News - page 1221

Despite angering iOS users by forcing their album, Songs of Innocence, onto every iPhone and iPad in the world, U2’s iTunes exclusivity bet is paying off big time.

Nearly one in four of all music users on iOS devices listened to U2 in January, which was nearly double the second most popular artist, Taylor Swift. The force-fed album debuted last fall but its impact is still visible five months later, according to Kantar’s latest survey of iOS users, which found that 23% of all music users on iOS listened to at least one U2 track in January.

Here’s the top 10 artists in January:

The Apple Watch reveal back in September was big on excitement, but short on details. Among those things that Apple failed to mention was whether or not Cupertino’s new smartwatch will be able to withstand liquids — making it suitable for, say, swimming or washing the dishes.

While we still don’t have a final, definitive answer on what is and is not advisable with the Apple Watch, Tim Cook shed a bit of light on the mystery during a Q&A session with staff at the Kurfürstendamm Apple Store in Berlin, Germany, where he is currently visiting. Cook said that that he wears his Apple Watch “even in the shower.”

From minor controversies like Antennagate to being kicked out of his own company and then returning triumphantly, Steve Jobs got out of plenty of tight squeezes in his life.

Now that he’s gone, it seems that that same spirit of near-misses and daring triumphs is left to Venus, Jobs’ 256-foot, $120 million super-yacht.

Having visited Montenegro, Palma, Gibraltar, Horta Azores and many other exotic locations since Jobs’ death in 2011, the yacht recently had a close call while passing through a bridge in Saint Martin, an island in the northeast Caribbean, approximately 185 miles east of Puerto Rico.

Check out the video after the jump.

Allen Zderad lost a career in science because of a degenerative eye disease. Now, science is allowing him to see his wife for the first time in 10 years.

The 68-year-old former chemist from Minnesota recently became the recipient of a “bionic eye” implant, a chip with electrodes implanted in his retina that interacts with a camera in Zderad’s glasses. The camera and wearable computer pack sends information to the electrodes, which then send the information on to the optic nerve.

Apple has been ordered to shell out $532.9 million to a patent troll after apparently infringing on intellectual property with iTunes features related to data storage and managing access through payment systems.

The fee was awarded by a Texas court, and was positioned between the $852 million Smartflash was seeking in damages and the $4.5 million Apple had argued for.

It was recently Chinese New Year, and to celebrate, thousands of people flocked to a well-known Buddhist temple in the country’s Guangdong province to make offerings.

One Apple super-fan apparently decided to eschew cash donations for something far more valuable, however: his new iPhone 6 Plus.

A shot of the man depositing the super-sized Apple smartphone in the temple’s donation box was featured in Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post. The saddest part? His generous offering was rejected.

Tonight, history is made as Modern Family becomes the first major TV show to ever air an episode shot almost entirely using Apple products — ranging from the iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2 to MacBook FaceTime cameras.

But while Apple products are famously easy to use, the episode itself contained numerous challenges: taking more than three months to complete, and a variety of nifty filmmaking tricks. To find out more details, BuzzFeed News reached out to the show’s executive producer and co-creator, Steve Levitan, to get some added insight about the challenges of making this unusual show.

The behind-the-scenes video is available to watch online, or download via iTunes.

When you’re a company the size of Apple, sometimes you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Having recently paved the way for racially diverse emoji by adding them to both Mac and iOS, Apple is now being attacked for the shade of yellow used for its Asian faces, which some critics claim is borderline racist.

Lenny Kravitz has designed a camera for Leica and you are going to need rock-star money to afford it.

Kravitz, whose life-long love for photography is evident by the Leica camera often slung on his shoulder, has collaborated with his favorite company to design a limited edition Leica M-P Correspondent digital rangefinder.

The “design” comes in the form of areas of the camera’s black enamel finish where the paint has been deliberately worn away to reveal flares of brass. It has the vintage appearance of a well-traveled workhorse that came from the bag of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Grumpy Cat, T-Shirt-guy, Leave Brittany alone! Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, Bill Gates. Music videos, TV episodes, vlogs, and — of course — PewDiePie.

That’s just a small sampling of the amazing video compilation edit you can see right now on YouTube, created by Luc Bergeron, director and video editor for YouTube, to celebrate ten years of the Google-owned video portal.

Take a look at this amazing edit of 198 YouTube videos below and be ready to thrill to all the video memes you already know, plus a ton you might have missed.

Can you imagine a time without the ubiquitous video service, available on every video device you have, from your iPhone and iPad to Mac to smart TV? YouTube has re-defined the way we create and consume video from the moment it came into being, and we love this retrospective for reminding us.

David Sherry and Allie Lehman are not out to kill anything. But when they named their growing photo agency Death to Stock, they were sending out a pretty strong signal. Not with malice toward this segment of the photo industry, but a tongue-in-cheek invitation to any person who has ever had to create something using expensive, mediocre photography from a stock agency.

The name as well as the pictures they produce have caught the eye of more than 230,000 subscribers since Sherry and Lehman started the agency in Columbus, Ohio, in 2013.

The value of the company, Sherry said, is growing fast — in large part because they distribute the work free of charge.

A good belt should hold your pants up and be fashionable doing so.

Piers Ridyard has raised the expectations of this simple but important mens fashion accessory: the belt as smart phone charger.

Ridyard’s XOO belt looked like any other belt when it made its debut at London Fashion Week in January as part of a new collection from men’s fashion house Casely-Hayford. The charging power is in layers of thin, flexible lithium ceramic polymer battery sewn into the leather.

A microUSB-to-USB charging cable stored on the inside of the band can be plugged into the belt to charge a pocketed iPhone or Android device. The belt can be recharged on a computer.

Adonit already makes some of the best styluses in the world, now it’s unleashing a new app that will help you make the most of them.

The company behind the popular Jot styluses line revealed today that it’s made a new app called Forge that’s not just a great place to sketch out drawings, but also doubles as a digital workspace for visual thinkers.

What happens to a bunch of weaponized high school kids recruited to fight intergalactic bad guys? They become some seriously disturbed adults.

That’s the message in this stylish, high-concept fan film that reboots the popular live-action television show for kids that first aired in the 1990s, Power Rangers.

This film by music video auteur Joseph Kahn, produced by Adi Shankar, stars Katee Sackhoff of Battlestar Galactica fame and James Van Der Beek (who also gets a writing credit) from Dawson’s Creek as two former Rangers on different sides of the long-running intergalactic war.

Check out the dark film below (NSFW warning: there are boobs and lots of violent scenes), and you’ll never think of this franchise in the same way again.

Want to know if that nasty mole on your shoulder is cancerous? There’s an app for that!

Errr… Actually, no. No, there’s not.

The Federal Trade Commission announced today that apps like Mole Detective and Mel App that are marketed as ways for iPhone users to snap pictures of moles to determine if they’re cancerous aren’t based on actual real-world science.

The two app makers reached a settlement with the FTC after the feds alleged that the apps lacked adequate evidence to support claims that they could calculate your mole’s melanoma risk as low, medium, or high without ever visiting a doctors office.

Call it Newton’s third law of Apple analysts: For every extreme reaction one way, there is an equally extreme reaction the other.

In this case, what that means is that while some doomsayers are happy to write off the Apple Watch as the worst thing Apple has done since building its own smartphone, taking on the music industry with iTunes, [insert actual bad decision], others go in totally the opposite direction and predict a landslide victory in Apple’s favor.

Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research falls somewhat into the latter category. His prediction? That the Apple Watch will have 100,000 apps ready to go when it launches in April, and that 42 million units will have sold by the end of December.

Mercedes-Benz already lost a key employee to Apple’s project Titan, but Daimler AG chairman Dieter Zetsche says he’s not losing any sleep thinking about Cupertino’s rumored self-driving car.

At the launch of the new Mercedes-AMG C63 sports sedan in Portugal last night, the Mercedes boss dismissed the threat an iCar could pose to established car manufacturers, saying Apple wouldn’t be worried about a Mercedes-Benz smartphone so his company is not worried about an Apple car.

Intel’s Broadwell chips are late. The 14-nanometer wafers, which are believed to be integral to the much-rumored Retina MacBook Air, are due soon, but still not here.

But Intel’s already looking forward. At this week’s 2015 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the chipmaker will announce a switch to a 10-nanometer process by early 2017 and to 7-nanometer chips shortly thereafter … a transition that means your Mac’s guts will soon no longer be made out of silicon, but another material entirely.

It may sound like the definition of #firstworldproblems, but some residents of New York’s Upper East Side aren’t happy that they’re about to get a gorgeous new Apple Store on their doorstep, according to a petition.

In fact, they’re mad as hell — and they’re not gonna take it anymore!

The question of when European iPhone owners can expect to start using Apple Pay may be answered sooner rather than later. Visa Europe has announced that it is putting in place the infrastructure to allow contactless payment terminals to support the “tokenization” service used by Apple Pay.

The technology will be in place by mid-April, after which Apple could theoretically introduce Apple Pay anytime it wishes.

Many of us have had AOL accounts throughout the years, but if you’re still using your AOL account to log into iTunes, you’re soon to be S-O-L: Apple has just announced that customers who use an AOL username to sign-in to iTunes will need to convert to an Apple ID before March 31st.

Late last week, we reported on the newest leak from Edward Snowden, indicating that the NSA had hacked the SIM cards of pretty much every smartphone on Earth. iPhones included.

It looked bad. The hack allowed the NSA to tap into your phone without a court order. But today, the Dutch company responsible for 2 billion SIM cards released a statement, saying that as far as they can tell, fears of a massive NSA invasion are overblown.

People hoping that Apple will drop the Samsung albatross from around its neck for the forthcoming iPhone 6s may be disappointed.

According to a new report coming from the Asian supply chain, Samsung has come to an agreement with Apple to supply new 20nm LPDDR4 DRAM memory chips for the next generation iPhone, expected this September. Samsung will reportedly provide half of the chips Apple needs for its next iPhone, and has no problems upping the order if more are required.

Apple’s second iOS 8.3 beta, which was pushed out to registered developers on Monday ahead of a public release later this year, enables Siri to speak seven new languages, testers have found. It also brings more performance improvements for older iOS devices like the iPhone 4s.

Had he lived, today would have marked the 60th birthday of Steve Jobs, who was born February 24, 1955.

While most of the tributes to Jobs will no doubt highlight later events in his life — the unveiling of the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone or the iPad — I instead wanted to mark the occasion with one of the lesser-known Jobs videos: his first television interview, recorded around the time the Apple II was making waves.

If you never thought you’d see the day when Jobs would geek out over seeing himself on a television screen, check out the video after the jump.