Apple’s iPhone business may have been stronger than ever in 2015, but — never fear — the Apple doom predictors are never far away.
In this case, the doom report comes from Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty who predicts that iPhone sales will drop for the first time ever in 2016.
Samsung’s next-generation Galaxy S7 will get its grand unveiling in March, and its big selling point will be an iPhone-like pressure-sensitive display, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing sources familiar with the company’s plans.
BBC’s iPlayer app has landed on Apple TV in the U.K., joining the other streaming set top boxes — such as Roku, Google Chromecast and Amazon’s Fire TV — for which it was already available.
The app includes a full catalog of programs from the past month, along with live-streaming of BBC TV stations, the ability to start watching a program on your iPhone or iPad and then switch to Apple TV or vice versa, and personalized recommendations.
Taylor Swift has announced that she will debut her new concert movie, The 1989 World Tour Live, on Apple Music — six months after her public spat with Apple over artist royalties.
“I have a little surprise for you,” Swift wrote on Twitter, with a link to the trailer of the upcoming behind-the-scenes concert documentary, which will also presumably include appearances from special tour guests such as Ellie Goulding, Justin Timberlake, Mick Jagger, and others.
This week on The CultCast: We take a look at Apple’s zany new Smart Battery Case; cover the new and notable in the watchOS, tvOS and iOS updates; and discuss our favorite strategies for managing overloaded inboxes.
Stick around till the end for our favorite iOS apps and games of 2015!
Consumers have a nasty habit of throwing out their electronics as soon as newer, shinier models become available, and they rarely ever do so properly. Nearly 42 million tons of e-waste — everything from microwaves and electric shavers to washing machines, laptops, cellphones, TVs and computer monitors — entered the global garbage stream in 2014, according to a United Nations University report.
Like all trash, this stuff doesn’t just disappear. Instead, it stacks up in landfills. Unlike most trash, however, e-waste is often packed with valuable components — as well as toxic chemicals and materials that can cause real damage wherever they end up.
You’d feel better if you could slap your boss. But common sense, workplace rules and a little thing called your bills remind you to check your rage.
A developer and a musician have teamed up to give us an authority figure we can slap silly. Will Capt. James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise do?
Apple releases a new iPhone 6 battery case and everyone hates it. Poor Apple.
This week, we chronicle the beating Apple’s Smart Battery Case takes from the internet, including a look at its insides, how the internet questions Jony Ive’s sanity, and the history of ‘humped’ design at Apple. That, plus accessories just as ugly as the new case, Apples updates to every OS it makes, the things we really don’t need in Apple Watch 2, and how to choose the right running app.
All this and much, much more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine. Check out the top stories below.
You have so much great video footage on your iPhone, but therein lies the problem. The thought of sitting down at a computer to edit any of it seems like a mountain you have no time to climb.
Cielo de la Paz is happy to help you reach the summit – rather quickly, too. de la Paz is a fearless creator whose soulful wanderings with her iPhone camera inspired Apple to select some of her work for the “Shot on iPhone 6” advertising campaign.
Quick! Get yourself over to the Google Store now, where you can claim a free Star Wars Cardboard, courtesy of Google. The limited edition headsets are themed to look like BB-8, a First Order Stormtrooper, Kylo Ren, and RS-D2 — but you can only pick one!
Unlike any other consumer electronics company, Apple has been nailing product design for decades. Jony Ive and his incredibly talented team have produced countless iconic gadgets that rivals can only dream of, and it’s the biggest reason why the company is so successful today.
But there are suggestions that Apple’s design prowess is beginning to slip away. Under new leadership, Apple has rolled out a number of products — most recently the butt-ugly Smart Battery Case — that have led some fans to question various design decisions.
Are those fans right to be concerned? Is it downhill from here for Apple’s design team, or is this a whole lot of fuss over nothing?
Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we battle it out over those questions and more — and weigh in with your thoughts down in the comments section!
The Apple Watch is the first major product to be launched without any involvement from Steve Jobs, but according to one of his long-time associates, the Apple cofounder was well aware that Jony Ive was working on a timepiece.
On Thursday at Glance Conf in San Francisco — the first Apple Watch conference ever — Tim Bajarin who had an on-and-off relationship with Jobs for over three decades, said Jobs had at least been told about the watch before he passed.
Want a spectacular stat for a Friday? Apple stock has increased 22,250 percent since its IPO almost 35 years ago.
And the accompanying depressing thought: If you had taken the money a new Apple computer cost at the time and instead spent it on AAPL stock during its 1980 public offering, you’d be sitting on a personal fortune of $965,650 today — just a few dollars away from being a freshly-minted millionaire.
Infamous street artist Banksy has created a new mural of Steve Jobs to make a big statement about the Syrian refugee crisis that is causing a storm of controversy not only in Europe but the U.S. as well.
Banksy’s Steve Jobs mural depicts the Apple co-founder with a black bag slung over his left shoulder and an original Macintosh computer in his left. The artwork was sprayed on a wall in the Calais refugee camp called ‘the Jungle’ in northern France.
Here’s a closer look:
Security firms Symantec and FireEye say that 2016 is set to usher in an increase in the number of attacks on Apple systems — following a rise in the quantity of threats to Mac computers, and the more-than-doubling of iOS malware in 2015.
Apple is selling an enormous amount of iPhones right now, but in its efforts to get an extra holiday sales bump it’s pushing an unsolicited pop-up notification to owners of older iPhone handsets — informing them of how “ridiculously powerful” the iPhone 6s is.
What’s the opposite of an iPad Pro? Presumably it would be an iPad con — and if a new scheme proposed by the U.K.’s Ministry of Justice comes to fruition, there could be a whole lot of them.
The proposed project aims to give prisoners taxpayer-funded iPads so that they can video chat with their families, while also improving their numeracy and literacy skills.
Couldn’t we at least pretend prison is designed as a punishment, and hand convicts cheap Android tablets as a deterrent instead?
Rumors that Apple might acquire portable camera maker GoPro caused a 16 percent increase in the latter company’s stock price yesterday — after GoPro shares had fallen 45 percent in the past few months.
When there are complaints about censorship in the App Store, it’s usually developers arguing that Apple shouldn’t have removed a particular app for infringing on its often-vague user guidelines.
Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban had something else in mind, however, when he sent a series of tweets claiming that Apple should boot Twitter off the App Store — until the social networking company finds a way of better removing “objectionable” material from its service.
A new poll of the most-wanted technology from the Star Wars universe shows that fans may not have really thought their answers through.
The survey comes courtesy of Harris Poll and software developer myDevices and asks one question: “If you could have any technology from the Star Wars trilogy, which would you want?”
While we approve of the study ignoring the prequels completely, we aren’t sure about the winners because it sounds like what these fans are really requesting are amazing and spectacular deaths.
An update to HBO Go is a direct assault on your productivity.
The streaming service just added two new features that are sure to send you spiraling into a “just one more” death spin. The new features are Picture-in-Picture (for compatible devices running iOS 9) and autoplay, which is how you sit down to watch a single episode and then look up later to discover the sun has come up, and now you have to go to work.
The latest quarterly report from antivirus company AVG has outed the battery-killingest, storage-hoggingest apps currently available.
Some of the culprits are unsurprising, but a few might be murdering your phone’s performance without you knowing, like some kind of ninjas that have somehow taken app form. All of this and more happens in “Appsassins,” the screenplay I’m pitching to SyFy.
But here are the biggest offenders, because that’s really the more important information here.
Didn’t think the Apple Watch would catch on? Not everyone agrees, especially analysts who study sales projections.
Cupertino is on track to sell 21 million watches and rake in about $8.4 billion in revenue in the first 12 months of the Apple Watch, according to one of the hottest Apple analysts around. Not bad for a company that entered the wearables game late.
When I first became a reporter, I bought one of those little mics you could suction-cup to a telephone to record interviews. That was some gadget, except for having to tape it to the handset because the suction cup sometimes popped off.
You can still buy this kind of microphone or use your smartphone with an app called Yallo. A simple interface lets you record incoming calls, share the recorded conversation with an associate or have recordings transcribed and automatically sent to email.
People that throw away money on gold Apple Watches usually don’t need deals, but if you’re looking to get an Apple Watch Edition for the holiday, Best Buy has the biggest deal we’ve ever seen on Jony Ive’s immaculate timepiece.