Best List: Oppo HA-2 portable headphone amplifier and DAC

What kind of audiophile nerd do you have to be to shell out 300 clams to “improve” your iPhone audio? Well, that’s what it is going to cost you to convert your digital audio into analog goodness with style.

You can find cheaper options than the Oppo HA-2 portable headphone amplifier, but few as elegant and sleek.

This week on The CultCast: We take a look at Apple’s zany new Smart Battery Case; cover the new and notable in the watchOS, tvOS and iOS updates; and discuss our favorite strategies for managing overloaded inboxes.

Stick around till the end for our favorite iOS apps and games of 2015!

One of the best parts of modern tech is that you can take it anywhere. Not so great is how much traveling with technology can become complicated by, well, traveling, especially in the car. We’ve rounded up some of the best gift ideas for anyone who likes to get around and stay connected.

Consumers have a nasty habit of throwing out their electronics as soon as newer, shinier models become available, and they rarely ever do so properly. Nearly 42 million tons of e-waste — everything from microwaves and electric shavers to washing machines, laptops, cellphones, TVs and computer monitors — entered the global garbage stream in 2014, according to a United Nations University report.

Like all trash, this stuff doesn’t just disappear. Instead, it stacks up in landfills. Unlike most trash, however, e-waste is often packed with valuable components — as well as toxic chemicals and materials that can cause real damage wherever they end up.

You’d feel better if you could slap your boss. But common sense, workplace rules and a little thing called your bills remind you to check your rage.

A developer and a musician have teamed up to give us an authority figure we can slap silly. Will Capt. James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise do?

Apple releases a new iPhone 6 battery case and everyone hates it. Poor Apple.

This week, we chronicle the beating Apple’s Smart Battery Case takes from the internet, including a look at its insides, how the internet questions Jony Ive’s sanity, and the history of ‘humped’ design at Apple. That, plus accessories just as ugly as the new case, Apples updates to every OS it makes, the things we really don’t need in Apple Watch 2, and how to choose the right running app.

All this and much, much more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine. Check out the top stories below.

You have so much great video footage on your iPhone, but therein lies the problem. The thought of sitting down at a computer to edit any of it seems like a mountain you have no time to climb.

Cielo de la Paz is happy to help you reach the summit – rather quickly, too. de la Paz is a fearless creator whose soulful wanderings with her iPhone camera inspired Apple to select some of her work for the “Shot on iPhone 6” advertising campaign.

Quick! Get yourself over to the Google Store now, where you can claim a free Star Wars Cardboard, courtesy of Google. The limited edition headsets are themed to look like BB-8, a First Order Stormtrooper, Kylo Ren, and RS-D2 — but you can only pick one!

The carrier announced this morning that it’s having a huge ‘buy one get one free’ promotion that includes top of the line Android devices like the Samsung Galaxy S6, Galaxy Note 5, iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus.

Maps is shaping up to be a pretty great navigational tool with its tight integration in iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan, as well as with much more error-free data.

I use Maps as a sort of mobile, digital yellow pages, finding businesses in town and looking up their phone number, hours of operation, website address, and more. It’s a couple of taps in, which can seem tedious after a while.

Now, though, with an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus, you can get this info in a summarized form, using the new 3D Touch. Here’s how.

Unlike any other consumer electronics company, Apple has been nailing product design for decades. Jony Ive and his incredibly talented team have produced countless iconic gadgets that rivals can only dream of, and it’s the biggest reason why the company is so successful today.

But there are suggestions that Apple’s design prowess is beginning to slip away. Under new leadership, Apple has rolled out a number of products — most recently the butt-ugly Smart Battery Case — that have led some fans to question various design decisions.

Are those fans right to be concerned? Is it downhill from here for Apple’s design team, or is this a whole lot of fuss over nothing?

Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we battle it out over those questions and more — and weigh in with your thoughts down in the comments section!

The Apple Watch is the first major product to be launched without any involvement from Steve Jobs, but according to one of his long-time associates, the Apple cofounder was well aware that Jony Ive was working on a timepiece.

On Thursday at Glance Conf in San Francisco — the first Apple Watch conference ever — Tim Bajarin who had an on-and-off relationship with Jobs for over three decades, said Jobs had at least been told about the watch before he passed.

My truck’s getting up in years and lacks many of the conveniences of a late-model vehicle. Forget about an in-dash touchscreen monitor — it doesn’t even have a USB port.

That means I’m stuck using a cigarette lighter adapter to charge my iPhone (which serves as my GPS on many trips). I’ve tried and enjoyed Gosin’s four-port charger, which is awesome for those rare times I’ve got a handful of devices to juice up, but that portly wonder juts out fairly far into the truck’s cabin. Like my truck itself, it is functional but slightly unsightly.

And then there’s the svelte Scosche reVolt dual car charger. Its disarming good looks have ruined me.

Want a spectacular stat for a Friday? Apple stock has increased 22,250 percent since its IPO almost 35 years ago.

And the accompanying depressing thought: If you had taken the money a new Apple computer cost at the time and instead spent it on AAPL stock during its 1980 public offering, you’d be sitting on a personal fortune of $965,650 today — just a few dollars away from being a freshly-minted millionaire.

Infamous street artist Banksy has created a new mural of Steve Jobs to make a big statement about the Syrian refugee crisis that is causing a storm of controversy not only in Europe but the U.S. as well.

Banksy’s Steve Jobs mural depicts the Apple co-founder with a black bag slung over his left shoulder and an original Macintosh computer in his left. The artwork was sprayed on a wall in the Calais refugee camp called ‘the Jungle’ in northern France.

Here’s a closer look:

The days are ticking away until you’re expected to present that special someone in your life with a thoughtful gift. If you’re stressing out about what to get, or what you might end up paying, take a look at this list of awesome gifts available at a fraction of the usual price. From DIY electronics to bluetooth speakers and even world class socks, whoever you’re shopping for, we’ve got you covered.

Security firms Symantec and FireEye say that 2016 is set to usher in an increase in the number of attacks on Apple systems — following a rise in the quantity of threats to Mac computers, and the more-than-doubling of iOS malware in 2015.

Apple is selling an enormous amount of iPhones right now, but in its efforts to get an extra holiday sales bump it’s pushing an unsolicited pop-up notification to owners of older iPhone handsets — informing them of how “ridiculously powerful” the iPhone 6s is.

What’s the opposite of an iPad Pro? Presumably it would be an iPad con — and if a new scheme proposed by the U.K.’s Ministry of Justice comes to fruition, there could be a whole lot of them.

The proposed project aims to give prisoners taxpayer-funded iPads so that they can video chat with their families, while also improving their numeracy and literacy skills.

Couldn’t we at least pretend prison is designed as a punishment, and hand convicts cheap Android tablets as a deterrent instead?

Rumors that Apple might acquire portable camera maker GoPro caused a 16 percent increase in the latter company’s stock price yesterday — after GoPro shares had fallen 45 percent in the past few months.

When there are complaints about censorship in the App Store, it’s usually developers arguing that Apple shouldn’t have removed a particular app for infringing on its often-vague user guidelines.

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban had something else in mind, however, when he sent a series of tweets claiming that Apple should boot Twitter off the App Store — until the social networking company finds a way of better removing “objectionable” material from its service.

A new poll of the most-wanted technology from the Star Wars universe shows that fans may not have really thought their answers through.

The survey comes courtesy of Harris Poll and software developer myDevices and asks one question: “If you could have any technology from the Star Wars trilogy, which would you want?”

While we approve of the study ignoring the prequels completely, we aren’t sure about the winners because it sounds like what these fans are really requesting are amazing and spectacular deaths.

An update to HBO Go is a direct assault on your productivity.

The streaming service just added two new features that are sure to send you spiraling into a “just one more” death spin. The new features are Picture-in-Picture (for compatible devices running iOS 9) and autoplay, which is how you sit down to watch a single episode and then look up later to discover the sun has come up, and now you have to go to work.

The latest quarterly report from antivirus company AVG has outed the battery-killingest, storage-hoggingest apps currently available.

Some of the culprits are unsurprising, but a few might be murdering your phone’s performance without you knowing, like some kind of ninjas that have somehow taken app form. All of this and more happens in “Appsassins,” the screenplay I’m pitching to SyFy.

But here are the biggest offenders, because that’s really the more important information here.

Didn’t think the Apple Watch would catch on? Not everyone agrees, especially analysts who study sales projections.

Cupertino is on track to sell 21 million watches and rake in about $8.4 billion in revenue in the first 12 months of the Apple Watch, according to one of the hottest Apple analysts around. Not bad for a company that entered the wearables game late.