Cult of Mac

Apple Music has gone country in the streaming service’s latest ad that debuted last night during ABC’s broadcast of the Country Music Awards. The new ad gives viewers a backstage peek at Kenny Chesney’s ‘No Shoes Nation’ tour as the country singer uses Apple Music to create playlists, and discover new tunes

Along with waxing philosophical about the ‘human element’ Apple Music offers, the one-minute ad also features the Apple Watch that’s worn by Chesney to track his workouts as he slams medicine balls into the ground while aspiring to become a bull rider.

Watch the new ad below:

We were all supposed to have personal jetpacks by now. But keeping them in the air for any length of time has made them impractical, so to get our futuristic fix we have to settle for Buzz Lightyear or James Bond from the 1965 movie Thunderball.

But check out jetpack pilots Yves Rossy and Vince Reffet, of the Jetman Dubai team, who recently conducted a fantastic formation flight over the Palm Jumeirah in Dubai with an Emirates A380 commercial jet.

Xiaomi’s efforts to follow Apple into adopting pressure-sensitive smartphone displays has hit a roadblock, with the Chinese company struggling to source suitable components at a reasonable price. This almost certainly means that Xiaomi fans will have to wait longer for its first handset with 3D Touch.

Giant drugstore chain Walgreens today announced that Balance Rewards loyalty scheme members can now earn and redeem loyalty points via Apple Pay through Apple Pay — without having to separately scan a Balance Rewards card or barcode.

Before he made The Martian, Ridley Scott directed the most iconic Apple ad in history with the classic 1984 Macintosh commercial.

So what better way to set yourself apart from Apple as a rival smartphone maker than to… completely rip off ideas Apple was circulating thirty-odd years ago? Yeah, we don’t get it either.

Check out HTC’s new One A9 ad below to make your own mind up.

Thanks to innovations like Apple Pay, Touch ID has become increasingly useful as of late. But Apple’s got another idea it’s been toying with also — in the form of a “panic mode,” which can be entered by unlocking your iPhone with a certain finger.

I wish I could have a failure like the Apple Watch!

Despite naysayers claiming the Apple Watch hasn’t taken off as Apple hoped, a new set of figures suggests that Apple has shipped close to 7 million Apple Watches since its launch — a figure which outstrips all other vendors’ combined smartwatch shipments in the past five financial quarters.

Ever find yourself scouring the house for a lost set of keys just yearning for the sci-fi device that’d tell you where you left them? In yet another sign that the future is indeed here, there’s an app for that.

Apple has been busy scooping up real estate in North San Jose throughout 2015 and now we finally know what they might be doing with all that acreage.

A new Apple campus is reportedly in development, and according to a report from the Silicon Valley Business Journal, it could be a lot bigger than the current spaceship campus that’s scheduled for completion next year.

If you upgraded to an iPhone 6s, chances are the case on your old 6 fits just fine. But if the old case is waterproof, don’t go dropping that 6s in a puddle.

The iPhone 6s is taller, wider and thicker by 1/100th of an inch in either direction, hardly noticeable in hand but enough to compromise the protection on a waterproof case.

Catalyst, an accessories company favored by Apple users unafraid of a little water on their devices, has rolled out a new waterproof case for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.

Your Apple TV remote is an amazing little device that lets you manage your big TV exerience. There are quite a few little settings you may have missed, though, when you started up your new Apple TV.

You can adjust and tweak your way through the Apple TV settings to make the most of your time with the remote, including monitoring its battery, adjusting accessibility options, and — yes — even figuring out what Siri commands you can use.

Here are five of them, just for you.

We’ve all seen those horrendously long Terms and Conditions documents with every bit of Apple software we download, including the iTunes Terms and Conditions.

But what if you could see them in an illustrated version? We all might read them in that case.

These illustrated panels, each drawn in a different comic book style after famous other cartoonists, put Steve Jobs front and center of the otherwise dry, dusty legal disclaimers from Apple.

Totally worth a look, right?

Pebble Time just got its first price cut since making its official debut on Kickstarter back in February, and it’s one worth taking advantage of. For a limited period, customers in the U.S. can save $50 — that’s 25 percent — on the black, white, and red models.

Old Apple computers are no stranger to Sotheby’s, but next week a different piece of Apple history is hitting the auction block, only this high-priced collectors item was created by Andy Warhol instead of Steve Jobs.

Warhol’s acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas painting of the classic Apple logo is going up for auction and could fetch as much as $600,000 according to early estimates. The painting is part of Warhol’s ‘Ads’ suite of creations which were created in 1985, just one year after the Macintosh launched.

The painting wasn’t created using a Macintosh, but Sotheby’s includes this interesting anecdote of how Warhol first met Steve Jobs when the Apple CEO came over to John Lennon’s house to setup a Macintosh for his son:

The second iOS 9.2 beta was released to developers yesterday and Apple is already making the new software update available to public beta testers as well starting today.

China’s legendary black markets have goods and services for every need, from organs to counterfeit designer handbags. For cashed-strapped Apple fans in this communist country, there’s also a thriving market around iPhone upgrades.

For as little as $100 U.S. dollars, the 16GB iPhone can get upgraded to 126GB. That’s a big deal to Chinese consumers, who have trouble affording the 16GB iPhone 6 at just over $700, let alone any models with more capacity.

The age of virtual reality is here, and you’re probably closer to taking part in this exciting new form of interaction and storytelling than you think. If you’ve got a smart phone, you’ve got most of what you need to drop into virtual reality today — the only other thing you’ll need is something like the Homido VR Headset. Simply slide your smartphone into the headset’s receiver and you’re on your way to another reality, all for $69.95 at Cult of Mac Deals.

Steve Jobs was considering building an Apple Car as far back as 2008, the year after successfully launching the iPhone, according to a new interview with Nest CEO and iPod co-creator Tony Fadell.

Speaking with Bloomberg TV’s Emily Chang, Fadell says that he and Jobs enjoyed “a couple of walks” (Jobs’ favored way of taking meetings), talking about a possible Apple vehicle.

Microsoft has long been threatening to bring Cortana to iOS as a rival to Siri — and it’s almost ready for you to test it out.

The Redmond, WA company is currently accepting sign-ups for the Cortana beta, although you’ll have to live in either the U.S. or China to take advantage of the offer.

Living in the U.K. as I do (in contrast to most of my California-based Cult of Mac co-writers), Christmas ads are one of the few bright spots at this time of year.

And Lloyds Bank just kicked off the season with a cracking 40-second ad showing off the fact that it is now well and truly on the Apple Pay bandwagon. The ad tells the story of a girl looking for the perfect Christmas gift for her mom — with Apple’s mobile payment service coming to the rescue.

Check it out below.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has branded a new proposed law banning encrypted communications in the U.K. as “stupid,” and says that if it is passed, Apple should stop selling iPhones in the country out of principle.

“I would like to see Apple refuse to sell iPhone in UK if government bans end-to-end encryption,” Wales posted on Twitter. “Does Parliament dare be that stupid?”

The new Steve Jobs movie has bombed at the box office — but director Danny Boyle thinks the failure has nothing to do with the movie he made, but rather the decision to open it nationally too quickly.

“We did brilliantly the first two weekends,” he said. “Then [the studio] went too wide too soon, and that’s a mistake. But hindsight experts are always around on Monday mornings.”

Apple has just released its second beta for iOS 9, coinciding with the release of Apple’s latest developer figures for iOS 9 adoption — showing that the company’s latest mobile OS can now be found on 2 out of every 3 compatible iPhones and iPads.

A 4-inch iPhone 6s — resembling an “upgraded iPhone 5s” — is on the way in the first half of 2016, says renowned Apple prognosticator, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Kuo claims the handset will come with an A9 processor and metal casing — although customers shouldn’t expect Apple to incorporate its 3D Touch technology into the handset, as a way of differentiating it from the premium iPhone 6s and 6s Plus models.

A company that specializes in making Lego-ized versions of tech-world giants is offering minifigures based on Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, current CEO Tim Cook, and some people who work for other companies, if you want to be all diverse about it.

The figures won’t even set you back that much, really. Depending on how much you value plastic that looks like people.