The Chinese iPhone market is exploding, but perhaps a bit too literally for one Hong Kong woman, who claims that her 128GB iPhone 6 Plus exploded while being charged — not only separating the screen from the handset, but significantly melting the back cover.
Get in on some of the best offers at Cult of Mac Deals this week, with more than a day’s worth of tech business lessons, a lifetime subscription to Penzu’s digital journal, a battery-powered AC outlet/USB charger, and more.
Hopefully you won't be doing any work this July 4 weekend, but Scanner Pro 6 is definitely worth a download for the next time you have to scan a document.
Essentially transforming your iPhone camera into a miniature document scanner, all users have to do is point and tap to scan a document to their handset. A batch-scanning mode meanwhile lets you simply pass multiple documents in front of your iPhone, with the app intelligently scanning each one in turn.
Perhaps best of all is the new Scan Radar feature which detects images in your camera roll — meaning that you can scan images even if you don’t happen to have Scanner Pro 6 open at the time.
Available on: iPhone/iPad
Price: $2.99 (on sale)
Download: App Store
Spring has left the building and these amazing deals are about to do the same, so jump on your last chance to sweep up the Spring Clean Mac Bundle, PhoneClean iOS Cleaner, and more.
If you bought an Apple Watch hoping it would help you get fit, but you haven’t been on your first run yet, maybe you need of a little more encouragement. So here’s some advice from a reformed couch potato.
The first workout is the hardest. It gets progressively easier and more rewarding from there. You just need to know how to get started.
Did you completely forget about Samsung Pay? Well, it’s still kicking. After a significant delay, the official launch is coming in a couple of months and Samsung is allegedly wrapping up tests to ensure it works properly.
Samsung is testing its Apple Pay competitor with eight different card companies in South Korea and is set to go live there as well as in the United States this September.
This week was all about the launch of the surprisingly fantastic Apple Music streaming service and the Beats 1 24/7 radio station here at Cult of Mac, and we’ve pulled all the cool info you’ll want about these two new Apple services into one delightful Cult of Mac Magazine issue.
Of course, we’ve got our first hands-on impressions of Apple Music and Beats 1, how Twitter and early reviews praised the service (and said goodbye to Spotify), all the details on albums you won’t find anywhere else, and a great tutorial on how to record the live Beats 1 audio stream right on your Mac.
Let’s get started, then, shall we? You can download and subscribe right here, too.
Beats 1 already boasts a superstar cast of DJ’s but they’re about to get a new pair of hosts in the form of rap group, Run the Jewels.
Killer Mike and El-P are set to take over Beats 1 every Friday at 6PM PT for their very own show called “WRTJ.” The show will follow the duo as they complete the Run the Jewel world tour and talk about music, as well as the merits of unicorns and dragons.
Check out the teaser El-P published today:
In 1987, Apple created a video set in 1997 that was all about how much better the world was with all of the amazing Apple products the company was going to create. Almost 20 years later, some of the predictions in this ’80s-tastic fantasy film are true, and some are laughably (and thankfully) absent from current hardware.
Check out the video below, but brace yourself for some really bad jokes.
No, you won’t lose all your DRM-free iTunes music. At least, not without deleting your actual files and not having a backup. Apple isn’t adding DRM to your iTunes files, either.
The reality here is that Apple will not automatically remove any iTunes music files you own on your computer and replace it with a digital rights managed (DRM) file.
However, the convergence of iTunes Match, Apple Music, and the new iCloud Music Library can be confusing, and there is a small potential to re-download files you’ve deleted from your Mac as DRM-protected Apple Music files.
Luckily, the folks at iMore have a pretty fantastic, clear explanation of what’s going down here, and a pretty neat way to check and see which of your music files have been matched, uploaded, or purchased. Even John Gruber linked to it, so you know it’s good.
Taylor Swift’s bold rant against Apple over royalties continues to echo in the ears of photographers.
A quick recap . . . Swift used her Tumblr page to chide Apple for initially not paying musicians during the trial period of the new Apple Music. Then a music photographer in England called her a hypocrite because the contract her people force editorial photographers to sign before shows says Swift has the right to use those photos for free to promote her brand.
Apple backed down, but the good publicity-bad publicity for Swift has photographers and photo editors taking second looks at the contracts of other musical acts.
Apple Music probably couldn’t have gotten off to a much better start. Following its launch on Tuesday, the service has been widely praised by fans and critics for its user experience and terrific Beats 1 radio — but what’s next for Apple and its Beats team?
Could the Cupertino company launch its very own music label? It has the talent, it has the resources, and it has already revolutionized the music industry once before. But does the move make sense?
Join us as we discuss that very question in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac.
Beats 1 is live 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it’s a fantastic way to get your dose of what’s happening right now in urban music.
Problem is, just like the terrestrial radio that it uses as its model, Beats 1 doesn’t have an archived recording of its shows. If you want to hear a specific DJ or interview, you have to tune in.
There are ways, however, of recording the audio stream with varying degrees of “free” and “easy.” Two of them involve some technical know how while the third will require you to drop some cash. Check it out.
Former Apple CEO John Sculley dropped some interesting new tidbits about Apple’s history in a recent interview. He said that all the way back in 1984, Jobs was dreaming up the idea of a “Mac phone.”
This “Mac phone” would be a desktop device that acted as a phone, but ran a version of the Mac’s software.
Samsung phones have been bogged-down with bloatware for as long as they’ve been around, but a Chinese consumer protection group is doing more than just complain about it — by suing Samsung and another Chinese vendor, Oppo, for loading their phones with literally dozens of pre-installed apps which are impossible to delete.
The consumer protection group wants to make it illegal for the smartphone industry to include bloatware on devices since it fills us phones’ internal memory and gives customers no choice in the matter.
Apple is turning to both long-time manufacturing partner Sharp and long-time “frenemy” Samsung to help build the displays for its eagerly-anticipated 12.9-inch giant-sized iPad Pro, according to a new report.
Sharp is said to have provided a small test batch of the enormous 264ppi, 2,732×2,048 displays in June, which met with Apple’s high production standards. However, Cupertino is also said to have given Samsung a back-up role building screen panels — suggesting that Apple is expecting big things with this next-gen device. Pun intended.
Finally, a boot camp where you’re encouraged to get your head in the clouds…er, the cloud. If you’re trying to establish any kind of cloud-based service, for yourself or a client, Amazon’s Web Services takes away the massive problem of actually having to build a server farm. That simplifies the work of setting up any service or application, and can help save (or make) you a lot more money, but only if you know how to use it. To help get your rear in gear, Udemy is offering the Amazon Web Services Engineer Bootcamp Bundle, a set of four critical courses. Clocking in at 24 hours’ worth of instruction on how to tap the potential of Amazon’s cloud, right now it’s 89% off the usual price — but like a vapor, this deal will disappear before long.
I’ve had the Amazon Echo sitting on my desk for the last couple of months and it’s an odd device – and I actually think it’s pretty great.
It’s a voice-controlled, speaker-cum-shopping tube that can go in your kitchen, living room or bedroom. You use it for simple queries like, “How’s the weather?” or “How is my commute? or “What is Barack Obama’s middle name?”
Listen to me interact with this device on this week’s edition of Kahney’s Korner.
Cult of Mac’s Photo Famous series introduces you to the groundbreaking photographers featured in Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 6” ad campaign.
Brad Mangin’s friends gave him a good ribbing as “the last photographer on the planet” to carry a flip phone. They all had iPhones and couldn’t believe it took him so long to not only own one but discover the picture quality of the phone’s camera.
Laughter would turn to admiration in less than a year’s time. Mangin would go on to use his first iPhone to produce a robust baseball essay for Sports Illustrated and get a book deal with his iPhone pictures.
Hidden in the dense verbiage of Apple’s latest trademark filing for OS X El Capitan is an intriguing detail not previously seen in similar filings for OS X Mavericks or Yosemite — revealing that Apple’s next-gen OS X could possibly be on its way to the iPad.
The Woz wasn’t exactly the world’s biggest fan of the Ashton Kutcher-starring 2013 movie Jobs, whose script he infamously dismissed as “crap.” But what did he make of the trailer for Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, which landed earlier this week?
In an email correspondence, Wozniak gives something of a mixed view — essentially dinging the film for its accuracy, but arguing that its heart is in the right place.
Apple will ship 50 million iPhone units in the fourth quarter of 2015, according to a new report published today which claims that companies in the iPhone 6s supply chain have started delivering finished components to Foxconn and Pegatron for final assembly.
If accurate, this means that the iPhone 5s, 6, 6 Plus, 6s and 6s Plus will hit combined shipments of 230-240 million units in 2015 — up from the 192 million units Apple shipped last year.
Siri has become an accessory to even more bullcrap from the Internet as pranksters have found another way to trick Apple’s digital assistant into contacting emergency services. And it’s only slightly less dumb than you think.
The prank claims that “something funny” will happen if you say “112” to your iPhone. North American users probably don’t know that 112 is the European equivalent to the 911 emergency number, and Siri will respond to the request by placing a call to your local switchboard.
Snohomish County, Washington’s Sheriff has taken to Twitter to put an end to the madness.
If you like the look of the high-end Apple Watch Edition, but the $10,000+ price point makes your heart and wallet hurt, a Swiss company might have a nice alternative for you.
Golden Dreams of Geneva specializes in classing up iPhones, cases, and bags, and it’s turned its monocle-rimmed gaze to Apple’s new smartwatch. The company can take a standard version of the wearable and make it fancy at a fraction of the cost of its more precious sibling.
If you’re one of the people out there who haven’t taken the plunge on an Apple Watch, you’re not alone. While Apple’s latest wearable has gotten a ton of press and sold really well, a lot of the rank and file out there might think it’s a toy, or only for rich folks.
In fact, says journalist Morgan Housel over at Time, most people throughout history have pretty predictable responses to new things.
He has a list of reactions to new innovative inventions, each of which are reactions we’ve all heard (or had) when the Apple Watch (or the iPad, or the iPhone) was launched.