News - page 1276

Being Steve Jobs’ son or daughter would surely mean a never-ending supply of new high-tech devices to play around with, right?

Not according to a New York Times article by Nick Bilton, who claims that Jobs set out to purposely limit the amount of time his kids spent using their iPhones and other gadgets — even going so far as to stop them using Apple’s latest must have-devices altogether.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Apple’s reveal on Tuesday of their first smartwatch was that it was square.

Many of us were expecting something that was at least curved, if not round: a more traditional watch form factor that represented an evolutionary step away from the square displays Apple has embraced since the original Apple I.

Of course, as we all know, the Apple Watch is boxy, at least for now. But as these renders show, the Apple Watch design and UI would work just as well, if not more so, in a round casing, with a round display.

With its latest iOS 8 beta, Apple added a bunch of gorgeous new wallpapers. Some of them appeared on stage during the company’s special event on Tuesday, and others can be seen on the its website decorating the home screens of the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus.

But you don’t need to wait until iOS 8 goes public next week to get your hands on them, because they’re all available to download right here.

One of the biggest disappointments from Apple’s announcements yesterday was the lack of a sapphire screen for the iPhone 6. A seemingly-neverending string of part leaks and rumors indicated that 2014 would be the year the iPhone got a nearly indestructible sapphire display cover.

And while sapphire is used for the Apple Watch’s display, Apple made no mention of sapphire for the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus.

What happened?

With all the livestream trouble Apple had during its iPhone 6 and Apple Watch unveiling, it’s likely you missed at least part of the big reveals.

Cult of Mac is here to help with this 90-second version of the Apple keynote that will show you all the most important highlights.

There’s tons more that Tim Cook and Co. announced but it’s impossible to cram it all into a minute and a half. Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to keep up-to-date with all the latest Apple news, reviews and more.

Apple is officially a watchmaker. And like all fancy watchmakers, the company has created a trove of gorgeous marketing close ups of its timepieces, only Apple has hidden a subtle to diss to competitors that its way ahead of their analog challengers.

Most watchmakers set their watch faces to 10 past 10 o’clock in advertisements. Rolex is anal about using 10:10:31, TAG Heuer uses 10:10:37, and Bell & Ross are dedicated to 10:10:10, but Apple’s so far ahead, it set the clock of its watch to nine minutes past 10 o’clock.

There are a lot of Apple skeptics out there. CNBC thinks the new iPhone 6 models are nothing special, and dis the Apple Watch because it doesn’t work with Android. Watch Cult of Mac editor and publisher Leander Kahney set them straight in the video above. See also our report card for Tim Cook’s first three years as CEO.

Apple’s first wearable is heading full-stream down the product pipeline ahead of its early 2015 release, and to aid with the launch of its first fashion accessory, Apple has recruited the talents of Gap Inc’s second top marketing executive.

Marcela Aguilar joins Apple with a deep background in fashion and ad agencies after serving as Gaps senior global director of marketing and communications, and has plenty of global expertise that will come in hand as Apple tries to convince fashion forward women and men to slap an Apple Watch on their wrists.

Apple is growing like wildfire in China, and Tim Cook expects the country to eventually overtake the US as his company’s largest market.

That’s why it’s a big deal that Apple has delayed the launch of its new iPhones in China. No explanation has been provided to carriers, although it’s suspected that there are still hurdles to overcome in gaining regulatory approval from the government.

The Apple Watch and iPhone 6 event yesterday in Cupertino may have been Apple’s most fashion-forward event ever. In addition to the usual schlubby tech journalists, there was Vogue editrix Anna Wintour leading a pack of fashionable scribes into the squat Flint Center as if it were a runway show in Paris or Milan.

It was Tommy Krul, however, who stole the show. He took the stage during the glitchy keynote to demo his company’s latest game Vainglory. Standing off to one side of the stage, his role was just to play the game on an iPhone 6 while co-founder Stephan Sherman of Super Evil Megacorp talked it up behind a huge video screen showing the action.

But Krul, the company’s CTO — sporting a chunky purple infinity scarf that brushed against a collar-length pageboy haircut — quickly became all anyone talked about.

The closing of Macworld is the end of an era. Thirty years ago, the publication was the midwife to the launch of the Macintosh.

Cult of Mac has a series of exclusive recollections by the magazine’s founder Dave Bunnell, which chronicle the journalist’s close encounters with a young and volatile Steve Jobs, the Mac’s difficult gestation and the birth of modern desktop computing. It’s a great trip down memory lane — with plenty of outbursts, last-minute changes and even a cameo by Ella Fitzgerald.

Read on for the full series.

Like clockwork, along with Apple’s new product announcements came a protest against them. The Free Software Foundation’s anti-DRM campaign took a timely if predictable potshot against the Apple Watch and Apple Pay after the products were unveiled Tuesday.

“It is astonishing to see so much of the technology press acting as Apple’s marketing arm,” said FSF executive director John Sullivan in a statement Tuesday after Cupertino’s big Apple Watch reveal. “What’s on display today is widespread complicity in hiding the most newsworthy aspect of the announcement — Apple’s continuing war on individual computer user freedom, and by extension, free speech, free commerce, free association, privacy, and technological innovation.”

The Apple Watch looks far more elegant than the rectangular smartwatches we’ve already seen from competing companies, but we couldn’t help noticing that some of its straps look a little… familiar.

In fact, several of Apple’s new strap designs look almost identical to straps from luxury watchmaker Ikepod, which not so coincidentally used to be run by Marc Newson, an Australian industrial designer who recently became a part of Apple’s design team.

Macworld is closing its doors. Parent company IDG has laid off much of its staff, including longtime employee and Editorial Director Jason Snell.

Tim Cook and the team at Apple seemed mighty proud of their incredible Apple Watch achievement yesterday, but Cook’s excitement was just a flash in the pan compared to the world’s truthiest Apple fanboy: Dr. Stephen T. Colbert

The late-night news show host was seen catching up on the iPhone 6 keynote when show started last night, but once the Apple revealed the device that’s going to revolutionize the way you look at your wrist, Colbert unleashed an explosive celebration and capped it off by making his boring dumbwatch as obsolete as possible.

Stephen even managed to get an exclusive look at the upcoming WristPad. Check out his hilarious Apple Watch segment below:

Apple crushed its introduction of the Apple Watch yesterday in Cupertino, but while Kevin Lynch and Jony were waxing poetic about the design of watch and its revolutionary UI, there was one feature everyone steered clear of: battery life.

Other than introducing the new inductive charging cable, Apple was mum on how long its timepiece will stay charged. According to a report from Recode, that’s because Apple is still trying to improve it ahead of the early 2015 release, but sources say Apple Watch battery life currently last about a day, and will require nightly charging.

Apple started introducing gold variants of its devices with the “champagne” iPhone 5s in 2013. Given the unexpected popularity of that device, it was only natural that Apple would keep the color scheme going for future devices — which now includes the Apple Watch, as unveiled yesterday.

While Tim Cook didn’t dwell on too many details regarding the individual Apple Watch models during his keynote, technology journalist David Pogue does have some additional information about the 18-karat gold Edition variant of the Apple Watch, which he claims will come in a “gorgeous jewelry box” that doubles as a charger.

Thanks to its work on the iPhone 6, Apple supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has announced record high revenues for August — representing an earnings increase of 6.7 percent from last month and a leap of 25.8 percent from the previous year.

TSMC made a massive $2.31 billion in August, with the phenomenal performance being credited to the company’s production of A8 processors for the iPhone 6-series of handsets — in addition to other chips such as Touch ID fingerprint sensors.

Apple is going big with the iPhone this year. Two million photo-aligned pixels big!

The sight of Apple’s new mammoth iPhone 6 Plus might inspire a lot of witty genitalia jokes thanks to its 5.5-inch display, but Apple will be laughing all the way to the bank, as the iPhone 6 Plus has the potential to be Apple’s biggest seller of the year, and I’m not talking screen size.

Yes, the iPhone 6 Plus has display so huge you’ll need to buy an entirely new wardrobe to fit it in your clothes, but it also packs all-new features we weren’t expecting, some of which didn’t even make it onto the iPhone 6.  Despite costing an extra $100, the iPhone 6 Plus is will hit shelves right as the phablet fad is booming, and its armed with features that make it not just bigger than the iPhone 6, but better too.

Here are eight reasons why the iPhone 6 Plus tops the iPhone 6:

For the second consecutive year, Apple has delivered not one but two new iPhones. Unlike the iPhone 5c, however, the slightly cheaper model this time around isn’t just an old iPhone inside a new shell. The iPhone 6 has the same A8 processor, the same Touch ID fingerprint scanner, and the same improved iSight camera as the iPhone 6 Plus.

So, is size the only difference, and how do you choose which model is right for you? Our in-depth comparison below will help you compare each device — spec for spec, feature for feature — and decide which one most deserves a place in your pocket for the next 12 months.

Baldur’s Gate is one of the all-time classic RPGs, and while it’s iOS Enhanced Edition has been available on iPad since late 2012, up until now iPhone gamers have been left out in the cold.

That’s changed thanks to a new update which adds iPhone support, meaning that we can finally play this epic fantasy game on the move.

But wait, you might say, Baldur’s Gate was already a challenging read on the iPad mini. How on earth is it possible to play on an iPhone? Well, developers Bioware have thought of that too, since they’ve added a new “Font Size” option, which makes the game easier to view on smaller iOS devices.

CUPERTINO, Calif. — This is the first group photo of Apple’s new Industrial Design team — the men and women behind the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and a long string of other hit products.

The group is super-secretive and rarely appears in public together. In fact, they’ve only been pictured once before. This picture was taken at the end of Tuesday’s launch event, when many of the journalists had been ushered out. In the middle is Jony Ive and the team’s latest and highest-profile hire, star designer Marc Newson.

The Industrial Design team is Apple’s idea factory. This is where Apple’s innovation comes from. They design and develop all of Apple’s products, and many of them were working at Apple before Steve Jobs returned in 1997.

As Bono came in chanting and The Edge power-chorded his guitar for the radio-friendly chorus of “The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)” today, we hoped for a revitalized big-arena rock band performance from the biggest Irish rock band of all time.

What we got was the boys miming a well-rehearsed, highly-produced single that sounds like anything but The Ramones. Bono sings, “I was young/Not dumb/Just wishing to be blinded/By you/Brand new/We were pilgrims on our way” and, frankly, we wish they were young again. We wanted to be blinded by rockstars, but we really only got an ad for Apple.

At first listen, Songs of Innocence is a musically safe choice, a collection of songs that will sound just fine in the background as you wait in line for your first latte of the day at Starbucks. This isn’t the same band that had us thrilling to “In the Name of Love,” or “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” let alone snake-dancing to the mysterious syncopations of “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” or the gospel-tinged “One.”

The new album is being pitched by the band as intensely personal, but it comes off as more craftsmanship than artistry. It’s not all bad, and chances are U2 super-fans would have bought it even if it weren’t free, but the music lovers in us were a little disappointed.

Work on the Apple Watch might have seen Apple’s R&D spending hit $4.36 billion over the past financial year, but that’s a drop in the ocean compared to the amount the wearables device cost Apple yesterday.

After AAPL stock prices hit a high of $102.91 prior to Apple’s special event kicking off, prices tumbled back down to $97.99 by the end of trading: wiping $30 billion off Apple’s market value.