News - page 1276

Is there anything cooler than images of our solar system? Especially ones of the actual Sol, or, our sun. No, there is not.

This fantastically seasonal Halloween image was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which does nothing but stare at the sun all day and night in complete disregard of what its mother told it not to do.

Regardless, this image is amazing.

“The active regions in this image appear brighter,” writes NASA on its website, “because those are areas that emit more light and energy. They are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.”

This image blends the images taken with two different ultraviolet wavelengths highlighted, one at 171 and the other at 193 Ångströms, to create this one-of-a-kind jack-o’-lantern sun.

Whatever — this thing is just creepy cool and I want a giant poster of it.

Source: NASA

Imagine this: Tim Cook walks out on stage to introduce a special musical act at the end of the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch event last month.

Instead of trotting out “aging Irish rockers,” though, imagine if the Foo Fighters came out. Then Zach Brown. And then they launched into the killer rendition of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” you can see below.

Imagine that.

The sudden collapse of GT Advanced Technologies surprised everyone last week, including Apple, but according to new info obtained by the Wall Street Journal, key executives at GTAT knew its sapphire production deal was in trouble as early as February of this year.

Apple’s third payment of $103 million, which was due in February, wasn’t paid to GTAT on time according security filings which reveal GTAT faced sapphire production problems just months after inking its exclusive deal with Apple.

A few years ago, Portland resident Sam Beck built a bike-powered speaker that wouldn’t cut off when he stopped pedaling at stoplights. He accomplished such a feat with an amazing new technology: supercapacitors.

Instead of stopping there, however, Beck decided to bring his vision to the portable bluetooth speaker market, and his company — Blueshift — was born. Crowd-funded and open sourced, these gorgeous bamboo speakers charge in minutes and sound amazing for hours. The original unit, called Helium, is a big, bold bamboo speaker that packs a ton of sound.

Beck is releasing a second generation speaker called Hydrogen on crowd-funding site Crowd Supply. This new boombox is smaller and a little less loud, but it’s the same quality and design as its larger sibling, and a little less pricey.

Part of the appeal, for Beck, of figuring out this entirely new way of powering a speaker was the inherent challenge of doing something that no one else had.

“It seemed like such a good idea,” he told Cult of Mac over the phone, “I wondered why no one else was doing it. I saw that there was another way to do things that no one else was doing.”

Check out the video below for more details on this gorgeous high-tech portable speaker cabinet.

Macworld Expo, the conference where Steve Jobs unveiled products like the original iPhone and MacBook Air, is no more. After closing Macworld magazine and laying off much of its staff, parent company IDG has announced that 2015’s Macworld/iWorld Expo has been cancelled.

The MacIT conference for enterprise professionals will still take place next year, but Macworld itself has been put on “hiatus.”

Instagram’s new Hyperlapse app is a phenomenal tool to capture buttery smooth timelapse video with more options and tweaks offered than iOS 8’s built-in timelapse feature. But if you’ve got a new iPhone 6 and want to record 1080p Hyperlapses you’re out of luck, unless you know how to access its secret settings menu.

Hyperlapsers can tap into their iPhone’s full potential by accessing the hidden ‘Labs’ menu that lets you tweak everything from your recording resolution, frame rate, speed multiplier options and even the sound levels.

Here’s how to access Hyperlapse’s secret settings:

Picture this. You’re a disembodied skull with stretchy brain parts. You use this elasticity to fling yourself around the afterworld, Angry Birds-style, in order to collect taxes from the deadbeats who reside there.

Sound like fun? It is, oddly enough. While Skullduggery may be one of the odder platforming games you’ve played, it’s as challenging and action-packed as anything out there. Once you’ve wrapped your, ahem, head around the control scheme, you’ll find yourself flying through level after level with glee.

Check out the launch trailer below to get a sense of what we mean.

If you’re not satisfied with the banging bass blasting out of your Beats headphones, you might soon be able to take them to the Genius Bar for a tune up.

Apple notified its service providers this morning that they will soon be responsible for offering post-sales support on all Beats headphones and speakers, according to an email obtained by TechInGreek, indicating Apple retail stores will be adding Beats support in the near future.

Here’s the note sent to official Apple Service Providers:

Working for Apple takes an insane level of dedication, so to help keep its top female talent around long, Apple is joining Facebook to provide free egg freezing for non-medical reasons.

Successful egg freezing allows women extend their fertility by storing eggs at a younger age for use when they’re older. The new process has become a viable family planning option for women who don’t want to put their career on hold, but procedures usually come at a steep price.

When the next generation iPads are unveiled this Thursday, we’re expecting a thinner form factor, recessed volume buttons, refined speaker grills, gold color option and, of course, Touch ID.

But what if Apple went ahead and rethought the devices’ design language so as to match up with the stunning appearance of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus?

That’s the idea behind some beautiful new 3D renderings from one of our favorite concept designers Martin Hajek, who previously imagined what it might look like if the iPad was also struck with a case of Bendgate.

Check them out after the jump.

People may talk about tablet sales flatlining, but if earnings of iPad parts makers are anything to go by, Tim Cook was absolutely right when he called this year’s sales lull a mere “speed bump.”

Casetek Holdings, aka the Pegatron subsidiary responsible for constructing the iPad chassis, has announced impressive revenues of 108.22 million for September: an increase of 21.25 percent on month and 16.48 percent on year.

According to a new report from Digitimes, this growth is the result of shipments for Apple’s eagerly anticipated next-generation iPads, set to be unveiled Thursday.

Ireland will apparently announce plans to phase out its “Double Irish” tax arrangement that has allowed companies like Apple and Google to save billions, according to a Reuters report citing sources familiar with the matter.

Over the past 18 months, the country has been criticized by both the United States and Europe for tax loopholes that let companies slash their overseas tax rate to single digits. Preliminary findings by the European Commission recently slammed a “sweetheart” tax deal on the part of Ireland that allowed Apple to avoid paying taxes by building up a massive offshore cash pile of $137.7 billion in the country.

Update: A Dropbox spokesperson has confirmed that its service has not been hacked and that the exposed logins were mostly expired and harvested from third-party services. More information below.

An anonymous party has allegedly hacked 6,937,081 Dropbox accounts and gained access to email addresses and passwords in plain text. Hundreds of account emails and passwords have been posted online as proof, with whoever is responsible claiming that more will be shared after receiving Bitcoin donations.

Mailbox, the iOS app that makes whittling your inbox down to zero as easy as a few finger swipes, has been working to bring its popular service to OS X since April, but after a long beta testing period it’s announced that Mailbox for Mac is finally available to everyone.

The full details of Apple’s second-generation iPad Air will be revealed in just four short days, but Apple.Club.tw has published a photo of an alleged iPad Air 2 logic board that reveals Cupertino has a souped up A8X chip ready for the new tablet.

If the logic board is genuine, it confirms rumors that Apple will improve the Air’s performance with a special A-chip variant, like the A5X and A6X processors used in previous iPads. The logic board also appears to contain 2GB of RAM, though the chip numbers are a bit hard to read.

You know you hate showing up to the Halloween party with that lame generic pirate costume. We all do, but we all end up doing it.

Then there’s those of us who want to make the coolest, most unique costume ever. But we never do, because, let’s face it, we just don’t have the time.

Your solution, then, just may be these amazing just-add-iPhone costumes from Digital Dudz. You buy the mask or shirt, download a free app, and you’re suddenly the best costume at the party. Check out the video below to see how it all works.

Apple’s iPhone 6 ad campaign featuring Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake has churned out some of the company’s funnest ads in years, but to put a British twist on the commercials, Apple’s getting some help from The IT Crowd.

Chris O’Dowd and Richard Ayoade have teamed up for Apple’s UK iPhone 6 campaign and re-dubbed the first two iPhone 6 commercials – ‘Duo’ and ‘Health’ – that were first broadcast in the U.S. last month. The iPhone action and dialogue are pretty much the same as the U.S. version, except listening to O’Dowd’s Irish accent wax poetic about Health.app sounds so much better.

Check out the other ad below:

iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite are designed to work closely together. Just like iOS 8, third-party developers are even encouraged to write extensions and widgets for their Mac apps. The result is a more seamless experience between an app’s iOS and OS X versions.

Such will be the case with Things by Cultured Code, an Apple Design Award winning task manager that was recently updated for iOS 8. Cultured Code has shared with Cult of Mac its plans for the Mac app when Yosemite drops, including a first look at how third-party apps will utilize Notification Center on Yosemite.

Last week we reported on how new, slimmer 12-inch Retina MacBook Airs have supposedly entered production, set to arrive in iPhone-inspired silver, gold and space gray color options.

With that being the case, some people have been asking whether we’re going to see the MacBook refresh at this Thursday’s Apple event.

I’ve always liked Jonathan Mann, the YouTube artist who became popular for writing and uploading a brand new song each and every day. Mann’s a big Apple fan, too, and over the years has put together numerous songs concerning everything from the iPhone 4’s Antennagate (which Steve Jobs actually danced to,) to duets with Siri, to a recap of the Apple Watch unveiling.

In his latest song (number 2,110!) he uses iOS 8’s new autocomplete function to compose a nonsensical song that — how do I put this delicately? — is still more entertaining and listenable than a large percentage of the music on the radio.

I won’t reproduce the lyrics here, since they’re essentially meaningless, but it’s a fun exercise nonetheless that may just be able to displace Mann’s WWDC song, which is still kicking around my head months later.

Via: The Loop

Apple’s bankrupt sapphire supplier GT Advanced Technologies might have stayed quiet about its reasons for the bankruptcy, but a few details are nonetheless starting to emerge.

Two of the most intriguing tidbits concerning the case regard the cost of sapphire production for GT Advanced Technologies, and the financial penalties Apple imposes on any supplier who leaks information about future products.

People blame Apple for the craziest things: from crafting metal devices that bend if you apply enough pressure, to giving out free albums, to — now — crashing national economies.

Today’s “gate” incident (Finnishgate?) comes from Finland Prime Minister Alexander Stubb, who blames the iPhone maker for bringing down two of his country’s biggest exports: Nokia and paper.

“The iPhone killed Nokia and the iPad killed the paper industry, but we’ll make a comeback,” Alexander Stubb told an interviewer for CNBC.

Apple is bringing the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus to 36 new countries by the end of this month. The Cupertino company today confirmed that the devices will be available in Monaco on October 17 — the same day they go on sale in China and India — and then in Israel on October 23.

Interviewed at the recent Vanity Fair Summit, Jony Ive had strong words for companies like Xiaomi producing iPhone copycats.

“I don’t see it as flattery, I see it as theft, and it’s lazy,” he said, when asked about the Chinese smartphone maker whose devices bear something of a striking resemblance to the iPhone.

Responding in an interview with the Economic Times, Xiaomi’s VP for International markets Hugo Barra suggested that it’s unfair to place the blame on Xiaomi — because Apple copies other people too.

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus may have shattered preorder records in the U.S. and elsewhere with a massive 4 million units reservations, but that’s apparently nothing compared to China.

Having had its arrival in China delayed to a lack of regulatory approval, preorders for the iPhone 6 family of devices have reportedly hit 20 million in the country since officially being made available on Friday.