Now available in more than 100 countries, Apple Music has reportedly hit 10 million paid monthly subscribers.
Provided these numbers are accurate, Apple Music now has a little under half of Spotify’s 25 million paid subscribers.
Steve Jobs picked up Golden Globes for “Best Screenplay” and “Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role,” but lost out on the “Best Actor” and “Best Original Score” prizes at last night’s star-studded Hollywood event.
“I’m usually better at words,” said screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, claiming his award. “You can perform surgery on me. I’m so stunned by what’s happened.”
Bargains happen all the time, but it’s not every day they apply to truly innovative products. From car locators to multi-device chargers and camera-packing mini drones, these are some great deals on some of the coolest gear and gadgets out there. Take a look at what we found:
LAS VEGAS — Booth babes have returned to CES — in the guise of fitness models.
Following complaints the last few years, the giant electronics show here in Vegas had been moving away from scantily clad sirens employed to draw inquisitive eyes to exhibitor booths.
But they’ve been replaced by a new type of eye candy: super-fit women showing off the latest health products or demonstrating fitness gear.
The Cult of Mac Watch Store just opened for business, offering a carefully curated selection of Apple Watch accessories — just in time for all your holiday shopping needs.
Whether you’re looking for luxe leather and steel bands or clutter-killing stands, our shiny new online store showcases nothing but the best Apple Watch accessories. You’ll find quality goods that let you put your personal stamp on your Apple Watch, all at fair prices.
The world is just getting more competitive, so it’s more important than ever to have a sharp set of skills in areas relevant to the modern workplace. In the following massively discounted courses, you’ll find invaluable additions for your resume, and the certification to back it all up — from project management to data science, Excel spreadsheets to SQL databases. Take a look at what we’ve found, most are more than 95% off:
This week on Cult of Mac’ podcast: Super-sized drones, app-controlled robot bartenders, smart coffee mugs and the coolest of gadgets from CES 2016. Plus, don’t miss our picks for the absolutely, positively, you-should-install-them-today, most essential Mac and iOS apps.
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. It’s simple to build a website that looks beautiful on any device at Squarespace.com. Enter offer code “CultCast” at checkout to get 10 percent off.
It’s been a busy week here at Cult of Mac as we all scrambled to get as much news as possible out of CES, the big electronics show that’s been chugging right along in Las Vegas. It’s one of the biggest trade shows in the world, so we had plenty of news to go around.
We had people on the show floor discussing everything gadgety — including the finer points of rejuvenating one’s vagina — and we had people at home trying to ignore how hilarious that was for long enough to crank out the rest of the news. While the stories were plentiful, our handy hub here ensures you don’t have to click around too much to get everything worth knowing from the show.
Here’s the huge collection of all of our coverage from CES 2016.
Apple has got its fitness strategy all wrong. It sees Apple Watch as a computing platform rather than a device, and so it promotes third-party apps instead of making better built-in ones of its own.
That may be a fine strategy for Macs and iPhones, but it just does not work for watches and fitness trackers. Relying on third-party fitness apps means spending far too long staring at the spinning dots of death (the Watch equivalent of a spinning beachball), when we should be working out.
Instead of offering a range of underwhelming third-party workout apps, what Apple Watch really needs is one great built-in app that integrates with popular fitness platforms like Runtastic and MapMyRun.
This might be the most divisive news of the day: RealDoll creator Matt McMullen is currently working with artificial-intelligence scientists to create a fusion between digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and synthetic companions. It could be the most amazing news you’ve ever heard, or it might be terrifying and make you feel like spiders are crawling on you.
Regardless of how much or little it creeps you out, however, it’s definitely interesting.
LAS VEGAS — You know your product’s hot when Chinese ripoff artists start selling knockoffs before your first unit rolls off the production line.
That’s the “flattering” situation the makers of Stikbox, the world’s “first” selfie stick case for iPhone and Samsung, find themselves in as they demo their only aluminum prototype on the CES show floor here. Stikbox’s Kickstarter campaign launched just two weeks ago, and the unique case hasn’t even been officially manufactured, yet already dozens of clones have popped up online.
“It just goes on,” Stikbox founder Yekutiel Sherman said as he scrolled through listing after listing of Chinese manufacturers selling Stikbox clones on Taobao, an e-commerce site owned by Alibaba Group. “Endless, endless,” he said, a mix of shock and dismay in his voice.
Welcome back to another week of amazing Cult of Mac action. We sent a crack team of staffers this year to Las Vegas’ all-you-can-eat buffet of technology, CES. Their on-the-spot reporting has resulted in a plate piled high with goodies, and we’re here to share it with you.
This week, we’ve got the best (and worst) of CES, a poll on which glitchy software Apple should fix, some more solid rumors about the upcoming iPhone 7, a quick look at some great knockoff Apple Watch bands, and a “one-click upgrade” that will double your MacBook’s hard drive.
Here’s the rundown this week:
A new drone video shows that some of Apple Campus 2’s most impressive features are coming along nicely.
Construction reached the point that builders can start installing windows on both the inside of the giant ring, but that’s not the best thing the camera saw. You can also get a really good look down into Apple’s 1,000-seat, underground auditorium.
Check it out in the video below.
Volkswagen is the first car maker to offer wireless CarPlay, but Apple doesn’t want them to show you how cool it is.
This isn’t a new feature; if you have an iPhone running iOS 9, it’s in there. But all CarPlay-compatible vehicles currently available go the wired route, making you plug your handset into your ride’s console to use the protocol. Volkswagen has managed to make the feature wireless, but Apple has forbidden the company from giving demos at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.
CES has brought us a whole host of new TVs that support HDR video, but like 4K, the content isn’t easy to come by right now. Fortunately, Google is going to change that by making HDR video available through YouTube.
2016 is here, and so far, it hasn’t been good to Apple.
Just this week, the Cupertino company saw its stock price fall below $100 for the first time since 2014 amid countless reports that iPhone demand is weakening at a rapid pace. Apple needs to do something, but what?
Should it address falling iPhone sales first and focus on making iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus the best smartphones money can buy? Should it put more effort into making iPad the tablet it once was? Or is it time for something new?
Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we battle it out over all this and more!
Some new (circumstantial) evidence is lending further weight to the possibility that we may one day cruise down the street in an Apple Car.
Listings on domain search site Who.is show that Apple is buying up car-related web domains like crazy. The sites in question are “apple.car,” “apple.cars,” and “apple.auto.” This is not the absolute, ironclad confirmation a lot of Apple Car fans are looking for, but it may point to some news coming.
Or it may not.
I’ve always loved being able to pick up an iMessage conversation that I started on my iPhone right on my Mac, and vice versa.
Unfortunately, I’ve been having an iMessage issue for the last few months — I can have conversations via Messages on my Mac and conversations via Messages on my iPhone, but my iMessages have stopped synchronizing across my devices.
LAS VEGAS — Your body is an amazing energy creation machine but you’re not even using it to its full potential. All the walking, running, biking and other movements you make throughout the day all create kinetic energy, and now you can finally harness it to charge the most important gadgets in your life with Ampy.
Ampy is a wearable battery pack that can be charged via USB, but its superpower is the ability to recharge using motion thanks to a couple of magnets that bounce up and down inside coils. One hour of moderate exercise (jogging or riding a bike) will add up to five hours of standby battery life to your iPhone, or about 1 hour of regular usage. It’s not something you’ll want to use everyday, but it’s perfect for when you’re going on a hike, or experience a power outage.
The device comes with a strap and carrying band so you can place it on your arm or leg depending on what exercises you’re doing. It features a curved profile, making it a great fit for jean pockets, jackets, or anything other object that moves a lot. Priced at $100 the device comes with an accompanying iOS app so you can track how much power you’re generating. A slimmer, more power efficient model is on the way later this year.
Everything that is good in the world of tech is designed well. Being able to craft an intuitive, user-pleasing experience or product might seem like magic, but that’s probably just because you haven’t studied it. This bundle of 9 courses, clocking in at 57 hours of content and worth hundreds of bucks, will get you caught up on the craft of design in the modern age, from responsive design, rapid prototyping, HTML, CSS and lots more, all for just $39.
Rich single men love the Apple Watch, but if they are dressing for a first date, they may want to wrist up with a good old-fashioned Rolex.
Rolex appears to be the way to a woman’s heart according to a survey of 1,400 members of the millionaire dating app Luxy, an unapologetic company that describes itself as “Tinder minus the poor people.”
Austin-based research group Brains Worldwide Foundation is developing a new iPad app to help parents carry out concussion tests on their kids at home, if they fear their children might have suffered a brain trauma during a sports game or similar.
Sprint is set to match Verizon and T-Mobile by stopping offering two-year phone contracts to new customers, although two-year contracts for tablets will remain.
You can try arguing that Apple’s doing what it’s always done by allegedly eliminating the (quite literally) century-old 3.5mm jack from the upcoming iPhone 7 — but 204,305 people are going to disagree with you.
Surprise box office bomb Steve Jobs has racked up yet more award nominations in the form of three BAFTA awards, a.k.a. the U.K.’s most respected film prize.
Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s controversial movie picked up nominations in the Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Actor categories.