Tis the season for playing around with weird iOS apps with your friends and family, and boy, do we have a doozy for you. It’s called Face Swap Live, and it does exactly what it says on the tin.
Although Fitbit may consider the Apple Watch a technical threat, Apple’s smartwatch didn’t seem to hamper Christmas sales any for the company: the market-leading activity tracker seems to have had a huge sales surge thanks to Christmas. Could Fitbit have outsold the Apple Watch this Holiday season?
This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: We venture into very heart of Apple, inside Jony Ive’s super-secret design lab, and what we find is amazing. Plus: the best holiday iOS App Store deals and our favorite movies of 2015!
Our thanks to FreshBooks — the easy-to-use invoicing software designed to help small business owners get organized, save time invoicing and get paid faster — for supporting this episode. Get started with a free trial at Freshbooks.com/cultcast.
In addition to rounding up the best stories of the year, we’re also showcasing the weirdest of 2015, and we can’t do that without including the sickest burns people laid down over the past 12 months.
It’s always strange when companies and CEOs snip and snap at each other like annoyed children. We should expect them to be above that sort of behavior, but guess what? They totally aren’t.
Here are some of the most blistering insults of the year.
If you got new devices for Christmas, don’t just put the old ones in a drawer — use Cult of Mac’s buyback program to get paid for them today!
Happy holidays everyone, however you celebrate it: Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, kickin’ Kwanzaa and a tipsy New Year!
We trust you’re in the company of family and friends, stuffing your faces and giving and receiving in the best spirit of the holidays.
Things are going be quiet around here for a few days while we enjoy a short break. We have a great Mighty Mac Freebies giveaway and several more “best-of-the-year” posts coming up.
We’ll be back in the New Year with a bang from Las Vegas! We have a crew heading to CES 2016, bringing you all the best in tech.
Meanwhile, take it easy on the eggnog.
Leander Kahney
Editor & publisher
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, so we’ve decided to unleash our weekly magazine stuffed full of great Apple news, reviews, and how-tos for your yuletide pleasure.
This week, we’ve got a peek inside Apple’s super-secret Industrial Design team, the ten best iOS games from this past year, a plethora of setup guides for all your shiny Apple gear, and a look at some of the year’s most dedicated iFans.
Here’s the rundown this week.
One of the most surprising movie flops of 2015 was Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs: a movie which, miraculously, earned even less for its creators than 2013’s panned Jobs, starring Dude, Where’s My Car‘s Ashton Kutcher.
Now the movie has received another ignominious fate: being singled out by major film critic and former co-host of At the Movies Rex Reed as his pick for no. 1 worst film of the year. Ouch!
Apple watchers should expect the company’s mobile payment service, Apple Pay, to expand to new markets in 2016 — with a heavy emphasis on Asia.
According to a new report, Apple is focusing on Asia and Europe since adoption in the United States has been slower than expected. Regions set to get Apple Pay next year so far include China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Spain.
Police in Tigard, Oregon have cracked an organized retail crime ring which used stolen gift cards worth three-quarters of a million dollars to buy iPhones bound for the Hong Kong black market.
Tigard Detective T.J. Hahn told the local KOIN 6 News that organized retail theft has become a bigger crime than even drug sales.
“This kind of activity makes millions of millions of dollars, into the billions,” he said.
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.
Robots are cool, but there are some things visionary engineers in the robotics field should not mess with – like eight tiny reindeer.
Boston Dynamics put their famous robotic dogs through another test – harnessing three Spot bots to a sleigh, pulling a waving Santa-like figure (not the real Santa, but a real person dressed as Mrs. Claus). The Google-owned company posted a video on YouTube of the prancing robo dogs, apparently showing the world once again that even the job of Rudolph can be replaced by a robot.
China’s Foreign Ministry said today that U.S. tech companies have nothing to fear from the country’s new anti-terrorism law, which could require companies to create “back doors” in products, or to hand over encryption information to the Chinese government.
Forget The Ed Sullivan Show, The Beatles are coming to Apple Music, Google Play, and a variety of other online streaming music services — and just in time for Christmas, too.
Starting Christmas Eve, the Fab Four will be available for your listening pleasure on Apple Music, Spotify, Slacker, Tidal, Microsoft’s Groove, Rhapsody, Deezer, Google Play, and Amazon Prime.
Apple fans are some of the most dedicated in all of tech (some might even call them a cult), but a few enterprising and/or desperate people really outdid themselves this year.
Not that we can really blame them. Cupertino brought the heat this year with the Apple Watch, a cool new Apple TV, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, and the massive iPad Pro. We can forgive the superfans for really going all out to get their hands on the latest iGear. But some of their efforts might have been a bit too enthusiastic.
Here are some times when people’s love of Apple outweighed logic this year.
Apple is changing the way members of its board of directors are nominated, according to a new SEC filing that reveals Apple plans to offer ‘proxy access’ that will give shareholders greater power to oust directors and dictate strategy.
Apple has claimed final victory in a lawsuit arguing that the company was purposely intercepting and failing to deliver texts sent from iPhones to Android owners.
The case was related to Apple’s iMessage service, which posed a challenge to Apple-to-Android switchers up until 2014, when Apple finally issued a fix for the problem.
Pete Souza, the Chief Official White House Photographer, just posted a huge album of all of the many wonderful shots he has taken with his iPhone over the last year.
As an Apple fan, there’s a great gift you can bestow upon your friends and family this holiday season. The amazing part is, it’s free.
I’m not talking about the free tech support you’ll inevitably dole out to befuddled relatives (Cult of Mac’s how-to section can help with that, BTW). I’m talking about evangelizing for two of Apple’s least-loved products — and this gracious act will also goose the greater good.
There have been plenty of rumors about Apple creating bezel-less iPhones over the years, and as many concept videos turning those rumors into sci-fi CGI.
This concept’s different, though, in that it’s actually plausible. Meet the iPhone 7 Edge, a concept that takes the concept of the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge and applies it to the next iPhone.
Having added voice calling at no extra cost earlier this year, WhatsApp is now reportedly looking to introduce FaceTime-style video calls, according to a new report.
The leaked iOS screenshot shows a full-screen video call, along with a smaller inlaid video preview with the camera view of the call recipient, just like Skype or Apple’s own video calling service.
Now you can watch (and explore) 360-degree videos on the new Apple TV, thanks to virtual reality network Littlstar’s free app.
The network’s new tvOS app delivers content from the likes of Showtime, Disney and PBS. It works with Apple TV’s Siri Remote, granting users the ability to control the angle used in the immersive 360-degree videos via the remote’s nifty trackpad.
Christmas came early for schoolfriends of a Chinese businessman when he distributed 39 brand new iPhone 6s handsets during an elementary school reunion (!) over the past weekend.
The rose gold iPhones were engraved with the words, “To commemorate the Beilun Sanshan Primary School Class of 1998.” The generous giver of the gifts, a businessman with the surname Zhang, reportedly handed out the iPhones during a dinner in Ningbo, a city in China’s Zhejiang province.
Remembering passwords is one of the biggest pains of modern tech living. Hundreds of geniuses at dozens of companies have been searching for an easier solution, but Google may be ready to unleash a new solution that uses your smartphone to replace passwords all together.
If you’re anything like us, procrastination is one of the biggest hallmarks of the holidays. We’re here to help with our gift guide liveblog, which will be updated from now until Santa starts dropping through chimneys.
Whether you’re looking for something for a friend, spouse, significant other or just your dog, we’ve got a little something for everyone. Snap up these great gift ideas now — so you can get back to procrastinating.