News - page 1206

Apple’s architectural firm, Foster + Partners, released pictures of the gorgeous new West Lake store in Hangzhou that was recently completed. The new Apple Store was covered by an incredible mural during construction, but the finished all-glass facade is even more stunning.

The firm says West Lake store was made in close collaboration between Apple and Foster + Partners’ engineers to create the perfect environment to view products. The end result is a 15-metre-high glazed box with a design that “combines an understanding of the local context with the philosophy of simplicity, beauty and technical innovation that characterises Apple’s products.”

Check out the store’s floating staircase below:

Sitting is bad for you. A quick Google search shows tons of research on how standing throughout the day will make you significantly healthier and possibly even extend your life.

Thanks to the scientific community’s heightened focus on sitting’s negative side effects in recent years, there’s no shortage of standing desks to choose from for just about any situation.

We’ve reviewed our fair share at Cult of Mac, like the NextDesk Terra, the NewHeights, and the Ergotron WorkFit-A. But the new M1 from Stir Kinetic Desk is not only as elegant and high-quality as anything we’ve seen, it’s way smarter.

The Apple Watch Edition has perplexed many Apple fanboys with its ridiculously high price tag. We still don’t know how much the beautiful, high-end smartwatch will cost, but it’s expected be one of the most expensive Apple products ever, which has a lot of analysts wondering, how many is Apple going sell?

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that only 17 percent of the first 5 million Apple Watch orders were for the pricey gold Edition. That number sounds almost insignificant, but Daring Fireball’s John Gruber did some math and found that Apple is expecting to sell about 1 million of the exorbitantly expensive timepieces per quarter.

Hitting 1 million in sales for the super-expensive smartwatches in the first quarter would be an impressive feat. But what’s more surprising is that if Apple actually hits that number, the gold Edition Apple Watches would account for the most Apple Watch revenue, bringing in at least $5 billion per quarter.

Here’s why:

John Hayward-Mayhew is one of the most prolific iOS developers ever to peddle a blackjack game. Over the past four years, the 25-year-old entrepreneur flooded the App Store with an astonishing 600 separate apps — everything from endless runners such as Dangerous Caveman Bum Runner to dentistry games like Emergency Dentist Race — raking in close to $1 million in the process.

The most miraculous part of all? He can’t even code.

But by taking advantage of one of the App Store’s great weaknesses, and borrowing a game plan from one of Hollywood’s most unusual impresarios, he’s built a one-man gaming empire.

Under openly gay CEO Tim Cook, Apple has done a lot to forward gay rights. A year ago, the company stood up against homophobic legislation going through Arizona and organized a company-wide march in San Francisco’s annual gay pride parade.

All in all, Apple’s one of the most gay-friendly companies you can work for. So here’s a shocker for you: When Apple figured out it had accidentally hired someone with a history of anti-gay activities, it quickly severed contact.

Apple Pay is less than six months old, and already it’s taking over the mobile payment world. The latest convert? Early adopter Staples, which announced yesterday that it is already seeing 30 percent of all purchases made through its iOS app made using Apple Pay.

“Right now it’s the number one payment method for us in our iOS apps,” said Prat Vemana, vice president of mobile commerce for the stationary company, speaking during a panel discussion hosted in Seattle on Tuesday.

There’s less than a month left before Sony’s first original television show airs on its flagship video game brand, PlayStation.

Based on Eisner award-winning comic Powers by Brian Michael Bendis (Daredevil, X-Men) and Michael Avon Oeming (B.P.R.D., The Mice Templar), the new show will air exclusively on the PlayStation platform, bypassing traditional distribution methods and heading straight for the gut of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video services.

It’s got an all-star cast and an intellectual property as wildly popular as The Walking Dead, a comic that AMC took and build a successful cable show around.

The creators of Powers hope they can do the same thing, of course, but it will no doubt be an uphill battle, with fewer PlayStation consoles than cable subscriptions in US households.

While most people are excited about the possibility that Apple might build a car to take on Tesla, former CEO of General Motors, Dan Akerson, has some warning words for Tim Cook: namely that Apple should steer clear of getting into the automotive industry.

“If I were an Apple shareholder, I wouldn’t be very happy,” Akerson told Bloomberg. “I would be highly suspect of the long-term prospect of getting into a low-margin, heavy-manufacturing.”

Well, if anyone would know, it’s the ex-head of beleaguered GM.

In a U.K. industry first, two major banks in the United Kingdom are finally adding Touch ID identification to their iOS apps.

RBS and NatWest customers must activate the feature using their existing security information, but can use Touch ID after that. As with the Touch ID login on iPhone, users who get three failed login attempts to their banking services will have to re-enter their passcodes.

Congressman John Lewis paid a visit to Tim Cook at Apple’s Cupertino campus today as part of the civil rights icon’s Northern California tour for his new book.

The Georgia lawmaker played a pivotal role in the bloody Selma march that’s back in the spotlight thanks to the its 50th anniversary and the Oscar-nominated film by the same name. Lewis was a guest speaker at Apple HQ today as part of the company’s celebration for Black History Month, and he met privately with Cook.

When camera companies began putting a “record” button on DSLRs, things got really interesting for Rob Whitworth. Is he a photographer or a filmmaker?

The ambiguity about his work description does not matter for anyone who has taken a heart-racing, stomach-dropping ride through his time-lapse videos.

In his latest, Dubai Flow Motion, viewers will feel shot out of a canon for a three-minute hectic but thorough tour of this sparkling Middle East city. Whitworth’s camera will take you up the tallest skyscraper, send you blasting through its floors to see rooms teeming with life and send you crashing into the sea.

You’d think one patent-infringement lawsuit would be enough, but Ryan Seacrest’s iPhone case startup clearly didn’t get the message after its last courtroom tangle with BlackBerry.

The new Typo Keyboard for the iPhone 6 was supposed to have fixed any infringement issues committed by its predecessor, but that is apparently not the case. This week BlackBerry filed another lawsuit against Typo, claiming the case maker “slavishly copied” its keyboard design “down to the smallest detail.”

Eccentric rocker Neil Young has never been swayed by the critics. He has always made the music he wanted.

But he may not be able to be so carefree, as some critics eviscerate his latest musical endeavor – a pricey, Kickstarter-funded digital music player aimed at rescuing music from the MP3 format.

The PonoPlayer, resembling a Toblerone bar in shape and color, was supposed to revolutionize the digital listening experience and with a $400 price tag, not to mention a $6.2 million Kickstarter campaign, expectations were high. Users can download music from the Pono site and listen to high-quality files that restore the quality historically compressed out of digital music.

Turns out, it sounds no better than music on an iPhone, according to several critics who have put the PonoPlayer through its paces.

Apple’s is continuing to make big changes in the friendlier post-Kate Cotton PR era with the announcement today that Chris Breen, the long-time senior editor at Macworld, has been hired by the fruit-flavored tech company.

Breen has worked at both Macworld and MacUser, but is making the change to working at the mothership after decades of covering the company as an Apple journalist.

The Brits surely know how to celebrate Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day, with a lovely meal full of pleasure food, like pancakes. Tuesday, February 17 is this year’s celebration, and we’ve got a tasty video below to celebrate.

The Star Wars UK YouTube channel wishes all of us a happy Pancake Day with this delicious video full of edible Star Wars characters, like Yoda, Boba Fett, a Stormtrooper and Darth Vader. Apparently, these chefs have a soft spot for the Dark Side.

Hit the jump below to see how strong the Force is with these foodie artists as they create delicious snacks for your Pancake Day celebrations.

If you’ve been longing for a cooking show with smart writing, attractive hosts and a ton of sexual innuendo, look no further than The Katering Show, where Aussies Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney smile for the camera while comparing too-expensive German multi-mixers to gangbangs.

“So, ‘What is a Thermomix?’ I hear anyone under the age of 33 ask,” says the perky McLennan. “It’s a blender, a microwave, an ice bucket and a set of kitchen scales. It’s a gangbang of kitchen appliances that’s created a futuristic robot saucepan. It’s the kind of appliance that your rich mother-in-law gives you as a wedding gift because she doesn’t think you can cook. Or something that you buy yourself because you’ve always wanted to join a cult, but you don’t have the energy for the group sex.”

Right? Now you need to watch the funniest cooking show I’ve ever seen, with the episode about making risotto (hot wet rice) in a gadget that looks like (and costs like) it might have come out of Jony Ive’s design shop.

It was only a matter of time before Sparrow flew off into the sunset. The beloved email app’s days were numbered the moment Google bought it in 2012.

Now Sparrow is nowhere to be found in the App Store on both iOS and OS X. What was once an incredibly popular email client among Apple fans is no more.

Apple is no stranger to having competitors copy its style. Samsung, HP, and Xiaomi have all been caught in the act multiple times, but the last company we expected to rip off Apple is Comcast.

For its new cable remote, Comcast has taken a page out of Apple’s playbook by copying the company’s iconic “Designed by Apple in California” tagline. The copy job is so bad, they didn’t even bother to change the font. It looks like the words “Comcast” and “Philadelphia” were basically slapped over Apple’s original tagline after production.

Take a look at the ‘premium’ remote below:

It’s been about six months since iOS 8 came out, and the official Dropbox app has been lacking one major thing: the ability to save files to Dropbox from any app’s share menu.

Today the long-awaited feature is finally available.

You may have never heard of the Aral Sea, even though it was the fourth largest lake in the world as recently as the 1960’s.

The once-gigantic body of water which rests on the border of Uzbekistan has shrunk to less than 10% of its former size over the last half century. It’s been dubbed one of the worst environmental disasters ever, but looking at Apple Maps you’d never even know the Russians drained the mighty lake dry, destroyed its robust fishing industry, and left behind a wasteland of salt, pollution, and toxic dust storms.

Touch ID has completely changed security on the iPhone, and now Apple’s fingerprint-scanning technology could soon be coming to the Mac.

Apple is planning to bring Touch ID to the upcoming 12-inch MacBook Air, according to sources at Taiwanese Apple blog Apple.Club.tw. In the past, the site successfully leaked the iPad Air 2 logic board, the Touch ID sensor and the iPhone 6 Lightning port, so it has a track record for accuracy. The site claims Apple has big plans for Touch ID in 2015 and wants to put it in everything from MacBook Pros to Magic Mice.

The iPhone 6 Plus has a hard time sliding into most pants pockets, but if you’d like to make the iPhone 6 Pinch even more unbearable, Bandai is coming out with a new case that transforms your device into the time machine from Back to the Future.

The DeLorean time machine case brings all the incredible details of Marty McFly’s DMC-12 to your iPhone with moving parts like wheels that switch between hover and street modes. The case doesn’t come with actual time-traveling and levitating features, but Bandai did pack in a couple extra goodies.

Apple may have sold 10 million+ handsets in the first weekend of the iPhone 6 going on sale, but don’t expect those kind of numbers for the Apple Watch.

Despite being eagerly-anticipated by both fans and the press, Apple has reportedly asked its suppliers in Asia to manufacture a total of 5-6 million units of its three Apple Watch models for the device’s upcoming launch in April. Of these, half are expected to be the entry-level Apple Watch Sport model, one third will likely be the mid-level device, and the remaining ones will be the ultra-luxurious models — including the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition.

MacBooks and iPhones have been no strangers on Modern Family but in an upcoming episode, Apple’s mobile devices are also taking over filming duties.

Modern Family plans to be the first major TV show to air an episode shot almost entirely with the iPhone 6, iPad Air 2 and MacBook FaceTime cameras. The episode, titled “Connection Lost,” airs February 25 on ABC, but the sitcom’s creator, Steve Levitan, says filming a TV show with the iPhone was even more difficult than anticipated.

Any way you slice it, the iPhone 6 has been a phenomenal hit for Apple: the kind of record-shattering sales phenomenon that would seem once-in-a-lifetime, were it not for the fact that Apple will probably beat its own record within a couple of years.

As is well known by now, between the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Apple sold a whopping 10 million units in just the first weekend of its next generation handset: a gigantic increase versus the 5,000,000 units the iPhone 5 sold in its first few days, or the paltry 525,000 that Apple managed to sell of its original iPhone back in 2007.

If you’re like me, these numbers are kind of hard to imagine in real-world sales terms. Fortunately, a new webpage aims to put these figures in context, by breaking down exactly how many handsets Apple sold every second of its iPhone opening weekends.