Cult of Mac

When iOS 8.3 introduced new gay-friendly emojis, one person no doubt responding with a :( sad face was Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s not taking it lying down, however. According to Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor, the President has requested a full pro-Kremlin group investigation and crackdown on same sex emojis, concerned that they violate the country’s ban on “gay propaganda.”

Because if there’s one thing proven to make you trade girlfriends for boyfriends, it’s someone sending you a picture of two male smiley faces holding hands.

It would be easy to think that Apple’s sapphire iPhone dreams went down the pan when GT Advanced Technologies went bust, but Apple’s nothing if not persistent.

Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple describing a new method for manufacturing sapphire displays by irradiating the sapphire crystal and then using a laser and “second gas medium” to slice it into the super-thin sheets Apple requires.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced that he is upholding the four game suspension the league gave Tom Brady for his role in Deflategate earlier this year, all because the four-time Super Bowl champion refused to hand over his cellphone.

The New England Patriot quarterback told fans this morning that he’s disappointed with the league’s decision, but he’s got a perfectly good explanation as to why he couldn’t give investigators his phone to access to his text messages – he had just switched to the iPhone 6.

The third public beta of Apple’s upcoming operating system, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, was seeded to public testers today, one week after the release of El Capitan beta 2.

AT&T is asking the FCC to not make it pay the largest proposed fine in the agency’s history as punishment for throttling customers’ data speeds.

After being slammed with the $100 million fine by the FCC last month when the government agency found the carrier had throttled speeds for customers with ‘unlimited’ data plans, AT&T says it didn’t really harm anyone, so it shouldn’t have to pay up.

iFixit has made repairing broken iPhones as simple as setting up Ikea furniture thanks to the site’s easy-to-follow guides and excellent repair tools Apple doesn’t really want you to use. Now the company is about make it easier to fix even more broken gadgets by partnering with Electronic Recyclers International.

Finding parts to fix broken Kindles, GoPros, and Nexus devices can be practically impossible, but now that iFixit and ERI are teaming up, consumers will have a way to keep more of their busted gizmos alive, instead of tossing them in the wood chipper.

Apple’s HomeKit connected devices are rolling out slower than expected, and one reason for this is that Apple reportedly requires that anyone making a third-party HomeKit device buy and use a special identity chip — a fact that caught many devs unawares.

“I know a lot of people who have been surprised by this requirement and had to re-spin boards for the chip,” said Michael Anderson, chief scientist of engineering firm PTR Group during a recent talk. “A lot of manufacturers are up in arms [about the] Apple silicon [that makes their] device more expensive.”

Learning is a life-long task, so why not give yourself a lifetime to learn? OSTraining’s top notch developer courses on web design usually go for $2,000, but right now you can get a lifetime subscription for just $79.

The tablet market continues to plummet worldwide, but Apple’s still leading the pack, thanks to the iPad.

According to new figures released by the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker, tablet shipments fell 7 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2015 to a total of 44.7 million units.

Does your Mac also boot into Windows? Mine does, and it’s a pretty great perk of owning a Mac since 2006. But modern Intel-based Macs aren’t the only ones that can dual boot operating systems.

Proof? This Amiga from the 1980s booting up Mac OS 6.0.1, the result of a particularly clever hack from the vintage computing archives.

42 percent of iPhone 6 users in the U.S. have used Apple Pay, according to new research from analysts at the The Auriemma Consulting Group.

The same study suggests that Apple Pay is no one-off novelty either, since 84 percent of these users have used Apple Pay for more than three transactions in store, while 76 percent have used it to pay for items in-app.

Maybe you’re like me, and you’re interested in trying Apple Music. Maybe, though, you feel locked in to Rdio or Spotify, because over the years you’ve set up an extensive library of favorites and playlists. Favorites and playlists you count on.

Well, good news! Migrating your whole life to Apple Music is just $4.99 away.

iOS engineers must keep their eyes on the jailbreak scene. In the past, popular jailbreak tweak Auxo showed what iOS’s approach to multitasking should be like years before Apple made its best ideas part of the core operating system.

Let’s hope this pattern holds with Alympus. It’s a new tweak that radically improves, for the better, iOS 8 multitasking.

Anyone who enjoyed last year’s smash hit Flappy Bird should take a minute to check out the excellently (if ironically) titled new iOS puzzler, Red Game Without a Great Name.

Putting you in control of a mechanical bird maneuvering its way through 60 levels of steampunk-inspired obstacles, the game takes a page from the Flappy Bird playbook, but tacks on the challenging addition of swipe-based teleportation for a genuinely original proposition.

Trust me, it’s a lot of fun!

Apple is set to open its 23rd Apple Store in China this week — with Hong Kong’s fourth retail outlet opening its doors, Thursday local time, in the city’s tourist-heavy Tsim Sha Tsui district.

This represents another step in Apple’s massive Chinese retail expansion, which Tim Cook has said will result in 40 stores in China by the middle of 2016.

Would you buy an apparently new iPhone from a random person on the street without thoroughly checking out the contents of the box first?

If you answered “obviously no,” then you’re certainly smarter than the Detroit Metro PCS business which bought “iPhones” from a group of three Detroit-area teenagers only to discover, upon opening them, that they were filled with Play-Doh bricks instead of smartphones.

Those of us old-school instant messaging warriors remember the day when Yahoo! Messenger was the king of the IM clients. The purple search giant is hoping that day may well be at hand again.

Apparently, it isn’t enough that our phones, appliances, TVs, thermostats and light bulbs are getting Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections so we can control them remotely and teach them our habits. No — some enterprising souls are looking at their stuff and just gasping at how dumb all of it is.

And so, things that we may never have thought of slapping the “smart” prefix on are getting all wired up and clever. Here are a few of the more interesting ones.

It is one thing to read about a madman. But what if you could feel like those were your hands around the victim’s throat, eyeballs bulging, his gasping breath brushing against your face?

Charles Dickens’ A Madman’s Manuscript feels all the more creepy when you experience the book in interactive form with the new iPhone and iPad app by iClassics.

If digital media is tearing us away from analog books, then the growing collection of illustrated works reimagined by iClassics ensures classic tails not only stay alive but get a new life with illustrations that move with the touch of your screen.

We still don’t even know if Apple is really building an car (even though there are a lot of signs that it is), but whatever the iPhone-maker’s next play in the auto-market is, the company’s about to generate a lot of innovation and competition in the market, says Ford CEO Mark Fields.

Wireless charging has been on Apple fanboys’ wish list of iPhone features for a few years now, and while it’s unlikely that Apple will bring the technology to the iPhone 6s, Qualcomm just made a breakthrough in wireless charging that would be perfect for the iPhone’s metal body.

OnePlus this week announced its long-awaited OnePlus 2, and despite its sub-$400 price tag, it has all the features and specifications it needs to give the latest flagships some tough competition — including Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 810 processor, up to 4GB of RAM, and a much-improved camera.

But OnePlus smartphones are all about beating the latest flagships. Does the OnePlus 2 have what it needs to do that? Find out below.

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Sure, playing games is a blast, but making games is where the real fun (and, let’s face it, money) is at. Turn this popular pastime into a passion and a profession, or just a creative outlet, with this bundle of lessons from Stone River eLearning.

Whether you’re a skilled coder or a total n00b, with dozens of courses covering the game-design gamut you’ll be able to get into the game in no time, and all for whatever price you’re comfortable paying.

When Motorola announced its new Moto X Style earlier today, the company said it had one of the top three smartphone cameras in the world, based on testing by the experts at DxOMark. Now those test results have been published, and it turns out Motorola was not lying.

Its new handset is actually ranked the second-best smartphone camera to date, second only to the Galaxy S6.

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In great news for music lovers, T-Mobile is adding Apple Music to its “Music Freedom” program, meaning customers can now listen to Apple’s streaming music service without using up their monthly data allowance.

T-Mobile already offers Spotify, Pandora, Google Music and more than two dozen other streaming services on Music Freedom, and users were apparently clamoring for Apple Music to be added to the list.