Shoppers frequent Amazon every day, trusting the site’s algorithms to show the best deals. But a recent Pro Publica report suggests that Amazon is becoming more biased, with its own products and “Fulfilled by Amazon” offerings being prioritized over those from other vendors — even if the other vendors have the cheapest prices.
We’re well into October and along with the shifting seasons comes a whole new set of deals on gear and gadgets. This week we’ve got three years of unlimited bandwidth over a VPN, a set of on-ear Bluetooth headphones, a lifetime subscription to Sticky Password, and — coolest of all — the Bionic Bird, a drone that looks and flies just like a real bird. That’s a diverse bag of goodies, read on for more details:
This week on The CultCast: Revamped iPads coming this spring; Apple lays the groundwork for the next era of personal technology; how smart homes get hacked; Google’s Pixel phone versus iPhone 7; and we reveal our favorite new iOS and Mac apps!
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This week at the Cult of Mac Store saw some spectacular deals. A triple pack of more than triple-length MFi-certified Lightning cables, an award winning app for expanding the usefulness of PDFs, a top-shelf set of wireless Bluetooth earbuds, and the latest version of the super popular Toast from Roxio. They’re all discounted by at least half, and they’re all worth checking out. Read on for more details:
If you’ve considering buying a shiny new Apple Watch Series 2, you might be wondering if it can really help you to get in shape. Especially if you’ve seen the recent headlines claiming that fitness trackers don’t work.
So what does science really have to say about wearables? I decided to investigate the science behind Apple Watch fitness assumptions.
Apple is facing a new lawsuit that was filed this Friday by a French open-source software maker that says its launching the lawsuit to get developers better HTML5 support on iOS.
Facebook is on a quest to cure your boredom with its newest standalone app that is focused solely on events.
Available only on iOS (for now), the new app dubbed Events from Facebook helps you find things to do in your area by giving you a filtered feed of what your friends are up to.
The FBI and Apple could be on a collision course for another legal showdown over a dead terrorist’s locked iPhone.
Apple refused to comply with the FBI’s demands to unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone eight months ago. That led to a very public legal battle over privacy and security. Now the FBI needs help again after obtaining the iPhone of a terrorist that stabbed 10 people in a Minnesota mall.
Miroslav Tichy roamed the streets of his Czech Republic town with a camera made of plywood, a cardboard tube and a plexiglass lens he polished with toothpaste and cigarette ashes. His crude, distorted photographs now hang in museums around the world.
So don’t worry if the camera on that iPhone 7 you just purchased doesn’t score high in some laboratory test that pits its image quality against other cameras.
The upcoming 2016 MacBook Pro is rumored to feature only USB-C ports, much like last year’s MacBook refresh.
If you’re hoping to get an external display to go with your shiny new laptop, right now the options are somewhat limited. Luckily, the stunning new LG Electronics 27UD88 monitor will provide you with everything you need.
Check out our video review below.
Halloween is right around the corner, which means your local CVS probably already put out Christmas decorations. They do that for a reason, you know: It’s never too early to start thinking about the holiday season!
Following that logic, we’ve put together some of this week’s best deals from around the internet to start the gift-giving wheels turning. Even if you’re just giving the gift to yourself.
The U.S. Court of Appeals gave Apple another victory today in its five-year-long legal battle with Samsung.
Apple won its appeal in an 8-3 ruling that reinstated a previous patent-infringement verdict that awarded the company $119.6 million. The judges in the case said it was wrong for the three-judge panel to throw out the verdict in February and suggested Apple could be owed even more money.
iOS10 has dropped, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to get up to speed on developing for Apple’s latest and greatest mobile platform. In fact, there’s never been a better time. This pair of comprehensive training courses clocks in at almost 200 hours, covering the ins and outs of building apps for both iOS 10 and iOS 9. It normally costs $1,500, but right now you can get both sets of courses for just $29 at Cult of Mac Deals.
Samsung’s booming chip and display business was enough to offset the cost of having to recall its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones, according to a Q3 regulatory filing the South Korean tech company made today.
The company’s 7.8 trillion won ($7 billion) profit grew 5.6 percent by quarter to beat expectations. However, things might be a bit more complex than they initially appear.
Apple Music and Spotify have started offering users access to unofficial, user-uploaded music remixes, courtesy of a deal with Dubset Media Holdings.
The company uses algorithms to sort out licensing and royalty payments for musical remixes. It’s an incredibly complicated problem to tackle, since a single remix might have upward of 600 different rights holders.
The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus went on sale in India today, as Apple continues to try and grow its brand in the country.
It’s going to be a challenge, though, as Gartner research vice president Mark Hung told CNBC’s “Street Signs” — given that the price for the new handset is more than the average Indian citizen earns in six months.
In the future, self-driving cars will make highways and roads safer for everyone. But if Google’s latest report on self-driving car accidents is any indicator, we have a long way to go before our robot overlords will save us.
Security researchers discovered a new way to hack the Mac’s built-in webcam this week, and the method is undetectable by users.
Apple built a green LED light into every Mac with firmware-level protection that turns on anytime the sensor is tripped by unauthorized access. The security feature has become increasingly difficult for hackers to beat, but former NSA staffer Patrick Wardle found a way to piggyback on outgoing feeds and record them.
The iPhone 7 won’t be enough to break Apple out of its sales slum.
In 2016, total mobile phone shipments are set to decline 1.6 percent. However, the latest forecast from Gartner reveals that 2017 could be a record-breaking year for Apple due to pent-up demand for a new form factor and better features.
If you work with a lot of digital media, professionally or just for fun, you know the critical importance of a versatile and reliable converter. You’ve also probably well aware of Toast Titanium, the top name in media conversion. The latest version of Toast is also the greatest, slathered with new features for maximizing any digital media workflow. And right now, you can get Toast Titanium 15 for just $49 at Cult of Mac Deals.
Siri may have celebrated five years since its iPhone 4s debut this week, but Apple didn’t rush to acquire Viv, the follow-up AI assistant created by Siri’s makers.
Instead, Samsung snapped up Viv for an undisclosed amount.
Given that it’s currently the world’s most valuable brand, few people would suggest that Apple should give up its name in favor of something a bit more, well, geeky.
But that wasn’t the case when the company launched, as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak recently revealed.
The epic scale of Apple’s Campus 2 “spaceship” awed many people when it was first announced — with impressive stats like the fact that it is wider than the Empire State Building is tall, and that it will house 13,000 Apple employees — or the equivalent of 35 fully-stocked Boeing 747 jetliners’ worth of people.
But according to a new report, Apple’s new HQ will now house considerably more than that number of staffers, as Apple aims to bring as many teams under one roof in the name of collaboration.
Foxconn, a company Apple heavily relies upon for iPhone production, plans to start selling its own smartphones in Japan.
It’s a bold move into one of Apple’s hottest markets by the Taiwanese electronics company, which employs around 1.3 million people and 40,000 robots.
There’s a constant war in our house for charging bricks and cables. I like to keep chargers in certain places so I know where they are — beside the bed for example. But they constantly disappear, thanks to my light-fingered kids.
It drives me bananas, which is why I like the Udoq, a universal charging stand that neatly organizes and charges between two and eight devices. It can’t be easily half-inched.