Cult of Mac

Faster, more powerful MacBooks come out every year, but for most of us it’s not very practical to throw down a bunch of cash every time a new model gets released. Luckily, it’s pretty simple to perform a MacBook RAM upgrade.

In today’s video, Cult of Mac shows you how to give your MacBook a speed boost by installing new RAM.

Apple Watch can track your workouts, from cycling to rowing to the elliptical at your local gym. This is a battery-intensive feature, though, what with all the heartbeat monitoring, GPS connections to your iPhone, and the like.

Here’s how to conserve your Apple Watch battery life by turning off all that juice-hogging stuff while you run or walk, so you can keep your wearable’s power at optimum for a long day between charges.

Imagine clicking iTunes’ “Buy” button to purchase the latest record from Drake or Pharrell Williams, only to get a popup from Apple suggesting you’re behind the times.

That’s what might happen as Apple uses its massive consumer base to push streaming music on the masses, even going so far as prompting iTunes users to switch from buying songs to subscribing to a cloud service.

That sort of mid-purchase upsell is just one possible element of Cupertino’s strategy to shake up the music industry again, and the Apple streaming music plan just might be crazy enough to work.

TV executives are lining up for a chance to possibly ink a deal for Apple’s new streaming TV service, but if you were hoping to ditch cable right after WWDC, you’ll have to keep waiting.

Data centers are not usually considered to be hazardous work environments, but Apple U.S. data centers have had a string of bad luck lately, and a new incident at the company’s center in North Carolina is adding to the fire.

Apple head Tim Cook has donated 50,000 of his shares in the company to an undisclosed charity, according to an SEC filing Friday. The donation has a value of $6.54 million, as of this writing.

If you’ve ever tried to book a cruise through a portal like Cruise.com or — heaven forbid — via a cruise line’s website, you know that it can be an incredibly confusing and costly experience.

The thing is, though, that it doesn’t have to be. Cruisable is a startup that hopes to take the obfuscation away and let you find affordable and/or incredibly fantastic cruise vacations with a website and app that won’t try to trick you.

“Cruises can be cheaper than other getaways,” said CTO and co-founder Giacomo Balli, “as low as a couple hundred dollars.”

Owning a car sucks mostly for one reason: I’m always losing my keys.

Like this morning on the way to the coffee shop when I somehow managed to lose my key after I already got in the car. Keys were not made for me, which is why I might need to upgrade to a Volvo someday because the company just revealed it’s ready to turn Apple Watch into the key to your car.

If you’re attending Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco next week and want to know where the parties are, here’s a website that’ll help you plan your evenings.

Older Apple computers may be susceptible to a new zero-day vulnerability discovered by a security researcher, who found the flaw can be used to install rootkit malware that’s nearly undetectable and very hard to remove.

Apple Watch could become one of the most important devices you can shackle yourself to, so to amp up the Apple faithful into more heatlh-focused nerds, Apple has sent fitness guru Jay Blahnik on a special events tour in Australia, China and Japan.

Blahnik is touring the areas to talking to some of the biggest personal trainers about the intersection between fitness and technology. At the Apple Store in Sydney, Australian personal trainer Michelle Bridges sat down for an interview with Blahnik to talk about some of things she’s learned from filming the Australian version of The Biggest Loser.

You can watch part of their interview below:

If you can’t get enough of Marvel’s Agent Peggy Carter, played to perfection by Haley Atwell, or Game of Thrones’ Jon Snow, broodingly acted by Kit Harrington, here’s a new movie that stars both of them: Testament of Youth.

It’s a deeply romantic period piece set in Britain during the first world war, based on a memoir by Vera Brittain, a young woman who overcame the serious sexism of her day to attend Oxford University, only to have her studies interrupted by the war.

When we discover an amazing app that helps your Mac run better, faster, and more efficiently, we can’t help but share it with you. And when we discover nine of them, you get this bundle. Enhance your Mac experience with our package of some of the best apps out there for your computer. Each one is worth between $14.95 and $49.95, but we’re selling all nine for a total of $19.99 for a limited time only. Here’s what you’ll get:

34 million smartwatch displays will ship in 2015, and 49 percent of them belong to the Apple Watch.

Thanks to Apple entering the market, smartwatch display shipments are set to increase 250 this year, according to a new study of over 35 suppliers, who expect Apple to be the biggest player in the smartwatch market 

When people talk about Apple’s Irish operations, it’s normally negatively, regarding questionable tax practices. But the company operates a 4,000-person factory in Cork, Ireland, that builds iMacs — and it’s the only Apple-owned manufacturing facility in the world.

The Irish Examiner recently got a peek inside the secretive Apple manufacturing plant in Cork. Check out some photos below.

The Asus ZenWatch 2 smartwatch certainly has something familiar about it, right?

The latest Android Wear device to be shown off at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Asus’ new timepiece sticks by and large to the form factor of its first generation device, aside from the notable addition of a suspiciously-familiar Apple-style digital crown.

Check out a video below:

The Typo Keyboard is dead. Long live… well, other iPhone 6 cases, we guess.

In a rare win for BlackBerry, the company today announced that it has come to an agreement with Typo, the Ryan Seacrest-funded company behind the BlackBerry-style iPhone keyboard. The agreement means that Typo will cease selling its keyboards for any device under 7.9-inches in size.

Being an Apple manufacturer is a pretty lucrative market if you can get in on it, which is why it’s no surprise to hear that Apple’s existing partners are constantly fending off challenges from upstarts promising to do whatever they can do — only cheaper and better.

According to a new report, Japanese manufacturers are currently making a concerted effort to secure more orders from Apple, which currently deals mainly with companies based in Taiwan and China.

If the Japan-based companies do manage to muscle-in on the Apple supply chain, it could result in iPhone manufacturing becoming even more of an international affair than it already is, while also having a potentially massive impact on existing Chinese iPhone makers.

Details about Nintendo’s next-gen NX console won’t officially be shared by the company until 2016, but according to a new report coming out of Japan one thing we might be able to expect is for the NX hardware to run a version of Android.

The decision is said to be rooted in Nintendo’s desire to give developers increased flexibility in making content that can also be used on smartphones and tablets.

Apple’s plans for its relaunched Beats Music streaming music service, rumored to be revealed at next week’s WWDC, took another step forward this weekend.

A new report suggests that Apple is currently in talks with Drake, Pharrell Williams and David Guetta for them to come on board as guest DJs for iTunes Radio. As three of the biggest names in music, having these artists on its roster would give Apple a massive selling point in its upcoming streaming music war with rivals like Spotify.

Have you ever thrown away something you regretted later on? If so, you have something in common with the San Francisco Bay Area woman who recently junked a vintage Apple-1 computer — one of just 200 surviving machines created by Steve Jobs and the Woz way back in 1976.

Fortunately the ultra-rare desktop was recognized by a member of the recycling firm she left it at. They sold it to a private collector for $200,000, and now want to track down the unwitting donor to give her the 50 percent they say the company owes.

Another week, another collection of amazing deals at huge discounts.

Pay what you want for the business design bundle worth over $1,500, ditch headphone wire tangles and save 51% on the Active Wrap wireless headphones, and pick up other great deals. Keep reading to check out our best deals of the week, brought to you by Cult of Mac Deals.

This week: Jony Ive’s big promotion has him handing over the keys to Apple’s legendary industral design lab, so we have to wonder… is this step one in an Ive succession plan? Plus: the surprising suitability of Ive’s replacement, Richard Howarth; Apple VP Jeff Williams lets some curious Apple car comments slip; why Apple Watch will get a lot faster come fall; Leander reveals his fetish for the weird whispering women of Youtube; and stay tuned till the end for a very romantic Get To Know Ur Cultist!

Our thanks to CultCloth for supporting this episode. If you’re obsessive about keeping your iPhone, iPad, Mac, DSLR, glasses, and other gadgets in sparkling clean condition, you’ll love ‘em. Use code “CultCast” at checkout to score a free 8×8 CleanCloth.