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Forget Apple Watch: Flamethrowers are the hot new thing

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The XM42 Flamethrower by Ion Productions. Photo: Ion Productions/YouTube
The XM42 Flamethrower by Ion Productions. Photo: Ion Productions/YouTube

One company suggests you could use their product to keep the neighbors on edge while the competition promises “endless possibilities of entertainment.”

Gosh, they’re both right. I need a flamethrower.

Two companies with very different designs are working to meet the needs of a public clamoring to clear brush or light their bonfires from a distance with devices that look like like the tool soldiers once used to clear jungles and machine gun nests during times of war.

Apple Store leaks images of new wireless keyboard with backlit LEDs

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LED backlighting coming soon? Photo: Apple
LED backlighting coming soon? Photo: Apple

Apple redesigned the LED backlights for the new MacBook keyboard, and it appears a similar update could be coming soon to the Apple Wireless Keyboard.

Several images of an updated keyboard appeared on the online Apple Store for the Czech Republic as well as an Arabic keyboard in the U.S. store. Some of the images of the keyboard have already been pulled, but the redesign adds toggles for brightness to the F5 and F6 keys, as well as a power button on in the upper right corner.

Manufacturing issues could slash Apple Watch supply in half

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Find out how to work your Apple Watch. Photo: Leander Kahney/Cult of Mac
Demand is there for the Apple Watch, but is supply? Photo: Leander Kahney/Cult of Mac

Apple may not sell close to the number of Apple Watches it wants to in the coming months — and it’ll have nothing to do with lack of demand on the part of customers.

According to a new report, Apple’s plans to manufacture between 2.5 and 3 million smartwatches every month could be cut by as much as half thanks to supplier yield problems, which mean that only 1.25 – 1.5 million watches are being churned out every four weeks.

Square Cash introduces the best bet to kill checks

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Photo: Square
Photo: Square

Square Cash is one of those few apps I can show my non-techy friends and immediately get a wide-eyed, “whoa” kind of response. Its ability to quickly send and receive money is super slick.

Today two big changes to Square Cash will make it an even more attractive peer-to-peer payments service. First, anyone can now create a web profile for accepting money without needing a standalone app. Second, businesses and nonprofits can get in on the action.

Apple officially loves new Steve Jobs bio, hated old one

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Becoming Steve Jobs? More like Forgetting Walter Isaacson. Photo: Penguin Random House

You may have suspected that the new biography Becoming Steve Jobs had Apple’s official endorsement the moment it was revealed that Jony Ive, Tim Cook, Eddy Cue, Pixar’s John Lasseter and Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, offered their participation.

However, with just one day to go until the book’s release, the word is now officially out: This is Apple’s sanctioned version of the Steve Jobs story.

“After a long period of reflection following Steve’s death, we felt a sense of responsibility to say more about the Steve we knew,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said. “We decided to participate in [the] book because of [author Brent Schlender’s] long relationship with Steve, which gave him a unique perspective on Steve’s life. The book captures Steve better than anything else we’ve seen, and we are happy we decided to participate.”

How Steve Jobs reacted when one of his top lieutenants joined Palm

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Breaking news -- Steve Jobs didn't like people joining companies he perceived as being subpar. Photo: Ben Stanfield/Flickr CC

Sure, Steve Jobs might not have been quite the one-man-temper-tantrum he was portrayed as for much of Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography, but he still wasn’t someone you wanted to get on the wrong side of.

According to authors Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli in their new book Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, Jobs flipped out after former Apple exec Jon Rubinstein decided to join Palm in 2007: never again speaking with a person he had been close to for years.

Apple Watch takes a trip down under in Oz’s Elle magazine

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Does my Apple Watch look big in this? Photo: Elle
Does my Apple Watch look big in this? Photo: Elle

Ahead of the April 24 launch of the Apple Watch, Cupertino’s debut wearable continues its world tour with a new style guide in Australia’s Elle magazine — advising on how Apple’s smartwatch can be used as a chic wearable everywhere from cocktail parties to the workplace.

For a cocktail party, for instance, the magazine suggests that you might want to pair it with a “tuxedo suit and sexy heels (think Le Smoking Saint Laurent style with Alexander Wang black heels), or if you have the legs for it, a killer cocktail dress.” For the weekend, meanwhile, you can “Wear it with trackies, your boyfriend’s shirt (worn cuffed and loose) and a chic cashmere overcoat.”

Easter eggs reveal Siri’s Apple Watch obsession

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Siri couldn't be more excited about the Apple Watch. Photo: Apple
Siri thinks it's about time the Apple Watch arrived. Photo: Apple

The tech world is eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Apple Watch and Siri, it seems, isn’t any different. With the launch of Apple’s debut wearable just a month away, the iOS virtual assistant is apparently just as obsessed with the device as we are — as a simple “What are you doing now, Siri?” question will attest.

Check out some of the amusingly geeky responses below.

Apple TV runs your home and Nintendo says yes to iOS on The CultCast

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The wonderful world of Nintendo, coming to an iPhone near you.
The wonderful world of Nintendo, coming to an iPhone near you.

This week: it’s kind of a big deal—the wonderful world of Nintendo is coming to iOS. Plus: the reviews are in, people are loving the new Force Cluck Touch Trackpad; Apple’s rumored streaming TV service might land in June; and why the new Macbook hails the end for the Macbook Air.

Our thanks for Freshbooks for supporting this episode. FreshBooks is the easy-to-use invoicing software designed to help small business owners get organized, save time invoicing and get paid faster. It also makes tax time a cinch. Get started now with a 30-day free trial.

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Full show notes ahead!

Boot Camp just got a little worse for the 2015 MacBook Pro

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Boot Camp just got a little worse on the latest MacBook Pros. Screenshot: Cult of Mac
Boot Camp just got a little worse on the latest MacBook Pros. Screenshot: Cult of Mac

First introduced in 2006, shortly after Apple transitioned the Mac to Intel-based chips, Apple’s Boot Camp multi-boot utility is the secret sauce that has allowed the Mac to be the best-selling PC on Earth.

The proposition Boot Camp offers to would-be Mac buyers is simple. If they buy a Mac, they can run any OS they want: OS X, Windows, or Linux. But if they buy any other laptop, they can never run OS X.

With the release of the latest MacBook Pros, though, Boot Camp just got a little less flexible. Apple has dropped support for Windows 7 from the 2015 MacBook Pro.

NeuBible and other awesome apps you might have missed this week

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alex

It’s the weekend, which means it’s time to catch up on all of the hot new apps you might have missed throughout the week.

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

Can reading the Bible be sexy? There’s a new app from an ex-Apple designer that argues it can. We’ve also got the snakiness weather app you ever did see, the long-awaited return of an App Store reject, and other indie goodies you don’t want to miss.

Without further ado, here are this week’s awesome apps!


Awesome Apps

Gold fever makes Apple Watch devs chase the dream

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Apple Watch Edition
Are Apple Watch apps an 18-karat opportunity for indie developers? Photo: Apple
Photo: Apple

With high development costs and uncertain prospects, now is a risky time to build Apple Watch apps. But like many other indie developers, I’m working on one anyway.

The Apple Watch gold rush is about more than money.

Jony Ive was almost fired by Steve Jobs

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"Will design for food." Photo: Apple
Photo: Apple

Steve Jobs planned to boot Jony Ive out of Apple the very first time he met him, according to an explosive new revelation from the forthcoming biography Becoming Steve Jobs.

“He came over to the studio, I think, essentially to fire me,” Ive told the book’s authors, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, in an interview.

We want Mario, Link and Pokemon on our iPhones

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What new Nintendo games will we get on the iPhone?Photo remix: Stephen Smith
What new Nintendo games will we get on the iPhone? Photo remix: Stephen Smith

Hell just froze over.

Nintendo has finally given in to the fact that smartphones have dealt its handheld gaming business a huge blow; the only way they’re going to stay relevant is to release their immensely popular gaming characters and game franchises onto the devices we all have in our pockets.

Whether you’re a Nintendo super fan or just looking at the gaming history this venerable Japanese company represents, you’ll be excited for this new era in which Nintendo partners with social and free-to-play juggernaut DeNA to bring it’s valuable content to mobile devices.

Even though Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata insists that the company has no intention of porting existing games to mobile devices, he said nothing about not brining the incredibly popular and cash-generating characters and franchises that have become synonymous with the company, and with video gaming in general.

Here, then, are ten of our top wishes for the characters and franchises Nintendo should bring to the iPhone or other smartphones.

Inside Apple’s top secret health lab

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Where no camera crew has gone before. Photo: ABC News

Apple rarely gives tours of its facilities, but it showed ABC News the inner workings of its top secret health lab for the purpose of hyping the upcoming Apple Watch.

Located in an unassuming lot near its Cupertino headquarters on 1 Infinite Loop, Apple employees have been working out for years in secret to collect valuable health and fitness data.

Siri and App Store will make Apple TV a game-changer

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We're finally going to get the TV experience we deserve. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

A new Apple TV set-top box is set to arrive this summer at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, according to a new report citing sources familiar with the situation.

The upgrade would represent a much-needed “significant overhaul” of the device, letting it go far beyond Apple’s current TV offering and crossing over into other areas such as music, apps and even home automation — with a nifty Siri-based interface, to boot.

College Humor pulls no punches in lampoon of new MacBook

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Not a new charger! College Humor makes fun of Apple and the new Macbook. Photo: College Humor/YouTube
Not a new charger! College Humor makes fun of Apple and the new Macbook. Photo: College Humor/YouTube

Did you roll your eyes when you saw the latest MacBook had a new kind of USB port?

So did the website College Humor, which went to work satirizing Apple’s pride in its product design.

Under the headline Why Every New MacBook Needs a Different Goddam Charger, College Humor released a new video that pokes fun at the latest Apple laptop.

Moju image app puts your moments in motion

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Just twist and watch your Moju file come to life. Photo: Moju Labs
Just twist and watch your Moju file come to life. Photo: Moju Labs

We grew up in homes with robust photo albums, reels of 8 mm home movies and stacks of VHS tapes. These represent the branches and blossoms of our growing family trees.

In the digital age, we’ve filled out the branches, capturing millions of pictures and video clips almost out of concern we will miss something.

And we rarely look at any of it.

Mok Oh wants to change that with Moju, an iPhone app that distills the essence of a life moment by taking a sequence of photos and creating seamless motion in a file that comes to life with a simple twist of your phone.

ICYMI: Revelations from new Steve Jobs biography

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Tons of stuff in this week's issue! Photo: Stephen Smith
Tons of stuff in this week's free issue! Photo: Stephen Smith

This week, Luke gives us a sneak peek inside the new Steve Jobs biography, Alex takes a good look at the upcoming Apple TV service, Leander helps us decide whether the new gold in Apple Watch is anything special, John figures out who invented USB-C (hint: it’s Apple), and Leander checks in with an Android user who made the funniest Apple parody video we’ve seen in a long time. All that and more in Cult of Mac Magazine, free to download (and subscribe to!) right now.

This brute-force device can crack any iPhone’s PIN code

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Photo: MDSec
It's not exactly the Enigma Machine, but it'll do the trick! Photo: Mobile App Hacker's Handbook

Touch ID might be a more convenient and secure security implementation than PIN codes, but for now at least PINs are sticking around — which makes your iPhone vulnerable to anyone who gets their hands on it.

Of course, your iPhone only gives you a certain number of failed guesses, which means that unless the hacker somehow quickly guesses the correct code out of the 10,000 possible combinations, your iPhone’s contents remain safe.

A new video which has surfaced online, however, shows off a brute-force machine capable of trying every possible four-digit numerical combination in turn, while also resetting your iPhone to try again when it runs out of attempts. You can check it out below.

The year’s creepiest puzzle game goes free on iOS as App of the Week

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Could this be 2015's most atmospheric game? Photo:
Could this be 2015's most atmospheric game? Photo: RAC7 Games

Although the App Store is still full of freemium games like Angry Birds, Apple is pretty great when it comes to highlighting some of the more unusual titles that pop up on iOS — from the M.C. Escher gorgeousness of Monument Valley to the nihilistic weirdness of Sometimes You Die.

The company continues that trend with its latest pick for App of the Week, which would normally set you back a couple of bucks, but can be downloaded completely free of charge for the next seven days. It’s Dark Echo, a uniquely twisted puzzle game by RAC7 Games — and I’m here to tell you it’s excellent.

Check out the trailer and a description below. Trust me, if you like unusually minimalist puzzlers, you won’t be disappointed.

Tesla, blackjack and burgers: Woz tweets his Reno roadtrip

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Photo: Steve

Given everything we know about him, you wouldn’t have ever expected Steve Jobs to tweet out his hotel room number, details of a greasy meal at Chili’s Grill & Bar, or brag about winning $300 at blackjack in Nevada.

That, in short, is what separates Jobs (and, indeed, Tim Cook) from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Woz recently took a road trip to Reno with his wife in his $100,000 Tesla — pausing only to send out a string of entertainingly wacky tweets to his 370,000 Twitter followers regarding hamburgers, Segways, an unnamed “blackjack system” he’s been working on and, naturally, a number puzzle that revealed exactly where he was staying.