News - page 1195

British singer Sarah Brightman has a five-octave vocal range and millions have paid top dollar to hear her sing. But to hit the highest note of her career, Brightman is spending her own money.

Brightman is paying a reported $52 million to become the first singer to travel in space. She will board a Soyuz spacecraft on Sept. 1 for a 10-day trip aboard the International Space Station. It is the most expensive space tourist trip on record, according to the TASS Russian News Agency.

Photos of Brightman’s training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City near Moscow, can be found on her website and in Wednesday’s Daily Mail, which gave a detailed account of her training.

Mitch Silverstein would have many visions of the future in 1964 and the first would appear in full-color wonder, his big 6-year-old eyes staring back at him in disbelief.

He was seeing himself on a color television at the RCA Pavilion at the World’s Fair at Corona Park in Queens, New York.

“It left such a big impression on me,” Silverstein said. “That was a first for most people because that was a pretty major technological step.”

For all the things the New York World’s Fair of 1964-65 was said to get wrong, the fair showcased several technological wonders that, some 50 years later, we take for granted.

Lat Ware is a pretty loquacious dude, without a bit of shyness in his persona. We came across Ware at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco the first week of March and tried out his upcoming game, Throw Trucks With Your Mind. He was strapping headsets onto conference attendees and keeping up a steady stream of patter to keep them off balance when trying to manage their character in-game.

You see, Throw Trucks With Your Mind uses an $80 headset from NeuroSky to actually read your brainwaves. Ware has set it up in the game to track opposite parameters: focus and relaxation. When you focus intensely, the onscreen red bar will fill up, allowing you to do things like jump, push, and toss heavy in-game objects. When you relax, a blue bar fills up and lets you do four other cool things for a total of eight different ways to interact with the game using your mind.

Try that while some chatty indie dev is all up in your ear, trying to distract you.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average measures the strength of American industry based upon how 30 large, publicly owned companies in the United States have traded in the stock markets. Companies come in and out the Dow periodically, according to whether their fortunes are waxing or waning.

When Apple joins the Dow Jones Industrial Average next week — replacing AT&T, which has been on the index since 1916 — the Dow will be at a historic high (assuming nothing catastrophic happens between now and then). But if Apple had joined the Dow in 2008, that value would be even more historic. It would have added more than 4,300 points to the Dow.

You can keep your new ultra-thin MacBook and your high-priced Apple Watch; for me, the most exciting thing at Monday’s “Spring Forward” Apple keynote was the announcement of ResearchKit, a new open-source iOS framework that essentially turns your sensor-filled iPhone into a crowdsourcing medical diagnostic device.

The idea is that researchers will be able to tap into Apple’s enormous base of iPhone users to gather medical data. Users simply sign up to participate in huge global studies about diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes, letting researchers build up giant data sets in a fraction of the amount of time it would normally take. Think Kickstarter for medicine!

And according to Bloomberg, initial reports are really, really positive.

We all know that professional industry analysts often say the darndest things, but the Apple Watch has unleashed some truly muddleheaded commentary, especially from people who get paid to know better.

There are the customary and entirely predictable predictions that the Watch will fail — just as the pundits predicted the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad would bomb. This kind of commentary is so knee-jerk and silly, it’s best to just ignore. But then there’s a higher tier of analysis that says the Watch’s success depends on apps (duh, yeah) or the device’s potential for upgrades (completely wrong).

I’m interested in smarter takes on Apple’s strategy, pricing and marketing. Surprisingly, some of the most insightful commentary I’ve seen is on reddit — known generally as a salty hangout for spotty teens and weirdos. Here are some key points outlined by reddit users.

Lust for Apple’s latest must-have gadget can make you do crazy things!

In what sounds like a cross between Breaking Bad and an Apple ad that I would totally watch, a story coming out China’s government-run Guangzhou Daily newspaper recounts the plight of a 21-year-old accused of orchestrating a crystal meth deal so as to be able to pay for an Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch is coming, and this means it’s time for Apple to put all the crappier fitness bands it’s been selling all these years into the airlock and flush them into deep space.

No surprise, then, that Apple’s retail stores are no longer selling the Jawbone UP and the Nike+ Fuelband.

The new MacBook is the biggest revolution to hit the laptop line in a decade, yet it’s not without its haters.

A mobile processor. One USB-C port. A 480p front camera. And a $1,299 price tag. “Just who the hell at Apple signed off on this thing?!” some fans might be asking. Well, thanks to some very rare footage of an Apple “engineer” speaking about the design process of the new MacBook, we finally know what was going through Jony and Tim’s heads when they signed off on production.

Whether you love or hate the new MacBook, you’ll laugh your ass off as the engineer tells a Spanish TV host all about the hilarious process.

The Apple Watch? It’s incredible.

The new MacBook? It’s unbelievable.

Apple’s team? Amazing!

Tim Cook is either the world’s most positive CEO or he possesses the world’s greatest poker face. Just watch the string of superlatives he unleashed during Apple’s “Spring Forward” event Monday, as rounded up in Cult of Mac’s supercut video below.

The shiny new watch on Tim Cook’s wrist wasn’t the item that tipped Apple’s hand as it bets on the future of computing.

The really big development was what wasn’t in the room: multiple ports on the new ultrathin MacBook.

The future lies in a single port for powering the device and seemingly not much else. It’s called USB-C. And the “C,” for now, stands for confusion.

Tim Cook eased some of our worries about Apple Watch’s battery on Monday by revealing you’ll get at least 18 hours of use from it. But if you’d like a wearable that looks just as good, and comes without the battery problems, Hini Mizushima has the perfect creation for you.

The slow crafter Mizushima created a wonderful ‘Super Low-Tech’ Apple Watch engineered to keep up with an active lifestyle with snap fasteners. The ultralight wearable doesn’t actually tell time, but it’s sure to turn heads just as quickly as the gold Apple Watch Edition.

Take a closer look:

Apple is diving into the luxury market for the first time ever with the exorbitantly expensive gold Apple Watch Edition. The pricey new timepiece has been met with criticism from Apple fans and haters a like, but according to Condé Nast, Apple is now a powerful player in the luxury industry and wants Jony Ive and Marc Newson to tell them all about it.

Jony Ive and Marc Newson will open the first ever Conde Nast Luxury Conference in Florence Italy in April 2015. The design duo will appear with event host, Vogue International editor Suzy Menkes, to discuss “21st century definition of luxury and their collaborative work to date.”

Apple is suffering one of its worst iTunes outages ever today as users across the globe have been unable to access the App Store, iBooks, iCloud and iTunes for more than eight hours this morning.

In an official statement released by the company, Apple has blamed the ongoing outage on a DNS error, saying “We apologize to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning. The cause was an internal DNS error at Apple. We’re working to make all of the services available to customers as soon as possible, and we thank everyone for their patience.”

The people of the Internet are not patient however, and have flooded Twitter with gripes about the 8 hour long outage. It’s not just the App Store and iTunes that are affected either. Apple Pay has been rendered worthless and Apple Stores have had to pull out their old credit card machines like it’s 1999.

Here’s a sampling of some of the best Apple outage tweets:

A Chinese workers’ rights group released a new report today that sheds light on the deplorable working conditions in factories that assemble the iPhone 6. According to China Labor Watch, on February 3, 2015, Pegatron assembly line worker Tian Fulei died while assembling the iPhone 6.

The hospital labeled the cause of death as “sudden death,” but fellow workers say Tian worked long overtime shifts day after day, which gave his family reason to believe that Tian died from overwork.

To smooth things over, Pegatron reportedly offered the family a measly $2,400 as compensation for their son’s death. Tian’s family of farmers couldn’t afford to pay for an expensive independent autopsy to prove the death was work-related. Eventually they took Pegatron’s next offer of $1,277 for his untimely death.

Apple is allegedly planning even more variations of its Watch, with up to three casings in the works for later this year.

Ahead of the Apple Watch going on sale April 24, the Chinese market is being flooded with fake versions of Apple’s wearable device — many of them bearing an uncanny likeness to Apple’s smartwatch, at a fraction of the cost.

Starting at less than $50, the “inspired by Apple” Apple Watch knockoffs are predominantly modelled on the cheaper Apple Watch Sport devices, but I’d be in no way surprised if we saw Apple Watch Edition replicas turn up at a later date, much as we routinely see fake Rolexes today.

As soon as Tim Cook announced that the Apple Watch Edition starts at $10,000, you could practically hear the scratch of jokes being written. This one, by YouTube’s CollegeHumor channel, is among the best so far. It describes the “groundbreaking” feature of letting wearers reveal with a single flash of the wrist that they have crazy amounts of money to spend.

Faux-Apple ads are well worn by now, to the point where they practically qualify as a comedy subgenre on their own. A few things made me chuckle about this one, however — from Jony Ive’s pronunciation of “aluminium,” to the foolproof method employed by the actor playing Tim Cook to check that he’s still rich.

Check out the video below.

One of the most difficult decisions you will need to make when choosing an Apple Watch is which case size to go for. But the Apple Store app for iPhone hopes to make the process easier by displaying both the 38mm and 42mm Watch cases at their actual size.

Derek Zoolander — the male model played by Ben Stiller who first appeared as a gag character in 1996’s VH1 Fashion Awards, and who later went on to star in 2001’s cult classic film — made a surprise appearance yesterday on a catwalk at Paris Fashion Week, where he stole some dude’s iPhone, then flashed Blue Steel all over Vine.

Update: Apple has updated its service status page to reflect the problem, although there’s still no word on when it will be fixed.

Apple is having problems with a number of its services, with the iTunes Store, App Store and Mac App Store all experiencing sporadic outages, while app submission service iTunes Connect is also down and beta testing platform TestFlight is unavailable to some.

If you only had about three minutes to spend in the country of Austria, let Thomas Pocksteiner and Peter Jablonowski give you the tour.

The filmmakers, who formed FilmSpektakel, have just released a breath-taking hyperlapse tour of their country. The two-minute, 54-second video took two years of filming and was winnowed down from 5 TB of raw footage.

Their travel Valentine, A Taste of Austria, awakens the senses with movement, sweeping and seamless color changes with day-to-night transitions and 360-degree views of architectural and natural wonders.

The tech world is completely aghast at the price of the gold Apple Watch Edition, which starts at $10,000 but is more likely to set buyers back $17,000 (plus tax!).

The pricing is baking everyone’s noodles. We can’t wrap our heads around a super-expensive watch that will soon be obsolete and is functionally identical to a $350 model. This is not how tech works.

But that’s the point. I wrote how the high-end Apple Watch winds me up — I argued that its very existence is antithetical to Apple’s democratic values. But after further research, it’s obvious that Apple knows exactly what it’s doing, and it’s very smart — even if I still don’t like the gold watch’s enormous price tag.

The Apple Watch Edition is a classic Veblen product. The outrageous price is the whole point. And the higher it gets, the more of them Apple will sell. It might even be priced too low.

I haven’t been to a mall in ages, except to go to an Apple Store. Turns out I’m not alone. Apple Stores have replaced the department stores of yore as the main driver of mall traffic.

If you’re an Apple shareholder who wants the company to buy Tesla, you are not alone. At the iPhone maker’s annual shareholder meeting in Cupertino yesterday, Tim Cook dodged not one, but two questions about whether Apple has plans to buy the electric car company.

While Apple is the ultimate example of a corporation that refuses to comment on rumors or speculation, Cook could have given a flat-out “no” and that would have been the end of it.

Instead, the Apple CEO danced around the question like he had a secret to hide.