China’s elite class overwhelmingly prefers Apple products for gift giving, even more so than luxury fashion brands like Gucci and Chanel.
An interesting survey conducted by Hurun asked 376 Mainland Chinese millionaires about their buying habits, and their responses also bode quite favorably for the forthcoming Apple Watch.
Apple has really been upping its game with curated app collections, and today a slew of amazing productivity apps were put on sale as part of a new “Get Productive” roundup in the App Store.
It’s the most impressive collection of app deals we’ve ever seen in the store. Many of the included apps have been discounted by more than 50 percent.
One of the first projects Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer oversaw as CEO was the Yahoo Weather app. The app was so well received that it even ended up receiving a coveted Apple Design Award in 2013.
Apple also redesigned its stock Weather app to look just like it in iOS 7.
It turns out that it wasn’t a coincidence the two apps looked so similar. Jony Ive was “tormented” with jealously of Yahoo Weather’s design.
Watching almost anybody explain technology can be torturous. But watching talking heads and fresh-faced kids from the ’90s rave about the wonders of the Internet — the miraculous “information superhighway” that was about to change life on Earth — is made even more heinous when their saccharine explanations get remixed and run through AutoTune.
Still, the hideously catchy new song and video “Just Surf the Net” will transport you back to a time when everybody wasn’t online all the time. And fashion was worse than you remember.
Tourists are invading Phoenix like locusts this weekend thanks to the Waste Management Open and a little football game called the Super Bowl. And while all the snowbirds are running around the valley watching golfers, snapping pics of gridiron superstars and taking in the unbelievable Arizona weather, Uber has a secret plan to lure fans into its black sedans.
Starting today, Uber is partnering with Mophie to deliver free JuicePacks to riders across the Phoenix valley, and they might just throw in an NFL superstar to go with it.
This afternoon I tested out the Mophie giveaway and wasn’t surprised how quickly an Uber SUV pulled up to my apartment. But when my driver opened up the passenger door to reveal Arizona Cardinals’ running back Andre Ellington, chilling like this is just what he does in the off season, I nearly lost my cool.
Developers trying to update their apps on iTunes got a surprise this morning, when thanks to a weird glitch with iTunes Connect, devs were logged into other users’ accounts.
Not only has the outage prevented developers from being able to log into their own accounts to update apps, but it’s also exposed apps that are secretly in development to competitors.
Developers have taken to Twitter this morning expressing their outrage, with some calling for Apple to just take an ax to any cable leading to the iTunes Connect servers. Apple has yet to release an official statement, but they have finally taken iTunes connect offline, hours after the first reports hit.
Tim Cook told investors he’s optimistic that the iPhone 6 still has legs, mostly because it has the highest Android switcher rate the company has seen in over three years.
The bigger screen was supposed to cause an avalanche of Android switchers, but according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, most of them must have come from outside the U.S.
Take a lot at their analysis of the last three years of new iPhone buyers:
Like glitter itself, the story on shipyourenemiesglitter.com just won’t go away.
But eventually it will and that could mean trouble for the undisclosed buyer of the website that promises to mail glitter bombs to enemies, according to a London-based broker who specializes in online businesses.
In a post published today by FE International headlined How to Waste $85k Buying Glitter, Thomas Smale predicts the buyer won’t make his money back. If Smale is wrong, he will willing pour a bucket of glitter over himself.
Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric are together again and still clueless about technology.
The former Today Show hosts were reunited not on a morning show couch but in BMW’s i3 electric car for a Super Bowl ad that has them reliving a 1994 segment when they could not explain the Internet. The commercial, in just three days on YouTube, has more than 4.6 million views.
“What is the Internet anyway,” Gumbel asks. “Do you write to it like mail?” Gumbel was admitting he did not quite know how to tease a story that would have more information on the NBC website. “That little mark – a – with the ring around it.” A colleague offers the answer “at” with Gumbel saying, “That’s what I said. Katie said she thought it was ‘about.’ ”
Apple just had a killer quarter. In fact, it was the most profitable quarter for any company in history. As such, Apple stock is up 5 percent since Wednesday trading.
But has Apple peaked? Not according to legendary investor Carl Icahn, who recently told CNBC that he was not only raising his own Apple stock price target, but called buying AAPL a “no-brainer.”
Although unlimited data was a promise carriers like AT&T once used to lure potential customers to their network, it doesn’t really exist anymore. Even if you have an unlimited data contract, carriers will throttle your connection once you push a certain data allowance every month.
Yet it’s starting to look like the Federal Trade Commission might be moving against carriers that throttle so-called “unlimited” connections. The FTC just smashed TracFone with a $40 million fine for throttling customers of its unlimited data service.
The first airplane was in flight for 12 seconds and flew 120 feet. But it was enough to send imaginations airborne.
Not long after Kitty Hawk, aviators were trying to figure out how to fly a car.
Glenn Curtiss was the first with the Autoplane in 1917. It had a triwing, looked like a Model T and hopped. Before he could actually get its wheels off the ground, World War I broke out and Curtiss diverted his energy toward building aircraft for the U.S. Army.
While we have figured out how to put people in space, we’re still tinkering with a future that has yet to arrive. If you’re waiting for George Jetson’s future, consider that the car his family flew around in was a 2062 model.
Yesterday, Apple announced that it had a monster quarter. In Q4, it sold 74.5 million iPhone sales to go along with $74.6 billion in revenue and $18 billion in profits. Not only that, but it broke the record for the most money made by any corporation in history.
Having a hard time figuring out how to quantify numbers like that? Check out this incredible visualizer.
At least one of the big boys is planning on developing an app for the Apple Watch. eBay has posted an ad listing, looking for a developer to help them come up with a bidding app for Cupertino’s new smartwatch.
Everyone at Apple should be patting themselves on the back after a record-shattering Q1 2015 financial quarter, in which the company raked in $74.6 billion in revenue and an impressive $18 billion in net profits.
But business unit was conspicuous in its absence from Apple’s celebratory earnings call and press release: iTunes.
Now that Apple has filed its 10-Q quarterly report with securities regulators, we now know why: Outside of the App Store’s continued success, iTunes was one of the few areas of Apple business that declined over the last three months. How badly? Read on to find out.
Every gamer over a certain age has a fondness for the 8- and 16-bit titles they grew up with, so it’s no surprise developers born in the 1980s are now creating nostalgia-infused iOS games harking back to the glory days of the Genesis and S.N.E.S. But which of these should you be playing? Fortunately, Cult of Mac can be your guide.
Pop in another quarter, click the button below, and find out what you need to download to truly be down with the kids thirty-somethings.
Tangerine has been a breakout hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The indie flick is drawing crowds thanks to a plot that features transgender prostitutes, Hollywood, meth addicts, pimps, and beat cops. But the craziest thing about director Sean Baker’s film is that instead of using a professional camera rig, he shot it all on the iPhone 5s.
Yeah, you read that right – this is a video game where you play as a piece of bread on an epic journey to become an actual piece of toast.
I Am Bread has been out on Steam Early Access since December of last year, and now the developers at Bossa Studios have let it slip that the game will indeed come out on iOS, as soon as they finish up the PC/Mac version.
If you’ve seen the massively viral hit game Goat Simulator, you’ll immediately have a sense of how this one plays out. You’ll hit various keys on your keyboard or buttons on your controller, and move a slice of oddly movable bread around, trying to find some way to toast yourself. Here’s a quick video to visualize it.
Thanks to contractual obligations that are purportedly ending this year, Google’s days as Safari’s search provider could be numbered. And Yahoo wants to take its spot.
During Yahoo’s quarterly earnings call yesterday, Marissa Mayer reiterated her interest in being Safari’s main search engine. “The Safari platform is basically one of the premier search deals in the world if not the premier search deal in the world,” she said in response to a question about Yahoo’s plans for search.
Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs movie has been down a hard road on its way to production. Disasters like fickle actors and directors have plagued the project, but filming is finally underway in San Francisco as we speak, and for the first time ever, we have an official cast list.
Universal Pictures announced the official cast for the movie this week as filming has already wrapped up at Jobs’ parents garage. The logline confirms the film will be “set backstage at three iconic product launches and ending in 2001 with the unveiling of the iPod. The film takes us behind the scenes of the digital revolution to paint an intimate portrait of the brilliant man at its epicenter.”
We already knew Michael Fassbender has been tapped to play Jobs, but the official cast list includes a few surprises — like the three different actresses that will play Steve’s daughter — and a veteran Apple PR guru we didn’t see coming.
Here’s the full cast alongside the real-life people they’ll play:
Let’s face it: iPhoto sucks. It’s slow. It’s buggy. It’s hopelessly burdened by skeuomorphic elements. It’s just behind the times.
That’s why we were excited when Apple said last year it would phase out iPhoto for a brand new app with a feature set somewhere between iPhoto and Aperture. The successor app was supposed to be available in early 2015, but it appears that Photos for Mac has been delayed.
What would it be like to drop acid with Steve Jobs?
Daniel Kottke was one of Apple’s first employees, but he knew Jobs from even earlier days at Reed College. The two bonded over their love for meditation and eastern spirituality at Reed. They also did a lot of LSD.
A longtime Cult of Mac reader wrote in with a question about some odd-looking folders she sees on her Mac.
“The ‘All Pictures’ folder has a sprocket looking icon,” she writes. “Same with All PDF documents and Recently Changed documents.
Are these files located elsewhere and if I deleted a file from one of the above folders does it remove it from all my files? Don’t understand the purpose of these.”
Excellent question, for sure. Let’s take a look at what these folders are, and how to use them to their full potential.
Let’s flash back to April 2010.
That was the month that Steve Jobs penned his famous “Thoughts on Flash” memo, in which he soundly rejected any and all reasons for Apple to adopt Flash on the iOS operating system.
Jobs famously said that Flash was too battery-hungry, too unreliable, too insecure, too slow and too closed to be a wise platform for the mobile-first developers of then-tomorrow. And people scoffed at the time.
But who’s laughing now?
When Apple releases a major update like yesterday’s iOS 8.1.3, it’s usual for the company’s coders to fix (or, in other words, break) all known jailbreak exploits.
Not so surprisingly, the latest update is no different. It fixes several exploits that are necessary to run the iOS 8.1.2 jailbreak. But in a classy move, at least Apple gave a hat tip to the jailbreak team for calling their attention to the exploits.