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Apple Watch band packaging looks like Swatch

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Is that an Apple Watch band box sitting on the tablet? Photo: Apple
Is that an Apple Watch band box sitting on the table? Photo: Apple

Apple might have just leaked some packaging for the upcoming Apple Watch.

The Apple Jobs website received a nice update today — including a new image of what appears to be some of the Apple Watch packaging that will hit Apple Store shelves April 24. The boxes look too thin to hold the Apple Watch and its inductive charger, so they’re more likely just for bands, but we couldn’t help but notice they look just like Swatch’s iconic boxes.

Here’s a comparison shot:

Wrap your iPhone in the world’s crappiest instant cover

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A balloon can make a quick iPhone cover in a pinch, but is not recommended. Photo: Storyful/YouTube
A balloon can make a quick iPhone cover in a pinch, but is not recommended. Photo: Storyful/YouTube

If you are broke after buying an iPhone, do yourself a favor and leave it in the box until you can afford a proper cover.

The quickie DIY cover demonstrated in the video below is neither smart nor attractive, but it does demonstrate just how much thought people put into different ways to live with their devices.

The balloon trick, while probably keeping part of the phone protected from rainy weather, renders the camera useless. On the plus side, if you drop your phone from a great distance, the balloon should keep your broken bits together.

This Jurassic World trailer will hit you like a ton of Lego bricks

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Photo: WBGames
This is how it starts. Then later there's running and building. Photo: WBGames

A new trailer for the upcoming Jurassic World video game re-creates some of the best moments of the Jurassic Park franchise using everyone’s favorite multicolor bricks.

I’m a massive fan of both Lego and Jurassic Park, so a combination of the two is pretty much guaranteed to hit the sweet spot. If you don’t absolutely lose it when you see Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm make a Lego-size appearance, I don’t know what to tell you, but I think there’s no way we can be friends. Lego incarnations of Richard Attenborough, Sam Neill and Chris Pratt also make an appearance, in addition to the expected plethora of dinos.

Check out the trailer below.

Kendrick Lamar’s album hits iTunes one week ahead of schedule

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'To Pimp a Butterfly' is here early. Photo: Interscope Records
'To Pimp a Butterfly' is here early. Photo: Interscope Records

One of the most highly anticipated rap albums of 2015 has landed on iTunes a week early.

To Pimp a Butteryfly, the follow-up to Kendrick Lamar’s highly acclaimed album good kid, m.A.A.d city is slated for wide release on March 23rd, but thanks to an error with iTunes pre-order, customers can access the hot new album right now.

Yahoo aims to kill passwords with on-demand codes

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Yahoo is stepping up its security game. Photo: Yahoo
Yahoo is stepping up its security game. Photo: Yahoo

Passwords are easy to forget. They’re even easier to steal. Now Yahoo has unveiled a new scheme to make permanent passwords as outdated as Morse code.

Yahoo is rolling out its “on-demand” email passwords that utilize phone notifications so you’ll never have to memorize a password again. It works kind of like two-factor authentication, except you don’t ever have to type in your primary password.

Apple seeds fourth OS X 10.10.3 beta to developers and public

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MacBook
Photo: Apple
Photo: Apple

Apple has released the fourth beta of OS X 10.10.3 to both developers and the public this morning, less than a week after the company seeded the third beta.

The new beta is pretty much identical to the third beta released last week, but adds a fix for the new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air that prevented it from working with those machines previously.

Use these wallpapers to spend less time on your iPhone

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Playful design with a serious message. Photo: Molly McLeod
Playful design with a serious message. Photo: Molly McLeod

Designer, artist and feminist Molly McLeod has an iPhone problem. It’s one we probably all share: We spend too much time staring at it. Imagine how much worse it’s going to get when we replace our neurotic iPhone obsession with an Apple Watch.

McLeod created four delightfully playful designs that we could use to remind us (with a healthy dose of irony) to stop staring at our tiny screens for a moment.

“I find myself habitually looking at my phone when I’m commuting or idly waiting for something,” she writes on her website, “so I thought I would make my phone give me this gentle reminder. There are always other interesting things to look at if you look up!”

The best March Madness apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac

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March Madness is here. Will your bracket survive? Photo: Cult of Mac

It’s that time of year when office work comes to a standstill for weeks thanks to the NCAA’s annual celebration of sweat, leather and nylon nets. The brackets have been set and teams are en route to play the 67 basketball games that will take place over the next few weeks, with Kentucky being the undisputed favorite to walk away with a perfect season.

Thanks to the glories of technology, you can follow all the action this year even if you don’t have a cable subscription. With the right combo of apps, you can get expert insight into your favorite Cinderella team, watch every game — and maybe even pick the perfect bracket.

Dominate March Madness this year with these apps for Mac and iOS:

Help NASA solve space’s mysteries with this asteroid app

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The Big Dipper rises behind the Catalina Sky Survey  telescope. Photo: Catalina Sky Survey/University of Arizona
The Big Dipper rises behind the Catalina Sky Survey telescope. Photo: Catalina Sky Survey/University of Arizona

There are millions of asteroids in the Solar System and relatively few astronomers to track them. They’d hate to miss that one dangerous rogue headed on a collision course with Earth.

So NASA has made it easier for the amateur stargazer to record and compare their discoveries and put extra eyes on the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

NASA and Planetary Resources Inc. have developed a computer program that is based on an algorithm that analyzes images for potential asteroids. The new asteroid hunting application, available for free download here, was announced Sunday by NASA at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas.

Safari plugin adds Beats Music to your browser, minus the Flash

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Apple has big ambitions for its new music streaming service.
Beats needs a native Mac app, bad. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

Beats Music is due for a big redesign come WWDC. Hopefully that means a native Mac app is on the way, as well as a web player that doesn’t use Flash.

While we’re waiting for Apple to trash its use of the web plugin Steve Jobs loathed, Chris Aljoudi has solved the problem with a brilliant Safari extension that brings Beats Music playback to your browser using HTML5.

How Pixar helped Jobs build a more collaborative Apple

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steve jobs
Steve Jobs with the Pixar founders Ed Catmull and John Lasseter. Photo: Pixar
Photo: Disney

The new Steve Jobs biography, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, promises plenty of fascinating tidbits about the life of Apple’s co-founder, some of which we’ve revealed here.

But the real thing I’m excited about, that I hope the book does a whole lot better than its predecessor by Walter Isaacson, is answering the question of how exactly Jobs went from being an impulsive, hard-to-work-with co-founder to the cool, collected digital emperor who barely put a foot wrong just over one decade later.

To mark the release of Becoming Steve Jobs, a new Fast Company article written by veteran journalist Rick Tetzeli grapples with that very question. One of Tetzeli’s conclusions? It was all about Pixar.

Eddy Cue blasts new Steve Jobs documentary

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Eddy Cue, Apple's Mr. Fix-It, leaving a New York courtroom like an OG. Photo: Apple
Eddy Cue, Apple's Mr. Fix-It, leaving a New York courtroom like an OG. Photo: Apple

Alex Gibney’s documentary about Steve Jobs debuted at the South by Southwest film fest in Austin this weekend, and the first reviews have called film a “coolly absorbing, deeply unflattering portrait of the late Silicon Valley entrepreneur.”

Eddy Cue took to Twitter this morning to blast the Oscar-winning director’s film, saying he was “very disappointed in Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.”

Here’s what Cue had to say about the documentary:

Revolutionary new mobile battery delivers double the juice

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battery1
There aren't too many better sights than a fully-charged battery. Photo: Apple
Photo: Apple

Whether it’s the iPhone 6, the Apple Watch or some other hot piece of tech, battery life is one of the most commonly criticized aspects of today’s devices.

That may be about to change, however, courtesy of a University of Michigan spinoff company called Sakti3, which has developed a new type of solid-state battery capable of storing twice the energy of traditional liquid-based lithium rechargeable batteries.

Apple Watch gets booth in trendy Tokyo department store, more planned

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Photo:
We know which part of the store we're, err, Watching. Photo: Macotakara

Considering that the Apple Watch goes on sale in a little over one month, Apple has still provided relatively few details about how exactly it’s going to be selling its upscale wearable devices.

Some images posted by Japanese Apple blog Macotakara offer a few hints, however. The photos show an Apple Watch booth or mini-store at the upmarket Isetan department store in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The sign reads “WATCH: Coming Soon.”

Predicted 58 million iPhone sales will crush the competition this quarter

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iPhone
The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are well on their way to clearing the 100 million units mark. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Photo: Jim Merithew

Like a Terminator in a downhill marathon, the runaway sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus aren’t slowing down in a hurry.

Analysts expect Apple’s smartphone to trample all competition in its path this quarter, with massive sales of more than 50 million units.

New Steve Jobs docu depicts a man ‘utterly lacking in empathy’

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Citizen Jobs? Photo: Ben Stanfield/Flickr CC
Photo: Ben Stanfield/Flickr CC

Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs documentary, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, debuted over the weekend at the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival in Austin, Texas.

Financed by CNN Films, the 127-minute doc was described by its maker as delivering a “far more complex interpretation” of Jobs than any of the previous movies depicting the life of Apple’s iconic co-founder.

But what did the press think? Well, the first reviews are out and, while they’re generally strong, they certainly don’t describe a documentary that paints Jobs in a favorable light — or one that contains too many revelations that will be new to anyone who read Jobs’ maligned 2011 biography by Walter Isaacson.

What it’s like to use Photoshop 1.0 on a vintage Mac, 25 years later

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Photoshop 1.0, 25 years later. Screengrab: Cult of Mac
Photoshop 1.0, 25 years later. Screengrab: Cult of Mac

First released in 1990 for the Macintosh Platform, Photoshop 1.0 turned 25 years old last month. To mark the occasion, CreativeLive asked eight Photoshop professionals to try to do their jobs — on camera, of course — on the original 1.0 version of Photoshop.

Spoiler alert: they didn’t have an easy time. “Only one level of Undo? No live preview? Is this even real life?”

Why supermodel Christy Turlington Burns loves her Apple Watch

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Christy Turlington Burns wants you to buy an Apple Watch. Photo: Cult of Mac
Christy Turlington Burns wants you to buy an Apple Watch. Screenshot: Cult of Mac

During last week’s Apple Watch event, Apple brought our 46-year-old Glamour supermodel Christy Turlington Burns to stand alongside Tim Cook and explain a little bit about how she’s using the Apple Watch to train.

After the event, Vogue caught up with Turlington Burns to talk to her in more detail about what it’s actually like to use the Apple Watch. And while there’s no new details, it’s still interesting to hear someone who is so influential in the fashion world have such a “gee whiz” moment about Apple’s new wearable.

Downgrading iOS to previous versions might be a possibility again very soon

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TinyUmbrella is back. Photo: Adam/Flickr CC

Back in the good old days of jailbreaking, your first step before upgrading to the latest version of iOS was to plug your device into an app called TinyUmbrella and save your SHSH blobs.

What are blobs? Simply put, saving your blobs gave jailbreakers the possibility of downgrading their devices to a previous version of iOS. Unfortunately, with iOS 5, Apple caught up with the way jailbreakers were using blobs, making TinyUmbrella virtually useless.

Now that’s changed. Three years later, it finally appears that the blobby wind is blowing in the opposite direction, and a new TinyUmbrella beta has been released that once more allows jailbreakers to save their SHSH blobs.

Enlight and other awesome apps you might have missed this week

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Awesome-Apps-of-the-Week1

It’s the weekend again, and Cult of Mac is here to bring you all the app awesomeness you might have missed throughout the week.

Nokia has its own maps app for iPhone, a hot new photo editor has arrived, Google Calendar gets a sexy iOS app, and more.

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


Awesome Apps

What we love and don’t about Macbook and Apple Watch on The CultCast

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Real men share heartbeats.  Photo: Apple
Real men share heartbeats. Photo: Apple

This week: we break down all that we know (and still don’t!) about the Apple Watch, and Leander says why the $10,000+ gold editions are totally opposite Steve Jobs’ vision for the company he co-founded. Plus: Apple quietly kills their iconic glowing logo; what we love and don’t about the new Macbook, and why some are not thrilled with its new “butterfly” keyboard; and with HBO Now coming exclusively to Apple… could big AppleTV changes be on the horizon?

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!

How an Android user created a hit Apple viral video

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The
The "Apple Engineer Talks" viral video by Armando Ferreira clocked more than 3 million views in a few days. Photo: YouTube

The viral video hit “Apple Engineer Talks,” which mocks the new MacBook, is a scream. I nearly died laughing — along with millions of other people.

The clever parody was crafted by somebody who clearly has a deep knowledge of Apple, so I was surprised to discover its creator is actually an Android user.

Here’s how he did it, and why he didn’t make any money off his wildly successful Apple viral video.

How the Apple Watch is made

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If you care at all about how Apple makes things (and you should, because the care Jony Ive brings to Apple's products is one we should all be trying to emulate in our personal lives), you owe it to yourself to spend the weekend reading this post. Photo: Apple
Apple put an unbelievable amount of care into crafting its smartwatch. Photo: Apple

No Apple fan is oblivious to the huge amount of science, technique, expertise and care that Apple puts into every product. Apple doesn’t design its products the way it does because it has to, but because it is compelled on a profoundly spiritual level to do so.

For the Apple Watch, Apple has taken that care to the next level. And if you want to see just how much artistry, skill, craft and passion has gone into creating the latest revolutionary Apple product, there’s no better way to spend the weekend than reading about the behind-the-scenes manufacturing process of the Apple Watch.

Amazon 1-Click shopping is coming to your Apple Watch

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Amazon for Apple Watch is here. Photo: Techcrunch
Amazon, coming soon to your Apple Watch. Photo: TechCrunch

Amazon is in the business of making it as easy as possible to spend money in their online store. It should surprise no one, then, that Amazon is already developing an Apple Watch app, which will let customers search for products and purchase them with a single click, all from a user’s wrist.