Cult of Mac

Very spicy episode this week on The CultCast: We break down why everyone is pissed that Apple is slowing down iPhones and Macs with older batteries, and how you can tell if you’re being throttled. Plus, it’s been a great year for Apple hardware — don’t miss our picks for Apple gadget of the year!

Our thanks to Upsie for supporting this episode. Why pay $200 for AppleCare+ when an iPhone X accidental damage warranty from Upsie is $80 less? Get 10 percent off your first purchase at upsie.com with code “CultCast” at checkout.

Act fast and you can score a great deal on a 2017 MacBook Pro or a current-gen iPad! You’ll also find a free Minecraft iPhone game and a very inexpensive embroidered iPhone case in this week’s roundup of the best Apple deals.

Apple has offered iPhone customers yet another apology for intentionally slowing down the CPU on some older iPhone models in order to increase overall performance.

In a letter to customers this afternoon, Apple explained that it added a feature in iOS 10.1.2 that successfully reduced the occurrence of unexpected shutdowns on iPhones. Apple was able to do so by lowering CPU performance so that it drew less power from older batteries, but the company is now offering an olive branch to customers: cheap battery replacements.

As the year nears its end, it’s time to take a look back at everything that was awesome in 2017. As usual, Mac developers rolled out some stellar software, which means macOS remains the best platform for the greatest apps.

Here’s our roundup of the best macOS apps of 2017.

It is usually correct to ridicule Apple Pencil accessories. This hand-stitched leather sleeve for the Pencil, for instance, is absurd. But some Apple pencil accessories are almost essential, including today’s selection, the Fintie cap holder, nib cover, and Lightning cable adapter tether. At first glance, these may look as pointless as a the pencil case, but after some study, you’ll see they’re essential to fix Apple’s own design mistakes.

2017 was a great year for Apple as a whole, and the App Store was no different.

From messaging apps to music-generating tools to a smart AI assistant, Apple and various third-party developers unleashed an impressive array of new software designed to get us tapping, swiping and — most importantly — downloading.

Having your own invisibility cloak could soon become a reality thanks to the iPhone X. Kind of.

Japanese developer Kazuya Noshiro showed off a demo of an app he’s working on that uses the iPhone X’s facial recognition features to completely camouflage a users’ face with the background. The trippy effect almost makes you look like a set of floating eyeballs with hair on top.

Watch his face disappear:

The iOS Mail app gets overlooked by power users, but it’s still the default for most people, unless they’re using Gmail in the browser. And that’s not a bad thing, because Apple’s Mail app has gotten pretty great in recent years, from smart mailboxes, to swipe gestures, to iOS 11’s drag-and-drop. Today we’re going to take a look at a feature so hidden you may never have seen it before. It’s a filter than can be applied to any folder, letting you see just mail with attachments, mail addressed directly to you, VIP mails, and more.

An Italian clothing company going by the name of “Steve Jobs” has won its long-standing legal battle with Apple for the right to sell jeans with Jobs’ name on them.

Apple is in discussions to open a retail store in Saudi Arabia in 2019, a new report claims.

At present, Apple is in second place in the Saudi market behind Samsung. Despite this, it has no direct Apple Store presence and has to sell through third party retailers.

2017 was a beast of a year, so let’s best it in 2018. A solid resolution for anyone to make is to learn some new skills. And one thing that definitely hasn’t changed since last year is the value of coding skills.

South Korea’s broadcasting and telecom regulator, the Korea Communications Commission, wants an explanation from Apple as to why it purposely slowed down old iPhones.

“We are hoping to get some answers on whether Apple intentionally restricted the performance of old iPhones and tried to hide this from customers,” the KCC said in a statement.

Apple has had a great year, and CEO Tim Cook is being rewarded accordingly. According to a new report, Cook will take home a massive $102 million this year, composed of his $3.06 million salary, $9.33 million incentive payment, and an equity award of $89.2 million.

For security reasons, the Apple board now stipulates that Cook use private planes for all business and personal travel. His personal security costs in 2017 were calculated at $224,216, while he ran up a $93,109 bill for traveling on private planes for non-business trips.

Apple isn’t the most transparent of companies when it comes to its technology, but from next year you’ll be able to dive into the code of one of its most revolutionary operating systems to see how it was achieved.

The operating system in question is that of the ill-fated Apple Lisa, a $10,000 machine which debuted in 1983 — and included Apple’s first ever graphical user interfaces, and one of the first in computer history as a whole.

Game developers are embracing macOS like never before, which means Windows isn’t the only place to get the greatest titles anymore. The past year brought us a ton of terrific Mac games, from intense first-person shooters to gorgeous platformers filled with charm.

Here’s our roundup of the best Mac games of 2017.

Focusrite’s iTrack One Pre might be the ultimate portable recording gadget for musicians. It’s a little cube that fits in a pocket, but that packs in connections for a microphone and a guitar, as well as a port for charging the iPad or iPhone you connect to. It can even supply Phantom Power to a microphone, and has it’s own gain (“volume,” kinda) knob.

Apple’s pretty darn good when it comes to advertising, and 2017 was no exception. Whether it was Portrait mode, AirPods or the iPhone X, creatives working on Apple ads found new and exciting ways to sell us on Cupertino’s latest innovations.

Check out our picks for the year’s best Apple ads below.

2017 has been one heck of a year for iOS gaming fans. From action-oriented arcade blasters to strategy games so deep they should come with a warning, just about every genre has been well represented.

Distilling hundreds of great titles down to a single shortlist isn’t easy, but we’ve done our best. These are our picks for the 15 greatest mobile games of 2017.

One thing we all have in common is browser tab overload. With all the amazing content online, you’ll inevitably pile up more than you can ever read before the laptop battery dies.

The China sales head of Huawei Technologies’ smartphone division has been arrested on suspicion of accepting bribes.

According to an internal memo sent to staff, Teng Hongfei was detained for, “the suspected crime of accepting bribes as a non-state functionary.” Huawei is currently the top smartphone maker in China by market share, and could soon overtake Apple in terms of global market share.

Kanye West is an Apple fan. So what better Christmas gift for him to buy his wife, Kim Kardashian, than AAPL stock?

Kardashian shared her surprising story online, saying that West gifted her the shares, alongside some Apple headphones, and some stock from other select companies including Amazon, Disney, and Netflix. While she didn’t share the exact amount, considering that AAPL is up 47 percent in 2017, that’s a pretty great gift!

Apple has reportedly shifted half of its baseband modem chipsets for iOS devices to Intel from Qualcomm, and is now considering shifting additional orders to Taiwanese manufacturer MediaTek.

The news comes at a time when hostilities between Apple and former manufacturer Qualcomm continue to heat up, with no signs that they will come to a close soon.

Welcome to Cult of Mac‘s Gadget of the Year extravaganza. Unlike some other blogs, where harassed writers get a last-minute order from the boss to come up with an end-of-year list, and then spend a half-hour writing up the first five Google results for their given subject, our top gadgets are all rad, and all genuinely worth your cash.

Two of them will even change how you use technology, which isn’t a bad score for just one year. Let’s take a look at our favorite gadgets of 2017, and see why they’re so good.

This post is presented by Udemy.

Massively online open courses have transformed learning. Thanks to MOOCs, pretty much anyone with an internet connection and a desire to learn can receive a vital education on almost any topic.

Of course, these online courses aren’t free. But Udemy is holding a Holiday Flash Sale that’ll get you pretty close. From now through Friday, December 29, 2017, Cult of Mac readers can access any course costing $200 or more for just $10.

With 2018 about to begin, why rehash everything that already happened, just to fill up some space while we take time out for Christmas? Let’s go with a different year-end cliche? Yes, it’s a wish list for Apple products in 2018.

Some of these will almost certainly come to pass, while others perhaps will not. One is probably doomed before you even read about it here. Let’s take a look at what Apple products I hope will part me from my money in the coming year.