News - page 1167

Tim Cook’s visiting Beijing at the moment and, when he’s not posting from popular micro-blogging network Weibo, he’s meeting with some pretty high-powered people.

Among them is Chinese vice premier Liu Yandong, who Cook met with on Tuesday to discuss how Apple can do more to promote scientific and educational cooperation between China and the United States.

Three of Steve Jobs’ old business cards — each representing a different phase of his career — have sold at auction for a whopping $10,050.

Spanning the years 1984 to 1990, the cards name Jobs as president of NeXT and chairman of the board at Apple and Pixar, the three companies Jobs was deeply involved with during his career.

So who bought them? Read on to find out.

Mobile giant Verizon has announced that it will acquire the former media kingpin AOL in an all-cash deal worth $4.4 billion.

Although AOL is virtually an afterthought these days, Verizon has said that it will use the deal to help push its online video content, which it has made efforts to become a leader in.

Notably, the deal also makes Verizon the owner of The Huffington Post, Techcrunch, Engadget and others.

Some customers who have ordered Apple’s gorgeous new 12-inch Retina MacBook are in for an unpleasant surprise. After prizing the pristine white lid off the device’s box, they’re discovering that their new notebook is already damaged.

The complaint was noted by Apple accessory maker tizi, whose newly arrived MacBook came with two large dents on its underside. And the company thinks it’s discovered the cause.

For many years Apple has been a great company when it comes to pushing the accessibility of its products for disabled users — from features like VoiceOver, which allow for descriptions of apps to be read aloud for the blind, to FaceTime which represented a breakthrough in allowing deaf people to communicate with one another using a mobile device.

In a new video for CNN Money, the latest step of that evolution is shown as a deaf Apple Watch owner demonstrates how he can use the device to control his hearing aid.

The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus may just be the biggest incremental “s” upgrades Apple has ever done, according to a new report.

As per well-connected KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone 6s will feature twice the RAM of its predecessors, a significant processor upgrade, better camera, new color option, sapphire display, strengthened shell, improved Touch ID and Force Touch.

Just about the only thing that would stay the same, in fact, are the two size options!

They promised us all jetpacks — these guys got them and took them to one of the world’s most remarkable locales. And you get to ride along if you dare.

The latest eye-popping (and possibly stomach-churning) video from Yves Rossy (aka the Jetman) shows the Swiss daredevil inventor and his new sidekick soaring in formation over desert sands and Dubai’s awesome skyline with nothing but jetpacks and a total lack of fear.

If you’re looking to plan a heist, you’d probably best stay clear of Hangouts: Google has inadvertently confirmed that its chat platform is susceptible to police and government monitoring.

While the tech giant usually keeps quiet about Hangouts’ security features, the revelation (of sorts) came out of an “Ask Me Anything” session Friday on Reddit that included members of Google’s public policy department and legal team. Its proposed topic was “the current status of U.S. government surveillance law reform and how Google thinks about these issues,” but the questions were less about laws or reform and more about Google’s practices.

The Apple Watch’s tiny screen has already proven to be a boundless landscape for creatively organizing app icons, but one obsessive reddit user has created the most scientifically convenient app layout we’ve seen yet.

The future is here, folks, with a little gadgety box called a CH4 that you place near your rear end to measure the amount of gaseous emissions from your nether regions.

Pair that with an app on your iPhone that tracks the foods you eat and compares that with the amount you fart, and you’ve got one handy device for your office, car, or dorm room.

Now all it needs is to deliver a little electric shock each time you fart, and this thing would be perfect.

If you’ve been secretly longing to recreate that famous light cycle scene from TRON in real life, you’re now out of luck, as the only working model we know of has now sold at auctioneer Sotheby’s for a not-horrendous price of $77,000.

While it’s great that someone grabbed this fully-functional homage to a nerd cult-classic, the bad news is that it wasn’t you.

Apple is following up its release of iOS 8.4 beta 4 this morning with a new beta build of OS X 10.10.4 for developers.

Apple continues to improve its redesigned Music app, as evidenced by today’s release of iOS 8.4 beta 3.

The new beta is available now in the iOS Dev Center and includes plenty of bug fixes for the Music app, which was updated with new features like a new MiniPlayer, global search, Up Next, personalized playlists and more in iOS 8.4 beta 1.

Summertime is finally upon us, and here in the Valley of the Sun, that mostly means one thing: cliff-jumping season.

I’ve been worried that my Apple Watch might not survive some of the 50-foot cliffs my friends and I like to hurl ourselves off of, but the folks at DC Rainmaker have put the waterproofing of Apple’s new wearable to the test by jumping off an Olympic diving platform. Despite momentarily being exposed to water deeper than the 1 meter it’s rated for, the Apple Watch keeps on ticking.

Watch the full test below:

Scott Forstall, the Apple executive who lead the creation of iOS and was then kicked out the company in 2012, says he’s not staying mad at Apple.

In a recent interview about the Broadway play he’s producing, Forstall addressed his split with Apple for the first time since leaving the company after the disastrous launch of Apple Maps. Rather than cheering for Google and Apple’s other competitors though, Forstall told the Wall Street Journal he’s ‘delighted’ that Apple is still making beloved products.

Apple Watch is great at many things like checking weather, tracking fitness and sending notifications. But when it comes to surfing the web, Apple Watch is unsurprisingly the worst device for the task.

An Apple Watch version of Safari wasn’t included with Jony Ive’s smartwatch, but that didn’t stop notorious jailbreaker Comex from hacking a web browser onto the wearable. Comex posted a video of his hacked Apple Watch running a web browser on the Google homepage over the weekend, showing it is possible to browse the web from your wrist — but you’ll never want to.

Check it out:

The CEO of Fiat Chrysler made a recent trip to Silicon Valley that included a ride in Google’s self-driving car as well as a meeting with Tim Cook to talk about Apple’s automotive ambitions.

Sergio Marchionne, Fiat’s chief executive, spoke Saturday at the opening of a Maserati dealership near Toronto, Canada, and said he had recently met with both Apple and Tesla to talk about the future of cars — and found out more about what Apple’s planning.

We have a reinvigorated interest in the mysteries of space. Astronaut Scott Kelly is just beginning a record-breaking stint in zero gravity, a space probe is about to fly by Pluto and manned missions to an asteroid and Mars are in the pipeline.

There is also the ongoing science on how to go to the bathroom in space, where things tend to float.

Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti explained that mystery over the weekend, when she took time from her work on the International Space Station to give a video tour of the bathroom (see below) and delicately describe going Numbers 1 and 2 in zero gravity.

The 12.9-inch iPad Pro could boast enhanced touch sensitivity while also incurring fewer production costs for Apple, according to a new report coming from the supply chain — suggesting that Apple is rethinking the material used for its tablet touch panel.

Given his unabashed love for “Jony Ives” (sic) and his status as the “next Steve Jobs,” it was only ever going to be a limited amount of time before Kanye West got his hands on a gold Apple Watch.

What may be slightly more of a surprise is that he didn’t just get the regular 18-karat Apple Watch Edition Apple has handed out to seemingly every celebrity who knocks on its doors, but rather the all-gold custom band unavailable to customers, which only Beyonce and Karl Lagerfeld have been spotted wearing so far.

Netflix is killing it right now, so I’d be inclined to believe founder and CEO Reed Hastings when he chips in with his thoughts on the future of TV.

And, wouldn’t you know it, when he gave a speech about that very subject last week in Berlin, what he described as television’s future sounded a whole lot like what Apple is reported to be unveiling this year.

As part of new environmental initiatives, Apple is funding a five year project to manage 1 million acres of forests across China — and Tim Cook has set up an account on the popular Chinese microblogging service Weibo to announce it.

Steve Wozniak thinks the future is all about self-driving cars, but don’t expect him to be putting his money on the rumored Apple Car.

That’s because the Apple co-founder has signed a deal with Cadillac which will see him not only appear in marketing for the firm, but also offering his thoughts in a technical consulting role.

“I will be meeting with Cadillac, offering tech ideas on what belongs [in future vehicles] and what doesn’t,” Woz told a group of more than 200 people attending a recent presentation hosted by BBVA Compass Bank.

Apple’s not exactly hurting for press coverage these days. There was a time, though, when the company was desperate for any bit of publicity it could drum up. That time was February 1977, when The Apple Computer Company spoke to Kilobaud magazine for a multi-page feature article.

I don’t know whether my favorite bit of the resulting article is the crowing about 10 Apple computers selling in three weeks (the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus sold 10 million in their opening weekend) or Steve Jobs not yet mastering the art of selling by admitting the machine “is not for everybody,” but it makes for fun reading nonetheless.