Apple’s recently acquired music streaming service, Beats Music, just received its biggest update since getting scooped up by Apple at the end of May, adding new features that let you fine tune your musical tastes on the service and view songs that were just served up in The Sentence.
If you’re a fan of stylish, true-to-the-comics movie adaptations, you’ve probably already seen Sin City. The trailer (below) released during last week’s Comic Con shows us the sequel, based on the second book in the Sin City series by Frank Miller, A Dame To Kill For.
Rodriguez (Spy Kids, Sin City) will produce and Miller (Dark Knight Returns, 300) will direct a script co-written by the two men and William Monahan (The Departed).
Actors returning include Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Powers Boothe, Mickey Rourke, and Bruce Willis. New folks to the series include Josh Brolin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Christopher Lloyd, Ray Liotta, Stacy Keach, Christopher Meloni, and yes, even Lady Gaga, who you can see as a waitress handing over some cash to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character in the trailer below.
While most of the other rumors about the upcoming iPhone 6 have tended to sync up with each other, one thing we’ve still yet to get a clear answer on is whether or not Apple’s next generation smartphone will feature a sapphire display.
The latest report, coming from LEDinside, claims that the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 won’t be incorporating sapphire displays, due to limited volumes of sapphire being produced this year — mostly as a result of sapphire ingot manufacturers yield rate being lower than expected, alongside other issues involved in sapphire glass processing.
Apple has been struggling to produce enough sapphire displays in time for the iPhone 6, but after going straight to the source of the freakishly indestructible glass – GT Advanced Technologies – MIT has learned of the company’s plans to use a giant machine that may solve all of Apple’s sapphire production problems, one slice of sapphire at a time.
The problem with sapphire glass is that while amazingly durable, it’s also ridiculously hard to produce in thin smartphone sized sheets. Apple’s current production methods involve taking a large chunk of sapphire and sawing it down to just a few hundred micrometers thick. It’s time consuming and wasteful, but GT’s new Hyperion 4 Ion Implanter technology could allow it to make paper thin sheets of pure crystal sapphire glass just by bombarding it with hydrogen ions.
Production issues continue to plague the 5.5-inch iPhablet, and while the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 is on target to launch in September, Apple may have just decided to pair the launch of its first wearable alongside its first foray into phablets, says one of Weibo’s top Apple leakers.
Tell me if you’ve heard this rumor before: the iPhone is getting NFC this year.
Well NFC fever is back again for 2014’s iPhone rumor season, only instead oozing from the mouths of misinformed analysts, a new rumor based on alleged iPhone 6 logic board claims that both the 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch iPhone 6s will be the first Apple devices to finally support near field communications.
Apple may be going harder than ever, while Microsoft is having to lay off 18,000 of its employees, but the Redmond, WA company is still intent on bragging about its “superiority” over Apple.
Taking a page out of the Samsung book of advertising-by-dissing-your-enemies, Microsoft has unleashed a new ad comparing its new Cortana virtual assistant with Apple’s virtual assistant Siri. And, wouldn’t you know it, in Microsoft’s version of events, Cortana blows Siri out the water.
Quite the surprise, huh?
Last week there were rumors that Swatch might be partnering with Apple to work on its iWatch project. Swatch quickly denied the report, saying that the only business relationship Swatch has ever had with a mobile phone maker is to supply integrated circuits and other electronic components.
Now a new piece of the puzzle has emerged, with Swatch CEO Nick Hayek providing Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag with another reason why his company isn’t going to be helping Apple: because it’s making a smartwatch of its own.
The European Commission today gave its approval to Apple’s $3 billion takeover of Beats Electronics and Beats Music. The regulator concluded that the two companies are not close competitors, and that the headphones they sell are “markedly different in function and design.”
Apple is in talks to buy Swell, a startup described as “Pandora for talk radio,” according to several sources.
Swell’s service compiles different podcasts and sorts them into personalized streams, thereby acting as a sort-of podcast recommendation system. The deal would reportedly set Apple back a cool $30 million.
One of the few exceptions was Doug Menuez, an award-winning documentary photographer. For almost a decade between 1985 and 1994, Menuez shot an unprecedented number of photos of Jobs during his wilderness years outside Apple. And, as can be seen in the gallery above, he also took some astonishing inside shots of Apple during this same time frame.
In the process, Menuez became one of the foremost documentarians of an incredible period in Silicon Valley history. To celebrate the launch of his new book, Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985-2000, Menuez spoke with Cult of Mac about his background with one of the greatest tech entrepreneurs to ever live.
We’re increasingly obsessed with the idea of personal health tracking devices like the long-awaited iWatch, but current Apple devices can also be used to revolutionize medicine within hospitals.
A new report in the U.K. states that doctors and nurses at Middlesbrough’s James Cook University Hospital are using iPads and iPod touches to streamline the hospital’s current reliance on paper notes.
It’s time for the various residents of Bon Temps to face the music. Karma’s a bitch, and in the latest episode of the final season of this hit vampire romance TV show from HBO, we’re gonna watch most of the main characters deal with the consequences of their past behavior and poor choices. Andy, Holly, Bill, Sam, Sookie: Each of these True Blood staples have to stand up and own their life choices.
This is a pretty expository episode, so we spend a lot of time watching characters explain their situations in sometimes excruciating detail. Let’s hope that our karma for watching the show will be some more action-packed and hilarious scenes in the upcoming shows left in the season, rather than a payback for following the show for so long. We still have faith, though.
Spoilers abound below, so be warned. Find out what happened on last night’s episode after the jump.
Particularly with iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite set to make all your Apple devices work together better than ever, it’s important to have a neat way of keeping your iPhone, iPad and Mac in close proximity.
Looking to solve the problem of messy desktops, a new Kickstarter project aims to create the first all-in-one stand for Apple devices — featuring integrated dock and charging system for your mobile and tablet devices.
We may be on the verge of receiving a refreshed 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro line, according to a leaked pricing chart apparently from Apple’s Chongqing, China store.
The chart shows three different configurations of the MacBook. The first of these features an Intel Core i7 2.2 GHz processor and 16GB of RAM standard (the current 15-inch base model Retina MacBook Pro has 2.0 GHz Intel Core i7 and 8GB of RAM.) The second features a 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM (compared to the current 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 processor.)
A third, higher-end Retina MacBook is also included — boasting Intel’s new 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, 1TB of flash storage, and Intel’s Iris Pro graphics, alongside a NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M.
This week: Yosemite beta is not for the faint of heart; William Shatner is the coolest grandpa ever; to take on Apple, Microsoft doubles down on design; Apple inches closer to a digital wallet; why the Apple on your iPhone 6 could glow; iBeacons are a marketer’s best friend; and then… if you could ride any animal into battle, what would it be? We’ll answer that question and more on an all-new Get To Know Your Cultist.
Quietly 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.
Our thanks to Lynda.com for sponsoring this episode! Learn virtually any application at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at Lynda.com.
Click on for the show notes.
Is Apple vs. Amazon the next “thermonuclear” tech war?
Perhaps not quite yet, but with Amazon moving into smartphones, and Apple choosing to stock the books Amazon refuses to, competition is certainly heating up. That may go some way toward explaining Apple’s acquisition of BookLamp, a startup described as the “Pandora for books,” which offers personalized book recommendations.
You know our culture's obsession with fame has reached moronic levels when Kim Kardashian has the top game on the App Store. Christopher Beha's new novel, Arts and Entertainments lands this month with a biting and incisive take-down on our love for the fame game thanks to the hilarious story of Handsome Eddie Hartley who disastrously dives into the spotlight by releasing a sex tape of his ex-girlfriend who has since become a popular TV-star.
iTunes - $9.99
Party on your bike with an iPhone speaker and a bottle cage for a hip flask, or protect your camera from water and dirt with dust-repellent filters and a great roll-top backpack. Or just forget everything and take your frustrations to the beach, with the SBOD tote bag.
Yo went from being what was considered a dumb joke to an amazing success basically overnight. The app’s idea dead simple: let the user send only the word “Yo” to a friend in a push notification. Now there’s an API for the app and it’s being used to warn citizens about missile strikes in the Middle East.
As you can imagine, there are plenty of app makers trying to jump on the Yo bandwagon after all the attention it has been getting. One app that sticks out from the rest is AHOY, a new iPhone app that takes the Yo concept one step further by adding location to the mix.
Watch today’s Cult of Mac news roundup for details on a lawsuit filed by Apple employees. Plus, you’ll get info on the latest Apple software updates, a look at the Starbucks app’s new capabilities and Jimmy Kimmel’s hilarious iWatch prank.
Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.
Verizon has announced that it will begin throttling customers still on an unlimited data plan beginning this fall. Until now, Verizon has only throttled 3G data usage, but the new policy will also apply to LTE usage in congested network areas.
Today the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that lets customers legally unlock their cell phones and switch carriers. The same bill was passed in the Senate last week, and now President Obama is expected to sign it into law.
The process of unlocking a phone to take it to another carrier in the U.S. has been a convoluted and questionably illegal one. The “Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act” is designed to make the process easier for those looking to take phones to a different service provider. But there’s an important caveat.
Beats just launched a legal assault against Chinese copy cats earlier this month, but it looks like the company just got hit with a legal bomb for copying another headphone maker itself.
Bose Corporation has filed a lawsuit against Beats for allegedly infringing on the company’s noise-canceling patents, according to CNBC’s Josh Lipton.
You know how it is — you want to share that lovely photo of your new puppy, but you really don’t want the person you hand your iPhone to swiping to those over-the-top party photos from your last lost weekend.
Overswipe, a new app from developer Haley & Hughes, aims to solve that very problem in a super intuitive way. All you do is open the app, tap on the photos you want to share, and then hand over the iPhone. Your intended viewer will only see the photos you chose, and won’t be able to swipe into anything super embarrassing.