Cult of Mac

When it comes to smartwatch sales, Apple Watch has well and truly embarrassed the entire Android Wear ecosystem, even though it hasn’t spent anywhere near as long on the market. But with Google’s platform getting a high-profile supporter this week, is it time for change?

TAG Heuer’s new Connected is the first smartwatch from a luxury watchmaker, giving consumers a high-end alternative to the Apple Watch. It has beautiful hardware, great specifications, and even comes with an upgrade program that lets buyers swap it for a traditional TAG watch when it’s no longer useful.

So, is this the device Android Wear needs to mount a threat against Apple’s popular wearable?

Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we battle it out over that very question!

Tim Cook has weighed in on the Apple Store accused of racially discriminating against six black students who were barred from the store because security felt that they might steal something.

In an email sent to all Apple employees this morning the CEO called the situation ‘unacceptable.’ Cook said he thinks the Highpoint store issue was an isolated incident, but notified employees that leadership teams will be ‘refreshing their training on inclusion and customer engagement,’ starting with Australia.

Read Cook’s full email below:

The iPad Pro’s display is huge. 5.6 million pixels huge.

It’s hard to comprehend just how gigantic a display with ‘78% more display area than the iPad Air 2’ is, so developer Dennis Munsie put it into the perspective by showing that there’s actually more pixels inbetween the iPad Pro’s app icons, than there are on the entire display of the original iPhone.

Check it out:

Dubai has the world’s tallest buildings. While this may boost national pride in the United Arab Emirates, it also raises worry among the city’s firefighters. How do you fight a fire more than 1,000 feet up?

Jetpacks, of course.

The sparkling UAE city will be the first in the world to have emergency responders trained in using jetpacks to combat fires in the taller buildings.

Apple decided to take on Flipboard with the addition of the company’s News app in iOS 9, but according to publishers, the news aggregation service has been a huge disappointment so far.

Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp ripped the serviced last week, and based on a report from DigiDay, other top publishers are also frustrated with the traffic they’re getting from the service that’s only been out for two months.

JJ Abrams has been doing a bad job at keeping his promise not to release anymore trailers until Star Wars: The Force Awakens hit theaters next month.

A new trailer debuted online last night for the highly-anticipated movie and while it doesn’t have as many new scenes as the international trailer that dropped a few weeks ago, there are a couple interesting new bits, like Finn fighting a stormtrooper with some type of electric anti-lightsaber baton.

We’ve created GIFs of all of the new scenes so you can obsess over all the details:

For gamers of a certain age, there are few things as familiar and full of memories as the look and feel of the Super Nintendo controller. Those golden days of gaming are 30 years in the past, but they’re not gone. In fact, they’re still here and better than ever with 8Bitdo’s SNES30 Bluetooth Game Controller, a classic in the remaking that you can get your hands on for $29.95.

Watch snobs say the Apple Watch could never be a true collector’s items. But there is one Apple Watch charger guaranteed to be a pricey collectible.

It is saucer-shaped, gold in color and encrusted with 1,000 Swarovski crystals. Act now and you could own one of 10 for $5,000.

Apple’s first brick-and-mortar retail store in Singapore is one step closer, with Cupertino hiring staff to man its next Apple Store expansion.

The company’s website lists 14 job postings for the store, with positions including business manager, business specialist, and Apple Store leader. The retail store itself is expected to open in 2016.

It’s just six weeks until Christmas, and Apple’s hoping to convince you that it’s the company you should be turning to for help with your festive shopping — courtesy of its 2015 holiday season gift guide.

To make things even better, Apple today started offering free holiday shipping in the U.S, Canada, Europe and select other regions to make your shopping (whether it’s for yourself or others) a tiny bit more affordable.

Apple is considering using iMessage to make it easy for iOS to transfer users money to one another, according to a new report.

Given iMessage’s high level of encryption and existing popularity among users (particularly millennials), it makes perfect sense that Apple would use the software — rather than developing a completely new app — to further its mobile payment ambitions.

The Apple Watch is still being rolled out around the world, but according to the chairman of Quanta Computer, a.k.a. the company which builds Apple’s debut wearable device, a sequel is very much in the works.

Apple may be about to broker a deal with Samsung, which would see the South Korean tech giant exclusively supply Apple with OLED panels.

According to a new report, Samsung is currently expanding its OLED production capacity on the basis that a deal with Apple is “on the fast track.” A source claims that negotiations are progressing rapidly, and that Samsung may end up building a dedicated OLED facility with the sole purpose of supplying to Cupertino.

Apple Music may be gaining an edge over rival companies like Spotify thanks to its remuneration of artists — but in a new interview, the artist currently known as Prince inexplicably blames Cupertino for musicians making no money on the Internet.

“Tell me a musician who’s got rich off digital sales,” Prince told the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, adding that, “Apple’s doing pretty good though, right?”

Because, as everyone knows, all of Apple’s money comes from withholding royalty payments for “Purple Rain,” right?

Apple has confirmed that it will shut down its Beats Music streaming service on November 30. The news comes just days after Apple Music finally arrived on Android, and users are being encouraged to switch over to its new platform.

We’re all excited to start unlocking the full potential of the iPad Pro, but we have a problem: We can’t really start doing that until we can get our hands on the Apple Pencil stylus that the company swears will change how we draw virtual lines forever. As of this writing, it’s showing a four to five week wait for shipping, and that’s up from the one to two weeks we saw when the peripherals first went on sale.

So if you have an iPad Pro to play around with but aren’t sure what to do while you wait for your awesome stylus to show up, we have your back.

Tim Cook is so bullish on Apple Pay, the CEO predicted that the next generation of children “will not know what money is”, on a recent visit to the across the pond.

The death of cash will happen sooner than expected, says Cook who told students at Trinity College Dublin that their kids will have no idea what the dead presidents were all about.

If you’re one of the lucky ones to get your hands on a big, beautiful iPad Pro, you might be surprised that many of the same OS X keyboard shortcuts, like the ones for cut, paste, find, etc., are available right on your new giant laptop replacement.

The iPad Pro keyboard has a Command key on it, as do several third-party keyboards.

If you’re already a Mac user (and you should be), you’ll feel right at home when you need to create a new document in Pages, make your text bold or italic, or even show the word count in a document. Here are several key combinations you can use right out of the box.

Apple’s massive iPad Pro tablet is finally getting into the hands of the waiting public, and now all that remains is the small matter of how to make the most of its 13-inch screen.

The company has been pushing its new hardware to creators and enterprise. And while we’re guessing that most artists and professional designers and artists who already owned iPads have a favorite app or two, newbies picking up the latest for its huge screen and fancy Apple Pencil stylus might be at a loss with where to look.

Here are some of our picks for iPad Pro apps to start getting your creati-on.

InstaAgent, a third-party app for users to track visitors to their Instagram feeds, was pulled out of app stores by both Apple and Google after an iOS developer discovered the app was stealing people’s logins and passwords.

If you have InstaAgent on your smartphone – and reportedly half a million of you do – delete it immediately.

iPad Pro Diray, Day One: Instead of writing a long and boring product review, I’m going to try something new with the iPad Pro. I’m pulling a Tim Cook: I’m using it as my main and only machine for a while. I’ll be keeping a diary of how it goes.

In fact, I’m typing this on it.

The question everyone is asking — and it’s Apple’s pitch for the Pro — is that this a bone fide computer. It’s not a silly tablet any more. It’s a heavy duty tool for Pros — a jackhammer for creatives.

I’m going to find out…

If you’ve called out, “Hey Siri” to your iPhone before, you know the joy of this Star Trek-style technology. You don’t even need to hold the Home button down. Sure, your iPhone needs to be plugged in, but it’s a pretty neat party trick.

Excitingly, you can do something similar on your Mac: activating dictation with a voice command. The next time you get a great idea and need to document it, you can just call to your Mac and dictate it right then. No pen, no paper, no walking all the way to your keyboard.

Here’s how.

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Social media is a key component for businesses of any size. Whether it’s a restaurant managing their Facebook page and Yelp reviews, or a massive corporation whose message must be coordinated and ultimately use social media to shift public opinion, there are a whole range of powerful tools available. Here we review a few of the free social media monitoring (SMM) options available to small and individual-run businesses, and the paid services for medium- and enterprise-scale companies.

We know Pope Francis is a fan of technology. He is on Twitter with 8 million followers and when in public, the guy never turns down a selfie request.

But His Holiness wants us all to put away our smartphones when seated at the dinner table.

Facebook continues to embrace virtual reality (VR) on its ubiquitous social networking platform with 360-degree video support for iOS. Zuckerberg’s big blue is also opening up its VR platform to advertisers, like AT&T, Corona , Samsung, and Walt Disney World, in the form of “immersive stories.”