Jony Ive doesn't find failure very interesting. Photo: Vanity Fair/YouTube
Jony Ive seemed embarrassed when Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter started their interview by calling Ive the “greatest industrial designer in the world right now.”
The Apple design guru closed his eyes, rubbed his head, and then provided a soft-spoken but enlightening 25-minute peek inside his head during 2014’s Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit. Wonder what he’ll say this year?
The app update wants to fill your pocket with recommended stories and videos. Photo: PocketThe app update wants to fill your pocket with recommended stories and videos. Photo: Pocket
Pocket updated its apps for Android and iOS to version 6.0, which now tailors to your interests. The release brings a new Recommendations tab that scans your activity in Pocket and, armed with that knowledge, presents you with new stories and other content you might find interesting.
NightStand is the first third-party Apple Watch accessory available in the Apple Store. Photo: ElevationLab
You no longer have to depend on the Internet to provide you with third-party Apple Watch accessories, as the company has started stocking them in its gleaming, glass-covered retail locations.
The first accessory on offer is a minimalist charging dock that will be compatible with watchOS 2’s Nightstand Mode when the firmware update launches this fall.
There they are! Hello, contacts! Screen: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
iOS 8 introduced the idea of showing your most-contacted contacts in the multitasking screen. You’d simply double click on the Home button to see the list of the most recent apps as well as a row of the folks you contacted the most across the top.
If you’re looking for that feature in iOS 9, you might have noticed that the contacts are no longer in the multitasking screen. Never fear, though, they’ve just moved.
The XY Share It lets you transmit photos to only those you want looking at them. Photo: XY
You have a great picture of your kid on their first day of school and you would like to share it with just two people. You could post to Facebook or Instagram, but then everyone sees it. You could attach it to an email or text or you could just pass the phone over the next time you see them.
The company XY has another option. It has designed a Bluetooth device the size of a keychain that lets you share an album of pictures with select people.
El Capitan coming to an iPad near you? Photo: Cult of Mac
Microsoft recently launched Windows 10 to the public, but it looks like that won’t be enough to help increase PC shipments next year as IDC estimates PC shipments will fall by -8.7% in 2015 and not stabilize until 2017.
PC shipments aren’t the only tech item on the decline either. Tablet sales are expected to decline even faster than IDC’s previous forecast of a 3.8%. The firm currently projects tablet shipments will drop 8% in 2015, however there is a silver lining for Apple.The 2-in-1 tablet market is expected to grow 86.5% in 2015, right as Apple’s preparing to launch the iPad Pro.
After years of speculation, we’ve finally gotten the official movie poster for the forthcoming Steve Jobs biopic — and, man, does it ever look great!
Keeping to the same minimalist style as the Walter Isaacson book jacket it’s based on, the poster shows Michael Fassbender striking a typically Jobsian pose, complete with plenty of white space.
This limited-edition flier that packs an amazing amount of moves in its palm-sized frame. Photo: Cult of Mac Deals
It’s fine to admit it: you get a little jealous every time you see someone playing with a drone. Why not join the fun with a little drone of your own? We’ve found five deals on compact, fully-equipped and affordable drones to get you flying, filming, and having fun in no time and for next to nothing.
The battle to win Apple's chip orders is hotter than ever. Photo: Apple
Taiwan’s top court ruled in favor of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in a lawsuit involving a former employee who allegedly leaked trade secrets to Samsung.
The accused party — TSMC’s former senior director of R&D, Liang Mong-song — allegedly helped Samsung catch up in the chip-fabrication business and win orders for Apple’s A-series processors..
The Note 5 has super specs, but can’t match iPhone 6’s speed. Photo: Samsung
The Samsung Galaxy Note 5 is one of the most beefed up and powerful smartphones the world has ever seen. In terms of raw specs, the Note 5 blows the 2014 iPhone 6 out of the water with 4GB of RAM and a zippier processor, but as Apple has taught us for so many years, specs don’t always translate into better performance.
To see how fast the Galaxy Note 5 is compared to last year’s iPhone hardware, DroidModderX pitted the two devices against each other in a speed test designed to mimic everyday use, and the results were quite surprising. The iPhone is running on weaker hardware, but thanks to Apple’s software it managed to blow the Note 5 out of the water, thanks to Samsung’s horrible TouchWiz UI that bogs down all the memory.
Apple didn't invent the Slide to Unlock gesture. Photo: Jared Earle/Flickr
Swiping a finger across a smartphone screen to unlock it may soon become a universal gesture, even on devices not made by Apple, because Germany’s top civil court has decided Apple didn’t invent “slide to unlock.”
You can use Gmail's web app and get Notifications in OS X with Aura. Photo: Cross Coded
If you use Gmail – and let’s face it, most of us do – one of the biggest draws of using an external app, like OS X Mail, is being able to get Notifications when new emails arrive. Unfortunately, many email apps don’t support Gmail’s best features natively, like labeling, search or automatically filtered inboxes.
If you’d like to get Notifications when a new Gmail comes in, but continue to use the Gmail web app instead of a dedicated client, here’s how.
Who better to turn to in your moment of need? Photo: Burning Man: The Musical
If you ever find yourself asking “What would Steve Jobs do?” in a bleak moment of crisis, you may well find yourself enjoying the latest would-be viral video.
Called Burning Man: The Musical, the short music video portrays the excitement around the annual Burning Man hippie-fest-turned-tech-networking-event, where zillionaire CEOs get together and pretend to be penniless beatniks for a couple of days, while staying in air-conditioned wigwams and attending $15,000-per-head parties.
Oh, and the video’s got a great Steve Jobs-themed song, too.
Want double the dock icons? Install Docker. Photo: Modmyi
Let’s face it: the dock gets crowded. Even on the iPad, the short row of icons Apple gives us at the bottom of our iOS homepage is always too little.
You can fill your dock with folders if you want to cram more apps there… or you can download this neat little jailbreak tweak, which doubles the amount of icons you can put in your dock.
Winslet says the Mac's legendary marketing guru was one of the few people who didn't need anything from Steve Jobs. Photo: Kate Winslet/Joanna Hoffman
The Steve Jobs movie isn’t really about Steve Jobs at all, claims actress Kate Winslet, who plays Joanna Hoffman, the legendary Macintosh marketing chief, in the upcoming film.
In a new interview, Winslet opens up about the movie, and says that it is more about one man’s ability to change the world — for better or worse.
Neil Young's high-res audio player is having a touch time taking off. Photo: Pono
After years spent whining about how the iPod was killing the music industry, rock legend Neil Young pulled his albums from Apple Music and launched his own iPod killer, the Pono Player. It was a weird pyramid shaped device that specialized in high-resolution audio, sold through its own music store, which Ars Technica memorably declared a tall, refreshing drink of snake water.
Anyone surprised to hear, then, that even as iPod sales die, Young’s Pono Player is having trouble keeping pace with it?
What AAPL stock looked at close Monday. Photo: Finviz
You might remember that on Monday, AAPL stock had a bit of a bad day before rebounding. It wasn’t just a bad day for Apple stock, though: Fueled by fears of a total collapse of the Chinese stock market, the whole S&P 500 collapsed that day.
In the first 24 hours, only Apple rebounded. It’s proof positive of Apple’s fabled “reality distortion field.”
Tim Cook isn't going to be digging down the back of a sofa for cash any time soon. Photo: Apple
Tim Cook is kicking butt at Apple — at least according to the tenure- and performance-based restricted stock units he recently received, with a market value of close to $58 million.
Don't be distracted by your iPad while driving a bus. Photo: 20th Century Fox/Cult of Mac
Talk all you want about the declining market share of the iPad, but some people are still willing to risk their life over Apple’s breakthrough tablet device.
One such person is Irish coach driver Sean Purcell, who recently lost his job after CCTV showed him driving his coach with his elbows at more than 60 miles per hour so that he could operate his iPad.
It's like YouTube, but with way less cat videos. Photo: YouTube
It’s a bit late in the game, but YouTube has the resources and brand-name cache to take on video game streaming juggernaut, Twitch, as it turns on the lights of its much anticipated game streaming service Wednesday.
YouTube Gaming is the new portal, separate from the Google-owned video giant’s regular video website, that will aim to capture the flags, hearts and minds of gaming’s streaming technorati, some of whom can make upwards of $8,000 per month just letting people watch them play video games.
Twitch is the 800-pound gorilla of the video game streaming world; in fact, YouTube tried to buy the service sometime before Amazon snapped it up. Will YouTube bring in both current customers as well as crushing Twitch in the process?
Inspired by gorgeous games of the past. Photo: Heart Machine
Even if this upcoming game from indie studio Heart Machine wasn’t already so hotly anticipated, I’d be caught up in its gorgeous art style.
Hyper Light Drifter seems to channel the 8- to 16-bit visual look of games like Sword & Sworcery while also connecting classic Legend of Zelda-type environmental puzzles and Diablo-style action RPG fun together in an awesome mashup that’s sure to get my attention and money when it releases next year.
Check out the second official trailer below for a better taste of what this game is promising.
Here's how to put the tap back into "taptic." Photo: Apple
Taptic feedback on the Apple Watch felt a little weird at first, but we’ve come to love its gentle nudges to let us know something is going on. But some Cult of Mac staffers have noticed that after time, the taptic feedback has started to feel not so … tappy anymore.
If you’re having this problem, here are a couple quick and easy ways you can try to put the pep back on your wrist.