Having helped pioneer the concept of the $0.99 music track on iTunes, Apple is now trying to bring down the price of streaming music.
According to a new report published by Re/code, Apple is pushing music labels for extensive price cuts that would bring the cost of a Beats Music subscription from its current $10 price point all the way down to $5.
Thinking of buying Apple’s new Mac mini? Make sure you get plenty of RAM when you place your order. Unlike its predecessors, the new machine’s RAM is soldered to the logic board, so you’re unable to add your own later on.
The Chinese authorities are staging a “man-in-the-middle” attack on Apple’s iCloud service in an attempt to steal username and password information, according to anti-censorship watchdog group GreatFire.org.
As per Wikipedia, a man-in-the-middle attack “is a form of active eavesdropping in which the attacker makes independent connections with the victims and relays messages between them, making them believe that they are talking directly to each other over a private connection, when in fact the entire conversation is controlled by the attacker.”
GreatFire.org first noticed the apparent attack when it became aware of the fact that certain connections made to Apple’s iCloud site in China no longer responded with a trusted digital certificate, thereby risking decryption.
In Spike Jonze’s film Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with a Siri-like “digital assistant,” played by Scarlett Johansson. But falling in love with Siri doesn’t just happen in the movies. In The New York Times, there is a beautiful piece about a 10-year-old autistic boy named Gus whose best friend is Siri.
Today marks the official roll-out of Apple’s long-awaited mobile payments service, Apple Pay. But while paying for items in-store using your iPhone is definitely an exciting prospect, Cupertino expects in-app purchases will make up the vast majority of early transactions, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Shanghai’s #Unicom store offers alteration service to enlarge pants’ pockets so to fit #iphone6 pic.twitter.com/uvjuTskGcn
— People's Daily,China (@PDChina) October 17, 2014
Is your iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus just too big for your skinny jeans? You’re not alone: a store in China is actually keeping a tailor on hand to enlarge pants for customers who can’t fit their new smartphones in their pockets.
Particularly if you work with computers, Dropbox is one of the most useful tools available, and a new update for its official iOS app has just made it handier than ever.
Adding support for Touch ID, iOS 8 users now have the ability to unlock their Dropbox with a fingerprint. In addition, the update also adds support the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, along with sorting out general stability and performance issues, such as a fix for previewing rich text format files on iOS 8.
Now that Marc Newson is one of Apple’s design bigwigs, the guys at Curved Labs wondered what sort of new products might result from the collaboration.
Their concept? An updated AirPort WiFi router that is also a smart smoke and CO2 detector, a la Nest Protect.
Hit TV show Family Guy followed a trajectory that’s very similar to Apple’s. The show appeared as a breath of fresh air early on, underwent a decline during which it almost vanished, then made a triumphant return.
In that way, Family Guy always seemed a perfect fit for iOS. Earlier this year, that pairing finally happened when developer TinyCo debuted Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff, a mobile game that follows Peter Griffin and the rest of the Fox TV show’s colorful supporting cast as they rebuild the town of Quahog after it’s been destroyed.
Six months down the line — and with the game currently in the middle of a haunting, courtesy of its Halloween update — Cult of Mac spoke with the developers about Seth McFarlane, making games funny, and the perils of in-app purchases.
The NBA season is set to tip off on October 28th and Beats is ready to celebrate with a new epic ad all about King James’ return to Cleveland.
The long cinematic ad is similar to Beats’ incredible World Cup ad, and flashes between LeBron’s fierce workout regimen he went through this summer – while rocking the Beats earbuds of course – as well as showing spurts from his past like St. Vincent-St. Mary high school, his old Spring Hill apartments, and his mom.
Check it out:
Fresh off the Apple event! Catch our impressions of iPad Air 2, the iPad Mini 3, the big, beautiful iMac with 5K display, and the updated Mac Mini. Plus, our favorite Yosemite and iOS 8.1 Continuity features; and HBO makes a move to offer all us cable cutters the a la cart TV we’ve always wanted.
Snicker your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the chuckles begin.
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The folks at iFixit have already gotten their hands on a new 27-inch Retina iMac, and their teardown reveals everything you need to know about the machine’s innards.
Thanks to a rear access door, the RAM in the new iMac remains user upgradable without needing to open the case. Most of the iMac’s internal design has stayed the same from last year’s model.
Filmed on location at the Alyeska resort in Alaska, the Alaskan wilderness, and the Golden Alpine lodges in Canada, this incredible film of extreme skiing will light up your screens on October 19.
The 12-minute video was created to show off the color and light technology of Phillips Ambilight TV. To do so, the filmmakers created LED ski suits and let loose their pro skiers in the Alaskan and Canadian mountains.
Check out the gorgeous preview in the short teaser below.
iCloud passwords and security passwords can be guessed using social networking and various phishing techniques, and complex passwords and two-step verification are not as intuitive as they should be.
In a delightfully complete article over at TidBITS, author Rich Mogul lays out the facts behind the current spate of Apple security problems – most of which boil down to this: People are the weakest link in the chain.
As anyone who’s worked with technology in the past decade can tell you, the thorniest technical challenges aren’t typically those that deal directly with hardware and software. No, in most cases, the toughest things to troubleshoot and fix lie along the human spectrum. System administrators have long known this, coming up with acronyms like PEBCAK and ID-10T errors.
The same goes for security, which in Apple’s case affects an ever-increasing number of people who not be savvy to the ways of information security.
Tim Cook called the iPhone 6 the fastest-selling smartphone in history during yesterday’s Apple event. It’s set a new high-water mark for the most first-month orders ever, and if you need any more evidence, just look at this line outside the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City today.
It’s been a month since the iPhone 6 launched and the line is still down the street. Unlike a month ago, Asian resellers can’t be blamed for the length, as China just got its fingers all over the bigger-than-big displays this morning.
Apple didn’t announce how many iPhones it sold in the first month – although we might find out during Monday’s earnings call – but with 32 countries accepting orders in the first few weeks, and another 36 getting it this month, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are poised to be Apple’s biggest cash machines ever.
Apple’s new iPads are now available to pre-order through the Apple Online Store. Prices start at $399 for the iPad mini 3 and $499 for the iPad Air 2, and both will be delivered to your door next week.
Christian Bale has reportedly been tapped to don Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck in the upcoming biopic from Sony, and I got to admit I’m stoked. Bale seems like the perfect fit. He looks as much like Steve as Ashton did, only he’s actually a phenomenal actor.
Conan is pretty excited about the Dark Knight playing el Jobso too. So much so, that last night he gave us a hilarious sneak preview of how Bale’s portrayal of Jobs will probably turn out.
Check it out:
If you’re an Rdio user, great news. The official iOS app has just been updated to optimize the music-streaming service for iOS 8. And it gets even better if you happen to have an automobile with CarPlay installed.
Are you looking for a high tech, upscale beverage maker to go along with your brand new 5K 27-inch Retina iMac?
If so you could do a lot worse than this revolutionary BKON Craft Brewer, a machine that allows you to make the perfect cup of loose-leaf tea, coffee, cocktail, and a variety of other drinks from your home, without the need for an intensive training course and plenty of spare time.
How does it do it? In one word: physics.
Some of the best tech ideas come from taking two separate concepts and trying to merge them together into one device.
With all the chatter about smartwatches and smartphones as of late, it was only going to be so long before someone tried to combine the two: creating a gadget that gives smartwatch-like functionality while on the wrist, but also allows the user to take it off and use it like a smartphone when necessary.
That’s the idea behind .klatz, a Ukrainian “smartwatch/watchphone” project that’s currently raising money on Indiegogo. Its creator points out its iOS support — which means that you can pair it with an iPhone if you don’t fancy using it as your primary handset — while a promo video for the project shows it providing Pebble-style notifications, along with fitness tracking and music playing functionality.
Another week, another issue — all of Cult of Mac’s best news stories and features, compiled in one place to read through easily on your iPad or iPhone. This week we’ve got some fantastic coverage of Apple’s iPad event, which revealed iPad Air 2, iPad mini 3, iMac with 5K Retinal Display, and a boosted Mac mini. Plus, read about how one cop saved a life using Find My iPhone, and the new official Reddit app. That and more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.
Dig into Cult of Mac Magazine October 17 Edition, Free on iTunes
Tim Cook sure is picking up a lot of nicknames as of late. At the iPhone 6 keynote he was dubbed the “Zen Master of hardware and software” by U2’s Bono, and at yesterday’s iPad event he was given the codename “Chairman Honeycrisp” as part of the entertaining Stephen Colbert secrecy skit.
Taking the latter nickname as his inspiration, YouTube’s resident Apple songsmith Jonathan Mann (whose work we profiled earlier this week) put together his customary post-keynote song, highlighting the October 16 Apple media event.
The result may not quite hit the highs of Mann’s superb WWDC tribute (a song that is still stuck in my head months later), but it’s worth a watch for the repeating “Intergalactic Chancellor Chairman Honeycrisp” chorus alone.
Check out the video after the jump:
Yesterday, Apple unveiled the iPad mini 3, a slightly updated version of the second-gen iPad mini with Retina display. But even though it’s two generations old at this point, Apple still sells the original iPad mini for $249. That makes it the cheapest iPad yet, albeit for good reason: It packs the same A5 chip and other silicon guts that the iPad 2 did way back in March 2011.
That might actually seem like a good deal for consumers, but it’s turning out to be a nightmare for developers who will likely have to support the iPad mini until 2017.
Tim Cook crowed over the sales figures of the iPad during yesterday’s Apple keynote, pointing out that it has sold a whopping 225 million units since debuting in 2010.
Despite the iPad Air 2 looking like the finest iPad iteration yet, however, sources in the supply chain reckon Apple’s new flagship tablet is going to be available only in limited quantities during the remainder of 2014 — thanks to production difficulties with the devices’ new anti-reflective coating.
When Tim Cook took time out of yesterday’s iPad and iMac keynote to discuss just how excited he was about the iPhone 6 coming to China, he wasn’t kidding: the market Cook has previously said could one day overtake the U.S. has been going iPhone crazy.
Having been made available for preorder on October 10, today marks the first day in which the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are available for (authorized) sale in China, being made available on all three major networks.