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Every mobile platform now ships with its very own virtual assistant, and while they all offer a similar set of basic features, Google Now and Siri are way ahead of their rivals. Google Now knows what you want and when you want it, but Siri has sass and personality, and is about to get a whole lot better with the help of Proactive.

If you were to pit the two against each other in a virtual ring, which one would come out wearing the belt? Join us as we find out in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac!

Cult of Mac’s Photo Famous series introduces you to the groundbreaking photographers featured in Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 6” ad campaign.

 Michael Mainenti is in the developmental stages of a photography career, a point when he should be looking at the works of the established masters and saying, “Some day.”

Mainenti is faithful to this time-honored tradition except that some day is already happening. The 25-year-old college student is among the photographers whose work was selected by Apple for a global advertising campaign to show off the improved camera in the iPhone 6.

“It is a humbling feeling to see my work in the same advertising campaign with photographers I followed even before the launch of the ‘Shot on iPhone 6’ ads,” Mainenti told Cult of Mac. “It’s a boost of confidence and motivation to get better.”

This week: some pundits are fed up with Apple music, but you know what? We’re not. Plus: Apple’s Back To School promotion is finally unveiled; Apple Watch topples expectations, gets an insane satisfaction rating; iOS devices cross a major threshold; plus we answer your questions on an all-new #CultCastQnA.

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.

Show notes ahead. Bon appétit.

What vaulted Apple from its humble Silicon Valley origins to the absolute top of the business world? From its first desktop computer in 1976 to today’s category-crushing Apple Watch, the company is intensely focused on creating technology that will delight the masses.

That vision is best exemplified by Apple’s five most important products, which I’ve rounded up in this week’s edition of Kahney’s Korner. Some made the list for reasons that might surprise you.

We hope that the designer of this cute Apple Watch stand doesn’t get an adorable little cease-and-desist letter in the mail.

The WatchMe stand bears an uncanny resemblance to the stars of some despicable memes scattered across the Internet like salt, but it isn’t a complete rip-off. They don’t have arms, after all. And luckily, the Apple Watch, which the stand wears like a monocle, isn’t round.

So it’s a toss-up, really.

The iPhone 6s is likely to be revealed within the next two months, which means the leaks are starting to flow out of the supply chain like toxic fumes pouring out of Foxconn factories. We got our first look at a purported iPhone 6s rear shell last week, and now a new set of pictures of an alleged iPhone 6s front panel have leaked online.

If you’ve been using iCloud to back up your iOS devices for a while like I have, chances are you’ve got a few older backup files crufting up your iCloud storage space.

If you want to maximize the space on your iCloud account, you might want to delete some of these older iCloud backups to make room for more.

Here’s how to do that.

“What you don’t know won’t hurt you” is a common phrase that unfortunately does not apply to the apps on your phone. It turns out that thousands of apps on Android and iOS secretly have ads in them that you can’t see, and they very well might be what’s causing a number of problems that plague smartphones today.

John Spinello stuck a safety pin in a light socket. He was 3 and never forgot how the shock “flipped me over backwards.”

As an adult, he turned that moment of mischievous curiosity into a board game that shaped the lives of millions of kids around the world.

Any “dopey doctor” who has played Operation knows the loud buzzing sound when you’ve botched your attempt at removing the patient’s funny bone. It first went off 50 years ago this year. Kids today play the game, adults still hear the buzzer from their childhood and some actually credit it with their pursuit of a career in medicine.

Remember when Google announced, probably from within a heavily fortified and Skynet-proof bunker, that its artificial neural networks were “dreaming”? And then we saw the above picture of a squirrel ravaged by a computer’s best and most terrifying guesses at what things look like, and we all peed a little?

Well, the company has released that code to the public, and now some Scarecrow-esque villain has provided us with Dreamscope, a way to turn your beloved pictures into extensions of a neurotic computer’s twisted psyche.

When it comes to smartwatch mind share, Apple Watch is killing the competition.

That’s just one of several key takeaways from an interesting new study that digs into the public’s perception of smartwatches in general and Apple’s wearable in particular.

We aren’t going to find out what the next iPhone looks like until Apple shows us (probably in September), but that isn’t stopping designers from dreaming up some concepts.

Here’s a pretty bold one that imagines the next Apple smartphone as a mix between a Samsung Galaxy Edge and a Club Cracker. You can check it out in the video below.

We didn’t get Apple Watch numbers, but Tim Cook and Luca Maestri delivered plenty of good news about Apple’s current financials and future prospects during Tuesday’s earnings call. Amid all the canned statements and bewildering biz speak, they dropped some tantalizing tidbits.

Cook and Maestri teased us with plenty of bullishness — and a little debunking — about impressive Apple Watch sales and consumer responses to the new device. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: Apple hit record numbers again this quarter, with massive sales of both iPhone 6 and Macs across the globe.

Here are the highlights from today’s third-quarter 2015 Apple earnings call.

iOS 9 beta 4 is out for developers two weeks after beta 3’s release as expected. It’s time for the usual roundup of new goodies in the latest beta and beta 4 doesn’t shy away from the tradition. It’s not nearly as big of a release as last time with Apple Music and Apple News both making their debut, but beta 4 still brings some nice improvements and tweaked features. Let’s get right into it.

You can’t stop staring at the new 12-inch MacBook, especially the gold one. It’s lighter and smaller and while it has all the computing power of your suddenly-bulkier model, you’re not sure about life with a single USB-C port.

A Miami startup, led by an electrical engineer, has designed adapters that will allow you to plug in all your peripherals and then gradually cut back as you move to a more wireless future.

The Cusby Building Blocks plug into a USB-C port with each offering a more traditional plug-in, like the current standard USB-A port, another with an HDMI video-audio port or another with an extra USB-C port.

The Apple Watch has been out for a few months now, and it’s given us plenty of time to decide what we do and don’t want from the wearable. It’s a versatile device, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that we expect it to do everything for us. In fact, a lot of the apps that we use all the time on our iPhones and iPads would be ill-suited, if not impossible for that plucky little screen.

Here are some Apple Watch apps that wouldn’t break our hearts if nobody ever got around to making them.

Websites these days have another tool to engage you: the desktop notification. Many sites, this one included, allow you to opt in to a system of popup notices that encourage you to click through and see new content.

Of course, not all content is created equal, and you might someday wish to stop being notified of new cat photos from that feline-friendly website.

Here’s how to manage web notifications using two of the Mac’s most popular web browsers, Safari and Chrome.

This week: we all love the popular products, but this episode we’ll remember some of Apple’s biggest blunders! Plus: why the new iPods might be the last iPods; Apple’s missing back to school promotion; and the perfect way to motivate your lazy workforce…

Our thanks to Casper for supporting this episode. If you’re waking up with numb limbs or back pain, Casper’s American-made mattresses can help, and with a price far lower than you’ll find in the stores. Learn more and save $50 off any order at Casper.com/cultcast.

Show notes ahead and they’re quite good.

When you run with Apple Watch, swiping to the right in the Workout app reveals your heart rate. Does the device display this data just for curiosity value, or can Apple Watch heart rate information actually improve your running?

It’s festival season and there’s a festival for everything – even one for Apple II users.

It’s called KansasFest and it has been going since 1989. It’s one of the longest-running computer festivals out there and the amazing thing is the Apple II was discontinued in 1992.

The endurance of this machine is the subject of this week’s Kahney’s Korner.

Cult of Mac’s Photo Famous series introduces you to the groundbreaking photographers featured in Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 6” ad campaign.

 The thick Icelandic fog lifted and Austin Mann saw an otherworldly glacier emerge. Photography is a way for Mann, a Christian and a professional travel photographer, to worship god, and this was the kind of scene that spoke to him.

But to get the shot, he would have to leave his camera gear in the car for a climb on all fours down a rocky cliff. Mann put his new iPhone 6 Plus in his pocket and scrambled down to make the picture.

The shot, taken using the iPhone’s panorama mode, was among the most prominent photos featured in Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 6” marketing campaign, a promotional blitz that began in the spring with billboards, giant banners stretched across the sides of buildings, and advertising on television and in magazines.

Apple has launched a new promotion, entitled “Amazing Apps & Games,” offering 24 different apps from a variety of different genres for just 99 cents each.

Ranging from games such as Goat Simulator, Blek and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to productivity tools like Scanner Pro 6 and Clone Camera Pro, and even throwing in educational apps like the STEM-related Simple Machines, it’s a great chance to pick up some excellent apps at some low, low prices.

Most every app I’ve installed on my Apple Watch brings some sort of Glance along with it. While that’s a neato-keen thing to put in your App description to sell more apps, I’m not convinced that every app I have needs to be on my wrist.

Nuzzle, Words with Friends, Tile, Fandango, Foursquare: These are all apps I surely do not need or want on my Apple Watch.

Here’s how to clean up your Apple Watch Glances section for a much more focused and clear informational workflow. Because seriously, how many swipes do I need to get to the battery Glance?

Sometimes the future is a fuzzy picture. This was literally true when looking at a 0.3-megapixel image produced by one of the first consumer digital cameras, Apple’s doomed QuickTake.

 Launched in 1994, the QuickTake didn’t exactly take off. The bulky behemoth looked like a pair of binoculars. There was no preview screen, so when your camera was full — after just eight pictures at the highest resolution — you had to plug the gadget into your Mac to look at your photos.

Enlarged beyond the size of a postage stamp, the pictures weren’t very sharp. Photographers scoffed that digital files would never record the detail of film.

After three models and three years of modest sales, the QuickTake was scrapped in 1997 along with other non-computer products when Steve Jobs returned to the company.

An iOS scam designed to cheat people out of money is being reported by users in both the United States and the U.K.

A number of iPhone and iPad users have received pop-up notifications on their devices informing them that iOS has crashed, that their personal data is being stolen by a third party, and that the only way to solve the problem is (surprise!) to pay between $19 and $80 for a fix.

Sounds legit. Where do we send our money?