Apple’s retail guru Angela Ahrendts took to the stage at Fast Company‘s ongoing Innovation Festival to talk her role as senior vice president for retail and online stores.
With the highest sales-per-square-foot of any U.S. retailer, the Apple Stores were hardly in need of a total overhaul, but Ahrendts nonetheless discussed the ways she’s trying to tweak the physical shopping experience for the better — with some fascinating insights.
Tim Cook is in my home country of Jolly Old Blighty (read: the U.K.) at the moment, promoting the imminent launch of the iPad Pro.
While there, he’s given an interview to the Telegraph newspaper, in which Apple’s CEO touches on everything from the new Apple TV to the U.K.’s rumored “snooper’s charter” to, of course, Apple’s super-sized tablet.
Check out the lessons we learned below.
If you’ve not paying really close attention to your Apple Watch notifications, you might have missed out on a really subtle and clever design decision the company built into them.
It turns out that Apple uses two different shapes for its watch Apple Watch notification badges. And here’s why.
Apple Watch owners have had some time to play around with the wearable’s custom faces since the feature launched with watchOS 2, and some creative tech and sci-fi fans have come up with delightfully nerdy ways to spruce up their devices.
A few users have taken to making specially formatted faces that showcase their love of games, movies, and TV shows, but the really enterprising ones have found ways to include coordinated Apple Watch bands into their designs.
Here are some of the coolest ones we’ve tracked down.
The first ad for the new iPad Pro was revealed by Apple today and it’s just as stunning as the new tablet’s epic display.
Apple’s new ad features some cosmic visuals the highlight the iPad Pro’s incredible display. The astronomy app Sky Guide is highlighted in the ad along side ProCreate and iOS 9’s side-by-side apps feature. Apple announced this morning that the iPad Pro will go on sale Wednesday, November 11th, with stores receiving units later in the week.
Watch the new ad below:
The latest trend in news consumption is curation. Apple News — replacement for the earlier, less-than-successful Newsstand — does just that. It may not be the first app to repackage the web for easy reading (looking at you, Flipboard), nor maybe even the best, but chances are it’s already on everyone’s iOS 9 iPhone or iPad, making it a clear winner for mindshare.
News is pretty fantastic, as it allows you to customize and set up the News channels and outlets you want to check on regularly without having to rely on any specific outlet for updates. News pulls from your favorite websites RSS feeds and repackages it all in an intuitive, newspaper and magazine-like format for easy browsing and reading.
Let’s take a look at how to set it up and use the iOS 9 News app to your best advantage.
We didn’t think it was possible to improve on the amazing second installment of The Room, but developer Fireproof Games has delivered.
The third entry in the puzzle series, The Room Three, takes everything we already loved about the franchise’s Myst-style puzzles and mysterious, Lovecraftian horrors and makes it bigger and smarter. And then it throws in a new character, the most coherent and engaging plot yet, and multiple endings, which it didn’t even need to do, but all of it is great.
Tech accessories tend to solve a single problem really well. The SELFLASH, a small ring light you attach to your smartphone for selfies, is not just around to make you look pretty.
In offering a flattering wink of light in a variety of colors and intensities, the SELFLASH also provides up to 128 GB of storage for file transfers, can serve as a backup battery for your phone and has a Bluetooth tracker. Not satisfied with your smartphone’s camera? A pro model of the SELFLASH also comes with a 15.1-megapixel camera.
If you’ve ever carried around one of those tube-shaped power packs for your iPhone or iPad, you know the one thing it really needs is a way to tell how much juice is left in the thing.
The Power Tube 3000 provides this in spades, with a simple three-light display on the tube itself and an app that lets you know exactly how much power you have left — and what that translates to in terms of usage.
I remember the day I was way late from school and met up with my frantic mother as I walked home. She was walking quickly and carrying a metal comb with a pointy handle. This was for stabbing my attackers, or at least the ones that entered her mind as she fretted.
Of course, technology these days brings us a saner way of tracking down a late kid. One is KIdGPS, by mobile accessories maker X-Doria. It’s a palm-sized tracking device the kids carry so that nervous parents can check on their whereabouts via a companion app on their iPhone or Android device.
Tim Cook loves the new iPad Pro so much it’s the only product he travels with now, other than his iPhone.
In a new interview talking about the benefits of the new big-screened iPad, the Apple CEO trumpeted the iPad Pro’s productivity thanks to new multi-tasking software in iOS 9 complimented by the new keyboard and Apple Pencil. Some detractors have dismissed Apple Pencil as a just a fancy stylus, but Cook insists it’s a much more revolutionary product than that.
You know how it is — you unlock your iPhone with Touch ID so fast that you miss some important Notifications. You swipe down from the top of your iOS device’s screen to see what you missed and — ugh — you realize that your Notifications are sorted by app. How will you ever figure out which new Notification you missed?
Luckily, there’s a fairly simple way to get your iPhone and iPad to list your Notifications in date order, assuring you never miss one again.
Here’s how.
Alloy is the iPhone app that ultimately wants you to spend less time using your iPhone. It lets you create automated tasks and workflows that you can launch with one tap. The automations can upload a selfie to Twitter, convert currency, save your parking location, perform a saved search on Amazon and just about anything else if you’re willing to get creative
As far as computers go, the Apple III was a rather rotten Apple. The first 14,000 were recalled with hardware problems galore and even with bugs eventually worked out, Apple never could erase the computer’s “lemon” label.
But if you’re willing to give the Apple III a second chance, there is a working one for sale, complete with manuals, startup disks and, quite possibly, the good karma of a famous swami.
Adobe’s VP of Products, Scott Belsky, said the iPad will transform how creatives work, and according to some of the most creative people that use the company’s apps, they agree.
Ahead of the iPad Pro’s launch later this week, Adobe gathered some top designers and illustarators to test out the company’s apps on the new tablet to see if you can do real creative work on it. Illustrator Draw, Photoshop Mix, Photoshop Sketch, Photoshop Fix and other Creative Cloud apps shine on the iPad Pro in the demo that highlights how transformative the iPad Pro will be.
Here’s how creatives make use of the large screen:
Apple released the first update for its new fourth-generation Apple TV today with tvOS 9.0.1.
The new tvOS 9.0.1 update is a minor update that mostly focuses on performance improvements and bug fixes that have been discovered after the device went on sale at the end of last month.
Apple Watch is great at interacting with other smart devices, but a cheap hack allows it to recognize everyday (dumb) objects based on their invisible electromagnetic signals.
All it takes is a $10 chip that can be installed on any smartwatch. Check out the demo below:
Apple’s senior VP of services, Eddy Cue, sat down with CNN this morning to talk about why you need to buy the new iPad Pro that will go on sale later this week.
Along with being the best iPad ever for professionals that want to create content, Cue told Brian Stelter that the gigantic tablet is a really great device to consume media on. “It’s great for doing things like email, but I consume more than I create,” said Cue, who claims features like Four Speaker audio will change the way you think about a tablet.
Watch the entire interview below:
Staying productive in business requires inspiration from study and the examples of others. That’s why we’ve gathered some of the best resources for the budding tech entrepreneur, lessons from one of the top minds at Apple, fundamental startup courses and a lifetime of coding courses. Check out what we’ve rounded up:
Apple’s tax practices in Europe have been the subject of investigation for some time now. However, European Union regulators say they’ll finally have a conclusion as to the question of whether Apple benefited from “illegal tax sweeteners” by the end of this year.
According to Ireland’s finance minister Michael Noonan, the decision will be announced, “between now and Christmas.”
What happens when a rose gold iPhone 6s undergoes a bizarre “burnout” stress test beneath the wheels of an Italian Ducati pocket bike? A completely implausible scenario that would never in a million years happen to a handset in the real world, that’s what!
But, hey, if seeing brand new iPhones destroyed in bizarre ways is what gets your engines revving, click below for the oddly-compelling video.
Apple has confirmed that its super-sized iPad Pro tablet will be available to order online Wednesday, with stocks available in retail stores from the end of this week.
More than 40 countries will be covered by the launch, including the United States, Canada, China and much of Europe. Apple will start selling accessories for the iPad Pro at the same time, with the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard available for $99 and $169 respectively.
There’s being careful about iPhone security and then there’s…. this.
Over the weekend, Japanese Twitter user yossy1999116 posted a video clip shot on the subway, showing a user with an historically long and complex passcode unlocking their iPhone. If you’ve ever wanted an advert for how Touch ID can improve your life, this is almost certainly it.
TAG Heuer is ready to take on the Apple Watch.
Its first smartwatch, powered by Android Wear and called the Carrera Connected, is set to make its debut later this week, and it will retail for $1,500.
Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs movie had another disastrous showing at the box office over the weekend. With earnings declining more than 69 percent from the previous weekend to just $823,000, the movie was dumped from 2,072 screens — more than any other film.
By comparison, the new Bond movie Spectre took $73 million in its opening weekend.