News - page 232

This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: Haters gonna hate, but digital artist Adam Duff explains why Apple’s new Studio Display is the perfect monitor — for some users.

Also on The CultCast:

• iPhone 14 leak reveals sizing, pricing and more.
• Who needs a smart water bottle?
• Apple TV+ has some hits on its hands.

Listen to this week’s episode of The CultCast in the Podcasts app or your favorite podcast app. (Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review if you like it!) Or watch the video livestream, embedded below.

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If you act fast, you can get one of Apple’s best products ever for less than $100. That’s how low AirPods 2 have dropped — that’s $59 below the usual price for these wildly popular in-ear headphones. Or you can save a nice chunk of change on AirPods Pro.

You might even be able to get the wireless earbuds delivered in time for Mother’s Day.

New video out of China shows workers at a MacBook assembly plant in Shanghai fighting with security guards. The Quanta Computer employees have been forced to live at their workplace for weeks amidst COVID-19 lockdowns ordered by the Chinese government.

The workers apparently hoped to leave the facility to go shopping.

We usually prefer to feature sunny or exotic or just-plain-fun computer setups on Fridays, but today a dark and brooding one caught our eye. A 13-inch M1-powered MacBook Pro and a 34-inch LG curved ultra-wide display are at its center.

But the “cozy productivity corner” also features excellent input devices, formidable audio and a rather nice standing desk.

The latest addition to the award-winning Badlands series is the first with online multiplayer gaming. Badlands Party is physics-based side-scroller like its predecessors – it’s just more social.

The game launched Friday exclusively on Apple Arcade.

Fortnite got kicked out of the App Store as part of a legal battle between Apple and Epic Games, but you can play it on your iPhone today for free. Microsoft added it to Xbox Cloud Gaming so the combat game is playable on iOS and iPadOS devices.

Setting up your iPhone or iPad to play Fortnite from the cloud rather than the App Store is different from what you’re used to. Not hard, just different. I’ll walk you through it.

When you want your iPhone to be visible, but you need your hands to do other things, mount your device almost anywhere with Xvida’s brilliant cases.

Built-in magnets allow it to be securely attached to a whole host of metal surfaces, as well as a bunch of companion Xvida accessories — like wireless chargers, stands, car mounts, and more.

Get yours today for from as little as $19.

Now is an especially great time to get AirTag item trackers. For one thing, a pack of four is on sale at the biggest discount we’ve seen. Plus, Mother’s Day is coming up fast, and AirTag makes a nice last-minute present.

This Sunday, you can give mom the gift of never misplacing stuff.

Apple, Google and Microsoft committed themselves to expand support for a passwordless sign-in standard. The goal is to make it easier for websites and applications to offer consistent, secure and easy passwordless sign-ins.

It’s a move toward greater support for biometric security systems like the ones already included in iPhone, Mac and iPad.

A 3-meter version of the Apple’s Thunderbolt 4 cable can now be ordered. The extra-long cable connects Macs to peripherals at up to 40Gbps and 100W of power.

It’s $159, or two or three times the cost of a high-quality 2-meter Thunderbolt 4 cable from rival companies. Trouble is, the 3-meter cable doesn’t have any direct competition.

If you need a Mac Studio this autumn, it might be smart to order it now. You could find yourself waiting for up to three months for delivery of some some top-tier configurations.

The macOS desktop appears to be caught by the same assembly delays that are affecting MacBook Pro.

Smart speaker maker Sonos will soon deploy its own voice assistant, similar to Apple’s Siri. It will let you play and control music on the company’s products, according to a new report.

The new voice assistant, “Sonos Voice,” will work with Apple Music and a handful of other services.

In the world of watch bands, nylon is sometimes overlooked in favor of steel, leather or silicone, but it’s an exceptionally good material for the job. That’s true of analog timepieces as well as smart watches like Apple Watch.

Done right, nylon is soft, comfortable and durable. It’s breathable and it dries quickly, too. It often doesn’t even look like nylon, either.

And if you can find a nylon band that looks and feels a lot like a knit weave fabric, all the better. But look no further, because the popular brand BluShark sells a selection of them in the Cult of Mac Store at a good price.

Ever wonder how champion pro athletes overcome all odds to win? Apple TV+ unveiled its trailer Tuesday for the second season of Emmy Award-winning sports documentary series Greatness Code.

It gives you a glimpse at what drives top athletes to succeed in impossibly competitive scenarios.

The series premieres May 13 on Apple TV+.

“Conversion” stories are fairly common in computing, with people deciding to switch from one “ecosystem” or another. Given Apple’s recent rash of hugely popular products, a fair number of folks are switching from PC-and-Windows-based setups to Apple-centric ones.

An avid PC gamer — strike that, a former avid PC gamer — owns today’s featured setup. In it, a new M1 Pro MacBook drives a couple of big displays. And an Elgato Stream Deck and killer audio components also enter the mix.

Happy Star Wars Day — even if you didn’t know that was a thing. Apple is celebrating the nerdy holiday by showcasing the widespread use of Macs and iOS devices at Skywalker Sound.

Festivities include the release of a “Behind the Mac” YouTube video and feature article about the audio artists at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, along with a special online “Today at Apple” session about creating Star Wars sound effects.

Apple shipped more computers in the first three months of 2022 than any of its rivals, according to a market research firm. Increasing Mac sales helped Apple take the top spot away from Lenovo in the global market for laptops, desktops and tablets.

Apple could have done even better but supply constraints cut into the number of iPads it was able to ship.

If you think something that’s “compostable” must be easily “destructible,” well, that may be true of your coffee filters. But it’s not true of everything. Take Casetify’s Ultra Compostable iPhone Cases, for example.

These things are tough as hell. They’ll protect your iPhone as well as many other iPhone cases. And the ultimate beauty of them is, once you move on to another iPhone and discard the case, it won’t hurt the environment.

Third-party iPhone apps scored significantly lower than their Android counterparts, according to an analysis of user reviews of 4,400 top mobile apps.

This does not necessarily mean that Android offers better third-party software, though. iPhone users simply expect more from their apps.

“The data shows iOS users are more critical of mobile apps than Android users are,” said David Kravets, senior content marketing manager for unitQ, the company that did the research, in an interview with Cult of Mac.

And after going through nearly 122 million reviews, unitQ analysts say there’s “lots of room for improvement” in mobile software.

Accelerating work on its self-driving electric vehicle project, Apple recruited veteran Ford engineer and executive Desi Ujkashevic to join the team.

The move comes after various stalls and road bumps in Cupertino’s secretive Project Titan in recent years, including Ford luring away Apple car chief Doug Field last year.

If you’re one to suffer charging anxiety while out and about, Anker has your cure. It unveiled its latest portable, MagSafe-compatible charging bank Monday, the Anker 633 Magnetic Battery.

The beastly little brick packs a 10,000mAh battery capacity, Anker’s first product of this kind to do so. Plus it features speedier wireless charging than some previous packs as well as spritely USB-C charging when you just want to pull out a cable and get it over with.

Leviton offered five new smart-home products in its Decora line Monday. Three of them help bring HomeKit-enabled smart lighting to older homes, which can be notoriously tricky: the Decora Smart No-Neutral Switch, Dimmer and required Wi-Fi Bridge.

The other two, for more modern abodes, are refreshes of the Decora Smart Motion Sensing Dimmer and Tamper-Resistant Outlet.

The iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 2, a pair of tablets from nearly a decade ago, have been added to Apple’s list of vintage products. This somewhat limits the repair options for them.

It’s a step toward them being declared obsolete by Apple. But that won’t happen until at least ten years after the launch of these products.

Everyone waiting for a new MacBook Pro to be delivered can take heart from a report that Quanta Computer has restarted assembling Apple notebooks. This comes after its assembly plant in Shanghai had been temporarily closed as part of the Chinese government’s attempts to slow the spread of COVID-19.

In the meantime, though, wait times for top-tier MacBooks now stretch into July.

The metaphysical-horror-thriller Shining Girls only premiered on Apple TV+ a few days ago, but the Elisabeth Moss series is already in the top 10 most streamed shows. And it’s drawing positive reviews, too.

Plus, the Apple TV+ hit Severance remains on the weekly list of popular shows, despite wrapping up its first season more than three weeks ago.