News - page 1089

Happy Friday, everyone! That of course means another Cult of Mac Magazine positively brimming with amazing how-to, news, and feature articles to keep you informed and entertained all weekend long.

We’ve got a fair pile of Apple TV how-tos aimed at getting you set up and running hot with Apple’s new set-top box, as well as a round up of the five best games to play on your big screen and several hidden tricks you need to know about the new Siri Remote.

We hope you like all that and a ton more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, the best slice of Apple news and info this side of Cupertino. Be sure to grab yourself a copy today.

Here’s the rundown for this week.

Chances are you can vaguely remember the last Apple ad you saw, but do you remember it in the same way you remember the company’s “1984” commercial for the original Macintosh, or its wonderful “Think Different” campaign? It’s been a while since we saw anything quite as iconic.

Apple still creates great commercials we can’t help but talk about, but many fans would say those ads aren’t as good as they once were. Has Apple lost its marketing magic, or is it just too difficult to create truly iconic ads in the digital age?

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!

While working for Apple alongside good friend Jony Ive on special projects, like the Apple Watch, industrial designer Marc Newson found time to devote his celebrated sensibilities to two very simple objects.

Behold his take on the toaster and the teapot. Simple and clearly fitting for kitchens right now and 100 years from now.

Google is in talks with chipset manufacturers with a view to designing its own processors and other components for future Android devices, according to a new report.

The company is said to be interested in following Apple’s footsteps in an effort to make Android “more competitive” at the high end of the market, and to “solve other major problems.”

There are only 5 more Fridays left until Star Wars: The Force Awakens debuts in theaters. Director JJ Abrams swore he wouldn’t give fans any more trailers, but a new international trailer for the film was released this morning, and oh boy is it filled with a bunch of new scenes.

This might be the most revealing trailer we’ve seen yet, with new footage of BB-88, Chewbacca, Leia, Finn, Rey, and of course, Kylo Ren wielding his broadsword lightsaber.

Check out all the new goodness in the trailer below:

Everything we’ve heard so far about Apple’s long-awaited iPad Pro suggests that it’s coming November 11th, but according to a source familiar with Apple’s plans, would-be customers can actually expect the plus-sized tablet to officially launch on Friday 13th.

Jason Voorhees would be proud!

iOS 9.1 brought a whole lot of new emojis, but some users are complaining that it had another unintended consequence too — breaking their Touch ID fingerprint sensor.

Posts on Apple’s Support Communities website claim that the recent update either slows down their Touch ID, or in some cases means it even fails to recognize fingerprints altogether.

Prior to founding a tiny little company called Apple, Steves Jobs and Wozniak were “phone phreakers” — selling illegal blue boxes to help people make free long-distance phone calls.

While both quickly turned their back on their law-breaking ways, Jobs noted that, “If we hadn’t made those little blue boxes, there might never have been an Apple computer.”

The entire saga is now the subject of a short documentary, featuring new interviews with Woz, alongside notable phone phreaks Charlie Pine, Tony Lauck, and John “Cap’n Crunch” Draper. Check it out below.

The Apple Watch is continuing its international rollout by going on sale in India — shortly before the country’s Diwali festival, and just one month after the Indian debut of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.

Apple’s first wearable device — which has so far shipped close to 7 million units around the world — starts at Rs 30,900 ($469) for the 38mm Apple Watch Sport, and goes up to Rs 14.2 lakh ($21,500) for the top-priced Apple Watch Edition.

It’s time to dust off that virtual reality headset that you’ve hardly used since the day it arrived, because the biggest video platform on the planet now supports VR video. Google CEO Sundar Pichai today announced that YouTube has begun offering its first VR video, which can be enjoyed with Google Cardboard.

Facebook is dipping its toes into the music biz this week with a brand new feature that makes it easier than ever to share your favorite tunes with all your social network friends.

The new Music Stories feature rolls out to iPhone users today and allows you to share 30-second song samples from Apple Music and Spotify by simply copy and pasting a link into your status update.

Here’s a preview of how it works:

You have your reasons for not owning a smartwatch, one of which is you happen to like the timepiece presently on your wrist. What if you could make your primitive wristwatch a little smart?

Chronos is like slapping a brain on the back of your favorite timepiece. It is an ulna-thin disc with 36 hours of battery life that brings curated notifications and health tracking to a watch of any age.

The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus have barely been out for a month, but Apple engineers are hard at work finishing the iPhone 7, and they’re already placing orders for new chips.

Apple has placed LCD driver orders with Synaptics for the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, indicating that the touch and display driver (TDDI) single-chip solutions its been developing in-house aren’t quite ready for prime time.

Apple Music has gone country in the streaming service’s latest ad that debuted last night during ABC’s broadcast of the Country Music Awards. The new ad gives viewers a backstage peek at Kenny Chesney’s ‘No Shoes Nation’ tour as the country singer uses Apple Music to create playlists, and discover new tunes

Along with waxing philosophical about the ‘human element’ Apple Music offers, the one-minute ad also features the Apple Watch that’s worn by Chesney to track his workouts as he slams medicine balls into the ground while aspiring to become a bull rider.

Watch the new ad below:

We were all supposed to have personal jetpacks by now. But keeping them in the air for any length of time has made them impractical, so to get our futuristic fix we have to settle for Buzz Lightyear or James Bond from the 1965 movie Thunderball.

But check out jetpack pilots Yves Rossy and Vince Reffet, of the Jetman Dubai team, who recently conducted a fantastic formation flight over the Palm Jumeirah in Dubai with an Emirates A380 commercial jet.

Xiaomi’s efforts to follow Apple into adopting pressure-sensitive smartphone displays has hit a roadblock, with the Chinese company struggling to source suitable components at a reasonable price. This almost certainly means that Xiaomi fans will have to wait longer for its first handset with 3D Touch.

Giant drugstore chain Walgreens today announced that Balance Rewards loyalty scheme members can now earn and redeem loyalty points via Apple Pay through Apple Pay — without having to separately scan a Balance Rewards card or barcode.

Before he made The Martian, Ridley Scott directed the most iconic Apple ad in history with the classic 1984 Macintosh commercial.

So what better way to set yourself apart from Apple as a rival smartphone maker than to… completely rip off ideas Apple was circulating thirty-odd years ago? Yeah, we don’t get it either.

Check out HTC’s new One A9 ad below to make your own mind up.

Thanks to innovations like Apple Pay, Touch ID has become increasingly useful as of late. But Apple’s got another idea it’s been toying with also — in the form of a “panic mode,” which can be entered by unlocking your iPhone with a certain finger.

I wish I could have a failure like the Apple Watch!

Despite naysayers claiming the Apple Watch hasn’t taken off as Apple hoped, a new set of figures suggests that Apple has shipped close to 7 million Apple Watches since its launch — a figure which outstrips all other vendors’ combined smartwatch shipments in the past five financial quarters.

Ever find yourself scouring the house for a lost set of keys just yearning for the sci-fi device that’d tell you where you left them? In yet another sign that the future is indeed here, there’s an app for that.

Apple has been busy scooping up real estate in North San Jose throughout 2015 and now we finally know what they might be doing with all that acreage.

A new Apple campus is reportedly in development, and according to a report from the Silicon Valley Business Journal, it could be a lot bigger than the current spaceship campus that’s scheduled for completion next year.

If you upgraded to an iPhone 6s, chances are the case on your old 6 fits just fine. But if the old case is waterproof, don’t go dropping that 6s in a puddle.

The iPhone 6s is taller, wider and thicker by 1/100th of an inch in either direction, hardly noticeable in hand but enough to compromise the protection on a waterproof case.

Catalyst, an accessories company favored by Apple users unafraid of a little water on their devices, has rolled out a new waterproof case for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.

Your Apple TV remote is an amazing little device that lets you manage your big TV exerience. There are quite a few little settings you may have missed, though, when you started up your new Apple TV.

You can adjust and tweak your way through the Apple TV settings to make the most of your time with the remote, including monitoring its battery, adjusting accessibility options, and — yes — even figuring out what Siri commands you can use.

Here are five of them, just for you.

We’ve all seen those horrendously long Terms and Conditions documents with every bit of Apple software we download, including the iTunes Terms and Conditions.

But what if you could see them in an illustrated version? We all might read them in that case.

These illustrated panels, each drawn in a different comic book style after famous other cartoonists, put Steve Jobs front and center of the otherwise dry, dusty legal disclaimers from Apple.

Totally worth a look, right?