During his January conference call with investors, Tim Cook said that 2015 would be ‘the year of Apple Pay’, and while Apple’s mobile wallet has already leapfrogged rivals like Google Wallet, a new survey of the top 100 retailers in the country found that Apple Pay still faces a long uphill battle.
Can’t Apple’s design guru catch a break? After Jony Ive received a well-deserved promotion to become Apple’s chief design officer, some pundits misinterpreted the happy news as a bad omen.
Our own Leander Kahney reads the tea leaves completely differently: Ive’s promotion is nothing but good news for Apple.
Here at Cult of Mac Deals, we rely on VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) for ensuring that our online activity stays private, browsing securely even on public Wi-Fi, and accessing any app or video no matter where we are in the world. To that end, we’ve put together a collection of deals on some of our favorite ones. Keep reading to see which ones get our stamp of approval, and save up to 77%.
We’re just three days away from Tim Cook and the gang taking over San Francisco’s Moscone Center for this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Preparations for the big event have been underway all week, but crews are starting to wrap up pre-production — and the final WWDC 2015 banners are being unfurled.
Take a look:
The NBA Finals started last night, with LeBron James taking to the court in search of yet another championship ring. His team is taking on the Silicon Valley Golden State Warriors and, while Apple Senior VP Eddy Cue was all too happy to cheer on LeBron during the last two NBA championships, this year he’s defected to the home team — and giving King James hell.
If you need a solid gold smartphone to go with your Apple Watch Edition, look no further than HTC’s limited edition One M9.
Made out of 24-karat gold, the one-of-a-kind handset has been made to celebrate this weekend’s UEFA Champions League final — and it was photographed with an iPhone.
Apple is planning to use WWDC to spotlight the new streaming music service its been working on for year. It could be Apple’s biggest play in the music industry since the launch of iTunes, but according to a new report, Apple is still struggling to ink its deal with record labels.
Looking to buy a new iPhone 6 or 6 Plus from Apple on AT&T but don’t want to sign up for the carrier’s Next plan? Too damn bad.
Just days after AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega promised subsidized phones are going away, the company has completely removed subsidized options for the iPhone from the Apple Store as well.
Already bored of the band that came with your Apple Watch? Now’s the time to get a new one, because almost every band available from the Apple Online Store is now shipping in just one business day.
You’ve probably heard — repeatedly, from us — that Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is happening in San Francisco next week. But that’s not the only show in town. The Alternative Developer Conference, aka AltConf, is running at the same time, right around the corner from the Moscone Center at the AMC Metreon.
It’s a more open and accessible convention than Apple’s, and that’s not just because it’s free.
“Alt has great information, but it has a lot more community feel where it’s not getting talked down to from the lectern and Apple, you’re getting talked to by your peers,” Jeff Kelley, iOS developer for Detroit Labs and author of Developing for Apple Watch, told Cult of Mac. “And everybody there is kind of on the same foot. Especially because it’s free. You can pay to get a reserved ticket this year, but you don’t have to pay to get in. Everybody is there because they love this stuff.”
A manic new music video called “Apple Watch Song” turns all the anticipation and angst surrounding the hit wearable into a geeky anthem for Apple fans awaiting delivery of their precious wrist gadgets.
From the Apple Watch Edition’s exorbitant price tag to the fabricated health scare of “cancer wrist,” the wacky song turns the dreams and doubts about Apple’s smartwatch into a cavalcade of comedic riffs.
Ahead of WWDC 2015, Apple’s lawyers have demanded AltConf organizers refrain from streaming or displaying any video or display any video content from WWDC. As a result, the conference has decided to cancel its annual viewing of the Keynote and State of the Union stream on Monday that has been a staple of the event for the past few years.
In a letter to AltConf, Apple’s lawyers maintain that the company has the right to “exercises control over not only the content of its messaging, but also the manner in which those messages are packaged, distributed and delivered,” and that the AltConf’s big party of developers watching the keynote together “would strip Apple of exclusive control over one of the most anticipated events of the year, and could deprive Apple of potential revenue generated from its exclusive rights.”
Keyboards are great for typing numbers and letters and stuff, but don’t they seem a little static sometimes?
This awesome-looking Bluetooth peripheral aims to solve that problem you may or may not actually have, and it does so with a lot of style and a crisp, simple design.
My Apple Watch is getting a little crufty. I wear it every day, including when I sweat a lot — like during a run, for example.
Recently, the Digital Crown started to get a little tough to turn. It took extra effort to spin the darn thing, and I wasn’t able to rotate it smoothly anymore.
Luckily, Apple had me covered — but I wasn’t prepared for what I had to do to get this Digital Crown fix to work.
A social-media campaign hopes to put pressure on Apple to release the Pebble Time smartwatch app for iOS.
The to-do started after an update on the Time’s Kickstarter page yesterday.
At its I/O conference last week, Google laid out the roadmaps for its most important platforms. It has already made its way into your pocket, but over the next few years, the search giant hopes to find a place on your wrist and in your home as well.
Things aren’t so straightforward as that, though.
Apple is fighting Google for territory in a variety of areas, with iOS competing with Android, Apple Watch battling Android Wear, and HomeKit trying to beat out Brillo.
But which one has the edge that will help it reign supreme? Here’s how they stack up against each other.
An upcoming mobile game will throw players into the struggle immediately following the death of the Emperor in Return of the Jedi.
Star Wars: Uprising, which is due out later this year for iOS and Android, is a real-time strategy game that picks up after the destruction of the second Death Star at the end of the third film as the decapitated Empire struggles to maintain control over the galaxy.
Check out the announcement trailer below.
Sales of the Galaxy S 6 haven’t been as great as Samsung would have hoped, so the company is going back to what it does best: desperately make fun of the iPhone.
The company released two new ads for the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge touting the phones’ wireless charging, wide angle selfies, and curved display that shows texts and emails and other info, while the iPhone 6 just has a boring metal edge with buttons.
You can watch both ads below:
After climbing up the Fortune 500 rankings the past few years, Apple is standing firm in the No. 5 spot it reached last year.
Walmart grabbed the top spot, followed by oil giants Exxon and Chevron, with Apple hanging in thanks to strong iPhone and Mac sales, although
Fortune noted slumping iPad sales are a point of concern.
There is a slight soapbox on which I stand sometimes when I write about photography. Nothing too high-minded, but when the topic allows, I will gently remind people to print out their pictures from their iPhones and computers.
Today, I stand before you, not on a soapbox, but on a short stack of photo books. The books are designed with iPad apps from pictures I made on my smartphone. I chose three companies I liked for ease of design and the final product.
All three – Cleen, Mosaic and ZOOMBOOK – have apps that allow you to quickly design a 20-page book from your mobile device and have a tracking number for shipping all within 10 minutes. In four to 10 business days, a hardcover book arrives in the mail that you can neatly shelve.
When it comes to choosing headphones for our workouts, we ask for a lot — comfort, durability and great sound. Sometimes we find a pair that delivers on all fronts, like these wireless Bluetooth earbuds by MMOVE. Now’s your chance to see why we love them and pick them up for $49 at Cult of Mac Deals.
Given how secretive Apple is, it’s no surprise that we know relatively little about the role of Jony Ive’s designer BFF Marc Newson, who works on so-called “special projects” for the company.
In a recent interview, however, Newson spilled a few beans about his work at Apple — including the fact that it consumes about 60 percent of his time, and is a job he hopes to hold “indefinitely.”
Who can blame him?
Apple’s new spaceship campus is scheduled to be completed late next year, but before 12,000 employees take over the new mothership, you can take a guided tour of Apple’s current headquarters, if you’ve got enough funds.
A new report published today by Adobe demonstrates that, when it comes to both pay TV and the devices people choose for consuming digital media, Apple trounces the competition.
Having once dismissed its own Apple TV offering as just a “hobby,” the powers-that-be in Cupertino are likely to want to rethink that statement following the news that its set-top boxes doubled their share of premium video viewing quarter-over-quarter during the last year — overtaking Roku in the process.
Casimir Zeglen was truly a man of the cloth. He was a Catholic priest — with an obsession for silk underwear — but the pleasure he got from silk touching skin was because it stopped bullets.
The Chicago priest is credited with inventing the first bulletproof vest, a calling he answered in 1893 after the city’s mayor was gunned down.
The vests worn today by soldiers, police officers and marked men are made with lightweight armor and sophisticated, bullet-resistant fibers like Kevlar that evolved as weapons got more powerful. Yet they work much the same way as Zeglen’s silk invention: The material catches and deforms slugs, then spreads the force of the strike over a larger area of the vest.