Greenpeace wants Apple to make its products more repairable. Photo: Greenpeace
Greenpeace has launched a new campaign, seeking signatures to push Apple and other device makers to make more repairable, longer-lasting products to cut down on electronic waste.
In partnership with our friends over at iFixit, the campaign casts a critical eye over 40 different devices made between 2015 and 2017, and then assesses them according to how repairable each one is.
A collection of iPhones, presented as a 30th birthday present to MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan, fills a critical hole in his private Apple museum. Photo: MacPaw
Buying a birthday present for your boss can seem impossible. But the friends and co-workers of MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan — a diehard Apple fan — saw an opening after he bought a treasure trove of vintage Macs to create a museum at his company’s headquarters.
MacPaw’s mini Apple museum, filled with vintage gear auctioned off by fabled Apple repair shop Tekserve, contained no iPhones. Leaving out the smartphone that changed the world seemed like a glaring hole in a collection that otherwise did a good job of showing Apple’s role in revolutionizing personal computing.
Apple Pencil can't beat a mouse at many things. Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
Apple has begun selling refurbished models of the Apple Pencil at a discount. iPad Pro owners in the United States can save a pretty penny when picking up the best stylus available for their tablet — but it’s still not the most affordable.
Tony Fadell spills the beans on the original iPhone's creation. Photo: Nest
As Apple scrambled to create the first iPhone, the company’s engineers tore apart literally dozens of rival products to work out what made them tick, according to a new interview with former Apple exec Tony Fadell.
He may be best known today as the founder of Nest, but Fadell was one of the fathers of the iPhone — which, if you haven’t heard, celebrates its 10th birthday this week. Fadell reveals more about Apple’s reverse engineering efforts in an interview with Wired U.K..
Cult of Mac is collaborating with Wired U.K. all this week for an in-depth look at the iPhone’s first decade — and the device’s lasting impact.
Fashion photographer Georges Antoni uses the iPhone 7 Plus on Portrait mode to photograph Margaret Zhang for the June cover story of Elle Australia. Photo: Bauer Media Australia/YouTube
When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, no one imagined that in 10 short years it would become the world’s most popular camera and herald a new era of visual communication.
Yet we are witnessing the death of point-and-shoots, the explosion of massive social networks devoted to pics and videos, and the rise of perhaps the most popular photo style of all time — the selfie.
Just consider that we are expected to take 1 trillion pictures this year alone. That’s a million million photos.
Here’s a brief overview of some of the ways the iPhone was transformed photography forever.
iPhone 8's OLED display is reportedly causing Apple headaches. Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
iPhone 8 production has reportedly hit another roadblock, with the problem this time being the OLED panels Apple is using for its next-gen handsets.
The use of OLED panels, instead of the LCD screens used on current iPhones, has been heavily rumored as one of the biggest selling points of the new iPhone for quite some time. A report earlier this year claimed that Apple will snap up 14 percent of all OLED panels produced in 2017 for the iPhone 8.
The E.U. regulators are hitting out at Google. Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
Google has been fined 2.4 billion euros ($2.7 billion) by European Union regulators for reportedly skewing its search results in a way that hurts smaller shopping search services.
In addition to the massive fine, Google has been told that if it doesn’t stop its “illegal” suppression of rival price comparison services within 90 days, the European Commission will fine it up to 5 percent of its daily revenue.
Apple may have just made a key acquisition that could help the company create a truly revolutionary augmented reality headset. According to a new report, German eye-tracking company SensoMotoric Instruments has been purchased by an Apple shell company, giving the iPhone-maker access the company’s trove of patents related to eye-tracking glasses and other systems.
Apple's first self-driving Lexus. Photo: Bloomberg
Apple’s foray into autonomous cars could eventually put rental car companies out of business, but for now, Apple Car rumors are doing wonders for Hertz which just saw its stock price skyrocket thanks to some new rumors.
A 2G iPhone never opened and under glass. How much would you pay? Photo: Discount Depot/eBay
When the iPhone launched in 2007, the tech world went into conniptions about the device’s price tag. At a time when carriers offered most cellphones for free, the iPhone’s $500 starting price seemed downright crazy.
Well, guess how much an original iPhone costs now?
iPhone 8 rumors haven't had an impact yet, either. Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
It might be the most successful smartphone on the planet, but the iPhone didn’t become what it is today without some failures along the way.
Even before the device made its much-anticipated debut in 2007, Apple overcame big missteps and mistakes. It tried putting iTunes on other phones. It believed we didn’t need native apps. It entered into embarrassing partnerships with big bands.
As Cult of Mac looks back over the iPhone’s history to celebrate the device’s 10th anniversary, in collaboration with Wired UK, 10 big failures stick out like a sore thumb.
They must have been holding their crystal balls wrong. Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
Predicting the future is tough, even for the experts. That’s the only lesson we can learn from looking back at these horribly misguided iPhone predictions that greeted the device at its launch 10 years ago.
Before most people had even wrapped their fingers around Apple’s first-gen smartphone, tech pundits, analysts and competing CEOs were already writing off the iPhone as a disaster similar to Apple’s previous excursions into video game consoles and the like.
Here are just a few of the laughable reactions that greeted the iPhone in 2007.
A new version of iOS 11 beta 2 is out. Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
Revised beta builds of iOS 11 beta 2 and tvOS 11 beta 2 have been seeded to developers by Apple this morning, just five days after the previous versions of the betas were made available.
Along with the new updated betas for iOS 11 and tvOS 11, Apple also dropped a new Apple Watch beta in the form of watchOS 3.2.3 beta 4.
It's nearly showtime at Steve Jobs Theater. Photo: Duncan Sinfield
The lobby of the Steve Jobs Theater at the new Apple Park campus looks nearly ready to host Apple events. Crews are working around the clock to finish the new Apple headquarters and the entire site is finally starting to come together now that landscaping is almost done.
A new drone video reveals there’s still some work to go on the theater and the main spaceship building, but road striping and landscaping are well underway. The video includes an incredible shot of the theater lit up at night with Apple Park in the background.
The world had never seen anything like the iPhone when Apple launched the device on June 29, 2007. But the touchscreen device that blew everyone’s minds immediately didn’t come about so easily.
The iPhone was the result of years of arduous work by Apple’s industrial designers. They labored over a long string of prototypes and CAD designs in their quest to produce the ultimate smartphone.
Apple’s first iPhone SE units manufactured in India are now on sale in the country.
“Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in India,” reads the tagline on the back. Despite being made locally, the devices cost exactly the same as those shipped from China.
Not convinced about how augmented reality has the opportunity to improve our apps? Then check out a couple of neat demos of Apple’s ARKit, the AR toolkit Apple showed off at WWDC to allow “fast and stable motion tracking” for augmented reality apps.
Between them, they depict how you’ll soon be able to use your iPhone as a tape measure by pointing your device at an object or scene, tapping two points on it, and then accurately measuring the distance between them.
Scott Forstall and others chip in to tell their iPhone war stories. Photo: WSJ
If you hadn’t heard by now, this week marks the tenth anniversary of a little device called the iPhone going on sale. To celebrate, the Wall Street Journal has created a new mini-documentary, entitled Behind the Glass, detailing the making of Apple’s breakthrough smartphone.
Courtesy of interviews with former Apple execs Tony Fadell, Scott Forstall and Greg Christie, here are the top factoids we learned from it.
The iPhone sure has changed over the years. Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
The iPhone packed a lot into its first astonishing decade. Not only has the device itself evolved significantly since its promising-but-by-no-means-perfect beginnings, but it’s transformed Apple’s business — and many of our very lives — in the process.
All this week, Cult of Mac’s “iPhone Turns 10” series will look at the innovative device’s massive impact on worldwide culture. The iPhone, which launched on June 29, 2007, truly changed the world.
What iPhone milestones have passed since Steve Jobs introduced this stunning hybrid device, which combined a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device? Check out our handy guide to 10 years of iPhone history.
A great deal on a great smart speaker. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Now is the perfect time to enter into the wonderful world of smart speakers. Amazon has slashed $50 off its impressive Echo for one day only, making it more affordable than it has ever been since it launched in November 2014.
'Appy weekend everyone! Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
SEGA unleashed some of its classic games for free on iOS this week, bringing a plethora of games from the Genesis era to the iPhone and iPad as part of its SEGA Forever series.
That’s just one of the picks we’ve highlighted for this week’s “Awesome Apps” roundup. We’ve also got a great Slack alternative, a nifty WhatsApp upgrade, and a puzzle game that’s sure to appeal to anyone who loves Tetris. Check out our choices below.
Anna Katrina Shedletsky is a former Apple product design engineer who is using her experience to build AI that helps companies streamline manufacturing. Photo: Instrumental
On this week’s Apple Chat (the podcast formerly known as Kahney’s Korner): I talk with former Apple product design engineer Anna-Katrina Shedletsky about her take on modern manufacturing and how AI will revolutionize factories. She introduces us to her new company, Instrumental, which is using machine learning to help manufacturers identify and fix problems on their assembly lines.
Using her hard-earned experience at Apple overseeing the production of the first Apple Watch and several generations of the iPod, Shedletsky says machine learning is coming fast to manufacturing. Amazingly, almost all consumer electronics products are still assembled by hand — including hundreds of millions of iPhones.
But that’s changing. Manufacturing is undergoing a huge sea change with the advance of robotics and AI.