You local coffee shop might finally start accepting Apply Pay this week, thanks to the official launch of Square’s new card readers that support NFC payments, as well as new chip-and-pin debit cards.
If you’ve played with one of the many palm-sized, office-friendly drones on the market, you know they can be more than a little squirrely. SKEYE has made a mini drone that’s a whole lot more stable — the trick was adding another pair of rotors. It’s a major upgrade for an already crazy fun toy, and you can get one for just $45. Get an additional 15% all drones with coupon code: DRONE15.
Destructive YouTuber TechRax is like the Tyler Durden id to our tech-loving superego — constantly wanting to destroy something beautiful because, you know, who hasn’t briefly wondered what would happen if you stuck your iPhone in a lava lamp or if you used to magnets to crush a $10,000 Apple Watch Edition?
TechRax’s latest stunt? Shoving an Apple Pencil in an electric pencil sharpener. Check it out below.
Google has teamed up with Disney and Verizon to develop a new virtual reality series in celebration of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The story ties directly into the new movie, and Google Cardboard owners can enjoy it on December 2 — but there’s more to check out today!
U.K. MasterCard customers in London can take advantage of a great Apple Pay promotion right now — with the ability to use London’s tubes, buses and trains for free for the next four Mondays, starting today.
If you’re like me, you’re playing Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic RPG Fallout 4 a lot lately. And that probably means you’ve stumbled across a lot of retro CRT monitors that have quasi-Unix systems running on them.
OS X? It’s also a quasi-Unix system. It runs off of a Unix base, which is accessible through the Terminal app.
And if you want Terminal to look like Fallout 4? Just download this app.
The real Steve Jobs would have been “appalled” at being the subject of a movie biopic like Steve Jobs, claims Pixar and Walt Disney Animation president Ed Catmull in a new interview.
Check out Catmull’s comments about the unfortunate box office bomb below.
Pebble has slashed up to 35 percent off its latest smartwatches ahead of the holiday season. Its new Pebble Time can now be had for $129.99 — down from $199.99 — while the Pebble Classic can be had for just $69.99.
Apple’s string of brick-and-mortar Apple Store openings in China is set to continue with the upcoming opening of its new Chaoyang Joy City shopping mall store in Beijing.
Apple’s fifth Beijing store will open its doors next weekend, Sunday November 29 at 10am local time.
You know how you can plug your Apple Pencil into the Lightining Port of your iPad Pro to charge it?
Wouldn’t it be great it you could charge your iPhone the same way?
A self-driving Apple Car may not yet be a reality, but that didn’t stop a Bangkok taxi driver from travelling two hours to return a passenger’s lost iPhone, which they had left in the back of his taxi cab.
“On my birthday on Wednesday just before midnight, [the driver] showed up at my hotel to return my phone. He’s a badass good guy,” said grateful iPhone owner Fraser Morton, after being reunited with his handset.
Attention, foodies and nutrition-istas! Successful Kickstarter SITU, a smart scale for iPad, has just added a couple of neat new features for its iOS app — while also getting a reduction in prices ahead of Black Friday.
Given that ex-Apple employee creator Michael Grothaus credits Cult of Mac readers with making the invention a reality, how could we not cover it?
The more we carry our music and audio programs in our pockets, the more those pesky headphone cables get in the way, or give way to fray. REMXD’s On-Ear Bluetooth Headphones offer full-spectrum sound unbound by wires, at an unbeatable price. You can get your hands on one of these hands-free sets for $35.99.
The Spider-Man drawing above was created entirely on the iPad Pro using Procreate and the Apple Pencil. After many years, my love of drawing has been reignited and transported to the digital age.
If you want to lose weight, your Apple Watch can help you sustain healthy habits, but it can’t actually monitor your progress. For that you need to step onto scales.
Any scale will measure your weight, but that is only part of the story. Whether you are dieting or bulking up, it is just as important to keep track of your body fat. The trouble is, this is notoriously hard to measure accurately. As I discovered when I bought a new Withings Smart Body Analyzer, if you think you already know your body fat percentage, you are probably way off.
This week: get your mace and taser ready for Black Friday! We share some of the best deals on MacBooks, iPhones, Playstation 4s, Xbox One’s, Wii U’s and more. Plus: why your Mac store apps could be corrupted (and what to do about it); RDIO bites the dust; and the iPad Mini 4 proves far better than we originally thought.
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. Build a beautiful website quick at Squarespace.com, and enter offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10% off.
JavaScript is one of the most essential languages underpinning the modern internet. It’s an invaluable entry on anyone’s resume, and with this bundle of 10 JavaScript development courses you’ll be able to claim that knowledge with confidence. What’s more, you can pay whatever you want for the whole thing, and 10 % of anything you pay goes to the good work over at Project Hope, which delivers essential medicines and supplies, health expertise and medical training to aid in disasters, prevent disease, promote wellness and save lives around the world.
They year of Apple Pay is nearly over, but the company is continuing to make its contactless payments push with a new guided tour video for iPhone users.
The new video details how iPhone owners can use Touch ID to verify payments both at physical payment terminals, as well as via shopping apps on iOS. There’s also a walk through on how to manage and setup new cards through the Wallet app.
Take the full tour below:
If you’ve ever tried to charge your laptop at the airport, you know that wall outlets are in demand like never before. ChargeTech’s portable power outlet means you’ll never be far from an outlet even if they’re all taken up or there’s not a wall around. It’s a game changer for anyone who needs a charge when they travel or go about their day, and you can get one now for only $139.99.
Many, many more Black Friday ads have come out since our last roundup, so we’re back with a new batch of top TV picks for 2015. Walmart and Target are currently leading the pack with screens both big and small, but who will ultimately take the top spot? Be sure to bookmark this page; you never know when a new ad will knock one of these off the list!
The new Apple TV’s Siri Remote is great, except for all of those times that it isn’t.
We’ve run afoul of the remote’s touchpad a few times; it’s fine for navigating (and less fine for entering passwords), but sometimes it does its job too well. For example, we can’t even count the number of times we’ve been watching a movie and accidentally nudged the pad, sending our show scrubbing all willy-nilly into the past or future.
It’s pretty annoying, but luckily, Apple thought so, too, so it gave us a couple ways to fix that mistake when it happens. The company could have just disabled the touchpad while things were playing, but we’re not engineers.
These two fixes are the next best options.
It’s one week away from Black Friday, and in addition to our killer live blog with up-to-the-minute deals, we’ve got a new magazine with all sorts of quirky products that our loving reviewers have taken the time to get to know.
We’ve got a funky clip-on lampshade for your iPhone, a Pro Tip to max out your iPhone battery, a conceptual piece on how Apple could fix the next version of its wristband, a secret messaging app that pulls in 1 million downloads every day, and (of course) our weekly gabfest about all things Apple, The Cultcast.
Here’s the rundown of what we’ve got for you in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine.
The flagship speaker from Sonos has been revamped, redesigned and relaunched. The result is awesome.
The new Play:5 is a big, beefy speaker that sounds absolutely wonderful. It’s available in stores today, and although it’s not cheap, I’d recommend you go out and get one. Or two. Stereo is even better.
The war between iPhone and Android will wage on for years to come, but in this week’s Friday Night Fight, we’re not going to be bickering about which is best. At least not in terms of design, features, flexibility — and the other things normally discussed during a platform war.
Instead, we’re battling it out over the supposed class divide — the notion that the wealthy only buy iPhones, and the poor only buy Android because they can’t afford that Apple logo. It’s going to be a fun one!
So, join us below for one of our hottest Friday Night Fights yet, and be sure to weigh in at the end!
Harvard classmates Lei Guo and Oliver Hayen created what could have been just another messaging app. They knew they had something unique, as every app development team claims, so they put it in the hands of 2,000 people and hit launch.
Within 30 days, their app SOMA Messenger had 10 million users and has been growing since. They’d love to brag about who is using it, except they can’t because of security measures built into the app that prevents even them from knowing SOMA’s users.