News - page 1184

The redesign and relaunch of Beats Music is one of the most anticipated announcements Apple fans are expecting to hear about next week at WWDC. Apple spent $3 billion on Beats in an effort to take on the likes of Spotify and Pandora, but according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, all that effort won’t make Apple a ton of money.

Beats currently has about 300,000 paid subscribers while Spotify has 15 million. According to Munster’s math, even if Apple matched Spotify’s subscriber base the profits will be weak.

The Apple Watch has a “behavioral value” of $351 a year, according to a note from firm Global Equities Research.

That’s basically the price of a 38mm Sport, so tell that to the people who ask you what your new wearable is good for.

HBO made a splash with its streaming service HBO Now, and now its cheaper rival Showtime is ready to get in on the action too with its own streaming service that’s also launching exclusively with Apple.

Starting in July, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV users will be able to purchase a stand-alone subscription to Showtime through the Showtime app to stream all of the company’s original programming. It’s just like HBO Now, only a little bit cheaper.

Apple takes over San Francisco’s Moscone Center next week for the Worldwide Developers Conference, and preparations for the annual invasion have already begun. More than 5,000 developers will descend on the conference center for a week of coding and a little bit of partying.

This year’s signage on the outside of the Moscone Center looks pretty much just like last year’s. Here’s a closer look:

Developer Bethesda Softworks released a trailer for Fallout 4, the upcoming installment in its franchise of post-apocalyptic role-playing games.

The video doesn’t include any gameplay, but it does feature a whole lot of voiceover from series narrator Ron Perlman. Check it out below.

Kanye West was part of Jay Z’s small army of megastars that helped launch Tidal, but when it comes to his next album, Ye is reportedly looking to take the U2 route by releasing it on iTunes for free.

According to a new rumor on Twitter, Apple and Kanye are joining forces for the launch of the company’s new music streaming service. As a gift to the fans, Yeezy has agreed to release his new album ‘Swish’ for free after Apple paid him nearly double what he expected to make of album sales.

Beats Pill XL owners should return their speakers for a refund because the batteries could overheat and pose a fire safety risk. Apple recalled the product Wednesday, saying people who return the potentially dangerous Bluetooth speakers will receive a full refund of $325 as an Apple Store gift card or electronic payment.

Hidden in HomeKit documentation published today is the intriguing confirmation that Apple TV will serve as the digital hub for Apple’s new home-automation setup.

It’s a reminder of just how seriously Apple now treats the set-top box that it dismissed as a “hobby” a few years ago.

Apple is likely to use next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference to announce the availability of Apple Watches in its brick-and-mortar retail stores, according to a new report. The announcement is said to be planned either as part of the WWDC keynote or directly afterward.

If you’re a gamer, odds are you have a perfect run, high score or really impressive combo that you list among the highlights of your “career.” Personally, I TKO’d Mike Tyson in Punch-Out!! when I was 10 or 12, and I did it when everyone else was out of the room. But I swear it happened, you guys.

Unless you have enough free time and determination to play one thing until you can beat it with your monitor turned off and your keyboard flipped around, however, your greatest moments can’t hope to compete with the four amazing speedruns shown in the videos below. These players have left “good” far behind them, passing through “really good,” across “crazy good” and over “suspiciously good” to enter a realm of pure skill in which merely beating a game is considered “a start.”

These people play a bunch of difficult titles pretty well, is what I’m getting at.

Apple’s next-generation iPhones may receive quite the resolution boost — with a new report coming out of China claiming that the forthcoming iPhone 6s handset will boast a Full HD display, while its larger sibling the iPhone 6s Plus will feature a dazzling 2K display.

If true, this would allow the iPhone to better compete against some of the high-end flagship Android handsets, which routinely offer 2K or “Quad HD” displays.

It’s a bad week for simple messages capable of bringing down entire apps. Following on from Apple’s Messages-crashing “Unicode of death” code, a nasty bug has been discovered in Skype, which promises to crash the software every time you attempt to sign in.

Thankfully, the bug doesn’t appear to have any effect on Skype for Mac, although it does work on the iOS version, as well as the Windows and Android versions.

And getting rid of it’s not easy.

Rumors about Apple making a return to the 4-inch form factor for future iPhones have been doing the rounds since late last year.

While they seem to have quietened down as of late, however, a new report injects some life into the story by claiming that Apple display panel maker AU Optronics is one of several companies involved with manufacturing 4-inch iPhone panels — for a device which could ship as early as Q1 2016.

In a speech to nonprofit research firm Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) at its annual “Champions of Freedom” awards dinner last night, Apple head Tim Cook had some strong words about online security, government monitoring, and corporate data mining.

Cook was the first business leader to receive recognition from EPIC, which lauded his “corporate leadership” on matters of maintaining Apple customers’ privacy.

Now that you’ve dropped a few hundred bucks on your shiny new Apple Watch, you may be tempted to give it someplace to live while you charge it. But you don’t have to shell out even more cash to provide your new gadget with a resting place. Odds are you even have the stuff you need laying around your house right now.

Here are a few cool, creative, and cheap ways Apple Watch owners have found to prop up their preciouses.

The new Macbook might be the most gorgeous laptop ever made, but killer looks come with a severe case of ports-deficiency.

MacBook owners can solve the problem by carrying around a backpack full of dongles, or you could try a more elegant solution designed by two former Intel engineers. It’s called Voltus — a slick USB 3.0 hub that can also recharge your MacBook

Check out the company’s first teaser video:

If you’ve ever been browsing through the Pinterest app and saw something that made you think, “OMG WANT,” but you were away from your computer or just didn’t feel like going online to make that thing yours, you may be interested in the program the company announced today.

“Buyable Pins” will let you purchase select items directly from the app using a credit card or Apple Pay.

Apple completely removed all ports from the new MacBook except for a solitary USB Type-C that was mocked by fanboys across the world, but now that Intel has taken the wraps off of the new Thunderbolt 3 protocol, new MacBook owners are getting the last laugh.

Update:We’re back! We were finally able to get hold of someone at Facebook and get our Facebook page back. Many thanks to everyone who tried to help and offered support. We contacted someone at Facebook through a reader in Chicago, who happens to work for a big newspaper. He had a contact in Facebook’s media team and called her up. Within minutes I received an email asking for details, and two minutes after that it was fixed. In fact, it was shocking how quickly the situation was reversed, given that we’d been wrestling with it for almost 24 hours — many thanks to the Facebook insider who fixed the problem for us. However, my thesis still holds — Facebook is a locked vault. If you don’t know someone who knows someone who works there, you’re SOL. Oh, and no word on what happened. I asked them, but no reply as yet.

Much to our horror, Cult of Mac’s Facebook page got hacked Monday and turned into a spam site. The hackers have locked us out and we’re finding it impossible to regain control.

We’re trying desperately to contact Facebook, but the company offers no customer support whatsoever. There are no online submission forms, no support email addresses, and the phone automatically hangs up on you if you call. It’s impossible to raise a human being over there.

It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. But during this ongoing nightmare, I’ve discovered something important about Facebook and the kind of tech companies it represents.

The U.S. Senate has taken one step closer to a final vote on changing the government’s controversial program to freely tap and monitor citizens’ phones.

Senators voted 83-14 to end debate on the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection and Online Monitoring” (USA Freedom) Act. The bill will extend lapsed provisions of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act and aims to add transparency to the NSA’s activities surrounding wiretapping and data collection.

A final vote could happen as early as this afternoon.

The home of the future arrived today and, while not exactly a whimper, it wasn’t much of a bang either.

Where are the smart voice-activated refrigerators? Where are the Jetsons-style gizmos that have us firing up our Apple Pay, and convince us that Apple is taking home automation seriously?

While there’s nothing wrong with what we got, it was the same predictable range of smart light bulbs, thermostats, and other gadgets that techies have had for years.

And after a year of waiting, we want more. Much more.

Apple probably isn’t going to be launching its new web TV service any month soon, but to hold users over until they can cut cable, Apple has added a new channel from National Geographic to give users their nature fix.

Almost a year since Apple unveiled its home-automation platform HomeKit, the first compatible products were officially announced today — allowing you to start building that Jetsons-style smart home you’ve always dreamed about, operated via Siri using your iPhone, iPad or even Apple Watch.

Among the first wave of HomeKit offerings are smart lights, thermostats, and home sensors for tracking air quality, temperature, smoke, humidity, air pressure, energy, and water consumption in your house.

Check out the full list below.

Apple has expanded its “Shot on iPhone” print ad campaign with a batch of videos showing off the kind of beautiful footage it’s possible to record using the latest iPhone.

Instead of calling in the pros to film spectacular sights, the ads focus on serendipitous slices of everyday life, such as a ladybug on a twig or a sparrow eating from a person’s hand. As with the “Shot on iPhone” print ads, the spots were crowdsourced from regular iPhone users.

And you know what? Considering that each one is just 15 seconds long (with five seconds being the Apple logo and the “Shot on iPhone 6” tagline), they’re actually pretty darn great!

According to Jony Ive, the Apple Watch project was first touted shortly after Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. But what would it have been like had Apple’s legendary co-founder lived to see the arrival of Apple’s debut into the smartwatch market?

To give us an idea, one dedicated Apple fan cut up and reassembled old “Stevenote” speeches to piece together an Apple Watch ad narrated by Jobs himself. Considering that it relies on old sound bytes about unrelated products, it actually works.

Check it out below. Bonus points if you can work out where each of the quotes originally came from!