Witnessing the ingenuity of app developers both small and large is a real highlight of my job writing about the Apple ecosystem. In that regard, 2015 didn’t disappoint: Some tremendous new apps got unleashed this year on both iOS and OS X.
Here are Cult of Mac’s picks for the absolute best apps of the year for iPhone, iPad and Mac.
The new year is here, but if you want your career to look any different you’re going to have to learn some new skills. We’ve collected some of the best deals on the lessons you need to keep that resolution to step up your professional game. Whether you’re looking to work with data, managing projects, master Microsoft Office or learn to develop games, we’ve got you covered.
We aren’t going to pretend we’re perfect, but that doesn’t mean we have no appreciation for the mistakes of others. They make us feel better about our own glaring flaws, and they also make for some good fodder for “weirdest of 2015” news roundups.
This year, we saw some really impressive corporate blunders as well as some head-slapping moments from Apple fans.
Aside from a few big developers, no-one much likes in-app purchases, which have long been used to ruin mobile gaming on iOS.
However, the parents of 7-year-old Faisall Shugaa probably like them less than most — after their son racked up almost $6,000 in IAP bills, including $2,200 spent in just one hour.
We’ve heard enough at this point to be pretty sure that a 4-inch iPhone 6c is coming, but how will it stack up against the last 4-inch iPhone, the iPhone 5s? Pretty well, according to a new report: You can expect better battery life, better performance and better security!
Smart upgraders know that when a major new version of iOS drops, older devices might want to think twice about updating. That advice isn’t much comfort to people on the iPhone 4s, though, who pulled the trigger on iOS 9, and saw their devices slow down as a result. Now, a class-action lawsuit is targeting Apple on behalf of iPhone 4s owners, arguing that Cupertino essentially crippled their phones with the update.
The iPhone may have fundamentally changed Google’s plans for its Android smartphone platform, but according to Google’s design chief, the iOS homescreen layout — consisting of grids of apps icons — is disappointingly stagnant.
“[The iPhone] crystallised a lot of other things that were kind of stayed even by that point, like the rows of icons, which don’t scale very well,” Matias Duarte, Google’s vice president of design, told Wired. “This idea of a tiny grid that you manually curate starts to feel very heavy and burdensome.”
We’re still waiting for an official decision from European Commission regulators about Apple’s alleged tax avoidance through its Irish subsidiary, but in the meantime the company has agreed to pay €318 million ($347 million) to settle a tax investigation in Italy.
Apple is focused on expanding into new markets, and after its success in China, it seems the next focus is on the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region.
According to analysts at Counterpoint Research, Apple saw its market share in the region climb 3.9 percent in the third quarter of 2015, compared to 2.2 percent during the same period one year earlier. Overall, iPhone shipments grew 133 percent on-year in 2015 to enter the top 5 smartphone brands in the area.
If you haven’t suffered Steve Jobs overload already (and the disappointing box office results for Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs suggests that many people have), Oscar winner Alex Gibney’s controversial feature-length Jobs documentary, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, debuts this Sunday on CNN.
An Atlanta man claims his iPhone 6 Plus caught fire when he was charging it in his home, setting his bed on fire in the process.
“There were sparks and flames,” said David Grimsley. “The whole apartment could have burned down.”
We’ve heard for years that Apple could incorporate OLED displays into next-generation iPhones, but over the past few months, those rumors have ramped up, suggesting that the power-sipping display technology could land as early as the iPhone 7.
Now, a new report buttresses those rumors, saying Apple is close to finalizing a supply agreement with Samsung and LG to give future iPhones OLED displays.
If you’ve ever tried to set a square photo as your lock screen or homes screen wallpaper, you know that iOS will zoom into the photo, resizing it to fit the entire iPhone screen.
This is fine with some images, but square ones, like the ones you save on Instagram or take with your iPhone’s square photo feature, just zoom in too far, obscuring much of the photo.
Here’s a quick and easy work around that will let you see the whole square photo when you use it as wallpaper.
Apple fans obsess over which new features will get added to the iPhone every year, but if the latest concept from designer Martin Hajek ever becomes a reality, the new iPhone will be more notable for the hardware it’s missing.
The iDot concept packs no camera, no internet connection, zero apps and minimal distractions, so you can focus on what’s really important instead of having your soul slowly sucked away by your iPhone screen.
Apple won’t tell you it makes the world’s best computing products. That’s because rhetoric doesn’t have the same power as seeing is believing.
Apple is showcasing the work of some of the more creative users of iMacs, iPads and iPhones in an advertising campaign called “Start Something New.”
An ancient breed of mountain sheep grew out their amazing to coats to bring us this amazing jacket.
Made of merino wool, the Icebreaker Stratus jacket is not only water-resistant, breathable and warm when wet, but it is also pretty much stink-free.
‘Tis the season to be jolly — or, if you’re a tech writer hoping to score enough clicks to help pay off the post-Christmas credit card, ’tis the season to label this the worst year for Apple since records began.
From Gizmodo’s restrained “Everything Apple Introduced This Year Kinda Sucked,” to The Verge calling this the year Apple spent in beta, to Bloomberg banging the “lemon of the year” gong for the Apple Watch, pundits aren’t exactly being kind to Cupertino as 2015 draws to a close.
But, you know what? They’re dead wrong. This was the most important year for Apple since 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone.
The holidays have come and gone, but the big deals live on, at least for a little while. The Cult of Mac Store still has plenty of awesome tools, toys and subscriptions priced to move, but they’re deals that won’t last for long. Now’s your last chance to take advantage of massive savings on everything from invincible Lightning cables to secure internet browsing.
Twitter has hired away Apple’s Director of Worldwide Inclusion & Diversity, Jeffrey Siminoff, who will join the microblogging company as its new VP of Diversity and Inclusion from January.
Pretty much everyone who met or worked with Steve Jobs has some anecdote about Apple’s late CEO that shines a light on an aspect of his personality and/or approach to life.
The latest is Evan Doll, co-founder of news reading app Flipboard, who worked at Apple from 2003 to 2009. In a series of tweets, Doll recalls the time Jobs was asked why Apple didn’t better remunerate its engineers.
Jobs’ response was classic Steve: part obfuscation, part passive-aggressive masterclass, all while subtly (or not-so-subtly) reminding the asker that they were lucky to be at Apple, and that it was their own fault if they weren’t being paid more.
User privacy has been a massive focus for Tim Cook during his time as CEO at Apple, but it’s apparently not an area of much concern for North Korea’s OS X ripoff RedStar OS.
The operating system, which borrows Apple’s “look and feel” but little else, is basically the “wet dream of a surveillance state dictator,” according to security researchers who analyzed RedStar OS.
Johny Srouji may only have been an Apple Senior Vice President for a hot minute, but already he’s reaping the benefits of his new position — courtesy of the festive awarding of restricted stock units currently valued at $9.6 million, plus common stock holdings worth $10.9 million.
If you’re anything like me, you find something compelling about an “endless clicker” game. There’s not a lot of gameplay or strategy in one of these time-wasters, but they’re fulfilling in some odd way.
Take my latest obsession: AdVenture Capitalist! Starting with a lemonade stand, you can work your way up to an oil magnate on Earth and then bust out of the atmosphere to take your industrious money gathering to Mars and the Moon.
It’s kind of ridiculous to just tap buttons to buy various industries like newspapers, pizza parlors, donut shops, and banks, but oddly soothing all the same. Here’s a quick video to give you a sense of the gameplay.
It looks like Kris Kringle spent quite a bit of time delivering iPhones and iPads this year. Apple still remains very much in the dominant position for the tech logo people find most under their Christmas trees. The company garnered almost half of the market share — 49.1 percent, to be exact — for device activations this holiday season, far ahead of the usual runner-up, Samsung.
Apple might need to play catch-up on virtual reality in the coming year. Oculus, Samsung and Sony are already promoting their own brand of VR headsets and technologies.
Virtual reality is the next big thing. As such, we undoubtedly will see a ton of it at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show. But one analyst already jumped in with his predictions about Cupertino’s chances for another hit product in the VR space.