Mobile menu toggle

News - page 1188

The problem with Becoming Steve Jobs? Too much Steve Jobs

By

Becoming Steve Jobs
The world needs fresh insight into how Apple works, but you won't find much of that in Becoming Steve Jobs. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

One of Steve Jobs’ favorite recordings was The Beatles working on version after version of “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

The new Jobs biography, Becoming Steve Jobs, is like that recording: It serves up fresh takes on oft-told stories from Apple’s history, this time with more sugarcoating.

Apple teams with Foxconn to launch iPhone trade-in program in China

By

People queue for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus all across China. Photo: People's Daily/Weibo
People queue for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus all across China. Photo: People's Daily/Weibo

Apple’s doing everything it can to push its brand in China, which Tim Cook is convinced will soon take over from the U.S. as the company’s primary market.

Having recently taken the top spot for smartphone sales in the country for the first time ever, and also beaten out the likes of Gucci and Chanel to be named China’s favorite luxury brand, Apple is now teaming with manufacturer Foxconn to introduce a trade-in program for iPhones — letting customers exchange their older iPhone handsets for credit against other Apple products.

The program is set to go into action next week, on March 31.

Apple may release three different iPhones this September

By

Is the 4-inch iPhone coming or not?
The projected sizes of Apple's next generation of iPhones. Photo: ModMyI
Photo: ModMyI

Whispers about three new iPhones set to arrive this September are emanating from Apple’s Chinese supply chain — suggesting that we may be set to receive the expected iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, alongside a 4-inch iPhone referred to currently as the iPhone 6c.

Check out details about internal components, possible pricing and projected sales below.

Trent Reznor is rebuilding Apple’s Spotify killer from ground up

By

Apple has big ambitions for its new music streaming service.
Beats redesign is coming to WWDC 2015. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

Apple is planning to unveil a hot new redesign of Beats Music at WWDC. The new streaming service is aimed at killing rival’s like Spotify and Pandora, but rather than relying on an Apple software veteran to redesign Beats Music, Nine Inch Nail’s frontman has been tapped to lead the redesign.

Nearly a year after acquiring Beats for $3 billion, Apple plans to overhaul its music strategy behind the Beats Music redesign, reports the New York Times. Reznor, who was the chief creative officer for Beats, has been made the point main for overhauling the iOS music service to include the streaming service.

The two personality traits that made Steve Jobs great

By

post-316999-image-8d267c37138394b1f0d5aa08666e4cb6-jpg
Steve Jobs was a total narcissist. And that's a good thing. Photo: Ben Stanfield/Flickr CC

The new Steve Jobs biography, Becoming Steve Jobs, rests on the premise that Jobs’ wilderness years outside Apple somehow helped turn a once-reckless co-founder into a seasoned leader.

Just how accurate the book’s kinder, gentler portrayal of Steve actually is, is something that will be discussed over the coming days and weeks — but a new study from Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management backs up the idea that brash, narcissistic qualities can be a “net positive” for CEOs, so long as they are counterbalanced by an added dose of humility.

The study’s illustration of the perfect mixture of these qualities? None other than Jobs himself.

Raising a daughter is even tougher when she’s a zombie

By

Real men cry, especially when they may have to kill their zombie daughters. Photo: Lionsgate Films
Real men cry, especially when they may have to kill their zombie daughters. Photo: Lionsgate Films

What happens when your daughter is infected by the zombie virus? You love her, and you want to save her.

Unfortunately, you’ll probably have to kill her.

Action-hero and California governor Schwarzenegger stars in the upcoming Maggie, a gritty, realistic, and very human portrait of the possible zombie apocalypse.

Becoming Steve Jobs searches for answers in Jobs’ wilderness years

By

Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Becoming Steve Jobs explores Steve Jobs' exile from Apple. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Photo:

New biography Becoming Steve Jobs attempts to answer an important question: What happened to Steve Jobs during his wilderness years outside Apple that turned him from a gifted-but-impossible-to-work-with youngster into the seasoned digital emperor he would be following his return to the company he founded?

It’s a question that’s crucial to understanding Apple’s rise back to prominence from the late 1990s onward — but one that was ignored by previous Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, whose 2011 book Steve Jobs sold a gajillion copies, but is now (perhaps unfairly) being recast as an unqualified failure.

In Isaacson’s book, these crucial years away from Apple take up just five chapters out of 42 — and that section also includes Jobs’ marriage to Laurene Powell and the birth of his children. In Becoming Steve Jobs, the lessons from that era permeate almost every page.

CNN lands on Apple TV, but you still need cable

By

Apple's forthcoming service would unify top TV networks into one package. Photo: Alex Heath/ Cult of Mac
Photo: Alex Heath/ Cult of Mac

CNN came to the Apple TV today in the form of “CNNgo,” an app that lets you view live broadcasts, shows, and popular news clips.

Unfortunately, the bulk of CNNgo is still shackled to cable, meaning you won’t be able to view anything except some short video highlights without first entering TV subscription information.

Apple doubles down on emojis in latest iOS 8.3 beta

By

Selecting just the right skin tone is now even easier. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac
Selecting just the right skin tone is now even easier. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac

Apple continues to tweak its emoji keyboard in the latest iOS 8.3 beta, the fourth iOS beta so far to make its way to developers to test and try out new features.

The new options organize the skin tone modifiers — which debuted in beta 2 of iOS 8.3 — into tap and hold menus, making things just a bit easier to utilize while streamlining the process as well.

In addition, all the yellow-colored Emoji people that previously had brown hair now have yellow hair, as you can see in the image below.

Apple Watch Edition buyers get double the hands-on time in stores

By

Photo: Apple
Photo: Apple

Starting April 10th you’ll finally be able to go into an Apple Store and try on Jony Ive’s first wearable, as long as you have an appointment. Those shopping for the regular Apple Watch and Sport models will get up-to 15 minutes of hands-on time at the Apple Store, but if you’re looking at the Apple Watch Edition, you’ll get to play with it twice as long.

Your location has been shared more than 5,000 times in the last two weeks

By

How much is your smartphone spying on you? Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
How much is your smartphone spying on you? Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

Smartphone users know that sharing personal data with apps can be part of the price of free apps, but when it comes to how frequently those apps give that data to third parties, the numbers will shock you.

A new study by Carnegie Mellon found that some smartphone users’ data is shared more than 5,000 times with third parties in a two-week period. Most people are totally clueless this is happening, but the study found that when people learn how much frequently data is being shared, they act rapidly to shut down the spread of personal info.

Vintage timelapse shows Disneyland’s construction 60 years ago

By

Photo: Disney
Photo: Disney

Disneyland is about to celebrate its 60th anniversary on July 17th, but before Walt’s playground become one of the world’s most popular tourist attractions, it was just an ugly patch of dirt outside L.A.

If you’ve ever visited Disneyland, it’s hard to imagine a time when the Matterhorn and Tower of Terror didn’t peak up above the Anaheim skyline while cruising up I-5, so Disney released a timelapse video of the park’s original construction that shows Disney’s Main Street popping up in the middle of nowhere.

Watch the full video below:

Woz says Apple would never hire him or Steve Jobs today

By

Wozniak: Steve Jobs was driven by a desire to be important
Woz and Jobs in their early days at Apple. Today, they'd have been looking at job rejection letters.
Photo: Apple

Steve Wozniak thinks he and co-founder Steve Jobs could never have found employment at the company they created together, had they been in their twenties in 2015.

“I look at the experience and education levels you need to get a job at Apple today and I think, ‘Well, Steve Jobs and I never could’ve gotten a job at Apple today,'” Woz told The Australian Financial Review in an interview.

The reason, he says, is that the rigorous Apple hiring process (like the ones at other tech giants like Google and Microsoft) would never have favored two college dropouts like himself and Jobs. This bias means the companies are potentially missing out on finding the next person to come along with a world-changing idea.

Fake Apple Store employees try to sell customers on Microsoft

By

Photo:
Welcome to the Apple Store. Would you like to buy a Samsung? Photo: NelkFilmz

I’ve always found the people who work in Apple Stores to be incredibly helpful and, considering that their job is to sell you on expensive products, honest. One thing that’s never happened to me, however, is having an Apple Store employee suggest that I consider choosing a Samsung handset or Windows Phone over an Apple device.

But that’s exactly what happened the day that YouTube pranksters NelkFilmz dressed up as Apple employees and hit their local Apple Store, with the aim of selling Surfaces instead of iPads. They’re quickly weeded out by the real store employees, of course — at which point things just get awkward.

You can check the video out below.

How Apple could give the Mac, iPhone and iPad gesture controls … no hardware required

By

You don't special hardware for laptop gestures. Photo: Gizmodo
You don't need special hardware for laptop gestures. Photo: Gizmodo

We’ve been waiting seemingly for years for the Mac to get gesture recognition. Accessories like the Leap Motion have tantalized us with the possibility of aftermarket solutions, while secret Apple patents have hinted at future Macs with Kinect-like possibilities. Heck, Apple even purchased the company that designed the Kinect’s technology back in 2013, yet we’ve still seen nothing.

Turns out we might not need to wait for Apple to release special hardware for a gesture-controlled Mac. By making use of a very simple phenomenon in physics, Apple could actually enable gesture control in the Mac, iPhone and iPad … no hardware required.

Fantastical 2 gets fresh design, new features for OS X Yosemite

By

Week View
The best calendar app just got way better on the Mac.

Fantastical has been my go-to calendar app for years. It’s interface and ease of use is second to none, especially Apple’s terrible Calendar app.

But Fantastical hasn’t received much love on the Mac in awhile. While the iOS version has continued to steadily iterate, the app’s design and basic feature set on the desktop has basically stayed the same.

Today Fantastical 2 for Mac arrives, bringing a complete design revamp for OS X Yosemite and several major new features.

H2 woah! Apple’s new spaceship campus will use recycled water

By

What the finished product will look like.
Apple's upcoming campus as it will eventually appear. Photo: Apple
Photo: Apple

Tim Cook wasn’t lying when he claimed Apple’s new spaceship-style Campus 2 would be the company’s most cutting-edge, environmentally friendly construction to date.

A new $17.5 million project — approved by the Santa Clara Valley Water District board Tuesday night — will involve the laying of 13,300 feet of pipeline that will pipe recycled water to both Cupertino and Apple’s Campus 2 HQ.

“Apple drove this project,” said Katherine Oven, deputy operating officer of the water district, describing it as “a true partnership of both public and private agencies.”

ILE Equipment bags are made in America but big in Japan

By

20150313_ile-bags_0103
"Inspiration comes in weird places," says Eric Fischer, owner of ILE Equipment. Photos: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

BERKELEY, Calif. — ILE is big in Japan. The California bag company has found a market with the Japanese bike website Blue Lug, and the collaboration keeps pushing ILE into new bags, materials, hardware and color choices.

Eric Fischer, 26, launched ILE (short for “Inside Line Equipment”) out of his apartment four short years ago. He was racing bikes, buying fabric and making bags one at a time for himself, his friends and friends of friends.

“I always liked making things, but building buildings didn’t seem scalable,” Fischer told Cult of Mac. “Making bags seemed more like a painting rather than building a house.”

Apple is being modest about the 2015 MacBook Air’s graphics

By

The new MacBook Air has more graphics power than it appears at first. Photo: Apple
The new MacBook Air has more graphics power than it appears at first. Photo: Apple

When Apple announced the new 2015 MacBook Air a couple weeks ago, there was at least a couple of disappointments.

First of all, for those of us who love the current form factor, power, keyboard, ports, and trackpad of the MacBook Air, there was no Retina Display in the 2015 model of the ultraportable.

In fact, the new MacBook Air’s Intel HD Graphics 6000 chip allegedly didn’t support Retina, with the maximum resolution it could pump out to an external monitor 2560 x 1600: a few million pixels below the 4K resolution necessary to make an argument for a desktop monitor being Retina.

It turns out, though, that Apple has undersold the graphic performance ability of the new MacBook Air.

Apple buys boring database company you’ve never heard of

By

Wikimedia_Foundation_Servers-8055_24
Not every Apple acquisition is exciting.

 

Apple has bought a boring database company you’ve never heard of called FoundationDB. While not as sexy as buying Beats, the acquisition is good news for Apple’s increasingly important cloud services.

The Virginia-based startup, which has raised a little over $20 million in funding, specializes in handling large chunks of data very quickly. TechCrunch first reported news of the acquisition.

Apple could definitely use help on the server side, especially after its cloud services just recently suffered the worst outage in their history. With the iTunes Store, App Store, iCloud, iMessage, Siri, and a forthcoming TV service, Apple needs all the data power it can get. Hopefully FoundationDB will help.

Radio Shack’s bankruptcy sale could include your private data

By

Now on sale - your personal info. Photo: Dig My Data
Now on sale - your personal info. Photo: Dig My Data

It looks like that cheap cassette adaptor I bought for my first iPhone and that universal remote for all my TV gadgets at RadioShack in the last ten years may come back to haunt me.

If you’re like me and you’ve shopped at RadioShack within the last several years, your personal information may be included in the sale of all of the failed electronics retailer’s assets in an auction that concluded Monday of this week.

The sale also includes Radio Shack trademarks, patents, leases, and the court presiding over the matter will likely decide whether Radio Shack can continue its retail operations at a smaller scale.

The reported winner of the bid, Standard General, is also RadioShack’s largest shareholder, making this an odd one. The winning bid still needs to be approved by a bankruptcy judge, who will have to consider the pending legal challenges to this sale.

Like, for example, whether a retailer that bragged, “We pride ourselves on not selling our private mailing list,” can sell them once bankrupt.

You can wear a virtual Apple Watch right now

By

Photo: Alex Heath/ Cult of Mac
But why would you? Photo: Alex Heath/ Cult of Mac

You can’t get an Apple Watch until April 24th. But that doesn’t mean you can’t pretend to have its fine metals rubbing your naked wrist right now.

By printing out a tiny piece of paper and downloading an app, a horrible render of the Apple Watch will appear on your wrist like magic.

Pro tip for thieves: Don’t Snapchat your hiding place

By

Snapchat aims to reduce data usage and give you easier access to emoji.
Photo: Snapchat
Photo: Snapchat

Police in Somerset County Maine have finally apprehended a man wanted for charges of burglary after the suspect, 24 year-old Christopher Wallace, made a crucial mistake after weeks of evading the cops: he snapchatted his hiding spot.

A warrant for Wallace’s arrest had been issued in connection to the theft of propane and wood stoves that were recovered at his home in February. Wallace hid for weeks after it was made known publicly that authorities were searching for him. Eventually he got cocky posted a message of Snapchat that he was back home.

Friends tipped off the sherif’s department that he was at house, which quickly brought officers to his door. They didn’t find him at first, but then Wallace decided to double-down on the stupidy and posted that the cops were looking for him and that he’s hiding in the cabinet.

More tips came in and the cops eventually located Wallace and posted this celebratory message on Facebook: