Apple has acquired acquired a sleep-tracking app called Beddit, suggesting that tracking users’ hours of shut-eye could be incorporated into a future Apple Watch or iPhone.
Financial terms of the acquisition haven’t been disclosed, although the buyout is confirmed by Beddit in the small print on its webpage.
It’s an OtterBox large enough for an actual otter, though insulating mammals won’t be necessary.
But keeping beer and some food cold on outdoor adventures is and that’s why OtterBox Tuesday introduced a new line of Venture coolers – with a cooling insulation that keeps ice for up to 14 days.
Apple’s Music Memos app is just about about the best way to record musical ideas before they evaporate into the ether. For years, musicians used the built-in Voice Memos app to record snippets, but Music Memos, as you’d expect, is much better suited to the task. It can listen to you and record only when you start playing, it can detect the chords you play, and it can even add drum and bass tracks to your recording automatically.
This last feature is what we’ll look at today. We’re going to record a simple guitar track, add drums and bass, and send the whole lot to GarageBand on iOS for further work. That sounds like a lot, but once you lay down your recorded track, all it takes is a few taps of the screen. And remember, I use a guitar, but you can use any instrument.
When a software company announces it’s starting a talk show, it’s hard to imagine anything less riveting.
But when that company is Adobe and the guests are some of the brightest creative minds sharing how they work, that not only has potential to hold your attention, it could also inspire you to make something for yourself.
Not lucky enough to live close to a spiffy Apple store that got a design refresh in the past couple of years?
Have no fear! On May 16, Apple will reportedly carry out an overnight design upgrade of its older and smaller retail stores worldwide.
Baron Fig, the brand that achieved a cult following among designers and artists with high-quality notebooks and pens, has come up with a thoughtful way for you to carry their tools.
Its new line of bags is called Bags for Thinkers, but the thought put into the function of each bag – a backpack, messenger bag and tote – goes beyond a clever name. How each works was created after soliciting the input of the fans of its other products.
iPhones and iPads are totally convenient, until you need to move data on or off of them. As soon as you start struggling with the sync settings in iTunes, the “magic” drains from these devices fast.
With iMazing, an all-purpose iOS management app, you can wrangle your mobile data easily and intuitively. Browse and manage your backups, extract and print your text messages, drag and drop songs to your device and more — all without jailbreaking. Right now, you can get a lifetime license to iMazing 2 for just $24.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.
Apple became the first $800 billion company in history this week, as stock rose to a record high yesterday.
In midday trading yesterday, Apple shares rose to $153.70 per share on the Nasdaq. With 5.21 billion shares outstanding, that briefly gave Apple an historic market cap of $801.37 billion.
Apple plans to purchase half a city block in downtown Reno, Nevada, to build a new 30,000-square-foot facility, according to city records.
The Reno City Council will discuss the proposal this week at its Wednesday meeting. Discussions concerning Apple taking over the property date back as far as 2012.
Update: Amazon unveiled its new touchscreen Echo Show device Tuesday. In addition to smart-speaker functionality, the Amazon Echo Show brings video calls, video flash briefings, YouTube, karaoke-style music lyrics, security camera integration and more. Available for preorder now, the device will ship June 28 for $229.99.
Amazon could debut its new touchscreen Echo smart speaker as early as today, claims a report from The Wall Street Journal.
The latest in a line of popular Amazon Echo voice-activated speakers, the new device is likely to add a 7-inch display and a built-in camera. It will function like the existing Echo, but with the addition of touchscreen-based features.
iOS 10’s Mail app may look just like its previous pedestrian iterations, but it packs a whole lot of hidden superpowers under the hood. While you still can’t export a message to, say, a to-do list app, you can do pretty much everything those fancy third-party mail apps do, and then some.
Let’s take a look at quickly setting up your iOS Mail app so you can slice and dice incoming messages easily using its hidden folders.
Apple says it will service “functional issues” on Smart Keyboards for the iPad Pro for up to three years, according to internal memos sent to Apple stores and service providers recently.
The company, in the memo sent last week, acknowledged that some Smart Keyboard owners experienced stuck or unresponsive keys as well as non-working Smart Connectors. Apple says it will fix any qualifying keyboards free of charge within three years of the date of purchase. The company will also give a refund to any customer who already paid for service on a Smart Keyboard.
Calling Apple one of “the most under-appreciated stocks in the world,” a Wall Street analyst says the company should be worth $1 trillion within the year.
Drexel Hamilton analyst Brian White gave AAPL a price target of $202, an increase of roughly 35 percent — and by far the highest Apple valuation on the books.
The inbox is a hazardous place. Full of important information and conversations, it also harbors loads of spam from people you’ve never met or even heard of. After a few days, the sheer volume of new emails can become overwhelming. That makes it all the harder to reach the fabled place called “inbox zero.”
A simple browser extension called Throttle Pro can help you get there. It prevents your email address from falling into spammers’ hands (among other useful tricks). And right now you can get a year of Throttle Pro for just $39 at Cult of Mac Deals.
Ever since the FBI got inside the iPhone belonging to the San Bernardino terrorist shooter, there has been speculation over how much the hacking exercise cost the Feds.
A year later, we finally have an answer — and it’s a whole lot of cash, but maybe less than you thought it would be.
Apple has confirmed that it won’t be slashing the commissions it pays when affiliates redirect customers to buy apps from the iOS App Store.
In an update to its iTunes Affiliate Resources webpage over the weekend, Apple made it clear that the reduction for 7 percent to 2.5 percent applies only to in-app purchases. As Apple explains, “[A]ll other content types (including music, movies, books, paid iOS apps and TV) will remain at the current 7%.”
That sound you just heard is a ton of website owners breathing a sigh of relief!
Despite rumors claiming the contrary, there will be no delay in the launch of the iPhone 8, claims China’s Economic Daily News.
Citing sources in the downstream supply chain, the newspaper says new iPhones will start selling in October, and not as late as 2018 as some reports have claimed.
Don’t want to spend your weekend catching up on paperwork or mowing the lawn? No problem: Cult of Mac is here to help you.
We’ve combed through the various apps which landed in the App Store over the past seven days, and picked out what we think is the cream of the crop. From Hulu’s new Live TV subscription service to a hypnotically fun puzzle game, here’s everything you (may have) missed this week.
If the Death Star had Wi-Fi, it would run on something as powerful (and ominous-looking!) as this limited-edition black AmpliFi HD Mesh Router from Ubiquiti Networks.
Assuming you’re ready to surf like a stormtrooper, you’re in luck. Cult of Mac and Ubiquiti are giving away three of these amazing mesh routers in honor of Star Wars Day. How can you win? Glad you asked, buckethead!
Apple could unveil its new smart speaker powered by Siri at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, according to new claims.
Earlier this week, we heard the company is currently in the process of finalizing the design of its first standalone Siri device, which is expected to take on the Amazon Echo. Now we have an idea what it might look like and when it could be revealed.
If you’ve got a computer without a data backup plan, you’ve got a serious headache waiting to happen. Whether due to physical damage, viruses, corrupted data, data loss is a total drag — and it will happen.
When it does, you’ll want a tool that helps you recover quickly. Disk Drill Pro offers a simple and powerful platform that makes it easy to restore documents, music, photos, videos, even entire partitions that have gone missing. It delivers single-button protection for more than 200 types of files on your computer or external drives.
And right now you can get a lifetime license to Disk Drill Pro for just $34.99 at Cult of Mac Deals, with an extra $5 off when you use the coupon code DRILL5 at checkout.
For a Mac setup to stand out, it doesn’t need a ton of color. Take the picture above from Cult of Mac reader Powi Hart, for example. Everything in there is either white, black or silver — and it looks fantastic.
In fact, these white-and-black-themed Apple setups have got to be some of my favorites so far. Check out this week’s three iSetups submissions in the video below. iSetups is our new show that highlights the best Apple-centric setups submitted by our viewers. (You’ll also get plenty of tips and tricks for how you can improve your own setup.)
Short of learning air guitar, hooking a guitar up to your iPhone is just about the easiest way to get started playing music. But it’s not just for practice, or goofing around at home. You can record and edit serious music with an iOS device, and even produce whole records.
But we’re already getting ahead of ourselves. Today, we’re just going to hook things up and rock out.
As the 21st century hums right along, you’ll want to upgrade to 21st century skills. This week at the Cult of Mac Store, we’ve got a bundle of coding lessons for Amazon Echo and their virtual assistant Alexa, a convenient tool for getting through books faster, a masterclass in Excel spreadsheets, and the ultimate media conversion platform, Roxio Toast. Everything is discounted by 50 percent or more, read on for more details:
In this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, we take a look at how a Siri-powered smart speaker could bring better audio (and a higher price tag) than the Amazon Echo. It’s highly like such a device will be unveiled by Apple at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
Plus we’ve got how-tos: You’ll learn how to turn anything into a PDF on your iPhone or iPad, and how to use Apple Pencil to mark up those PDFs in the Mail app.
Also, check out Juuk Designs’ third collection of high-grade aluminum bands for Apple Watch. The new Ligero collection is now on view in our Watch Store.
Here are this week’s top stories.