There are two things in the universe that give us incomparable joy: Apple devices and Star Wars nerdery.
The latter is strong with the video below, where Jimmy Fallon, his house band The Roots, and the major cast members from The Force Awakens sing a medley of Star Wars music in a giant Brady Bunch-style colored grid.
If your lightsaber doesn’t explode with joy when you watch, there’s obviously something wrong with you.
Check it out below.
Rdio made the date of its demise official this morning. The streaming music service as we know it will cease to exist on December 22 — just six days from today — at 5 p.m. Pacific time. Rdio sent around an email to its users to let them know the specifics of the shutdown.
“Rdio is being acquired, and the service is shutting down worldwide on December 22,” the company wrote on its Goodbye page. “We’re excited to bring great music experiences to even more listeners in the future as part of the Pandora team.”
Apple convinced us we couldn’t live without a smartphone. Now many of us have a smartphone in hand and Apple may be facing the curse side of the blessing — finding new customers for the iPhone.
Credit Suisse recently issued a report to investors that further fuels speculation that iPhone sales will dip for the first time since Apple introduced it in 2007. The upshot: Smartphone ownership is approaching 100 percent. We’re nearing “peak smartphone.”
Tired of the same old boring wallpaper on your shiny new iPhone 6s or 6s Plus?
You can now grab a cool app that will let you put one of up to 40 different animated images on your iPhone lock screen that you can animate with 3D Touch.
Here’s how to make it happen.
George Hotz made a name for himself at 17 years-old as the first person to hack the iPhone, but his next project could be headed on a collision course with Apple’s self-driving car.
Using affordable electronics that any nerd on the street can purchase, Hotz revealed that he hacked an Acura ILX to become a self-driving car. The hack uses a lidar system on the roof with cameras mounted on the front and back that plug into a computer in the glove box. To top it off, Hotz added a 21.5-inch touch screen to the dash, and replaced the gear shift with a joy stick controller.
“Modern cars are very electronic and computer,” Hotz told Bloomberg. “If you ask me, I know a bit about cars, but I’m not a car guy. I’m a computer guy. Cars are computers.”
If you’ve been waiting to check out Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs movie (and, based on the dismal box office figures, people certainly haven’t rushed out to theaters), you’ve got a couple more months before you can watch it from the comfort of your own home.
The internet is a scary place where protecting your data and privacy can be a lifelong endeavor. It’s an endeavor made a lot easier by getting a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and right now we’ve got a bundle of hundreds of dollars worth of online security and spam protection from ProXPN, that can all be yours for whatever you’re willing to pay. A part of all proceeds go to the good work of Save the Children, so you can add the good feeling of helping the needy to your newfound sense of online security.
iPhone ranks as the no. 1 consumer tech gadget on Google’s newly-released “Year of Search” list, beating Samsung’s Galaxy S6 as the smartphone we were, apparently, all looking for this year.
Apple and IBM today announced that they have hit their partnership goal of creating more than 100 IBM MobileFirst iOS enterprise apps together. These so far cover 14 different industries and 65 individual professions — ranging from wealth advisors to flight attendants, first responders, nurses and retail buyers.
And the two companies aren’t finished yet!
Australian banks including Westpac, ANZ and Macquarie have announced that they will soon accept contactless payments made via Android Pay — although would-be Apple Pay customers are still being left out in the cold.
The reason? Banks still aren’t happy with Apple’s terms for its mobile payments solution, and showing that they are willing to accept Android Pay is a way of forcing a better deal with Apple.
Apple is allegedly using its secretive new lab facilities in Taiwan to develop microLED displays which are thinner and more energy-efficient than the displays currently used in the company’s products, a new report states.
Two years after it acquired Topsy, a San Francisco-based firm offering Twitter analytics to companies, Apple has officially shut down the service.
“We’ve searched our last tweet,” Topsy has noted on its official Twitter account. Topsy’s website redirects to an Apple support page detailing how users can use search features on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
Poor Jeb Bush. He can’t even discuss the Apple Watch and its shortcomings without coming off as overly exasperated.
“It’s not as intuitive as the other Apple products,” he said in a recent video interview with Business Insider. “The battery gives out too quick,” he continued, exhibiting the kind of head-bobbing body language he usually reserves for queries about his flailing presidential bid or Donald Trump’s oversimplified answers to complex questions.
Pac-Man is a touchstone of gamer nostalgia, and Hipster Whale (the dynamic duo behind runaway hit Crossy Road) has created one of the best spin-offs yet: Pac-Man 256.
Better yet, it looks like the free-to-play endless runner cum dot muncher is now available on your high-def living room screen via the Apple TV itself.
Whether you play it fast or slow, Quadrantic might become your new puzzling obsession.
The newly released game, which is available for a mere $0.99, takes the time-honored puzzle-game tradition of arranging things in groups of three and throws in some strategy and a surprisingly intense timed mode just to keep things interesting.
But the concept is simple, and once you start playing it, it’s really hard to put down.
After some controversies and embarrassing missteps, social-media giant Facebook is introducing tools to let its users go by the names they most identify with.
The tools it’s rolling out today will change up both how account owners can both report on and respond to real-name challenges.
Notification Center on OS X seems like a great idea, most of the time, until you get a ton of notifications about things you really don’t care about all at once. You’ve got to click all the little “close” boxes, or click and drag the Notification banners to the right. It can be downright disconcerting.
You can turn on Do Not Disturb for 24 hours, after which it’ll default back to “Disturb.” You can hack your way in and turn off the feature altogether, but then you wouldn’t be able to see any Notifications, ever.
If you want the best of both worlds–Notifications that you can open the Center to see but that don’t pop onto your screen all the time–check out this cool tip.
Your smart life is about to get even smarter with a new set of software development tools that will let coders include world-class speech recognition and natural language processing — the same stuff that powers Siri, Apple’s personal digital assistant — to thermostats, refrigerators, apps and, yes, even robots.
The folks at Nuance have created a new system, currently in beta, to allow any company to include code with language commands that are specific to their hardware or apps. It’s called Nuance Mix, and anyone can sign in and create their own speech-recognition code to work with their apps or connected devices.
“Any developer, big or small, can come in and define a custom set of use cases,” Nuance’s Kenn Harper told Cult of Mac during a demo of the SDK. “You’re going to start talking to everything at home and work — speech is about to get more ubiquitous.”
You no longer have to rely on third-party apps to track your fitness on a Pebble watch. Pebble is today rolling out a new update that adds Pebble Health, a new fitness and sleep tracking feature that wants to help you become fitter and healthier.
I would love a smart wallet that doubles my money. Tuck in a five spot and boom! Alexander Hamilton.
That would be a magic wallet. A good smart wallet, though, can help protect you from losing your money.
At least, that is the idea behind the ultra-thin Ekster Smart Wallet, which provides RFID blocking to keep credit cards secure and has a GPS tracking device that communicates with a smartphone app when the wallet is out of range or even lost.
With his ability to fire people up and get them motivated, Steve Jobs has been likened to a great football coach. And now to bring things full circle, a real football coach (or “soccer” to you American readers!) is using Jobs’ creation, the iPad, to help coach his players.
The coach in question is Gary Neville, who a new report claims has distributed iPads to the Valencia football team to teach them strategies on the pitch, while covering up for his lack of fluency in Spanish.
Many offices have become a den of ninjas, hiring those who are nimble and efficient in things like coding, spreadsheets, graphic design, analytics, you name it. Staying sharp along a broad range of skills is key to staying marketable, and with more than 100 lessons that’s what the eduCBA bundle is all about. It’s just in time for your new year’s resolution to up your game at the office — now you’ll be ready the time comes to choose your weapon, er, workstation. The eduCBA bundle normally goes for over $2,000, but right now you can get access for just $39.
Hit-and-miss Apple analyst Gene Munster has admitted he couldn’t have been more wrong about the likely customer uptake of Apple’s iPhone Upgrade Program, the $32+ per month scheme designed to get new iPhones into the hands of people happy to pay a monthly fee to Apple.
Microsoft has given its Outlook iOS app an overhaul — offering iPhone 6s owners the chance to use 3D Touch to create new emails and events, or access the calendar directly.
Apple has bought a former chip fabrication plant in North San Jose — shelling out $18.2 million for a 70,000 square-foot facility next door to Samsung Semiconductor’s new campus in the area.