Another week, another Cult of Mac Magazine – the best place to get your Apple fix in one place.
This week, we’ve got quick tips to speed up your iPhone and Apple Watch, our take on the stupidity of killing the iPhone’s headphone jack, new how-tos for Apple Music and Apple TV, a hilarious bit of Star Wars fever that Siri’s picked up, and the latest rumors about iPhone 6c and iPhone 7. That not enough? There’s tons more inside.
Here’s the rundown for this week’s cover stories:
The iPad lineup has seen a ton of changes since Apple introduced its first tablet in 2010. Not only have the form factors evolved ever so slightly, but the internal components have pushed the product line from a cool reading/gaming device into a powerhouse machine that can replace your laptop.
To see just how much iPad has progressed, EverythingApplePro created a speed test using every iPad ever made. It’s no surprise that the iPad Pro comes out on top, but the original iPad off a shocker by beating some of its successors.
Check it out:
Maybe you played with Lego bricks as a kid and moved into adulthood building with computer graphics, steal and concrete. Lego always promised it could inspire future builders.
Now the toymaker loved around the world is looking for someone who still likes to hit the bricks. Lego is looking for a master model builder for a new Legoland Discovery Center in Michigan and is holding a two-day tryout next month to find the perfect candidate.
Dropbox has announced that it is killing its Carousel and Mailbox apps in early 2016.
The company says it will use what it has learned from these products to improve its core Dropbox service, and to increase its focus on Paper, the tool that allows you to create new documents and collaborate on them in real-time in the cloud.
Understanding and working with data is key to how organizations large and small make and measure their impact. Mastering data can give you new insights and make you an invaluable asset to any team. If you’re intimidated by the thought of big numbers and spreadsheets, this massively discounted collection of lessons will give you the solid grounding you need to work with data like a maestro, covering the essentials of extracting, managing, and analyzing data. It’s a comprehensive bundle of lessons going for just $39 at Cult of Mac Deals.
I’m not usually a big fan of third-party iOS keyboards because they’re often clumsy and perform worse than iOS’s default keyboard. But I like Slash Keyboard. It’s fast, it’s accurate, and it allows you to search for and insert nearly anything on the web – GIFs, stickers, YouTube videos, Foursquare locations, you name it — into an email or text message, without once changing screens.
It’s hardly speculation to suggest that, as soon as Apple is rumored to be entering a new area of production, every manufacturer with capacity wants to get in on the new opportunities.
The latest example of this is Japan Display, which is reportedly in the early stages of converting one of its factories in Ishikawa factory into an test production line to try and win iPhone orders when Apple switches to using OLED displays in the near future.
Given its slowing sales and the continued record smashing of its iPhone brethren, it’s easy to think of the iPad as the “also ran” of Apple’s iOS devices.
In fact, people continue to talk about the iPad an enormous amount — more than any other topic in tech, if you believe Twitter’s freshly-released list of 2015’s top trending topics.
Reports that iPhone 6s production may be slower than expected may be plain wrong, if you go by the record earnings one iPhone supplier recorded last month.
Catcher Technologies supplies the metal casings for the iPhone 6s. In November it recorded sales on $254 million — representing an increase of 1.4 percent from the previous month, and a massive 50.3 percent increase from this time last year.
There’s no doubting that Apple’s “Find my iPhone” feature can be pretty useful at times. But a recent story highlights the feature’s potential dark side — as a family was attacked after a group of people knocked on their door, erroneously claiming their lost handset was inside the family’s home.
We’ve heard plenty of conflicting reports about when we should expect a new smaller, 4-inch iPhone “c” from Apple, but Piper Jaffray’s resident Apple analyst Gene Munster suggests that Cupertino would be wasting its time by releasing a sequel to 2013’s iPhone 5c.
Why? Because, Munster claims, customers don’t really want smaller handsets at all.
The Japanese Apple Store in Tokyo’s upmarket Ginza district had to be evacuated and a promotional event canceled over the weekend after it received a bomb threat.
From a photography app with a difference to a math training app with human curation and a fantastic classic iOS puzzle game going free, we’ve sifted through this week’s most exciting apps to bring you the ones you absolutely need to download now.
Check out our picks below. Trust us, this is the way you want to spend Sunday!
Drones are becoming so common and easy to use that they’re almost impossible to break. Take the Micro Drone 2.0+ with HD-Camera: Inverted Flight Edition — just toss the thing into the air and it’ll automatically right itself, no matter the angle. Want to fly it upside down? It’s cool with that, in fact that’s what it’s built for. It’s an acrobat of a drone that’ll make your jaw drop, and so will the price, just $99.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.
The magic of the Magic Flute is its ability to do two things with equal aplomb.
On the one hand, it is a solidly built hand pump that lets you fill your bike tire the old-fashioned way. On the other, it is a handy CO2 cartridge adapter that lets you fill your tire quickly without the need for elbow grease.
Back in June, Apple’s Eddy Cue promised that iTunes Match – Apple’s song matching service that syncs local music files to the iCloud for streaming anytime – would soon phase out its 25,000 track limit in favor of 100,000 tracks.
Sadly, we haven’t heard anything more about that since. But Apple might now be soft-launching the higher 100,000 track limit.
If you’re a Verizon customer who wants to be able to make Wi-Fi calls on your Android or iPhone like your brethren over at Ma Bell, you’ll soon be able to. But if you’re on an iPhone, you’ll have to wait until 2016.
Though Apple spends far less on research and development than the competition, they out-innovate them all. How? Catch the discussion on this episode of The CultCast. Plus: iPhone 7 may ditch the beloved headphone jack; Amazon Video is coming to Apple TV; the holiday accessory that could be eroding your WiFi signal; and with the year drawing to a close, we choose we our favorite Apple device of 2015!
Our thanks to Lynda for supporting this episode. Lynda is like the Apple Music of online education, with over 3000 expert-taught video courses you can stream straight to computer or mobile device. Learn how to use Logic’s new super powerful Alchemy synth, or develop Mac apps for OS X—learn all you want for free for 10 days at lynda.com/cultcast.
Still have a few names on your list for holiday shopping, or worried about going over your gifting budget? If any of them are Apple users, we’ve found three sure-to-please peripherals that are as useful as they are cool. The best part? They’re all less than 30 dollars.
There are so many iPhone apps for runners, it’s hard to decide which one to use. Should you go for a familiar brand like Nike, or a specialist like Runkeeper?
Ultimately, all running apps do pretty much the same thing: They use GPS to track how far and how fast you run. But when you take a closer look, their features and prices vary considerably. So I’ve done the leg work for you, to help you find the right running app faster.
The fifth-grader who just last year was at least one grade behind in math is now a year ahead and helping his classmates. Sebastian Johnson’s grasp and meteoric understanding of math did not happen because of the tutor he met with twice each week.
It was, his father Fred said, because of an iPad app called Tabtor Math, a tutoring program that assesses skills, analyzes learning snags and designs a personalized curriculum to raise math proficiency in students grades K-8.
If you’re still subscribed to Beats Music instead of Apple Music, your days are numbered. Until January 19, you have the opportunity to save all of your playlists and migrate your account data over to Apple Music if you wish to do so. But after that, Apple will discard of your current data.
Drone footage of the progress being made on Apple Campus 2 has given us our first look at the underground auditorium where Apple will unveil all of its magical new products in the future.
The new auditorium won’t be visible once construction is complete, but thanks to Duncan Sinfield’s latest 4K aerial footage of the project, we can see how huge the new auditorium will be once Apple finally moves in.
Check it out:
Apple has famously killed popular technologies when it believes they’re past their best — and it could be gearing up to kill one more. According to recent rumors, next year’s iPhone 7 will ship without the 3.5mm headphone jack in favor of a thinner form factor.
Understandably, a lot of fans are unhappy about that prospect, which would mean all our existing headphones wouldn’t be compatible with the next iPhone — at least not without a (pricey) adapter. But could it be a move that pays off in the long run? Are there pros that outweigh the cons?
Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we battle it out over these questions and more!
It’s hard to find the best games out there. Every month, there’s a list as long as, well, a really long list of games on iOS that you might like but might actually suck.
Even the sheer volume of the vaunted Editor’s Choice picks can get overwhelming.
That’s why we’re here — to give you a leg up in finding just the right number of the very best new iOS games you can find on the App Store, without all the weeding you’d need to do just to find them on your own.
Here are our five favorite games from the month of November.