The Apple Watch has displaced Rolex on a list of luxury global brands, as measured by analytics firm NetBase, measuring social media mentions and consumer sentiment from more than 700 million posts between 2014 and 2015.
The Apple Watch took the no. 1 place in the list’s “watches” category — made all the more impressive by the fact that it was the only smartwatch featured. Other watchmakers it outranked included Tag Heuer, Richemont, Curren and Patek Phillippe.
Compared to tech companies whose PR departments act like celebrity hangers-on, bigging you up and laughing at your jokes to win favor, Apple’s uber-succesful public relations department is more like the movie Mean Girls in its approach to those not on its wanted list.
And with the proposed new hiring of a former Apple communications wizard, it seems that Twitter’s looking to get in on the Cupertino-style action.
Although there are ways of messaging people with the Apple Watch — either with Siri dictation, or using pre-written responses and emojis — as far as I know, no-one has yet come up with the perfect method for typing and sending messages from the device itself, without needing to whip out your iPhone to help do so.
That’s exactly the problem Patryk Laurent, cognitive scientist working at the Brain Corporation in San Diego — and an avid Apple Watch fan — has set out out to solve. His solution is a nifty homemade app, which allows users to input their messages using Morse code.
Yes, it’s every bit as geeky and awesome as it sounds.
Siri’s latest trick has it setting the tempo for the Internet’s beatboxing magic.
Apple’s digital assistant may not be the best beatboxer on its own, but it can provide the backdrop for some more talented people. And those people have found a way to get Siri to lay it down so that they can spit hot fire and record it for our entertainment.
All it takes is a little math.
Apple reported record revenue during its earnings call Tuesday, but Tim Cook almost sounded like he was channeling Game of Thrones characters. He didn’t actually say “winter is coming,” but he might as well have.
Revenue is high for now, but iPhone sales are slowing down, the iPad continues to underperform and — most troublesome of all — the global economy will continue to play havoc with Apple’s bottom line.
Still, Cook and Co. remain optimistic about Apple’s ability to continue its world-beating performance. Here are five of the biggest takeaways we got from Apple’s Q1 2016 earnings call today with Cook and Apple CFO Luca Maestri.
The stakes couldn’t be higher today for Apple’s first earnings report of 2016.
Depending on how well Apple’s holiday season went, the company could set new records for the most profits in a quarter by any company ever as well as total number of iPhones sold in any quarter.
Apple’s earnings for Q1 2016 have broken the world record for the most profit made by a company in one quarter.
With total revenue hitting $75.9 billion, Apple managed to rake in a record $18.48 billion in profit. The company managed to increase iPhone sales to 74.8 million despite predictions from Wall Street that the company would see decline. However, Apple did warn investors in its guidance that next quarter may be the the first time growth drops.
Despite missing on some numbers, Tim Cook praise Apple’s team calling Q1 2016 “Apple’s biggest quarter ever.”
If you like blazing up every now and then, make sure you don’t post it on Instagram. Since marijuana use is still federally recognized as illegal in the United States, posting a picture with that Mary Jane could mean you wind up with a serious fine or even some significant jail time.
Social media strategist Shannon Self says that an Instagram post with someone smoking marijuana is punishable by a fine of up to $150,000 or 18 months of jail time. That’s especially true in many states that still have laws in place banning marijuana either medically or recreationally.
iOS 9.3 has a new feature that allows you to protect your sensitive Notes with a password or with Touch ID. It’s a great way to keep stuff like security codes or medical information safe on your iPhone.
It’s kind of a weird process, though, so you might miss it at first glance.
Here’s how to keep your private notes secure with the latest version of iOS 9.
Long gone are the days where video editing has to take hours and involve your Mac. Thanks to the iPhone and iPad, I’ve put together some awesome, professional-looking video. Depending on what your needs are, and how much control you want over the process, these are currently the best video editing apps I’ve found for iPhone and iPad.
Whatever else we hear from Apple’s earnings call later today, we know that its App Store game is strong.
The virtual store that provides all of your favorite fart apps raked in a Scrooge McDuck-esque pile of coin with a record-setting $3.3 billion in revenue and 5.5 billion downloads during the last three months of 2015.
Apple wasn’t the only company that finished the year strong, though; Facebook also pulled in some impressive numbers.
Apple’s News app that came preinstalled with iOS 9 hasn’t exactly taken off like the company hoped it would, but a new report claims Apple is planning to give the app and publishers a big boost by adding subscription-only content.
When LynnMarie Rink and her son, James, got to the Nashville Apple Store to replace his broken iPad last week, they weren’t expecting anything unusual. Of course, for James and his mom, atypical is their way of life.
James has Down syndrome and autism, and uses his iPad to communicate. When he got to the Apple Store last Thursday, he got excited at something out in the mall and ran out of the store at top speed. Unfortunately, there was a big glass wall instead of a door in front of him, and he ran into it face first, causing a little scene with tears and a fat lip.
It was just then that an Apple Store employee came up and offered to help them get their new iPad — and did something amazingly gracious.
Sure you can get you MacBook or iPhone in gold or rose gold colors. Or for a few bucks more – OK, several thousand dollars more – you can get your Apple products plated with real 24K gold.
Maybe the bitten Apple logo on your devices is enough status symbol for you, but Goldgenie, with offices in London and Dubai, is betting there are a few Apple fans drawn to the hypnotic shine of the precious metal.
Google’s awesome Inbox app just got a heck of a lot more useful for those who leave all the important information they’ll need later inside their emails.
Starting today, Inbox can seek out addresses, contact information, bills, directions, bookings, package tracking numbers and more effectively than any other mail app.
It is hard to write an unbiased review about some of the greatest ski gloves I have ever pulled on.
The Arc’teryx Lithic gloves skip leather in the palm and instead use thermoplastic polyurethane, or TPU. Its hydrophobic properties keep the gloves from taking on moisture, which in turn keeps your hands from getting cold.
iOS 9 is a wide open landscape for building profitable apps and services, but you can’t set out to do so unless you know where you’re going and what you’re doing. This course from Makers Cabin teaches the skills you’ll need to build beautiful things on Apple devices, taking you through hands-on examples by building 10 apps. It’s invaluable, tangible experience that’ll give you the confidence to see your own development ideas come to life, and right now you can get access for just $39.
There’s no great way to record phone conversations. Apps and recording services come with fees and limitations. There’s my clunky way – putting the phone on speaker with my digital recorder nearby – but I will often lose a good quote from some sudden outside noise.
A company in Israel wants to mass produce a simple solution with an iPhone case that has a built-in recorder to pick up both sides of the conversation with the press of a button.
By default, iOS doesn’t support animated icons, although there are a few exceptions: the Clock app, for example, or the way the Settings icon used to animate when you were downloading an OTA update. But wouldn’t it be great if every icon on your homescreen animated? Yes, it would … but unfortunately, only jailbreakers can make that happen.
Our Twitter timelines have become swamped with ads and sponsored tweets, but if you’re famous enough, you don’t have to see them.
To provide its “VIP” users with a greater experience, and to prevent them from wandering to rival services, Twitter has all but stopped injecting ads into their timelines.
iOS 9.3 might not look like much of an upgrade, but there’s one feature you should definitely be excited about. It’s called Night Shift, and it makes using your iPhone or iPad before bed more comfortable, more enjoyable and healthier by banishing blue light.
Here’s why you should use it once iOS 9.3 becomes available.
Apple Pay has added the last of the U.K. holdout banks, with Barclays revealing that it will start offering Apple’s mobile payment service to customers in the United Kingdom, “within the next 60 to 75 days.”
Although there’s no definite day given, that would put the date somewhere between March 12 and 27, which is slightly later than the “very early 2016” launch the bank had mentioned last year.
The other day, we learned that Microsoft’s next app would be an iOS keyboard called Word Flow. But today, we can do one better. We can show you what it looks like running on an iPhone! And it turns out to have a really cool mode for one-handed texting.
If you had asked me in the 1990s, I’d never have thought I’d one day feel sorry for Microsoft, but right now it’s pretty hard.
Two days after Microsoft finally got NFL announcers to stop calling the Surface an iPad, just in time for Microsoft’s tablet to stop working during a game, Microsoft VP Joe Belfiore, a.k.a. the long-time face of Windows Phone, has been spotted tweeting on an iPhone.
D’oh!
Apple has invented a camera lens that would yield higher-resolution images and would be even tinier than the cameras used in today’s super-slim iPhones.
How tiny would it be? Imagine a total axial length of just 2 mm or even less, making this potentially perfect for the long-awaited FaceTime camera of the next-gen Apple Watch 2.