Cult of Mac

President Obama threw some shade Apple’s way yesterday, failing to mention it as one of the tech companies putting user privacy and security first, while describing his new Cybersecurity National Action Plan.

Obama talked about businesses which “empower Americans” by keeping them safe with extra layers of security like fingerprints scanners — only to then namecheck “companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft… and Visa.”

No mention of the company which actually popularized Touch ID then? No, just checking!

Apple is ready to take its fight to protect user privacy all the way to the Supreme Court, says Eddie Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, in a newly-published interview with Spanish-lanugage television channel Univision News.

“We’re willing to take it wherever we have to — and such an important event needs to be settled by the Supreme Court,” Cue said.

Renderings of a supposed Spigen case for the iPhone SE indicate that the upcoming model will take most, if not all, of its design cues from Apple’s older iPhone 5s.

The iPhone SE reportedly has the same general shape as the iPhone 5s, with round volume buttons, a power button at the top and an ovoid or pill-shaped cutout for the flash, all of which sound nothing like an iPhone 6.

Google’s mobile Chrome web browser gets a new update today, which — according to the Chrome team — has “more than a barge full of performance and stability fixes.”

We’re not sure how many software fixes a barge would hold, but we feel confident in saying it’s a whole lot.

Up until recently, I almost always accepted Game Center invites from whoever. I like playing games on my iPhone and iPad and always welcome a worthy opponent. However, there are a lot of people out there cheating and faking scores. While I handled some of this by just deleting them, I also realized that there is a way to report these accounts via Game Center.

Every year Apple introduces a new iPhone, and every year I get my hopes up that this will finally be the model that can go two or three days without needing to be recharged. But according to a lithium-ion battery expert, the odds of Apple adding a power source capable of boosting iPhone battery life like that are practically zero.

Dee Strand, chief scientific officer at battery research firm Wildcat Discovery Technology, says the throughput on smartphone batteries is rapidly improving every year. The problem is, new features are bogging them down.

Microsoft is taking a page out of Apple’s marketing playbook for its newest ads promoting the Surface Book, and the company threw in a few digs at the Mac while they were at it.

Rather than just focusing on the product, Microsoft’s new ads add a human touch by focusing on how the device has changed some professionals’ workflow. First up is photography Tim Flach, who uses a Surface Book and Surface Pen to precisely edit his incredible animal photography. If owning a Surface Book gave me killer shots just like Flach, I’d ditch my Mac too.

“Being able to use a pen like this on the screen directly with the image gives me a different relationship to it,” says Flach. “And I just can’t do that on my Mac.”

Check it out:

Google I/O doesn’t kick off for another two months, but Google won’t wait that long to drop its next-generation Android N upgrade.

Its first developer preview is out today for Nexus devices, and it comes packing a number of features swiped from iPad Pro and iOS, including split-screen multitasking, picture-in-picture mode, and bundled app notifications.

Live Videos might be a boon to content creators who want to capture the attention of more of Facebook’s teeming throngs of users, but getting a ton of notifications from all the sources you’ve previously liked can be a serious pain in the pants.

Luckily, Facebook plans to release a new update that will let you turn off Notifications for Live Videos altogether, which should please most of the people complaining about it on Twitter.

As far as smartphone cameras have come with improved low-light shooting and intelligent LED flash, there will always be some situations in which you could use just a bit more light. This is especially true for photographers who want to make smart adjustments for their photos, or people who tend to do most of their socializing at night. So it’s worth shining a light on iblazr 2, a fantastic Bluetooth LED flash.

This successor to Concepter’s original iblazr isn’t just your ordinary wireless LED flash. It’s equipped with tons of features that let me fine-tune the way I want my photo to come out. The most important feature for me is that it works with the native camera apps on iOS and Android. In fact, according to Concepter’s website, it’s the only wireless LED flash that does.

It turns out that Tim Cook’s old high school in Robertsdale, Alabama, isn’t quite as fond of the MacBook is he is.

Robertsdale High, from which Apple’s CEO graduated in 1978, has swapped the company’s notebooks it was giving to every student for significantly more affordable Chromebooks built by Lenovo.

Macs are great for handling the day to day, but there we’ve found some great ways to make it even more productive. From unlocking PDFs to removing distractions from your daily workflow and managing finances, these apps are affordable ways to get a lot more out of your Mac.

Take a peek at what we’ve found:

Manufacturers are gearing up for the iPhone 7, which means we’ll be getting our first blurry glimpses of what could potentially be Apple’s next-gen smartphone — courtesy of “leaked” iPhone 7 case pictures doing the rounds online.

Check them out below.

When you’re binge-watching a show like Walking Dead or Person of Interest on Netflix, you may at times need to get up for a snack or bathroom break (or both).

Fumbling around for the mouse to bring up the playback overlay is fine, but using the keyboard to pause your streaming media is much faster. Here are five hidden keyboard shortcuts that will put you in charge of your Netflix experience.

AmpMe, the magical app that syncs multiple phones together to create one giant speaker, is getting a much needed update today that lets you take the party anywhere, even if you don’t have internet.

The Montreal-based startup revealed today that it has added a new ‘Offline Mode’ that will let users sync an unlimited number of phones together regardless of whether or not you have a data connection. And to make it easier to get the party started, the app has add a new ‘Auto-Join’ mode that makes it easier than ever to get the music listening party started.

As if the United Nation’s support wasn’t enough to show the tide is turning in Apple’s favor in its encryption standoff with the FBI, a newly-published poll suggests that registered U.S. voters are now evenly split over the year’s biggest tech story.

Parodies of Jony Ive and Apple’s rarefied advertising are nothing new, but you rarely get to watch a spoof featuring a comedian as talented as Sacha Baron Cohen.

To promote his new movie The Brothers Grimsby, the creator of Ali G, Bruno and Borat recorded a spot-on Apple parody, which shows that — despite the many who have aped it in the past — there’s still mileage in poking some good-natured fun at Apple’s way of selling us on its latest revolutionary products.

Check it out below.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden made a (virtual) appearance at yesterday’s “Blueprint for Democracy,” during which he threw some shade on the FBI’s claims that only Apple has the power to help it unlock the iPhone at the heart of the San Bernardino shooting case.

“The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’ to unlock the phone,” Snowden told the audience. “Respectfully, that’s bullsh*t.”

If you’ve long dreamed of seeing the epic tech rivalry between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates staged as a Broadway musical, written by two of the writers from Cartoon Network’s Robot Chicken (and who hasn’t?), well, I’m afraid you’ll be waiting a bit longer.

That’s because the somewhat unflatteringly-titled Nerds has seen its Broadway opening — originally scheduled for April — cancelled after one of the sources of funding pulled out of the project.

The Internet has exploded recently over reports claiming that evildoers can trick Siri, Apple’s digital assistant, into giving them access to your iPhone without entering your passcode. But our own testing confirms that these claims aren’t just exaggerated; they’re hilariously mistaken and wrong.

Posts warn against the “terrifying new way” that teh haxxorz can get into all of your secret data, but the people reporting on and testing the supposed methods are really just taking a really long path to unlocking their own phones normally.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is well on his way to becoming a life-sized action figure.

Not really, but we’re nerds, and that’s how we prefer to think of the prospect of Madame Tussauds’ waxperts immortalizing a person. Woz’s statue is set for an unveiling later this month, and the museum has published some great footage and pictures of the subject’s sitting, which included a lot of photographs and measurements as well as a healthy dose of green gloop.

Check it out below.

When the NCAA Men’s Basketball championship tips off on March 15th hoops fans will have an all-new way to get their fix using Apple TV.

The new March Madness Live streaming app will contain an exclusive Apple TV feature that lets users watch two games side-by-side, but you’ll need to be a paying TV subscriber to use it.

When it comes to Apple Watch concepts, they tend to be conservatively similar to the current Apple iteration of its wrist computer.

Adrian Berr has come up with a new concept for an Apple Watch that actually takes the concept further: it looks like an Apple Watch, just evolved.

Instead of trying to replicate all the function of an iPhone, this concept is more like a wrist-mounted remote control for your life.

A young man in China was found guilty of selling his 18-day old daughter in exchange for enough money to buy himself a new motorcycle and iPhone.

The 19 year-old man identified as ‘A Duan’ by local Chinese media reportedly found a buyer for his newborn through the popular messaging app QQ and negotiated the entire deal without the consent of the child’s biological mother.

A few years back, I looked forward to checking into my favorite TV shows and movies on GetGlue and seeing how many of my other friends were watching what I was. There’s something to be said about movie- and TV-tracking apps that build a sense of community, which is why I think GetGlue did so well with its initial strategy.

Since GetGlue went away, I’ve had to find other ways to not only track my favorite TV shows and movies, but build watch lists and get recommendations from friends. Here’s what I’m currently using and why I think they’re the best movie- and TV-tracking apps for the job, at least for now.