News - page 1210

Life at Apple has been phenomenal ever since Tim Cook took over as CEO. AAPL shares are up 120 percent. 750 million iOS devices have been sold. $100 billion was returned to shareholders. And Apple just became the first $700 billion company in history.

To celebrate a successful 2014 campaign, Cook sat down with Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn today to talk about how Apple achieved its unbelievable results, as well as what other tricks the company has up its sleeves.

Here are the 12 biggest revelations from Cook’s Goldman Sachs tech conference appearance:

Boom! That’s the sound of AAPL stock hitting yet another all-time high Tuesday, making Apple the first $700 billion company in history.

Microsoft made history in 2000 when it became the first company to close at $600 billion, so this feat must make Tim Cook and the entire Apple team incredibly proud.

Apple is building a massive new solar farm in California to power the company’s upcoming spaceship campus and other facilities, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Tuesday.

The solar farm will occupy 1,300 acres in Monterey, California. Cook said the move is a testament to Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility.

How does Apple defy the law of large numbers as the company posts ever-increasing iPhone sales?

That’s one of the first questions Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked at today’s Goldman Sachs technology conference. While Apple posted a record 74.5 million iPhone sales last quarter, Cook says he sees no reason why that number can’t keep growing.

Going to college is supposed to be all about going to parties, drinking heavily, hooking up and maybe squeezing in a few classes if you find the time. But when it comes to college students today, it turns out what they really want most is an iPhone.

Researchers at Student Monitor asked 1,200 U.S. undergraduates last fall to choose “what’s in” among students from a list of 77 options. Not only did students rank the iPhone as more popular than coffee, texting, drinking beer and college football, but Apple’s smartphone somehow managed to top the collegiate tradition of “hooking up” to take the No. 1 spot.

The iPad didn’t do too bad in the survey either, topping Instagram, laptops and selfies. Here’s the rundown on what college students ranked as most important:

Touch ID is going to get a big upgrade in the next iPhone, according to a new rumor from reputable Apple analyst Ming Chi-Kuo.

In his latest note to investors, Kuo says Apple plans to upgrade the fingerprint scanning technology in its Touch ID module this year to reduce the number of reading errors and offer a “better and safer Apple Pay user experience.”

Tim Cook doesn’t make many speaking appearances at non-Apple events, but the Apple CEO is in San Francisco today to speak at Goldman Sachs’ technology and Internet conference.

Cook attended the conference in 2013 and 2012, but skipped the event last year. Apple fans can listen to streaming audio from the conference, which starts at 12:30 p.m. Pacific.

It’s no secret that Apple has given some thought to wearable cameras. The company already has a patent that would crush GoPro if it ever decided to make sports cameras, but there’s not enough money in the market for Apple to even bother.

We’ll probably never get to see what Jony Ive’s perfectly designed answer to GoPro would have looked like, but our friends at Curved have been busy dreaming up the perfect action cam that works seamlessly with the iPhone and Apple Watch. Their answer is called the iPro: an action cam that looks so good, you’ll never want to beat it up.

Take a closer look:

Apple Pay has already become the fastest growing mobile wallet but the only thing holding it back is the limited number of retailers that accept it. A new study has found that PayPal is still leading the mobile payments race with 13% of retailers accepting it more than any other alternative payment type.

Boston Retail Partners surveyed the top 500 retailers in North America and found that only 8% currently accept Apple Pay, but Apple’s mobile wallet is expected to make a big push this year and take the top spot with nearly 40% of big shops in the U.S. accepting Apple Pay by the end of 2015.

Here’s the full breakdown:

Neil Armstrong had just been the first man to walk on the moon but now had to put out the trash.

It was a critical step home. Precise weight had to be calculated for re-entry and to make way for moon rocks, miscellaneous space travel items had to be discarded in the lunar module.

Just before sending the Eagle crashing into the surface of the moon, Mission Control records Armstrong’s voice saying nothing historic, certainly not as memorable as “One Small Step for Man…”

“You know, that – that one’s just a bunch of trash that we want to take back . . . We’ll have to figure something out for it.”

This audio proved to be an important piece of provenance when the wife of the late astronaut discovered a white bag in a home closet.

Last year, despite the constant cries from naysayers that Cupertino had lost its edge, Apple blew past all expectations by shipping over 259.5 million iOS devices.

So how many iOS devices will Apple ship in 2015? According to one reputable industry analyst, a staggering 320 million iOS devices.

Sling TV — the Dish-owned streaming service that does for cable what Netflix did for video tentals — has just announced that it is opening its door to the general public. And if the cable stations it currently has on offer don’t entice you to sign up for its $20 per month subscription, well, some more channels are coming down the pipeline soon.

Robot vacuums might be having a moment.

Should sales suddenly spike, it may be because of the unintentional endorsement from a South Korean woman, who made news when her hair got sucked up by her robot vacuum.

The woman had to make a “desperate” call to her local fire department and paramedics spent about a half-hour trying to free her hair, according to the newspaper Kyunghyang Shinmun.

While such a device allows you to nap while your floors get cleaned, its seems like a bad idea to sleep in its path.

Intel’s talking a lot of smack about ARM lately. Around a month ago, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said that he wasn’t worried about Apple ditching Intel for ARM chips. And today, Intel’s chief financial officer, Stacy Smith, is openly scoffing at the possibility, saying Intel’s way ahead of ARM when it comes to performance.

Like you, we’re excited about Apple’s next MacBook Air, a device that is rumored to be a an ultra-sexy 12-incher with only a single port and a beautiful Retina Display.

Now we’re hearing that Apple is planning on updating the MacBook Air later this month. But don’t get too excited. This is not the MacBook Air you’re waiting for.

The hope with Apple Pay is that everywhere there are financial transactions, there will be Apple’s mobile payment solution — and, yes, that includes the sky.

Starting next week, passengers on select JetBlue Airways flights will be able to pay for food, drinks and assorted on-board amenities (such as upgrading seats) using their iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. This gives JetBlue the claim to fame that it is the first airline to accept Apple Pay at 35,000 feet.

As tech fans, it’s easy to take a forward-looking view of technology: constantly excited about the next iPhone or smart wearable, while our old gadgets gather dust in the back of a cupboard somewhere.

Hoping to reach some of those tech owners, the SIU School of Medicine in Illinois is currently requesting old iPods as part of what it calls the “Music and Memory” program to help people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.

As the medical school explains it, the iPods are used for a form of musical therapy designed to help calm patients and make them happier and more sociable by playing music from their younger years.

Sony and Marvel have struck a deal, paving the way for everyone’s favorite sass-mouthed wall crawler, Spider-Man, to appear in films alongside Iron Man, Captain America and the Avengers.

Let’s rewind a bit. The year is 1996, and after overextending itself during the previous decade’s comics boom, Marvel Comics is broke. But along comes an Israeli toy designer named Avi Arad to save the company, who famously tells creditors not to give up on Marvel yet (“Spider-Man alone is worth a billion dollars,” Arad reportedly said at the time).

San Francisco design firm Ammunition beat out Apple and others to be named Fast Company’s top “Innovative Company in Design.”

Co-founded by Robert Brunner, the former head of Apple’s industrial design studio who hired Jony Ive, Ammunition is most famous for designing the Beats Electronics headphones. Ammunition was named most innovative not just for the string of hit products it’s helped bring to market but for taking an equity stake in the companies with which it works.

Brian Williams may be waiting for the brouhaha to wear off his “mis-remembering” of which helicopter he was in during the 2003 war in Iraq, but the internets will just not let it go.

He might have conflated his experience as a reporter with that of the actual soldiers who were fired upon, but the meme police are making sure this faux pas lives on forever, creating hilarious photo “evidence” that not only was Williams at Gettysburg, but also present for the first moon landing and riding along with O.J. in his white Bronco slow roll.

Check out some of the choicest photographic “evidence” of the disgraced news anchor below, from some of the funniest minds on the interwebs.

First it was reported that Apple and Tesla are in an intense bidding war for each other’s talent, and now an anonymous Apple employee has come out of the woodwork to talk smack.

Galactic crime lord Jabba the Hutt may just be the most costly puppet ever made.

“I knew that he was expensive in that with the full crew involved,” says puppeteer Toby Philpott in a new video, “it would be about a dozen people.”

In this new documentary from London-based Jamie Benning, you’ll get a literal inside look at how this immense, multi-person operated puppet was put together and performed by the two to three men inside the Hutt, as well as the various people controlling the eyes via radio control outside.

Take a look at the video below to peek inside the creature.

Breaking Bad is dead, but it’s all good man. Saul Goodman is back!

The Breaking Bad prequel, Better Call Saul, broke cable records with 4.4 million viewers last night, and there are several ways to watch the premiere online.

iTunes and AMC are offering Episode 1, titled “Uno,” for free.

Imagine cruising low around South Africa in your small plane at 105 knots. You’re enjoying the scenery below when all the sudden your plane’s canopy pops open just wide enough to send your bag with a MacBook Air plummeting 1,000 feet to its death.

That’s exactly what happened to one pilot, only lucky for him, the MacBook Air miraculously survived. Redditor av80r posted pictures of his still-functioning MacBook Air after it fell out of his plane mid-flight. According to his story, the farmer who found it claims he heard a whistling sound. He looked up and saw a bag hurtling towards him and took one step to the left and watched it land near where he was standing.

Despite the crash landing, the MacBook Air still works. Although the cooling system is damaged and the glass on the trackpad was busted into a million fragments, the display is hanging on like a champion.

Here’s a view from the side:

Apple’s release notes for the first iOS 8.3 beta don’t mention any new features, but we’ve combed through the just-released update to discover a number of goodies.

iOS 8.3 won’t overwhelm you with new features, but if you love CarPlay, emojis and Apple Pay, you’ll enjoy a couple surprises.

Here’s everything that’s new in iOS 8.3: