While Google and Samsung’s smart watches seem designed with function over form in mind, it looks like Apple’s iWatch will be more of a luxury fashion item. A key executive from TAG Heuer, a Swiss watch maker, has been hired by Apple to help market its upcoming wearable.
Along with this latest hire, Apple has been slowly building a team of fashion industry experts who will be instrumental in making the iWatch a commercial success.
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
This week we’ve officially entered peak iPhone 6 rumor season. We’ve heard everything from possible launch dates, new names for the iPhablet, and engineering tricks Apple might use to shrink the iPhone 6 to minuscule proportions. There’s also some whispers of Siri getting and upgrade and new iWatch features, but you’ll have to step up to our crystal ball to find see which of these are bangers, and which are bound to be duds.
Load up your manly new leather tote with dreamy camera filters, stick a handmade lens on your Leica, slip into a hideous, advertising-overloaded shirt from Rapha and jump on an outrageously expensive bike that’s unique selling proposition is its paint job. What could be more fun this July 4th weekend?
USA! USA! On this festive 4th-of-July CultCast: Apple prepares to kill-off Aperture and iPhoto; Siri might soon understand us all better; Apple maps stops getting you lost; and did you know Steve Jobs always ate lunch alone like a sad Keanu? We’ll tell you the story. Plus, we reveal our favorite 4th activities, and a weird breakthrough app has us texting Hodor to all our friends! Gods be good.
Grab your sparklers and catch up on this 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 festivities begin.
Our thanks to TextExpander for supporting this episode! TextExpander for Mac saves you time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently-used text, pictures, code blocks, and more, and it’s an application we use every single day. Try it out for free at Smilesoftware.com/cultcast.
The iPhone is far and away the most popular smartphone in the U.S., according to a new report by research firm ComScore. According to ComScore, 169 million cellphone users in the U.S. use smartphones — representing around 70 percent of all mobile users.
Of these, Apple can lay claim to 41.9 percent of users, while runner-up Samsung has captured 27.8 percent of the market. After Samsung, the numbers drop dramatically to 6.5 percent for LG, 6.3 percent for Motorola, and 5.1 percent for HTC.
As excited as a lot of people are about the forthcoming iPhone 6, one of the big sticking points has been the presence of ugly antenna breaks on the back of most of the models we’ve seen so far.
In mockups and alleged leaked production units, these antenna breaks resemble strips of tape, or grout between the line of tiles, and leave Apple’s next generation iPhone not as attractive as it could otherwise be.
Happy July 4! While you’ve probably got plans with friends and family — or a date with a BBQ — appmakers are hoping you’ll have a bit of time for iOS gaming over the holiday, too.
I’ve written before about how 2014 is shaping up to be a golden age of mobile gaming for Apple users, and to make the deal a little bit sweeter, various popular games are currently being discounted in the App Store to give you something to play over the long weekend.
Which games? Check out our list below for the full details.
Independence Day is finally here, which means your extra-long weekend is probably stuffed with BBQs, pool parties, and explosions so big you could see them from Mars.
We're out enjoying the celebration America's birthday, but between all the partying and family fun, we've got a selection of our favorite patriotic books, music and movies queued up for everyone to enjoy over the weekend. Here's the patriotic media will keep our 4th of July celebration rocking hard into the weekend.
Your favorite not in our list? Drop us your top 4th of July hits in comments
Could this be the next generation iPad Air? New pictures showing up on the Japanese online news site ASCII Plus depict what appears to be a mockup of Apple’s forthcoming iPad Air 2, including images of it next to the current iPad Air model.
The images show a tablet that looks around 1mm thinner the current iPad Air, and features the expected addition of Touch ID, which has been the basis of multiple previous rumors.
If you’re an Apple fan (and who reading this isn’t?), there are few conversations that would be better than sitting down with one of the company’s top execs to quiz them over all things Cupertino.
That was the rationale behind a 2013 auction to raise money for the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. The prize? A cup of coffee with Tim Cook at 1 Infinite Loop. The eye-watering (iWatering?) price tag: $610,000.
Even at that price he’s not going to tell you what the iPhone 7 looks like, or if Jony Ive is working on an aluminum hover board, but it would still be the conversation of a lifetime. If you’re feeling a bit cash-strapped, you could try lunch with Mr. Fix-It Eddy Cue. A related auction went for "just" $10,000.
When it comes to the driving forces behind Silicon Valley innovation, caffeine would rank pretty high on the list.
If you’ve always wanted to get an inside peak at Apple, but don’t have the kind of computer science or engineering background you think you need, you may be interested to hear that Apple recently advertised a position as “iCup Technician.” Your job? To keep the iPhone, iPad and other Apple divisions up to their chattering teeth in coffee throughout the day.
“The Apple iCup Services is specially designed to provide a fresh brew coffee to all Apple employees within their department,” is how Apple phrases the position. “The iCup staff is also available on call during business of operation.”
Sunrise, one of the most popular third-party calendar apps for iOS and Android, released a Mac version today.
It looks a lot like the existing mobile app and has many of the same features, including the functionality that sets Sunrise apart: direct integration with services like Evernote and Facebook.
An alleged display panel for the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 has been shown off on video. Not only do you get a good idea of how the device will fit in the hand compared to the 5s, but the display reaffirms previous rumors about the device’s new design.
The Chinese media is affirming that Apple will unveil new iPhone hardware in September, although there’s confusion about exact dates.
It’s the iPhone’s battery life that gets attacked in Samsung’s newest TV ad for the Galaxy S5. With the tagline “don’t be a wall hugger,” the ad depicts iPhone owners in desperate need of a charge at the airport. We’ve all been there, sadly.
Galaxy S5 users walk about without a care in the world showing off the device’s powering saving mode (which basically makes it a dumb phone) and swappable battery. The ad itself is another attempt to make Samsung’s product look better than Apple’s by slinging mud, and it comes across just as petty as it did the last dozen times.
Three years after it was released for the iPhone, Facebook has finally brought its Messenger app to the iPad. Like most messaging apps for the iPad, Facebook Messenger features a sidebar of conversation threads with a chat window to the right.
The competition between iOS and Android is coming to your car. The recently announced Android Auto is Google’s answer to Apple’s CarPlay, and the two platforms offer similar features, with each promising to seamlessly connect smartphones to automobiles’ in-dash monitors.
As you might expect, though, there are some key differences between CarPlay and Android Auto beyond the type of phones with which they work. In today’s video, we take a look at the many features of the competing platforms, as well as the automakers who are partnering with Apple and Google, to help you decide which will be the best fit for you.
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Disney need to be a bit quicker off the mark than this!
With both the U.S. and England now knocked out of the FIFA World Cup, Disney has just now taken the opportunity to release an iOS version of Bola, the hugely popular Facebook soccer game developed by Three Melons and acquired by Playdom back in March 2010.
Now called Disney Bola Soccer (or Disney Bola Football if you live somewhere where football is used to describe a game in which players kick a ball with their feet), the game is a whole lot of fun — utilizing simple swipe and tap gestures — and is well worth checking out.
While sitting in on a session at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last year, Nick Frey, Chris Galzerano, and Veeral Patel got an itch to make something. As part of iOS 7, Apple had introduced “Multipeer Connectivity,” a framework for communicating with nearby devices.
Frey and his friends were at WWDC on student scholarships given by Apple, a tradition that provides the opportunity for hundreds of grade school and college students to attend the expensive conference for free each year.
Nearly a year later, the result of their shared itch is Audibly, a nifty iPhone app that can chain together iPhones to create a wireless sound system.
iPhones represented 48.9 percent of the UK’s smartphone-based web traffic in Q2, according to a new study by Chitika.
While Samsung came in at the expected second place, its percentage (22.8 percent) was much closer to BlackBerry’s (16.8 percent) than it was to Apple’s. The rest of the numbers were made up of HTC, Nokia, Sony, Google and Motorola handsets.
This is likely to be disappointing for the South Korea-based Samsung, which has recently been investing heavily in marketing its smartphones in the UK — including a “rebranding” of London’s Heathrow airport’s Terminal 5 in order to promote its latest Galaxy S model.
Yesterday Cult of Mac revealed that Samsung’s new Galaxy S5 smartphone was outsold by both the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c during the month of May: the first month Galaxy S5 was on sale in the country.
The new Mac Pro, with its sleek cylinder design, has gotten a bad rap. While it’s light-years from the bulky, ugly first-generation Mac Pro and “built for creativity on an epic scale,” this ingenious machine, which Apple sells for between $2,999 and $3,999, looks like a common waste receptacle.
The much-trashed design recently got some love from architect Takara Maru, who carved out a spot on this sleek walnut desk for it. Some might joke that it’s to shield users from the Mac Pro’s looks, but really the aim is to reduce clutter on the desk surface so Maru can focus on home design.
Whether you believe Apple’s claim that it “invented” apps or not, there’s no doubt that the concept of downloadable mobile apps have had an enormous impact on our lives since the App Store first opened its digital doors back in 2008.
Now a new documentary Kickstarter project aims to tell that story, with the aid of the developers who helped the revolution to take place. Called App: The Human Story, the documentary has currently raised $37,769 of its stated $100,000 goal, with 28 days still to go.
I’m a massive fan of Sometimes You Die, the weirdly existential platformer with the banging soundtrack, which topped the iOS game charts earlier this year.
For those who have played and completed the game, there’s some good news today because as of this morning creator Philipp Stollenmayer released the so-called Prologue Update, which adds a whole new chapter to the game, plus new unlockables, and even a German translation.
Shortly after updating Spotify with the ability to search for downloaded music offline, Spotify’s iOS app has just received a notable new update.
Spotify now lets users view play queues on their iPhone. This can be done by tapping the queue icon on the top right corner of the “Now Playing” screen. The update also features a new dialog box, which appears each time you try to add a song to a playlist which already includes it: a great way of avoiding duplicating songs without you realizing it.
Future Apple devices may be able to dynamically modify user interface elements, security levels, and other types of behavior based on location, according to a new patent application published Thursday.
Referred to as “Location-sensitive security levels and setting profiles based on detected location,” Apple’s application describes a setup in which both the hardware and software of your iPhone, iPad, and whatever other mobile devices Apple releases in future can seamlessly work together to automatically adjust various UI and device behavior settings.
Pick any version of the show (except possibly Star Trek: Voyager) and you’ve got a sci-fi future we’d love to live in. Unlike a lot of sci-fi, Star Trek has always tended toward a utopian vision of our future selves in which racism, sexism, ageism and, in Captain’s Picard’s case, jokes against male-pattern baldness are all relics of the distant past. There’s also intergalactic travel, a ton of colorful aliens in existence, and the holodeck to unwind on after a hard day’s work. Oh yes, and we get to wear spandex jumpsuits to our heart’s content.