At a strategic briefing for investors today in Tokyo, Nintendo CEO Tatsumi Kimishima took to the podium to talk about the game-maker’s plans for the near future, including, we hope, information on the venerable company’s foray into mobile gaming on iPhones, iPads, and possibly Android devices.
The new service — blandly called “Nintendo Account” — will connect console, PC, and smart device users in a way that has never been seen before in Nintendo’s history.
The new Apple TV looks like the old one, but it’s a complete overhaul of the little black puck. It now comes with a full-blown App Store, a touch-sensitive remote and voice controls via Siri.
You can preorder it now, and it’ll ship Friday.
We got our hands on a developer model and have been playing around with it. We like it a lot. Setup is fun, the interface looks stunning, and the touch remote works beautifully. If the Music app is any indication, apps on this thing are going to be great. There’s just one little thing wrong. And it’s not little, actually. It’s big.
Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly about the 4th-generation Apple TV.
Whereas most websites these days — Cult of Mac included — are responsive to whatever device you’re browsing on, there are still a few websites out there that will serve you a special mobile version when you head there on your iPhone.
Unfortunately, sometimes the functionality of the full desktop version of the website is missing from the mobile version. When that happens, you can use the iOS 9 version of Safari to get the full desktop versions even when the web developers don’t provide a link to do so.
Here’s how.
Pulling the plug and getting the new MacBook with its single USB-C port doesn’t mean pulling the plugs on your peripherals. Plenty of companies, Apple included, offer adapters.
But one of the most versatile and elegant adapters arrived Wednesday from Satechi. Its hub adapter offers three A-type USB ports, an SD card slot and a micro SD card slot, allowing a user to seamlessly carry on.
Apple and U2 have gotten together again to promote their greatness, only instead of force feeding you an album you don’t want, this time the duo is diving into virtual reality for the band’s new video for “Song for Someone.”
YouTube Red, the new subscription service that lets you enjoy the latest content from your favorite YouTube channels without ads, is now live in the United States.
Priced at $9.99 — and bundled with Google Play Music — Red also lets you play YouTube content in the background on your mobile devices, and download videos for offline viewing.
Microsoft is merging two of its most popular mobile apps into one: Outlook email and Sunrise calendar. Outlook has always been a favorite among email users while Sunrise rose to fame for being both free and feature-packed. Combined as one, Microsoft is hoping the move enables users to more seamlessly glide between emailing and calendar tasks.
The result isn’t really a huge departure from what Microsoft currently offers in Outlook, since Outlook already has your calendars built in. Instead, it’s more about refining navigation within the app while additionally bringing in some features from Sunrise.
The biggest change is that the sun is setting on Sunrise. After Microsoft bought the calendar app just this year, the company is already pulling the plug on it.
Videos on Snapchat are getting some new special effects today with a big update that adds ‘speed modifiers’ to the app’s toolset on both iOS and Android.
The new speed modifiers are basically video filters that allow snappers to add slo-mo, fast-forward, or rewind effects to a video. If you’re on an iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus the update is even better, bringing 3D Touch support to the app for the first time.
We loved the original UE Boom and the new 2.0 version is even better. The UE Boom 2 is stain-resistant, stylish, shock-resistant and completely waterproof. We’re not sure who is trying to listen to their tunes underwater, but if that’s your jam … you are good to go.
Chinese smartphone maker Huawei has had a couple of good months as it aims to shed its image as a manufacturer of cheap devices. It released a new and now popular premium phone in September, surpassed rival Xiaomi in sales in their home market and, like Apple, had a glowing Q3 earnings report.
And with Apple boasting of rapid growth in China, Huawei answers the challenge by hiring Apple’s former creative director, Abigail Brody, to be the company’s chief user experience designer.
Steve Jobs was a big believer in great ideas coming from serendipitous interactions. So it’s no surprise that this concept was a central part of the design brief for Apple’s forthcoming “Spaceship” campus — one of the last projects Steve was actively involved with at Apple.
In a new (rare) interview with Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing talks about the importance of collaboration, and how Apple’s new 13,000-person campus will help further that goal, despite its massive size.
If you’ve been weighing the pros and cons of splurging on a new iPad, T-Mobile now has one more pro to add to your list. Through its Jump on Demand program, customers can get a 16GB iPad Air 2 or iPad mini 4 for $0 down. The iPad Air 2 will cost $26 per month after that and the iPad mini 4 will cost $22 per month. Additionally, the program allows you to upgrade your tablet up to three times per year.
There’s traveling and then there’s traveling smart, and few are smarter about travel than Tim Ferriss. Star of The Tim Ferriss Experiment is and author of #1 New York Times bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek, he’s made a living out of helping people travel better and more effectively. The Round-the-World Giveaway gives you a chance to hang out with Ferriss and travel the globe with a big bag full of world-class gadgets. It’s a package worth thousands of dollars, but here’s the clincher: entry is totally free.
Nintendo is set to unveil its first smartphone game tomorrow, October 29 — seven months after it announced that it would finally give in to the demands of Android and iOS gamers.
Nintendo will be hoping that its mobile game business is a success following weakening demand for its 3DS and Wii U consoles.
One day after the Library of Congress amended the law to make jailbreaking completely legal in the United States, Chinese jailbreak team Pangu has released a Mac OS X version of its iOS 9 jailbreak.
Apple made its refreshed Apple TV available for pre-order earlier this week, and now Best Buy is also accepting pre-orders for the next-gen streaming set-top box.
As with Apple’s official pricing, the 32GB model will set customers back $149.99, while the 64GB version costs $199.99. Best Buy notes that the product will be available for in-store pickup from November 4.
As developers race to embrace 3D Touch, more and more third-party apps are utilizing iOS 9’s killer feature to make common tasks faster and easier.
Employed properly, 3D Touch’s Quick Actions lists can put many tasks at your fingertips — assuming you’re using an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus, the only models with the hardware to us the new technology. 3D Touch’s new Peek and Pop features also let you preview certain items (Peek), then press deeper if you want to open them (Pop).
With more and more apps adding 3D Touch, developers are clearly hell-bent on creating more stimulating experiences. Here are more third-party apps that are doing big things with 3D Touch.
Apple doesn’t want developers creating digital scale apps for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus!
In a recent post on Medium, dev Ryan McLeod says he and his friends created a digital scale app that worked using Apple’s new 3D Touch pressure-sensing feature.
Called Gravity, they submitted it to the App Store, only to have it rejected for “having a misleading description.” To show the app in action, the team then submitted a video to Apple, but were told that “the concept of a scale app was not appropriate for the App Store.”
It’s no secret that Apple Senior VP Eddy Cue is a massive basketball fan, with an office full of Duke memorabilia, and sightings at various NBA games over the years.
Which probably explains why he looks quite as ecstatically happy as he does to be rocking a Golden State Warriors’ championship ring in a new photo posted to his Twitter feed, following yesterday’s award ceremony for the new NBA champions 2015-2016.
iPad sales dipped below 10 million this quarter for the first time since 2011 — and the lack of demand for tablets is hurting Apple’s suppliers.
According to a new report, the Taiwan-based company Coretronic, which provides backlight units for Apple, has been forced to cut down its work force at three separate factories in Taiwan, while closing a subsidiary in Nanjing, China completely.
SoundKey is a clever keyboard app that plays instruments as you type to create melodies from your words.
Developed by two French students who wanted to incorporate music directly into people’s daily use of the iPhone, it’s an unusual twist on the custom iOS keyboards we’ve come to know and love.
Bill Hader eats a hamburger while getting Siri to read him his email in this new fun video from Apple. The message from “Prince Oseph” offers Hader a life-changing opportunity, and having his iPhone read it really shows off the “Hey Siri” functionality in iOS 9.
Nerd cred: Obviously, Hader is using an iPhone 6s, because Hey Siri only works when not connected to power on the latest iteration of Apple’s flagship smartphone.
Check out the full ad below.
Great news for people who are looking forward to jailbreaking that Apple TV that’s on its way to you this week: The Library of Congress has amended the law to render after-market firmware modification completely legal in the United States.
Small questions like legality haven’t stopped people from opening up their gadgets before, but they’ll be happy to know that it’s totally above-board now.
The iPhone 6s is a huge hit, China is still doing great, and Android users absolutely love switching to iPhone.
Those are just some of the details Tim Cook and Apple CFO Luca Maestri revealed during this afternoon’s earnings call with investors that revealed Apple managed to top Wall Street’s expectations thanks to the iPhone 6s.
Here are the top takeaways from Apple’s latest record-setting quarter:
Apple’s earnings barely beat Wall Street’s expectations for fourth-quarter revenue thanks to strong sales of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, which helped the company bring in $51.5 billion and quarterly net profit of $11.1 billion
The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus set a new launch weekend record of 13 million units sold, helping Apple finish the quarter with 48.5 million units sold. 2015 was Apple’s most successful financial year ever, leading Tim Cook to call it a “testament to the tremendous execution by our teams.”