Cult of Mac

Two minutes after Apple Music launched Tuesday, Hans Metzke was listening to it on his device. He hit pause on his excitement to send out this Tweet: “And we’re live! Awesome! Bye Spotify.”

Apple Music users immediately took to social media to sing the praises of Apple’s new music streaming service. At the same time, many were saying farewell to music streaming’s current king, Spotify.

Whether Apple Music, which is currently free for the three months, will usurp Spotify or the other big player, Pandora, remains to be seen.

I’m a streaming music junky. I gave up collecting, owning, and maintaining music files on my own Mac years ago and I’ve never looked back. It’s the only sensible way to have access to millions of songs without having to worry about storing them.

I’ve used and tested Rdio, Spotify, Beats Music, and other on-demand streaming services over the past few years, so it made sense to check out Apple Music, the new on-demand service to come out of Cupertino.

It’s going to take some time to dig in deep, but so far, Apple Music is proving to be an amazingly comprehensive streaming music product that focuses on discovery, something that the competition struggles with. Within minutes of downloading iOS 8.4, I’m already listening to a playlist of artists I know as well as those I don’t – a perfect blend of old and new.

I’ve found a new streaming service to love in Apple Music, and I think you will, too.

So you want to design apps for iOS. Good choice! Of course getting started can be tough, but today’s your lucky day: right now the iOS Designer Bundle is on sale for whatever you want to pay, but only until Midnight. It includes a slew of of lessons and tools that’ll bring you up to ninja level in no time.

Samsung has overtaken Apple to regain its lead of the U.S. smartphone market following strong sales of the Galaxy S6. The South Korean company’s latest smartphone became the third best-selling smartphone in its first full month on sale, trailing only the iPhone 6 and the Galaxy S5.

After months of speculation, Apple Music has officially launched — with the Beats 1 radio station also kicking off one hour from now at 12pm ET/9am PT.

Apple Music, which received positive first-look reviews earlier today, is initially available for a free three-month trial, after which it will set users back $9.99 per month — or $14.99 if you want to share with up to six members of your family.

One of Ireland’s largest newspapers told readers Tuesday morning not to expect any photos of Taylor Swift performing during her two sold-out concerts in Dublin.

The Irish Times passed on photographing her shows because of a restrictive contract Swift’s people ask shooters to sign. The contract gives the photographer a “one-time-only” use on the photos yet allows Swift unlimited rights to use the images for publicity and promotion.

Such contracts by entertainment figures are nothing new, except Swift famously called out Apple for initially withholding royalties to musicians during the free three-month trial period of the new Apple Music service.

Sony is looking to pour billions into its smartphone camera business as it looks to increase production and development of modules for customers like Apple, Samsung, and others. The company’s camera business is already a success, but its production capacity is limited.

Next to his favorite Bentley getting into a scrape, there can be few things which sound more likely to give Jony Ive nightmares than a chemical element capable of causing the catastrophic structural failure of aluminum.

Unfortunately for Jony, that chemical — referred to as gallium — not only exists, but has somehow gotten into the hands of oddball YouTube stress tester TechRax. All in the name of clicks science, TechRax has previously established himself as enemy number one to Apple’s Industrial Design team — doing everything from assaulting new iPhones with DeWalt angle grinders to crushing an Apple Watch Edition between two magnets.

Check out the video below to see how the aluminum iPhone 6 manages against its toughest challenge yet.

Apple Music is set to launch at 11am ET/8am PT today, alongside the release of iOS 8.4. As we count down the minutes, however, we can entertain ourselves with the first batch of “early impression” reviews for Apple’s new streaming music service.

Has Apple done it again? With minor quibbles, the answer certainly seems to be a resounding “yes.” Check out some of the review highlights below:

Compared to more sedate virtual assistants like Google Now, Siri has always had a reputation for snark — whether it’s answering every annoying hypothetical question we can throw at it with equally sarcastic answers, or getting amusingly annoyed when we confuse him/her with rival AI assistants.

A newly-discovered Siri Easter Egg swept the Twittersphere on Monday, however. Asking Siri to divide zero by zero may sound like a basic math question, but the result is pure offbeat hilarity.

And just a bit mean, too.

Is there a better place to intern than Apple? Quite possibly not, according to the claims of one former intern who recently broke confidentiality to speak out about his experiences with the company.

Forget about hopefully making enough to cover your bus fare, “Brad” says Apple offers interns around $6,700 per month, plus the opportunity to work paid overtime at time-and-a-half.

And when it comes to perks, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Design firm Cambridge Industrial Design herd that dairy farmers might want to track their cows’ moo-vements, so they went ahead and developed some udderly clever smart collars to help keep an eye on the beasts.

That’s right: Even cattle are starting to horn in on the wearables scene.

Parents looking to keep their creative kids busy this summer might want to look into Apple Camp, a free, three-day workshop at select Apple retail stores.

As in previous years, sessions will occur throughout July and August and will guide campers ages 8 to 12 through one of two cool projects.

You can call it customer loyalty, brand stickiness, or whatever other terms the cool marketing kids are using these days, but it all means the same thing in this case: Apple is doing a better job than Samsung of retaining customers and winning over new ones.

This is according to a report from RBC Capital Markets, which polled Apple and Samsung customers about their current and future purchases.

We’ve been promised jetpacks since the 1950s and dreaming about them even longer. Just hang on a couple more years.

Plenty of time to save the $150,000 it will cost to buy the Martin Jetpack, which promises to be the first practical jetpack ready for vertical liftoff.

The Martin Aircraft Company has been conducting research and development on personal jet packs for a couple of decades. Even before it became a privately funded company, its founder Glenn Martin had been tinkering with the idea of something that can fly longer than 30 seconds since the early 1980s.

Apple Music makes its big debut tomorrow, June 30, at 8 a.m. PST. It’s going to be a very big day for the music industry, and for us listeners. It’s the day streaming goes truly mainstream. From tomorrow on, it’s officially the streaming era.

But how does it work? What artists are going to be available? You probably have a lot of questions about what Apple Music’s launch means for you — and we’ve got answers.

If your Apple Watch stops responding to your iPhone, you can reboot it or you can turn the Bluetooth connection off and on. If that doesn’t work to reconnect your Watch, you might need to reset it, and then you’ll need to re-pair it.

Here’s how.

We’ve all done it before: we head to the family reunion, the wedding, the kid’s birthday party and we just shoot everything. We have no plan except that we think we’ll have time later to edit it down to something interesting.

Unfortunately, that just leads to a bloated iPhone with too many unnecessary video files. Plus, you know you’re never going to get around to sitting down and looking through all that footage again. Ugh.

With a good plan, however, and a firm grasp of one simple storytelling technique, you’ll avoid this problem and create some amazing videos without a whole lot of extra work.

Here’s how.

There’s good news and bad news for Beats Music and future Apple Music users alike. Apple has confirmed that the new music service will arrive for Sonos apps and speakers, but unfortunately not right away. It turns out integration won’t be ready in time for the big launch tomorrow, June 30, but the two companies are working together to bring Apple Music to Sonos as soon as possible.

OnePlus is putting a fingerprint scanner inside its upcoming OnePlus 2, and it promises to be better than any of the scanners we’ve seen on Android devices so far. So good, in fact, that OnePlus claims it’s “faster than Touch ID” on Apple’s iOS devices.

If you’ve ever taken a ride on an unfamiliar city’s subway or transit system, you know how confusing it can be to know which specific exit to use to find the right above ground location you need to get to where you’re going.

In the upcoming iOS 9, Apple Maps aims to help you out with a subtle yet extremely useful feature: it will tell you which exit to take when you’re using the Transit option, also new to iOS 9.

Learning to code is like learning a second language: it’s best done fully immersed and with expert guidance. Unlike learning a new language, there’s nothing like the nation of “Code-topia” to visit (yet) where you can learn among the native speakers. And unless you’re already in school for coding, it’s largely up to you to find your own teachers and classes. Luckily, BaseRails Ruby on Rails Training offers a comprehensive education in one of the top programming languages on the web, Ruby on Rails, straight to your computer (who knows what kind of virus shots you’d need to visit Code-topia anyway).

Google has teamed up with the Federal Railroad Administration to bring rail crossing warnings to Google Maps. Every crossing in the U.S. will be added, and drivers will receive alerts while using turn-by-turn directions in the Maps app.

With one day to go until Apple Music officially launches with iOS 8.4, Eddy Cue has revealed that Music’s iTunes Match integration will soon let users upload 100,000 of their own songs to iCloud for streaming at any time.

Geography doesn’t have to get in the way of the band coming together.

A startup company by the name of Soundtrap Monday rolled out what it calls the first online music and audio recording studio, allowing musicians to collaborate remotely in real time using any operating system.

It will likely directly compete with Garageband, Apple’s popular software used to create music and podcasts that first launched in 2004.