Amazon’s Echo — an odd voice-activated domestic hub — just went on sale to the general public. If you’ve got $200 to burn, I recommend it. It’s oddly great — and it gives you a glimpse of the future.
If Apple’s Siri-controlled HomeKit comes close, controlling your home by voice is going to be a lot of fun.
Your Apple Watch band contains some cutting-edge fabrication technology that could extend into other fashion accessories, according to a patent filing released today.
The patent describes an ingenious method for molding “woven fibers” into any desired shape and securing them without stitching.
Recent reports claim that Apple is looking to eliminate the need for a physical “home” button on future iPhones by integrating Touch ID fingerprint sensors into the main display. Now we have the patent application to prove it!
Published Thursday, Cult of Mac got its hands on a patent application entitled “Fingerprint Biometric Sensor Including Drive Signal Level Updating,” which reveals how Apple has been exploring processing circuitry capable of acquiring fingerprint data by using special “sensing pixels” within screens.
Taylor Swift, who made Apple blink this week by criticizing the company for initially denying musicians royalties during the free trial period of its new streaming service, now has her gaze square on the photographer who implied her stance is hypocritical.
Swift, through a spokesperson in England, said music photographer Jason Sheldon misrepresented the contract shooters sign before her concerts, saying it does not force them to sign away the rights to their shots.
If you’ve been waiting for Apple to make an iPhone with a flexible OLED display, you may be getting your wish — although not for at least a few more years. According to a new report coming out of South Korea, Apple is “very likely” to release its first iPhone with a flexible OLED display in 2018, and the company’s display suppliers are currently “working on it.”
Does this mean we’re about seeing bendgate part two?
Apple seeded iOS 9 beta 2 to developers today and while there aren’t any groundbreaking new features or drastic improvements, the company did manage to add a bunch of little changes and tweaks across the OS.
Most of the improvements are small design changes, but there are a couple really useful additions too, like adding Handoff to the app switcher, search improvements are more.
Take a look at everything that’s new in iOS 9 beta 2:
Everybody loves a good Siri Easter egg, but they aren’t always “ha-ha” funny.
The city of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, has apparently seen some serious fallout in the wake of the latest viral “Ask Siri about … ” trend.
Apple’s second OS X 10.11 El Capitan beta is now available to download for registered developers. The release comes just two weeks after Apple previewed the big update at WWDC and made its first beta available for testing.
The second beta of Apple’s huge iOS 9.0 update is now available to developers who are ready to take the plunge with Apple’s newest mobile operating system.
From the suggestion that the Earth is actually hollow to accusations that Jay Z and Beyonce are the world’s most famous Illuminati members, the Internet is nothing if not great for spreading crazy conspiracy theories.
In the wake of the recent Apple/Taylor Swift confrontation over Apple Music, there’s another one to add to the list: That the whole thing was staged to promote Apple’s new streaming music service.
And based on the number of times it’s already being mentioned, a surprising number of people believe it.
Taylor Swift is a shrewd business woman and thought she was speaking for all the little artists when she told Apple to kiss off when it comes to featuring her album 1989 on its new music streaming service.
To not pay artists during Apple Music’s free three-month trial period is exploitive, the singer-songwriter suggested, not to mention “shocking” and “disappointing.”
So forgive music photographer Jason Sheldon if he is unable to Shake It Off and is bothered by the hypocrisy of her stance. Editorial photographers assigned to shoot her shows must sign away rights to their photos, preventing them from being paid while giving Swift unlimited use of the pictures for publicity and promotion.
Google I/O and WWDC have been and gone, and Google and Apple have laid out the plans for their next major platform updates — Android M and iOS 9.
Now that we’ve had a chance to let those announcements sink in, it’s time for Cult of Android and Cult of Mac to battle over which is best in another Friday Night Fight. Let us help you decide which one will reign supreme when they roll out to the public this fall.
We rely on our iPhone for so many facets of our life, but as a camera it has become a disruptive force in the photography world. The “Shot with an iPhone 6” advertising campaign is likely making traditional camera companies shutter – pun intended – as sales of consumer cameras continue to fall.
It’s a go-to tool for professional photographers, who have done everything from publish books with iPhone photography to shoot commercials for corporate clients. But there are limitations and sometimes it would be nice to supplement a smartphone’s camera with the punch of a DSLR camera.
DxO, the makers of sophisticated imaging software, may have the ONE camera to do this. The ONE is a palm-sized camera that plugs into your iPhone with functions and optics that have the potential to deliver greater image quality.
Tapping away at your smartphone screen while you’re driving? Not cool. Rummaging through your bag to find it? An equally terrible idea. If you commute by car or bike, the Satechi Bluetooth Home Button for $23 is an absolute must-have.
Many babies these days have to wear an eyepatch to correct vision problems. That’s why the two-year old girl above, Layla Grubb, is wearing the best eyepatch ever: an ’80’s style Apple logo, pasted over her left eye. Talk about a Pirate of Silicon Valley!
Apple is one of nine different companies to be given the full five stars in this year’s “Who Has Your Back?” report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
“This is Apple’s fifth year in the report, and it has adopted every best practice we’ve identified as part of this report,” the digital advocates group’s report reads. “We commend Apple for its strong stance regarding user rights, transparency, and privacy.”
We’re still a couple of months away from Apple’s unveiling of the latest iPhone, but that only means that we’re spending a lot more time thinking about which features it could — and should — have.
Here’s everything that’s gotten our keyboards going about the unannounced handset.
If you’ve dreamed of being able to drop into your local brick-and-mortar Apple Store to pick up your very own Apple Watch, today is your lucky day!
That’s because a new option available on the online Apple Store now asks customers if they are “Interested in buying in-store?” and then offers them a link letting them check reservation ability, before they head to their nearest Apple Store for a try-on appointment.
There are plenty of great stories about people using the Find my iPhone feature to track down and reclaim stolen iOS devices. However, a story which emerged this week shows the tragic flipside of that phenomenon.
18-year-old Brampton, Ontario native Jeremy Cook died from multiple gunshot wounds after tracking down his lost phone, and then confronting the three men who had taken it.
SAN FRANCISCO — Not content to conquer the Bluetooth speaker market with tubes and bigger tubes, Ultimate Ears made its latest portable audio device look like a lily pad. They made it waterproof, too. The only problem was, the UE Roll sank like a stone.
“As life would have it, it doesn’t float,” said Rory Dooley, Ultimate Ears’ senior vice president, during a visit to the Cult of Mac headquarters.
The solution? Create a tiny life preserver for the UE Roll, and give it away to anybody who orders the hottest speaker of the summer directly from UE’s website (while supplies last).
Apple Watch stand makers are responding to watchOS 2’s Nightstand mode feature, which will turn your wearable into a makeshift alarm clock and display the time in landscape mode when it’s charging on its side. New Apple Watch docks are starting to appear to accommodate this feature ahead of the software update coming this fall.
When iOS 9 rolls out to the public this fall, it’ll be iPad users that appreciate it most, thanks to the many improvements Apple has made to multitasking. One of the biggest is Split View, a feature that’s exclusive to the iPad Air 2, which lets you run two apps side-by-side — just like you would on your Mac.
Split View lets you read articles in Safari while composing an email in Mail, enjoy a novel in iBooks while taking notes in the Notes app, and talk to friends via iMessage while organizing your schedule in Calendar.
But is Split View as game-changing as it looks at first glance? You bet it is.
Apple’s giant iPad has been one of the rumor mill’s favorite products to gossip about for years, even though no one has seen so much as a chamfered edge of its supposed 12-inch display. However, some assets hidden inside iOS 9 indicate that the new tablet — often referred to as the “iPad Pro” — could make an appearance soon.
According to a developer who’s been digging through iOS 9, the new keyboard scales to a much larger screen size than we’ve seen so far. When the new keyboard is enlarged, it adds an extra row of keys, hinting that Apple’s monstrous new tablet could rear its head in the near future.
Check it out:
Some were outraged about the $10,000 cost of the Apple Watch Edition, but will people really race to see one of the glittery timepieces get obliterated by powerful neodymium magnets?
Oddball YouTube stress-tester TechRax clearly hopes so, because he recently plonked down the money to carry out just such an “experiment” in his quest for views. Check out the resulting video below.
Seriously, how does this guy get his money?
A New York building that once housed a bank has been transformed into a pristine Apple boutique. The Apple Store Upper East Side opened Saturday morning, giving a swarm of shoppers a chance to try on an Apple Watch in the former bank vault.
There’s no question that when you walk into this store, it’s to buy something high-end and fashionable. Take a look at the Instagram photos taken during today’s grand opening.