News - page 1208

The construction of Apple Campus 2 came under fire earlier this week, after the Mercury Times reported that Apple had a blanket ban on hiring ex-felons. However, Cult of Mac has learned that such a ban never existed.

“We believe in opportunity for everyone, and Apple has never had a blanket ban on hiring people with felony convictions,” an Apple spokesperson told Cult of Mac.

Some ex-felon applicants were turned away within the past seven years, because of a part of the background process. Those restrictions are now being lifted though, as Apple says it’s recognized that “that this may have excluded some people who deserve a second chance.”

Here’s the full statement from Apple:

To make the most personal device ever, Apple is using sapphire glass for the Apple Watch to make its display more durable. None of the reviews we read yesterday complained about scratches on their Apple Watch, but iPhoneFixed managed to get its hands on a 38mm Apple Watch display and put it through a barrage of tests.

Apple Watch’s glass stood strong during tests with keys, sandpaper, and even a hammer. Then the crazy nerds busted out a power drill to and throttled it on the glass. The results might shock you.

Check out the glass after the test below:

We’re eagerly counting down the last few hours until we can preorder the Apple Watch, but I think I may have found a new love for my wrist: The Apple II Watch.

The brilliant folks over at Instructables unveiled a retro Apple Watch styled after the Apple II computer. If Apple made a smartwatch back in 1985, this would be it. The amazing device actually works and you can make one yourself.

Check out its incredible features:

The new MacBook goes on sale this week, and while the first reviews have raved about its incredible design, unbelievable thinness and jaw-dropping display, it’s probably not for you.

While early critiques might have alleviated concerns that the new MacBook’s CPU is about as powerful as a 2011 netbook, there are a few other issues you should know about before you rush to the Apple Store to snap up a shiny gold MacBook.

These are the new MacBook’s 10 biggest flaws:

Tim Cook has only said that the Apple Watch Edition will be available in “select stores” later this month. You won’t be able to just walk into any location and try on the ultra-expensive gold model.

Now we know exactly which Apple retail stores around the world will sell the Edition when it goes on sale April 24th.

Apple Watch has been hogging so much of the tech spotlight lately that you could be forgiven for forgetting that Apple is also about to release a revolutionary new computer.

The first reviews of the new MacBook landed on the web to remind us that the first gold MacBook will be available to order tomorrow, too. According to the experts, it’s the most beautiful computer ever created. But should you buy it?

Here’s the good and the bad of the new MacBook.

You’re in a mood and your face can’t hide it. Now imagine if that face was the source of music.

The “Sound of Emotion,” a musical project created with facial expression recognition technology, will be on display at the Market Street Prototyping Festival in San Francisco. The festival runs today through April 11 on Market Street between Embarcedero and Van Ness.

The installation will use four iPad and for selected genres, each device will represent a single instrument, such as bells, a didgeridoo and drums.

Apple dropped its third major update for iOS 8 yesterday, and along with racially diverse emoji, two-factor authentication for Google and new Siri languages came another altogether unwelcome addition: a fault that is stopping Touch ID from working for many users.

Sadly, this is the kind of thing that is becoming a more regular occurrence for Apple. Despite exciting new hardware developments like the Apple Watch, the company has been getting increasingly sloppy with software updates — with routine and sometimes crucial functionality taking a hit on what feels like a regular basis.

The person who named the first television remote control in 1950 knew exactly how it would transform Americans. It was called “Lazy Bones.”

 Sure enough, we became couch potatoes. But television today without a remote would be near impossible and far from relaxing. Who would want to stand at the set pressing the up arrow button to go through the infinite number of channels brought to us by cable and satellite TV?

You probably grew up with parents that referred to the remote as a “clicker.” That’s because early models had big buttons that made a percussive sound when pressed. The first TV remotes, like Zenith’s Lazy Bones, were tethered to the set with a long cord.

Apple is clearly expecting the Apple Watch to be a big hit, because it’s already limiting orders to just its online store.

In an effort to help meet expected demand, Apple has announced that you won’t be able to go into your local store and walk out with a Watch for the foreseeable future.

Here’s a couple of tips should you decide to hire an octopus as your photographer.

If it asks you to “watch the birdie,” be sure to know exactly which tentacle is holding it. Also, don’t let it charge you double for the shots where a tentacle got in front of the lens.

An animal trainer at an aquarium in Aukland, New Zealand has trained an octopus named Rambo to photograph visitors to her tank. Considering the intelligence of these sea creatures, it may only be a matter of time before she raises her prices. For now, she charges $2.

While you’re at work today, Tim Cook is enjoying croissants and chocolat chaud at a chic French eatery. Probably.

That’s because the Apple CEO is reportedly in Paris: most likely for the Apple Watch’s official public unveiling tomorrow at one of the city’s fanciest department stores, Galeries Lafayette Haussmann.

A destroyed MacBook Air is now on display as part of an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Wondering how it got there? Two words: Edward Snowden.

The Apple Watch launch might be Cupertino’s most innovative — and complicated — product rollout ever. Usually you just pick between a colors and tech specs, but for Apple’s “most personal device yet,” things aren’t so straightforward.

Even the actual purchasing process is different: Lining up at the store a couple days early isn’t going to help you this time, but this guide to buying an Apple Watch definitely will. It’s loaded with tips for beating the odds and wrapping an Apple Watch around your wrist on launch day.

Here’s everything you need to know about how to preorder and buy an Apple Watch.

(Editor’s note: This post has been updated and stickied to the top of Cult of Mac’s homepage. You’ll find fresh Apple news by scrolling down the page.)

You probably knew this already, but if you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone or iPad, don’t upgrade to iOS 8.3. Not only does it break existing jailbreaks, but it patches a huge number of security holes in the operating system, making an iOS 8.3 jailbreak farther off than ever.

Shooting ultra slo-mo videos are one of my favorite things about the iPhone 6 Plus, and thanks to Twitter, it’s now far easier to share them via social media.

That’s because the micro-blogging network now supports the posting and embedding of slow-motion iPhone clips; opening up whole new possibilities when it comes to making sure that video of your office work party, your pet running across a field, or your kid practicing skateboard stunts looks as dramatic as possible.

Slow-motion enthusiasts like director John Woo are going to have a field day…

Apple Pay continues its march to becoming the standard mobile payment solution, adding ten new participating retail partners in the United States, to bring its total number of merchants to 68.

Major new Apple Pay adoptees include GameStop, T-Mobile Stores and the Golden State Warriors, Orlando Magic, and Phoenix Suns NBA franchises.

Check out the full list of new participating companies below.

Apple released big updates to iOS and OS X today, and among the changes is a whole lot of new emojis.

There are over 300 emojis added by Apple as part of an update to the Unicode standard, and most of them focus on racially diversifying the existing emojis we all know and love. There’s also an awesome Spock emoji for when you’re wanting the world to live long and prosper.

But the catch is that if you’re not on the newest iOS 8.3 and OS X 10.10.3, you won’t see these new emojis. Instead, you’ll see an alien or an empty box!

There are plenty of Apple Watch reviews out in the wild now, but we have yet to see a solid unboxing of the hottest new wearable in tech.

French newspaper Metronews did the honor, and here’s what opening an Apple Watch for the first time is like:

The first wave of Apple Watch reviews landed this morning with the consensus that Apple has created the best smartwatch ever. Now whether you actually need a smartwatch is still being heavily debated, but the early Apple Watch reviews have highlighted some pretty compelling cases.

Reviews from tech news sites have praised Apple Watch for its innovative UI and incredible design. After slogging through the first reviews though, the most interesting insights I found about Apple Watch came from non-tech sites. What will it be like for normal, non-tech nerds to use Apple’s timepiece?

Here’s everything new I learned about Apple Watch from reading all the reviews:

Space travel is bound to be essentially lonely. Even in our one galaxy, there’s something like 300 billion star systems. Three hundred billion. It’s hard to even conceive of that number, to be honest.

Frontier Developments, the developer of Elite: Dangerous, has gone to great lengths to give players that feeling of loneliness, balanced with the excitement and multiplayer action that current gamers expect when they launch a video game.

“With a real full scale galaxy it’s easy to head off into unexplored space,” executive producer Michael Brookes told us. “We think that’s a good thing; players can choose the life of a pioneer on the unexplored frontier, or stick to more populated places for cooperative and competitive play with other players.”

Even better, this stunningly gorgeous fourth entry in the Elite game franchise is coming to your Mac soon.

The Apple Watch isn’t available for preorder until this Friday, and it’s already looking like certain models won’t ship by April 24.

Apple released the third major update to iOS 8 today with the public launch of 8.3, which brings a host of new features to iPhones and iPads.

The iOS 8.3 update is available as an over-the-air update or via iTunes. Some of the new features include racially diverse emoji, two-factor authentication for Google, new Siri languages, and tons of bug fixes.

Here’s a run down of the biggest features you’ll find:

Apple has released OS X 10.10.3 to the public. The update includes the all-new Photos app, which has been in beta for the last several weeks.

Hundreds of new emojis have also been added, along with improvements to Spotlight, Safari, Wi-Fi connectivity and more.

The first reactions to the Apple Watch are hot off the presses and, to be honest, they’re pretty much what I was expecting.

There are some nice revelations (battery life isn’t as bad as we feared), some areas to improve on (activating the screen carries a lag, although Apple promises it can fix it though software updates), praise for how easy it is to manage notifications, and a general sense of reviewers trying desperately to figure out what the hell a smartwatch should try and do.

And concluding that — despite being unclear about quite what that is — Apple has done it pretty well.

Check out the highlights of the early hands-on impressions from Re/Code, the Wall Street Journal, David Pogue, and the other people lucky enough to get an early review unit: