Whether you’re camping, waiting out a power outage, or fixing your car on the side of the road at night, having a ready supply of light is handy indeed. Maybe the coolest lamp out there is the LuminAid PackLite.
Scotty Allen loves to tinker. He followed up on his recent project manually expanding the storage capacity of his iPhone with a new trick: extracting an iPhone memory chip and converting it into a USB drive.
To be clear, Allen isn’t suggesting this is practical. Buying a USB drive is cheaper and vastly easier. But he sure seems to have fun doing it.
iOS 12 is right around the corner, but iPad users should be thinking longer term. It’s iOS 13 “Yukon” in 2019 that’s expected to bring more new features to Apple’s tablet.
At the top of the list of the ability to work with multiple windows from the same application side-by-side. This would allow the user to, for example, have two Pages documents open next to each other.
Apple’s AirPort routers introduced one game-changing new feature to the world: easy backups. Time Machine is Apple’s automatic backup utility, and it made backups easy enough for non-nerds to use regularly.
The easiest way to use it was to buy a Time Capsule, a wireless AirPort router with a hard drive built in. Before Time Capsule, nobody backed up. After Time Capsule, anyone could keep hourly, daily and weekly backups without even thinking about it. But now that Apple has stopped making Time Capsule, and AirPort routers in general, how do you keep using Time Machine?
In this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine: Analysts have been extremely pessimistic about the iPhone X, with almost daily predictions that Apple’s top-of-the-line model was a flop. And they were all dead wrong. Tim Cook just said the iPhone X has been Apple’s best-selling model for every week since it launched, and that sales of all the company’s phones grew last quarter. How did the analysts get it so wrong?
You’ll find that story and more in this issue. Mother’s Day is around the corner on May 13, so check out our Watch Store’s Mother’s Day Gift Guide for on-time shipping. Get your free subscription to Cult of Mac Magazine from iTunes. Or read on for this week’s top stories.
This week we look at the amazing new Bias Amp 2 for guitarists, which looks just awful on the big-screen iPad Pro, we see how the Newton email app has banished the “sent” mail folder, we check out the new privacy features in the Overcast podcast app, and find out how to duplicate our entire Instagram history on our own microblog.
The batteries in our devices are struggling to keep up with how much we use them. From ever-more-powerful apps to power-sucking operating systems, there’s only so much you can do to keep your gadgets going. So having a solid backup battery is a must.
iPhones are photography and video powerhouses. But shooting with a tripod means sticking with static shots, and handheld, well, looks handheld.
Ready to up your iPhone photography game? This motorized mount offers a bunch of new possibilities.
Weeks of iPhone sales doom and gloom has done wonders for Apple’s stock price.
Shares of AAPL closed at an all-time high today thanks to the company’s historic Q2 earnings report that revealed the iPhone X is doing much better than the analysts expected.
Refurbished Apple gear carry prices ranging from great to unreal. This week, you can get fantastic deals on refurbished iPhones, MacBooks and iPads. (Here are a few things to keep in mind when shopping refurbs.)
Plus, get a deal on the new space gray Apple Magic Keyboard!
Apple plans to shut down the Texture app for Windows following its acquisition of the magazine subscription service back in March. The app remains available to download from the Microsoft Store for now, but it will stop working on June 30.
Apple’s recent software updates have broken some iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus microphones.
Users report that they cannot be heard during calls since updating to iOS 11.3 or later. Apple has advised Authortized Service Providers that they can initiate repairs if necessary — even on devices that are no longer covered by a warranty.
Just in time for May the Fourth-be-with-you, Star Wars: Jedi Challenges added multiplayer lightsaber battles so you can take on your friends in virtual reality combat.
Of course, doing so requires a couple of $150 AR helmets and lightsabers. But still.
Podcasts are a great way to stay informed and entertained, or just to pass time. The number of podcasts is booming, and if you listen efficiently you can hear even more of them.
With the Overcast podcast app for iOS, you get a great podcast listening experience along with some awesome time-saving features.
The money that Google pays Apple to be the default iOS search engine is poised to become a much smaller part of Apple’s Services revenue.
In its most recent quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Apple singled out licensing as one of the main factors for its 31 percent increase in Services revenue over the past quarter. But Google parent company Alphabet told investors that the money paid to distribution partners — including Apple — will slow down this year.
Baby monitors serve an important purpose. All parents need time to make dinner, do chores, work, and other things that you can’t do from beside the crib. Baby monitors used to be glorified, chew-proof walkie talkies, but technology has taken them a long way.
It was written off as a flop by analysts until just a week ago, but according to newly released figures from Strategy Analytics, Apple’s iPhone X was actually the world’s best selling smartphone model in the first quarter of 2018.
Selling a massive 16 million units out of total smartphone shipments of 345 million worldwide, the iPhone X has seemingly disproved everyone who expected this to be a sales dud for Apple.
This week on a very volatile episode of The CultCast: the analysts were all wrong—iPhone X is a massive hit. Plus: the death of 3D Touch starts with 2018 iPhone; the world’s most famous Apple analyst may no longer be reporting on Apple; Apple’s AirPort router lineup is officially dead; and we pitch you our favorite show, movie, and vodka in an all-new Under Review. It’s a juicy one. Hit play and catch the discussion.
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. It’s simple to accept Apple Pay and sell your wares with your very own Squarespace website. Enter offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10% off your first hosting plan or domain.
If you do a lot of gaming on your Mac or PC, a $10 mouse from Walmart isn’t going to cut it. But that doesn’t mean you have to break the bank on something super-fancy, either.
The Abyssus Essential, Razer’s newest mouse, has everything the average gamer needs — and it’s ideal for buyers on a budget.
Analysts everywhere are trying to restore their Apple credibility after predicting doom for the iPhone X, only to be confronted with Apple’s best ever March quarter!
One person who apparently didn’t buy into the negative chatter about Apple? Renowned investor Warren Buffett. In the first quarter of 2018, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway firm shelled out for a massive 75 million AAPL shares. That joins the 165.3 million shares it owned at the end of last year.
Back in my distant misspent youth, I was an enormous fan of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series of kids’ horror books. Jump forward 25 years and this fond piece of nostalgia is about to make its way onto iOS — courtesy of a new mobile game. And it actually sounds like it could be a lot of fun.
Check out the trailer below.
Is there a single tech company out there that doesn’t want to get in on the mobile payments game?
Not wanting to be the kid picked last for soccer practice, Instagram has started rolling out a native payments feature for its app. This allows you to register a debit or credit card as part of your profile, add a pin code, and then start making purchases right inside of the Instagram app.
Google’s service making its accounts uncommonly secure has been extended to iOS native apps. This is only for people who carry around really sensitive information and who therefore expect their iPhone or iPad to come under sophisticated attack.
Starting today, the Advanced Protection Program supports Apple Mail, Calendar, and Contacts. Naturally, this is only for those who connect these iOS apps to Google accounts.
Reviews of Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery don’t agree whether it’s a good iOS game, but all say it’s vastly too expensive. It’s actually free to download, but playing the game essentially requires buying expensive power-ups.
But now developer Jam City may have changed course because reports are coming in that the cost of power-ups has dropped by up to 80 percent.
There’s no doubt who’s top dog in the global wearables market. Just over 4 million Apple Watches shipped during the first quarter of this year. That’s nearly double the number of Fitbits shipped.
The performance of Apple’s wearable was also up dramatically when compared to the same period of last year.