Jony Ive’s new interview with The Financial Times is packed with nerdy details on the Apple Watch and the designer’s life. Slipped in among the juicy design bits, Sir Jonathan also hints that Apple invented an entirely new form of gold just for the timepiece.
“The molecules in Apple gold are closer together, making it twice as hard as standard gold,” Ive says.
Wait. Gold is a metal. Does Apple’s design studio exist in another dimension?
On March 19, the world’s most valuable company will join the world’s top stock index.
In a feat of great irony, Apple is replacing none other than AT&T on the Dow Jones Industrial Average this month. And even if you don’t care about the stock market, for Apple it’s a big deal.
If Jony Ive sometimes missed out on getting his rightful credit while Steve Jobs was steering the ship at Apple, that same accusation can’t be made today. Following on from the recent superb New Yorker profile about Ive and the Apple Watch, Apple’s superstar design guru is the recipient of another profile (complete with interview), this time with the Financial Times.
The story’s not nearly as in-depth as the 10,000-word New Yorker piece, but it still has a few interesting observations about Ive’s approach to technology and the unique design challenges of working on the Apple Watch — including why the Apple Watch was a very different prospect for Ive than working on the iPhone.
Highlights can be found after the jump.
Blood makes Sherwood Forlee squeamish, it really does. So imagine the surprise of friends who know his weakness when he created a type of bandage for the everyday boo-boo that creates the illusion of a stomach-churning wound that would make most people call 911.
Forlee’s sense of humor is sicker than the images on his Boo-Boos bandages, though. He says he was in a “jovial spirit” when he began drawing up plans for the morbid adhesive strips.
“They look disgusting, but they also look funny,” Forlee told Cult of Mac. “While I was doing the research, I was at the point of quitting. I would google search ‘terrible wounds’ and I could only handle like five minutes at a time.”
When Tim Cook was recently asked, during a trip to the Kurfürstendamm Apple Store in Berlin, Germany, whether he would agree to give everyone who worked for Apple’s retail stores a free Apple Watch, he basically rejected the idea in the kindest and lightest-hearted way possible.
But while Apple Watches are currently thought of as more recreational devices than serious enterprise tools, there are those who see Apple’s debut wearable device as the kind of device that would fit perfectly within a business or office environment.
One of those is BetterWorks, a company backed by Google board member John Doerr, which is pitching itself as Fitbit for the workplace. “Having visibility and immediate access to your most critical business data literally at your fingertips, rather than on the phone in your pocket or on the web application from your computer, is super powerful,” creator Kris Duggan tells Cult of Mac.
SAN FRANCISCO — Whether they’re in town to pitch products, apply for jobs or ponder the next big thing, the Game Developers Conference is an annual rite of passage for gaming geeks of all sizes, shapes and economic persuasions.
More than 24,000 game developers, publishers and journalists cram into Moscone Center for a weeklong dive into the latest gaming trends. In between panels like “Adventures of a Video Game Drag Queen,” “How Players Engage with Morality” and “Designing for Mobile VR in Dead Secret,” they mix and mingle — at least the ones who don’t have VR goggles strapped to their heads.
Here’s a taste of the action on the ground.
Mac users have had it pretty good when compared to Windows users, at least on the adware and nuisanceware front. Even Oracle, who has bundled the Ask.com search toolbar with Java for Windows for years, has abstained from infecting its Mac users with adware.
Sadly, though, that era now seems to be an end, with Oracle opting to bundle its most recent versions of Java for Mac with the Ask.com search toolbar.
In the summer of 1991, Sonic the Hedgehog was, quite simply, the greatest thing Simon Thomley had ever seen.
At the age of 11, Thomley had graduated to the SEGA Genesis gaming console after years as a Nintendo Entertainment System player. Sonic had lured him to SEGA’s system, and he wasn’t alone: The spiny blue speedster captured the hearts of gamers everywhere. By the end of the year, SEGA had sped past Nintendo on console sales.
A series of sequels followed. While many people remember the Sonic games primarily as a relic of the ’90s, they become an unlikely career for Thomley and his developer friend Christian Whitehead. Better known as Stealth and Taxman, they brought remastered versions of classic Sonic games to iOS for a new generation of gamers to enjoy.
“This has always been my hobby, but I’m lucky enough that this has now become my full-time job,” Thomley tells Cult of Mac. The pair brought finely tuned official versions of Sonic games to iOS — although recent turmoil at SEGA has thrown the future of their highly regarded work into doubt.
Apple was among a group of almost 400 companies which yesterday filed a so-called “friend of the court” brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that same-sex couples should have just as much of a right to marry as anyone else.
Interestingly, the brief doesn’t just focus on moral or ethical reasons that the Supreme Court should be on the right side of history, but actually makes a business case for the legalization of gay marriage; arguing that the confusing legality around the issue “places significant burdens on employers and their employees — making it increasingly hard to conduct business.”
Battery life is one of the most discussed aspects of the iPhone, but some handsets have it worse than others.
If you bought an iPhone 5 in the six month window between September 2012 and January 2013, you could be eligible for a free replacement due to a battery fault.
Apple first launched its iPhone 5 Battery Replacement Program back in August 2014, and has now extended it past its original deadline of March 1, 2015 to January next year. That means that if you’re one of the affected customers, and you’ve not yet done anything about it, you’ve still got a bit longer to do so.
Even in the wake of an uber-popular device like the iPhone 6, which sold upward of 10 million units in its first weekend alone, it’s fascinating to see analysts hedging their bets when it comes to the Apple Watch. The spread of predictions from these professional prognosticators might as well have been generated at random.
The latest group to weigh in is Strategy Analytics, which is predicting that the Apple Watch will sell (or at least ship) 15.4 million units worldwide in 2015, which would still make Cupertino the world’s No. 1 smartwatch vendor, but with a much smaller market share than others are predicting.
How do you make Apple Watch apps without access to the actual device?
For many developers, it doesn’t get better than the simulation tools Apple provides and some cardboard cutouts. But for a select few, Apple has given the opportunity to test the unreleased Watch in person at a top secret lab.
SAN FRANCISCO — Another Apple event, another mysterious building sprouting up seemingly overnight. They pop up to shield Apple’s prep work from prying eyes, but they also fuel the imaginations of anybody who’s interested in Cupertino’s next move.
The latest such structure — this time with solid white walls and a tented, tarp-like roof — isn’t nearly as elaborate as the gigantic building erected before last fall’s Apple Watch event, but the mysteries concealed could be gigantic.
The big reveal comes at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts next Monday, when we will almost assuredly learn more about the Apple Watch (among other things). Until then, all we can do is wait and wonder: What could be hidden inside Apple’s mystery tent?
The Apple Watch has a secret connector port the company hasn’t shown off, yet it could unlock some exciting possibilities in the future for Apple’s wearables.
Apple designers placed a secret Lightning port inside one of strap connector slots during development, reports TechCrunch which confirmed Apple is only using it to debug watches, but it could unlock an new ecosystem of Apple Watch accessories in the future.
GoPro may have a new celebrity endorser, but he seems like a real sour pus.
An octopus in the neuroscience lab at Middlebury College apparently did not like having a GoPro placed in its tank. It turned the camera around on his photographer before trying to eat it.
Benjamin Savard, a digital media producer for the College, retrieved the camera and was surprised to discover the photos, which he posted to Reddit following Monday’s shoot.
The next episode of Beats Music won’t be making an appearance at Apple’s ‘Spring Forward’ event next week.
Sources “with a knowledge of the company’s current plans” have told TechCrunch that Apple will debut the new service — which ditches the Beats branding for tighter iTunes integration — during Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference.
Snapchat may wipe away your messages after a period of time, but don’t count on it to wipe away your sins.
A man in the San Antonio, Texas who goes by “@Priest David” is hearing confessions via Snapchat through March 16. News 4 San Antonio interviewed the man, who said he has been a priest for 23 years and started taking the Snapchat sacrament as a way to help a college student with a class project.
The man, who wished to remain anonymous released a statement to News Radio 1200 WOAI said religion needs to “engage young adults, where they are and how they live.”
The Apple Watch will be the most personal device ever, and that might include engravings too.
Apple plans to offer personalized engravings for online purchases of the Apple Watch, according to a new rumor from iPhonote. The site’s sources claim Apple hasn’t finalized when it will begin offering engravings, but the customization will almost certainly emerge eventually.
The Mac platform has been treated as an afterthought by Microsoft’s software engineers for decades. That slowly started to change last year with new apps for iPhone and iPad, but with the public release of Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac, Microsoft is making its biggest play yet to woo Apple users to its productivity software.
Microsoft released a free preview build of Office 2016 for Mac today. You’ll be able to buy the final suite of Office apps later this summer, but Microsoft is luring Mac users by giving out the beta to the public.
Anyone who’s followed Apple for a long time knows the company has not always been the kind of world-beating success it is today. An entire book could be written about Apple’s failures over the years — and there are the doomsday predictions to prove it.
But Apple has succeeded in taking those seemingly disastrous mistakes and learning valuable lessons from them. The graphical user interface of the Apple Lisa? Apple learned that sometimes you need to stick with good ideas for a while before they catch on. The takeaway from Apple’s QuickTake Camera? Rushing to beat everyone else to market isn’t always the best idea.
A new infographic runs down 21 of the biggest Apple flops in history — and what Cupertino learned from them. If you’re a long-time Apple fan it’s a great trip down memory lane. If you’re a newcomer, it’s a fascinating introduction to how Apple has learned from even its most grievous errors and become the undisputed giant it is in 2015.
There are plenty of schools with computers. But find a teacher with tech industry experience and you’ve found a “unicorn,” says a school director who wants to introduce kids to the language of coding.
Lyel Resner, director of K-12 curriculum at New York’s Flatiron School, is promoting a series of summer workshops across six U.S. cities to teach high school students programming fundamentals, app development, front-end web design and how to get a startup off the ground.
The Cold War and that whole mutual assured destruction thing sure made the space race fun.
Every astronaut strapped into a rocket and sent toward the stars was an ideological finger in the chest of the other side, each mission asserting who had the better technology or, more importantly, the most firepower.
The United States took its licks as the Soviet Union was first to launch a satellite, put a man in space (and then a woman) and execute the first spacewalk. Only after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon could the Americans begin to perceive they were finally winning the race.
But the Reds were absolutely unmatched when it came to using talented illustrators to make the average citizen believe their country would conquer the cosmic frontier.
Apple’s March 9 “Spring Forward” event is just around the corner, and its tagline can only mean one thing: Apple Watch news galore.
Scheduled for the day after daylight saving time kicks in, we expect Apple to shower us with details about the upcoming wearable, including pricing and availability. Select Apple Watch apps from App Store developers will likely be shown off as well to whet our appetites for what’s to come.
While there’s a chance some new Mac hardware could share the stage Monday, we expect the event to focus mostly on all the unanswered questions surrounding the Apple Watch.
What are those questions? Glad you asked:
Oh god. What else is there to say? The first Apple Watch fart app is already in development.
Fan films are the ultimate way for devotees to pay tribute to the characters they love. They give fans the chance to show how the beloved heroes (and antiheroes) should be portrayed — without the creativity-sapping “benefit” of focus groups, hack screenwriters and overpaid producers.
With a war raging between the fans who make these productions and the rights-holders who argue they’re being damaged, Cult of Mac runs down six of the best fan-created short films doing the round on the interwebz.
Check out our picks below.
