My dog has a new archenemy, and its name is Botvac.
Neato’s tiny automated robotic vacuum stirs my dog into a fit of worried anger every afternoon I send it out for a round of sweeping and vacuuming. It’s so magical my dog doesn’t trust it.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. Mostly because I’m too lazy to be bothered with tasks like vacuuming.
This week on The CultCast: Why the new iPad Pro screen is “practically perfect”; stories from The Cult of Mac; our most anticipated WWDC 2016 announcements; a look at Apple’s newly updated MacBooks; Apple’s secret plan to create hit TV shows; and, have you ever wondered how rich you’d be if you invested in Apple’s IPO instead of buying its computers? We break down the numbers.
Our thanks to Freshbooks for supporting this episode. FreshBooks is the easy-to-use invoicing software designed to help small-business owners get organized, save time invoicing and get paid faster. Get started now with a 30-day free trial.
Most fitness apps seem obsessed with calories. Go for a run, and your Apple Watch tells you how many calories you burned. Scan a barcode and MyFitnessPal tells you how many calories are in the food you are about to eat.
So what exactly are calories, and does counting them really help you achieve your fitness goals?
The Mars Bluetooth speaker has a fairly reliable gimmick: the top part — which looks like a little UFO from an old sci-fi flick — floats above the bottom cylinder. It’s a cool visual trick managed by some fairly strong magnets, but it’s just that: a fun gimmick.
What’s surprising, though, is just how great this speaker sounds. It fills my house with deep bass thanks to the subwoofer abilities of that lower section of the speaker, and the UFO attachment flies proud while reproducing the rest of the sonic spectrum with highs and mids that don’t get lost in the bass response, but are also not too brittle.
Turn this floating speaker up and you’ve got a serious powerhouse Bluetooth speaker that just cries out to be admired by everyone at the party.
The Apple Watch doesn’t need to prove itself to you. And contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t need a “killer app” to make it indispensable.
In fact, the Apple Watch is an awesome device all on its own, with a ton of tricks up its sleeve, like controlling your big screen TV and finding your iPhone, even in the dark.
Here are 13 killer things you can do with an Apple Watch that prove it’s worthy of a place on your wrist.
From saying that he doesn’t want to be stuck in the Apple ecosystem to advising Apple to build an Android phone, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has said a lot of things that probably don’t go down too well at his former company.
His latest comments, however, put him more directly in the sights of Tim Cook — as Woz uses a new interview to take a shot at Apple’s tax payments. His thoughts? The company should pay more than it does. Half of everything it earns, in fact!
Just hours after the great musician’s passing, Prince reigns supreme on the top albums, songs and music videos on iTunes.
You may not be able to stream his incredible volume of hits on Apple Music or Spotify, but it seems as if his fans don’t care, with iTunes purchases rocking Prince’s tunes to the top of the charts.
As news of Prince’s unexpected death spread today, shocked fans hoping to stream his tunes on Apple Music came up empty.
In the streaming era, the incredibly prolific musician — best known for his string of hits and Grammy Awards in the 1980s — is practically a ghost.
If I ran the world, Krosmaster Arena, a fabulously fun and deep strategy game that started out as a board game with delightfully sculpted miniature figures, would be topping the charts right alongside stuff like Clash Royale or Angry Birds.
Of course, I don’t, but I’m hoping each one of you reading this tries it out on your iPad so you can experience the joy of playing it digitally.
Greg Packer is a shirtless footnote in the history of the iPhone. The retired highway maintenance worker from Long Island made a name for himself as the first person to line up for the sale of the first iPhone in 2007.
During his nearly weeklong stint sitting outside the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City, scores of reporters came by to interview him as he sat in a lawn chair, at times not bothering to put on a shirt during his many closeups.
As a tech fan, there are plenty of times — particularly when you hear about billionaire investors and record-breaking stock prices — when you wonder whether you would have had the foresight to predict things turning out the way they have.
Would you have bet big on Apple around the time of its 1980 IPO? Was it obvious that Steve Jobs was going to turn around the company in 1997? Or would you have been the equivalent of folks calling the Titanic an unsinkable ship, and pouring your life savings into pre-crash dot-com companies?
An amazing new data-viz shows how the returns on a $1,000 investment made in Apple, Microsoft and IBM would have fared over the next 20 years following January 1, 1996. Check it out below:
We’d almost forgotten about the eMac, but some designers have refreshed it for 2016.
The clever thinkers over at Curved have come up with a concept that brings the teardrop shape back for a new generation. Their version combines that classic design with more-recent Apple hallmarks. And while we’re not completely sold on some parts of it, it’s still a pretty handsome machine.
Check it out below.
Since there is still much to learn about the upcoming iOS 10 debut presumably at WWDC this year, Federico Vittici of MacStories and concept designer Sam Beckett took it upon themselves to bring their dreams to life. They worked together to design an incredible concept video that fulfills Vittici’s wishes for the next version of iOS. The video is nothing short of stunning and their implementation of his (completely reasonable) feature requests will have you absolutely drooling.
I’m willing to bet that you’ve misplaced your iPhone around the house before. I know I have; almost once a week I’m wondering where I set down that magical device. Is it in the bedroom? The kitchen? The (gasp) bathroom?
If you’ve got an Apple Watch, though, you can use its ping feature to find your iPhone with an audible sound, and even a flashing LED if you need it.
Here’s how.
Putting your mouth around a Pax 2 vaporizer is like smoking the future.
At a time when every other vape company is making smoke boxes that look giant battery packs with an exhaust pipe, Ploom — the Silicon Valley-based startup behind the Pax loose-leaf vaporizers — is killing the market with a dank dose of subtlety.
The more I grow to love photography with an iPhone, the more I miss certain things about conventional cameras. Get a grip, you say? A grip is one of the things I am talking about.
miggo, innovative makers of camera bags, straps and mounts, brings to Kickstarter the Pictar, an ergonomic camera grip for the iPhone that also shifts cumbersome menu functions to five programmable wheels and buttons right at the tip of your shooting finger.
If you’re setting up your new iPhone for the first time, one of your must-do steps will be setting up Touch ID. Apple’s biometric security system lets you map your own fingerprint to the Home button so nobody can unlock your device but you (or the bad person who has gained control of your thumb somehow, but that’s a bit grim).
When I set up my Touch ID the first time, I mapped the thumbs of both hands separately, and that was a good idea because I frankly have no idea which side my phone is going to be on when I want to get into it. And that’s served me well, but we’ve found an even more efficient way to do that same thing thanks to some sharp internet investigators.
We’d heard rumblings and observed omens and portents about the imminent release of new 12-inch MacBooks, and now they are here. And that’s pretty cool, I guess.
Longer battery life is always a plus, as are faster Skylake processors and speedier memory. The new Rose Gold option is pretty, too.
But despite the fact that I’m still rocking a 2011 MacBook Pro, I’m not reaching for my wallet to grab one of the new Retina MacBook models. I can’t even explain why that is — I simply don’t care.
While the iPhone 7 is rumored to have wireless charging, those of us who upgraded to the 6s are stuck without until the 7 launches this fall.
Xvida is here to save the day with its new modular mounting system with QI charging, launched today on Kickstarter.
And of course, Cult of Mac is here to show you everything you need to know with a handy video. Check it out below.
Most people don’t use a stylus with their iPhones, and late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wouldn’t want them to. But the StylusFlex might change a few minds because it’s not simply a substitute for the five styli you have at the end of your arm.
You have plenty of reasons to just stick with your fingers when you’re using your iPhone or iPad, and this device seems to realize that. That’s why it does a few extra things that might help it earn its keep.
Have you ever tried to plan a trip with your posse while gathered around your iPhone? It’s kind of a mess. The tiny screen doesn’t really lend itself to larger viewings. Even an iPad is much smaller than one of those big-old paper maps we used to use to group plan.
If you want to use a big screen to find your way to a road trip this summer, perhaps TV Maps by Arno Appenzeller will do the trick, letting you plan a trip right on your giant screen TV.
This third-party Apple TV app will let you search a destination, get directions, and then send everything to the companion app on your iPhone, which will then launch Apple’s Map app to get you where you need to be.
Here’s how.
There are plenty of reasons you might want to wipe your iPhone of its data. Whether you’re selling it through our Apple gear buyback program, recycling it or handing it down, wiping your iPhone is a simple and effective way to keep your information safe.
Ask Amazon’s Echo smart speaker “How much does the Earth weigh?” and she’ll rattle off the answer in pounds. It takes about a full minute and is genuinely amusing. It’s just one of many surprises up Echo’s sleeve (see this crazy list of Echo Easter Eggs on Reddit). It proves she is by far the best computer you can talk to. Sorry Siri.
And now there are two new members of Amazon’s smart speaker family, both with significant advantages. I love them both, with a couple of caveats.
This week on The CultCast: We recall how Steve Jobs and the industrial design team brought Apple back from the brink. Plus: The reason Jony Ive gave up his car for a chauffeur; one year with the Apple Watch; and we reveal the strange cultural phenomena we’ve been secretly loving in an all-new What We’re Into.
Our thanks for Freshbooks for supporting this episode. FreshBooks is the easy-to-use invoicing software designed to help small business owners get organized, save time invoicing and get paid faster. Get started now with a 30-day free trial.
If role-playing games take too long, and you don’t think Threes is violent enough, Stencilsmith might be your jam.
It’s an endless puzzle title that has you sliding tiles around to harvest ore, craft weapons, and fight monsters, and it manages to do all of those things with beautifully simple and elegant style. And while everything looks pretty basic and charming, you’ll find after a while that you have way more to keep track of than you thought, and that’s when its ridiculous difficulty will start to gnaw at you like one of those wolves that always shows up on the board when you aren’t quite ready.
But it’s all great fun, and you should definitely check it out.
