Cult of Mac

Apple is ready to report its financial results for Q4 2015 to this afternoon and, as usual, investors are expecting it to be another record-breaker.

Cult of Mac will be here to liveblog all the action, from the numbers down to the analysts’ questions. iPhone 6s sales will loom large on the minds of investors who have been leery that demand might be waning. Revenues are expected to top $51 billion, but with China’s economy slumping, we wouldn’t be shocked if Wall Street isn’t thrilled with the numbers.

Tim Cook or CFO Luca Maestri will kick off at 2 p.m. Pacific, but we’ll be jumping on the liveblogging party early with a breakdown of all the numbers. Bookmark this page and join us for Apple’s monstrous earnings call.

Maybe you know this sickening feeling: Your smartphone slips from your hand and starts its descent toward the ground. If you’re standing in an asphalt parking lot or walking down a city sidewalk — and you don’t have your phone protected in a life-preserving case — you know what happens next.

Time seems to stand still as the phone falls toward earth. Then … Impact. Shattering glass. And a horrifying glimpse at the damage done.

Every day, I delete files. Usually, they’re images or screenshots I download or use for my work here at Cult of Mac. These kinds of files pile up across a full day, and I just want to get rid of them to de-clutter my workspace.

Even if I use the Command-Delete keyboard shortcut to get them to the Trash, I still need to empty the Trash (with Shift-Command-Delete), making this a two-step process.

OS X El Capitan brings a feature that lets me skip one of these steps. Here’s how to delete your files immediately using your El Capitan-enabled Mac.

Apple is scheduled to reveal its earnings for the final fiscal quarter of 2015 on Tuesday, October 27, and investors are expecting monstrous results.

Sales of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus should boost revenues to new heights after Apple announced that it sold a record 13 million units of the new devices during launch weekend alone. Exactly how many iPhones Apple sold won’t be revealed until the bell closes, but Tim Cook seemed pretty optimistic in a recent interview.

Cook told The Wall Street Journal that Apple Watch shipped even more watches last quarter than in the first quarter. It’s unlikely Apple will give us the actual Apple Watch sales figures during the earnings call, but there should be a lot of juicy Apple bits.

Here’s everything to expect from Apple’s Q4 2015 earnings:

One of the coolest features of the new Apple TV is its absolutely stunning new screensavers, which fly you through some of the most gorgeous locations in the world.

Apple hasn’t announced any plans to bring the screensavers over to the Mac yet, but they’re such a perfect fit that developer John Coates created a new Swift app that lets anyone get the beautiful backdrops on their desktop.

Here’s how to do it:

Less than a week after releasing the first major update for iOS 9, Apple has seeded iOS 9.2 beta 1 to developers today.

The year of Apple Pay might be starting to plateau after adoption of the mobile payments service exploded through out 2015, according to data from Phoenix Marketing.

Apple Pay is still picking up users one year after launch, but the firm’s data shows that growth has slowed over the last few months. It appears that Millennials aren’t as crazy yet about wallet-free payments as expected. Gen X users have grown the most though with nearly 23% having already signed up for the service in the first year.

Best List: AudioOHM RNF earbuds by GOgroove

My kids are constantly breaking their earbuds. Whether a pair of Apple’s pack-in EarPods or a $40 pair of neon green ‘buds from Best Buy, anything they use ends up with frayed and broken wires.

These ruggedized earbuds from GOgroove, however, withstood both teens — and I’m still able to use them. Plus? They sound really great for the price.

China’s rising middle class has been good for Apple and the iPhone. CEO Tim Cook said iPhone sales in the world’s largest smartphone market has risen 112 percent over the last year.

Cook reported the China earnings during Apple’s third-quarter conference call as the company gets to set to release an earnings report Tuesday afternoon for the last quarter that many analysts are predicting will be underwhelming.

Twenty dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to, but that doesn’t have to be true if you know where to look. Cult of Mac’s frugal sleuths have found some great deals that you can add to your life with a spare bill floating around in your wallet, from hands-free mounts to game design training and more. Check them out below.

You may soon be able to make purchases in the iTunes store without a credit or debit card.

Apple has been working with a phone carrier in Germany on an agreement that would let people pay for items as part of their phone bills. Users’ phone numbers, rather than credit cards or bank account numbers, will be used to make purchases that will show up on the next bill.

Samsung is supplying Apple with OLED displays for the Apple Watch, and is trying to sell Cupertino on using its panels in other devices as well.

Could future iPhones come with an OLED-based curved screen? Depends on how the tests go.

The iPhone 6s Plus has a frame rate problem, and the only solution is more cowbell right here!

Although it’s not necessarily something your average user is going to get too concerned about, a number of people have noticed that the iOS transition animations on the phablet-sized iPhone 6s Plus look considerably slower and more jerky than those on the smaller iPhone 6s.

Fortunately there’s a way to fix it.

In advance of the opening of Apple’s massive 50,000-square-foot retail space at the Mall of the Emirates this Thursday, Gulf Business has gotten a sneak preview of the company’s debut United Arab Emirates store — showing a leafy open-plan oasis carrying the new Jony Ive-designed Apple Store interior.

Check out more pictures below.

It’s hard to resist the allure of a fancy Apple Watch stand, especially if you want to take advantage of watchOS 2’s awesome Nightstand Mode. Sena’s Travel Case and Stand is one such premium accessory, and how useful it’ll be to you depends on what kind of relationship you have with your smartwatch.

It looks great, and it’s definitely high-quality. And while it does solve a couple major issues I’ve been having with my Apple Watch, it offers solutions for some other ones I can’t imagine ever confronting.

After debuting three new iPhone 6s ads over the weekend, showing off the handset’s new wireless “Hey Siri” feature and various camera improvements, Apple has dropped one more ad — depicting the iPhone 6s’ Live Photos tool.

Called “Half Court,” the 15-second spot shows Golden State Warriors NBA player Stephen Curry making an impressive half-court shot, which can then be re-lived thanks to Live Photos.

Check it out below.

Apple hopes the iPad Pro will reinvigorate slumping tablet sales, but the company’s not showing much faith in the device, if initial orders are to be believed.

According to supply chain sources, Apple is taking a “rather conservative attitude” toward iPad Pro, ordering just 2.5 million for the rest of 2015 — and possibly even less for the first quarter of 2016 if holiday sales prove weaker than expected.

With its pro-privacy stance, Apple’s pretty good at treading the line between usefulness and creepiness, which other tech companies can struggle with.

A newly-published patent, however, may challenge that assertion — describing a method for monitoring another person’s location, via their iPhone, with constant user notifications sent to alert you of any changes in their progress along a route.

Presumably so you can hop in a chair, grab a white cat for your lap, and sit facing the door to greet their arrival with the line, “Mr. Bond, I’ve been expecting you.”

I’m a big fan of getting instructions off the internet: recipes, directions on car maintenance, or video game walkthroughs, for example. The problem is that you need to be online to view them.

Now in iOS 9, however, there’s a way to save web pages to a handy, offline-friendly PDF file. The next time you’re flying on an airplane and trying to get through Broken Age with a walkthrough, you’ll be in luck.

Here’s how to convert any webpage in iOS 9’s mobile Safari to a PDF and then read it in (or send it from) iBooks.

Android Pay, the newest kid on the block in mobile phone payments, has found a way to get people using their smartphones to pay for goods and services: loyalty reward systems.

Like similar retail, grocery and airline programs, Android Pay will soon include points for specific purchases to encourage us all to use our smartphones more and more to pay for the stuff we already buy.

Coke is the first program up, according to Google exec Sridhar Ramaswamy, with points to earn each time you use Android Pay to buy a Coke through any one of some 20,000 NFC-enabled Coca-Cola vending machines. You’ll get points that will let you get free Coke, Coca-Cola gets to know where and when people are buying its products and Google gets people to use Android Pay. It’s win-win-win.

A recent study that measured the brain activity of people using the Apple Watch suggests that even the most skeptical of users came to like the wearable after some hands-on time with it.

The findings come from “neuromarketing” group eMerite, which connected electroencephalograms to 20 people and studied their reactions as they tried out different functions of Apple’s smartwatch.

Microsoft officially opened its flagship store on NYC’s historic Fifth Avenue today just blocks away from Apple’s iconic glass cube, and it’s taken a few pages from the iPhone-maker’s playbook in the process.

The doors to Microsoft’s new store opened just in time for the release of the new Surface Book and Surface Pro 4, but Microsoft says it’s totally cool if Apple fans bring in their devices too.

“If you bring your iPhone in here, I’d love to show you how to use Office on it,” said Kelly Soligon, senior director of retail stores marketing at Microsoft. There are signs of Apple’s influence throughout the store through, from the giant glass facade to the glass staircase.

Take a look inside:

You’ve got an idea for a shot with your GoPro camera. But you don’t have the right mount, or the tripod you carry won’t go low enough or fit in a space with that great angle.

Photographer Ruogo Zhou has designed a hunk of plastic that cradles the GoPro and provides it 20 different angles for shooting. It’s a small polyhedron support that can fit in tiny spaces and it goes by the name SLOPES.

If you want Siri to tell you everything there is to know about music you might need an Apple Music subscription to get the right answers.

The three-month trial period for Apple Music has finally ended, and it appears that not signing up for the monthly service may cost you a bit of Siri functionality.

My female friends who are photographers bristle when you bring up the idea of a camera bag being designed for women. The few women’s camera bags they’ve seen have tended to be cutesy – and cutesy doesn’t cut it.

They want the same things in a bag as the men – roomy, stealthy and sturdy. Why should gender matter in the design?

ThinkTank, an industry leader in camera bags for every kind of photography, may have found the right combination of aesthetic and function in a new line of bags created for women.