There’s not much time left to buy gifts but still plenty of amazing deals in the Cult of Mac Store to check out. If you’re looking for some new techy toys or tools that are guaranteed to please, let us make it a little easier on you. Have a look at the five best deals on gadgets and gear from 2015 on sale now:
For many of us, Christmas is a time for relaxing with family, sitting in front of the TV, overindulging and generally moving as little as possible. In other words, all the things your Apple Watch hates you doing.
So if you have a nice streak going in the Activity app, chances are it is about to come to an abrupt end. And that may not be a bad thing.
You know how it is: You press and hold the Home button to set a quick timer and Siri comes back all loud, “OK! Setting the timer! I’m in suspense!”
Or some such nonsense. Sure, you want to confirm that Siri’s not, say, adding an event to your calendar or calling your Aunt Tilly instead of setting a timer, but maybe you don’t need Apple’s AI helper to be all chatty about it.
Here’s how you can tamp down Siri’s sometimes-annoying banter.
Happy holidays, everyone! No matter what you celebrate (or don’t), we’ve got a ton of great stuff in the latest issue of Cult of Mac Magazine, right here for you.
There’s a sneak peek inside Apple’s secret design studio to start you off, plus the best games for your Mac from 2015, a deep dive on what the management shake-up means for you, how to maximize your MacBook trade-in, a look at new Siri-style voice technologies coming down the pike, and a bunch of how-tos and tips to keep you rocking all the way through your season.
Here’s the rundown this week:
Tim Cook will sat down for a wide-ranging interview with 60 Minutes host Charlie Rose for Sunday night’s episode inside Apple HQ, and it appears that the two will have a heated exchange about Apple’s tax practice.
In a preview of the interview released this afternoon, Tim Cook defended Apple’s tax policies, noting that the company pays more taxes in the United States than anyone. Rose also prodded Cook about the company’s massive pile of cash stashed overseas, asking why the CEO doesn’t bring all that money back home.
“It would cost me 40% to bring it home, and I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to do,” replied Cook, before launching into a rant against the US tax code that was built for the industrial age and not the digital age.
Watch the heated exchange below:
The ONAGOfly is a quadcopter like all the rest – four props and an onboard camera that records video at heights once the domain of TV news choppers.
But you don’t need to stand back to launch the ONAGOfly – not when the palm of your hand will do for a launch pad.
You can track your every mogul experience, tree run and back-scratcher with this tiny disc of a tracker attached to your skis or snowboard.
Using inertial and GPS sensors packed into a miniature hockey puck package (with all-day battery life), the Trace tracker captures all the stats you need to give you the ultimate playback of your day in the powder.
Target is reportedly looking to become a player in the mobile wallet game. The fourth largest retailer in the U.S. would be joining a market that’s quickly becoming pretty crowded. The next mobile payment solution on your smartphone very well could be Target Pay, though it can’t be confirmed at this time.
Very few outsiders have been inside Apple’s Industrial Design Studio, the amazingly creative product lab behind the company’s blockbuster hardware.
That may change this weekend, when 60 Minutes broadcasts a tour of the design lab. Apple’s lead designer, Jony Ive, gave journalist Charlie Rose a peek at the facility earlier this year — and his report airs this Sunday.
But you can take a tour of Apple’s secret Industrial Design studio right now. A virtual one, anyway.
Drones of any size, especially if it carries a camera, usually mean dropping big bucks on a big bird. This miniature flier is an exception to the rule, with a built-in camera perfect for capturing aerial video and photos while fitting in the palm of your hand. It comes with a 2 gig memory card, and all for a mere $34.99.
Evernote’s efforts to streamline its business will see it chop a number of apps from its lineup, including the popular annotation app Skitch. Clearly, a browser extension for Google Chrome, is also getting the boot — as is Evernote’s Pebble app.
2015 brought us a souped-up Apple TV, so it’s great news that the same year yielded plenty of high-quality entertainment to watch on the fourth-generation device.
From tenured favorites like ’60s Madison Avenue masterpiece Mad Men to the arrival of smash hits like Mr. Robot, there was no shortage of great entertainment gracing our screens.
In our humble opinions, these were the best TV shows of 2015.
Apple Pay will finally arrive in China next year, and it’s going to have strong competition from day one. Just hours after Apple announced the expansion of its mobile payment service, Samsung confirmed its own will be following after it struck an almost identical deal with China UnionPay.
Big savings on Apple products have meant that Best Buy is increasingly living up to its name, but today’s iPhone deal may be one of the best yet for the cash-starved.
The retailer is selling the 16GB iPhone 6s for $1, while also throwing in a $200 gift card if you trade in a working iPhone 5 as part of the deal.
If you’re already bored of playing Christmas songs on repeat, there’s some good news — since Star Wars fans can now enjoy John William’s The Force Awakens soundtrack on iTunes and Apple Music.
71 percent of iOS users are using the latest version of the mobile operating system, according to stats released by Apple. Measured by visits to the App Store this week, the stats also show 21 percent of users are running iOS 8, while 8 percent are running previous versions of iOS.
60 Minutes viewers will get an early Christmas present this Sunday, as presenter Charlie Rose gets a rare peak inside Jony Ive’s design studio, while also receiving a tour of “Apple’s store of the future” from retail guru Angela Ahrendts.
After more than a year of calling it “top of the list” in the company’s priorities, Apple today announced that it is partnering with China UnionPay to bring Apple Pay to China, the country Tim Cook has been outspoken about calling Apple’s biggest market of the future.
I love wallet cases. I love the convenience of carrying everything together in one place. For over a year, I’ve exclusively used Overture folio-style wallet cases by Moshi — first a Sahara Beige model, now a Steel Black one.
I love the new one even more, because black goes with everything.
Scribblenauts Unlimited, the latest version of a fun game that’s been on one device or another since 2009, is headed to mobile.
Main character and magic notebook owner Maxwell’s got a sister, Lily, who he’s gotten cursed, thanks to his smart-ass ways. The pair go to see Edwin, one of the 40 other brothers and sisters of Maxwell and Lily (go figure), and find out that doing nice things for people is the only way to earn starite, the magical cure for Lily’s curse.
So there you are, watching Netflix, binging on some TV series that everyone’s talking about when you suddenly fall asleep. What happens? Netflix keeps playing, running through a few more episodes while you catch some Zs.
Imagine, though, having a garment — socks, for example — that can automatically detect when you fall asleep and pause that Netflix stream for you. How great would that be?
If you’re comfortable around a pair of knitting needles as well as an Arduino mini-computer controller, some IR hardware and a soldering gun, you just might be the kind of person who should make these socks for a last-minute holiday gift.
Apple made some promotions and tweaked the responsibilities of some of its managers Thursday. Companies do it all the time without much notice or disruption to the goods and services they create.
But this is Apple. Any change in the way it does business could ultimately change our experiences with its product. That is the point behind CEO Tim Cook shifting and shoring up duties for some of his closet managers.
Badland 2, the sequel to popular game that won Apple’s iPad Game of the Year award in 2013, is now available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.
The new fantasy adventure game comes just in time for Christmas, sending you on a wild ride through a dark alien wasteland full of flamethrowers, buzzsaws, lava, oil and more obstacles to thwart your progress.
Check out the full trailer:
Like iOS, OS X has its own Notifications Center to keep you abreast of all the stuff going on in your world, from calendar events to reminders.
Unlike iOS, OS X El Capitan defaults to a date sorting system that groups all your Notifications together by the date they were triggered. That’s super handy if you’re searching for a notification you got today, but don’t remember what app it came from. If, however, you want to sort by the app the notification is coming from, or–better yet–sort by date and app, you’re in luck.
Here’s how to choose a different option.
Apple seeded the first beta of iOS 9.2.1 to developers this morning, coming nearly a week after Apple dropped iOS 9.2 to the public.