Apple revolutionized the music industry with the introduction of iTunes in 2003, but even Cupertino is having trouble selling albums these days.
iTunes revenue dropped 13% over the last year reports the Wall Street Journal, marking the second straight year that Apple’s digital music sales have declined, after falling 5.7% in 2013.
Amazon added Apple Pay support today for its Amazon.com Rewards Visa.
Since Chase, the Amazon rewards card issuer, was an Apple Pay launch partner, some speculated that Amazon intentionally opted out of Apple’s mobile payments system. But Amazon quickly confirmed this week that it was working on adding support for its credit card in the near future. Now it’s followed through.
Apple will be holding on to its top executives until at least 2019, if the granting of new stock options by the Apple board has anything to do with it.
Angela Ahrendts, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, CFO Luca Maestri, VP of hardware engineering Daniel Riccio, lawyer Bruce Sewell and COO Jeffrey Williams all received stock grants potentially valued at a total of $27 million, based on the high closing price of AAPL stock Thursday.
We get slammed 24/7 with new Apple rumors. Some are accurate, most are not. To give you a clue about what’s really coming out of Cupertino in the future, we’re busting out our rumor debunker each week to blow up the nonsense.
We're one month into iPhone rumor season and even though the rumormill has been quiet about upcoming hardware this week, we've got plenty of rumors surrounding Apple Pay's future, as well as some gossip that Nike and Apple are working on making some wearable together. Step up to the crystal ball and see which of this week's juicy rumors are full of fluff.
Tim Cook has described his desire to bring Apple Pay to China as “top of the list” in terms of priorities.
Cook was quoted on Friday, following an interview he gave with China’s official Xinhua news agency. “China is a really key market for us,” he said. “Everything we do [in terms of services in the U.S.], we are going to work it here.”
Christian Bale is Steve Jobs. The Oscar-winning actor has officially signed on to play the late Apple co-founder in Sony’s upcoming movie based on Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay. Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle is attached to the project, but no other cast or crew members have been confirmed.
A lot of big Hollywood actors, including Leonardo DiCaprio, have been in talks to play Jobs at some point, but Bale’s name stayed in the hat till the very end. Looking at Bale as an actor, it’s easy to see why. Here’s why he will play the perfect Steve Jobs.
When the Apple Watch is released next year, it’s going to represent a major paradigm shift for iOS: it’ll be an interface made up of fingertip-sized bubbles, not rounded square icons.
Don’t you think that calls for a new logo to mark the occasion?
If you’re looking for a fun puzzle game to play over the weekend you can do a whole lot worse than RGB Express, Apple’s “App of the Week” which has gone free in the App Store.
Arriving on iOS one month ago, the game is a charming strategy title in which you play the route planner for a fleet of trucks, responsible for plotting their paths through increasingly complex neighborhoods, always ensuring that every home receives its package.
Starting off simply but getting increasingly complex as the game goes on, it’s an entertaining challenge, spanning 200 levels in all, that’s sure to appeal to the kind of iOS gamers who also enjoy titles like Blek.
Yes! Another week, another scintillating issue full 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 delightful coverage of the new Apple Pay features in iOS 8, tips and tricks on the latest operating systems, iOS 8.1 and OS X Yosemite, and a couple of great apps you won’t want to miss. That and more in this week’s spectacularly useful Cult of Mac Magazine.
Dig into Cult of Mac Magazine October 24 Edition, Free on iTunes
Tim Cook may be the Apple CEO we picture when we think of the mission to make Apple a “force for good” in the world, including enhanced accessibility for deaf users. But Steve Jobs was the person who first got the ball rolling.
During the Tampa Bay Business 100 awards last night — an event dedicated to honoring the 100 largest private companies in Tampa Bay, Florida — the CEO of a company which makes Internet video communication tools recalled how Jobs helped him use the so-called ZVRS technology with FaceTime.
Well, here’s one for the record books. Apple just rejected a developer’s app for violating its policies against pornographic content.
Nothing weird about that, except for the way that Apple went about it: by sending that developer pictures of a dude masturbating. What?
Continuity is one of the best features of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, allowing your iPhone, iPad, and Mac to all operate more seamlessly together than ever before. But there’s a problem: Continuity requires Bluetooth 4.0 LE to work, and many older Macs don’t have it.
But don’t despair. A new tool has been released makes it possible to easily hacktivate Continuity, even if Apple doesn’t want you to.
Third-party keyboards like SwiftKey and Swype vastly improve touchscreen typing in iOS 8, but sometimes you need to go that extra mile to really express yourself. Sometimes you need to send text messages in Klingon, or get your point across visually with an animated GIF or an off-the-cuff doodle.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, showcased a Klingon Keyboard during last week’s iPad media event, and that’s just one of the amusingly offbeat keyboards flooding the App Store in this new era of freedom.
Cult of Mac talked with the developers behind the Klingon Keyboard and other wacky alternatives for this guide to the weird world of third-party iOS keyboards. You’ll never type the same way again!
A crucial part of making apps involves the beta testing process, and Apple has released a new tool to help streamline the process for everyone.
After initially previewing TestFlight for third-party developers alongside iOS 8 at WWDC in June, Apple made it available for use today. Developers can now invite up to 1,000 beta testers, including non-developers, to try early builds of their apps before they hit the App Store.
Apple’s sapphire ambitions with GT Advanced Technology have been a complete disaster. But even though the plan to turn Mesa, Arizona, into the Sapphire Capital of the West failed, Apple executives are still looking for a way to repurpose GT’s new factory.
The city of Mesa and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer bent over backward to bring Apple to the Grand Canyon State, but now that GTAT plans to shut down operations, Apple says it’s still committed to helping the area.
It turns out that the rumored app that Facebook has been working on isn’t an anonymous chat app, but rather a platform that lets you create your own chat room right on your iPhone.
Basically, Rooms is an iPhone app — soon coming to Android — that lets you make tiny message boards to post photos, videos, and text to. You’ll create a different username and identity for each Room you create or visit, and you’ll let other people join via a QR code you can generate and share via the internet or in real life.
Head developer Josh Miller told The Verge, “We’re not trying to build the next Snapchat — we’re trying to build the next WordPress.”
Email has become somewhat of a necessary evil lately, with a attempts like Google’s recent Inbox to use software to corral the over-abundance of the technology into something that makes better sense for us humans.
Designer Brendan Dawes worked with email marketing provider Mailchimp to come up with these fascinating single-use gadgets that bring email into the real world. Nim, the gadget named for a famous chimp in linguistics, is a light switch that lets you turn your email off. And on again, assumedly.
“Email is an interface we’ve been using for years,” Dawes told Wired, “so why not leverage its power some more?”
Dawes has several other gadgets he’s designed in concept. Each one tries to make the digital real and interactive. Some are more successful than others, of course, but they’re all fascinating.
Steve Wozniak changed the world when he co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs to create the first personal computer. Now, after revolutionizing the tech world, he’s ready to impart his wisdom upon the top tech minds in Australia.
University of Technology, Sydney announced that it’s hired Woz on as an adjunct professor for the school, where he’ll start teaching in December.
Apple’s deal with sapphire supplier GT Advanced Technologies went sour just one year into the company’s agreement to build a sapphire factory in Mesa, but after a tense few weeks, the companies have reached a settlement that allows them to part ways.
As part of its ‘amicable’ separation from Apple, GTAT will be expected to pay back $439 million over the next four years without interest, by selling off over 2000 ASF sapphire growth systems it purchased for the Mesa factory.
Set two years after Ghostbusters II, Ghostbusters: The Video Game was described as franchise creator Dan Aykroyd as “essentially the third movie.” He’s not lying either. In addition to using ideas originally designed for the never-made third film, Ghostbusters: The Video Game features a cast reunion including Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, and Ernie Hudson — along with supporting characters like Max von Sydow as Vigo the Carpathian.
The gameplay is pretty outstanding too, with the ghost-trapping feature really putting you in the shoes of everyone’s favorite ghost hunters.
Photo: Atari
One of the things that makes a Mac a Mac is the beautiful startup sound it makes when you turn it on: a soothing, sonorous noise that sounds like electronic harp strings being plucked as you enter the gardens of Zen.
But it wasn’t always this way. When the original Macintosh was released, the startup sound was horrible. Yet it wasn’t Steve Jobs who fixed it. It was an unknown sound engineer who hated it with such a passion that he defied his bosses and literally snuck it onto the Mac.
For the last decade or so, Apple has made some of the most beautifully designed devices on the planet. But because those devices are technology, not furniture or art, they have an incredibly short half-life in our home. Yet these are still classic designs that, in any other context, we might keep around for decades.
That’s why I like this bench built by Klaus Geiger.
Tim Cook wasn’t kidding when he said that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were proving to be Apple’s most popular iPhones of all time.
Two new reports coming out of Apple’s Chinese supply chain today demonstrate the extent to which this is true. According to one report, Apple’s Chinese production line is on course to ship a total of 50 million iPhone 6 devices by the end of 2014 — referring only to the 4.-inch iPhone 6 and not including the 6 Plus.
By comparison, for the calendar fourth quarter of 2013, Apple sold a total of 51 million iPhones all-in, which itself marked an all-time quarterly record.
As they so often do when new Apple products land, the gadget vivisectionists at iFixIt have used one of their trademark spudgers to crack open a brand iPad Air 2, and there’s at least one interesting finding.
All the iPad Air’s specs have improved this generation except for one critical thing: battery.
First arriving on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) way back in 1992, Final Fantasy V is one of the greatest RPGs ever made — and thanks to a new update by Square Enix, its iOS port is now more playable than ever.
Following on from Apple’s Handoff feature for iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, the update similarly encourages you to pick up play on whichever iOS device is closest to you with a new iCloud save syncing feature. What this means is that game data saved using iCloud can now be shared across devices, so you can enjoy working through Final Fantasy V on an iPad at home and an iPhone while on the move.