News - page 1264

Apple is being sued by China’s second biggest insurance company over claims that it allowed a “counterfeit app” to be sold in the iTunes App Store.

The app in question misleads users into thinking it is the official app of Lufax, the leading provider of wealth and financial assets management in China, and a subsidiary of the Ping insurance group.

Ping is arguing that users in China might download the counterfeit Lufax app instead of the legitimate one, and that the ensuing risk of fraud and potential loss for Lufax’s customers is significant.

One of the longstanding complaints about iMessage is how it can stay active even when you switch to an Android phone. The result is that texts often get sucked into some sort of purgatory where they never actually reach your contacts.

Today Apple released a new web tool that permanently deregisters phone numbers from iMessage. Anyone can enter their phone number and cut all ties with Apple’s messaging platform for good.

The iOS 8 Pangu jailbreak tool was made available on the Mac today after being on Windows only for the past few weeks.

This week: more rumored details of a 12-inch iPad Pro; 755 new emojis are coming soon to your iDevices; with Christian Bale out, we make our list of the actors that should definitely NOT replace him in the Sorkin-penned Jobs movie; and finally… nude or not? Do you keep your iDevices bare or covered up in a case? We ponder the pros and cons and ask the question: why are so many iPhone and iPad cases horrid pieces of garbage? We’ll share some of our faves, too.

Chuckle 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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Apple is working on a new pair of Beats headphones, according to leaked FCC documents. They work over Bluetooth and appear to be pretty much identical to the Solo2 headphones Beats released in May.

Remember the iPhone 6 “prototype” that was listed on eBay and almost sold for $100,000 before getting mysteriously pulled? It was relisted last week and just sold for $11,100.

The seller got what he thought was a brand new iPhone 6 from Verizon only to find what appeared to be an unfinished prototype running internal software. After he told us that he was excited to hear from Apple regarding the prototype, the listing was suddenly taken down.

Apple and its former sapphire supplier GT Advanced Technologies have stayed quiet about their disastrous relationship, but newly unsealed court documents reveal that the two companies never had a chance of making things work.

Judge Henry Boroff ordered the sealed documents to be opened on Tuesday, and one of the affidavits from GTAT CEO Daniel Squiller claims Apple used a “bait-and-switch” strategy that was massively one-sided. When GTAT balked at Apple’s terms, execs were told to stop trying to negotiate and “put on your big boy pants and accept the agreement.”

Imagine futuristic and innovative design engineered into a display that’s capable of changing the way work with our computers as well as the way we view what we’ve created. And what if that display is the perfect tool for energetic collaboration?

Before you say anything, check out this new video from LG Electronics, which recently collaborated with artists who are passionate about genuine creativity.

Newark International Airport is renounced for its habitually tardy flights, but in an effort to woo (and distract) flyers, United Airlines announced today that it’s planning to give its main terminal an iPad makeover.

The airline is investing $120 million into a upgrade of its main terminal at Newark, which consistently ranks as one of the worst airports in the country, despite being the 14th most busy. To spruce up the terminal, United plans to rollout iPads and other tech flourishes that have become an expectation among fliers now.

We’ve all taken our fair share of selfies, those ego-stroking quick snapshots of ourselves and others engaged in the most fun moments of our lives, right?

What would it be like, though, if various figures from historical times, like, say, the Renaissance, had camera phones? Would they take photos of themselves?

Olivia Muus at the Museum of Selfies Tumblr blog thinks they might, and set out to prove it with her series of portraits as above.

“This is a project that started when my friend (aka. my right hand) and I went to the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen,” she writes on the blog page. “I took a picture for fun and liked how this simple thing could change their character and give their facial expression a whole new meaning.”

Apparently it caught on, because in addition to her original four photos, more and more folks are contributing their own “museum selfies” to the blog. Check out more of these fascinating portraits below.

Clearing the way for its own fitness-tracking wearables, Apple has stopped selling Fitbit activity trackers in the Apple Online Store, and has begun removing them from its brick-and-mortar retail outlets also.

Fitbit’s devices have been sold in Apple Stores for the past few years; quickly racking up close to 70% of the fitness-tracking device marketshare, courtesy of a head start over competitors such as Nike’s FuelBand and Jawbone Up.

Sometimes all a penguin needs is love, says the new Christmas ad from British department store John Lewis.

There’s a young boy with a real penguin. The penguin, named Monty, loves playing with the boy: swimming, sledding, building with Legos. but there’s one thing the boy cannot provide for poor Monty, and that’s a life mate.

Watch the full ad below and be sure to stick around for a delightful Calvin & Hobbesian moment at the end.

Monument Valley is my pick for iOS game of the year; a twisting, gorgeous, MC Escher-style puzzler that’s spellbinding from start to finish. And given that it has received upwards of 1 million downloads, I’m far from alone in thinking that way.

Which is why it’s great to hear that the game is set to receive its first expansion on November 13. Titled “Forgotten Shores,” the expansion will plunge players back into the world of Princess Ida, as she travels through eight entirely new levels, with a slew of fresh puzzles to solve on her journey.

In a much-requested feature, paying Spotify users can now use their iPhone or iPad to control the songs playing on their desktop computer.

Thanks to the update, you can now easily switch between desktop and mobile — perhaps using your iPad to skip and change tracks at a party, or shutting down your laptop, and then picking up listening on your iPhone from exactly where you left off on your phone.

According a rumor in BusinessKorea, Apple is set to switch from using the problematic TLC (triple-level cell) NAND flash to MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. MLC NAND was used in the 16GB version of the new iPhone 6 devices, as well as some of the 64GB models, while the 64GB and 128GB models use TLC NAND.

A few days ago we detailed reports that a small percentage of users were having issues with their new iPhones crashing and becoming stuck in a boot loop, supposedly due to the controller IC of the TLC NAND.

Although the suggestion that Apple was looking at a full-on product recall were largely debunked, the company is supposedly looking to fix the problem going forward.

iPad users generated a massive 79.9% of North American tablet-based Web traffic over the month of September, according to a new report by Chitika Insights.

This number is down slightly from the 81% figure the iPad represented one year ago, although the iPad actually gained 1.9% points since July 2014 — the largest quarter-over-quarter usage share increase of any tablet brand out there.

Slo-mo videos have become my favorite new thing to shoot with the iPhone 6 Plus now that Apple added the ability to spit out gorgeous vids at 240 FPS, but my slo-mo addiction comes at a heavy cost: storage space.

The best smartphone camera in the world doesn’t mean jack if your 16GB iPhone can’t hold another 30 second video, so the guys at Leef have come up with a brilliant solution to ensure you never run out of room for all your video. It’s called the iBridge, and while it might look an ordinary USB-stick, it has the extraordinary ability to add storage to both your iPhone and Mac.

From answering trolls online to busting out near-fluent Mandarin in front of a surprised audience, Mark Zuckerberg’s all about defying expectations these days. That trend continued yesterday, as he gave a reasonable (and even Steve Jobsian) answer about why Facebook moved messaging out of its main app and into a standalone Messenger one.

Telling the audience at his first public Q&A that, “I’m grateful for hard questions” and “it keeps us honest,” Zuck noted how:

My math-averse daughter wanted to cheat on her algebra homework. So we downloaded PhotoMath, a free app that lets you take a picture of your mathematical and algebraic equations, solving them for you and showing the steps to the solution.

PhotoMath has been at the top of the App Store charts for a couple of weeks, hitting number one on the Education, Kids Games and Top Apps lists. Small wonder, as it seems like a great way to get out of doing homework.

However, despite the concerns of some parents and teachers, apps like PhotoMath just won’t help when it comes to cheating — they’re far too limited. Still, it’s a promising technology that, once it matures, might actually turn into the type of wonder tool for education we’ve long been promised, turning our iOS devices into useful educational tools that will help kids actually learn math, rather than simply giving them a shortcut to homework answers.

Today Apple quietly added a new feature to the developer beta version of iCloud.com. Photos can now be uploaded directly from the browser to a user’s iCloud Photo Library, which was introduced with iOS 8.1.

Since Apple isn’t releasing its new Photos app for OS X until next year, this could very well be the only way to upload photos to iCloud from a desktop for months.

Today’s good news: a new Toy Story movie.

Pixar just announced that it’s releasing the fourth installment of Toy Story in June 2017. The movie will be directed by John Lasseter, the legend who directed the first two movies and currently serves as Chief Creative Officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Toy Story 3 came out in 2010 and earned nearly $1.1 billion worldwide at the box office. No plot or character details about Toy Story 4 have been revealed yet.

Via: Variety

iOS 8 has been technically jailbroken since October 22, but it’s taken weeks to get it polished enough for Cydia, the jailbreak alternative to the App Store.

Now that things are “stable enough,” Cydia creator Jay Freeman has flipped the switch to start allowing the sale of iOS 8 tweaks and themes.

Today CBS News added a new channel to the Apple TV. The network’s CBSN channel is the first of its kind to offer live, anchored coverage without a cable subscription.

CBS is now seriously competing with Fox, ABC, CNBC and other competitors on the Apple TV with a mix of streaming news and on-demand content.