jack; Amazon Video is coming to Apple TV; the holiday accessory that could be eroding your WiFi signal; and with the year drawing to a close, we choose we our favorite Apple device of 2015!
Our thanks to Lynda for supporting this episode. Lynda is like the Apple Music of online education, with over 3000 expert-taught video courses you can stream straight to computer or mobile device. Learn how to use Logic’s new super powerful Alchemy synth, or develop Mac apps for OS X—learn all you want for free for 10 days at lynda.com/cultcast.
If you’re still subscribed to Beats Music instead of Apple Music, your days are numbered. Until January 19, you have the opportunity to save all of your playlists and migrate your account data over to Apple Music if you wish to do so. But after that, Apple will discard of your current data.
Drone footage of the progress being made on Apple Campus 2 has given us our first look at the underground auditorium where Apple will unveil all of its magical new products in the future.
The new auditorium won’t be visible once construction is complete, but thanks to Duncan Sinfield’s latest 4K aerial footage of the project, we can see how huge the new auditorium will be once Apple finally moves in.
Check it out:
Apple has famously killed popular technologies when it believes they’re past their best — and it could be gearing up to kill one more. According to recent rumors, next year’s iPhone 7 will ship without the 3.5mm headphone jack in favor of a thinner form factor.
Understandably, a lot of fans are unhappy about that prospect, which would mean all our existing headphones wouldn’t be compatible with the next iPhone — at least not without a (pricey) adapter. But could it be a move that pays off in the long run? Are there pros that outweigh the cons?
Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we battle it out over these questions and more!
Han Jin was looking through the eyes of the robot and could see the future. But the story doesn’t end well for the robot.
Jin’s view, with his colleagues’ support, put robot building on hold. The team changed direction, using the robot’s seeing mechanism to develop a Virtual Reality camera that could be put in the hands of regular folks.
Donald Trump has said that his “real dream” is for Apple, along with other U.S. companies, to bring their manufacturing back to the United States.
Trump made the comments during an interview to promote his new book, Crippled America. “We think of Apple as an American company,” Trump said. “But they make their product in China. And they have offices here, but China makes more money with Apple than we do, if you think about it.”
The Apple Watch continues to go from strength to strength, while Samsung’s own wearable devices are eclipsed by new arrivals, according to new figures released by International Data Corporation (IDC).
Does your browser feel slow? Hate modern web design? Boy, have you got it lucky. Web browsers used to be infinitely worse. And so did web pages.
Don’t believe me? Here’s an emulator that allows you to surf websites from up to a couple decades ago, using old browsers like Safari 3.2.3 on Windows, IE 4.0.1 on Mac, or Netscape Navigator 3.0.4, also on Mac.
Because even the newest devices get stepped on and dropped in toilets, Cult of Mac’s buyback program has been updated to include the latest Apple products.