Cult of Mac

Along with revealing last quarters monstrous profits, Tim Cook has announced that Apple is increasing its capital buyback program to the tune of $140 billion.

Apple’s Board of Directors have authorized an increase of more than 50 percent to the company’s program to return capital to shareholders. Under the new plans, Apple will give a total of $200 billion in cash back to stock holders by the end of March 2017.

“We believe Apple has a bright future ahead, and the unprecedented size of our capital return program reflects that strong confidence,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “While most of our program will focus on buying back shares, we know that the dividend is very important to many of our investors, so we’re raising it for the third time in less than three years.”

You can read the full press release below:

Apple has released the numbers for its Q1 2015 financial results, and they’re monstrous.

Not only did Apple manage to have the second most successful earnings in the company’s history, but it blew past Wall Street’s expectations with a monstrous $58 billion in revenue, leading to $13.6 billion in profits – both of which are records in Q2.

“We are thrilled by the continued strength of iPhone, Mac and the App Store, which drove our best March quarter results ever,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re seeing a higher rate of people switching to iPhone than we’ve experienced in previous cycles, and we’re off to an exciting start to the June quarter with the launch of Apple Watch.”

Apple shares were trading up about 2% on the day and closed today at $132.65, just under that company’s all-time high. Here’s a closer look at Apple’s impressive numbers:

Apple sucks! Or at least it does according to its most recent purchase: the domain name Apple.sucks, which the company has shelled out the cash to acquire.

In less than an hour, Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri will reveal whether iPhone 6 sales have continued to sail past Wall Street’s expectations. We’ll be on hand to liveblog all the action from the Q2 2015 Apple earnings call.

The results are expected to be monstrous, thanks to strong demand for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus carrying over from last quarter’s historic results. Wall Street is expecting Q2 2015 to be the second-biggest quarter in the history of Apple, with revenue believed to top $56 billion, for 23 percent year-over-year growth.

Apple only needs to sell more than 58.1 million iPhones to make it the second-biggest quarter ever, but what we’re most anxious to hear is whether Tim and Luca drop some Apple Watch numbers on us.

The call begins at 2 p.m. Pacific, but the liveblog action starts now. Keep this tab open and come back throughout the day for coverage and commentary.

Instagram continues to play with the color wheel, introducing three new filters Monday the company says get inspiration from weekend outdoor adventures.

In addition to the filters, named Lark, Reyes and Juno, Instagram now allows users to include emoji on hashtags.

Since surpassing more than 300 million users in December, Instagram has added several new features to the photo-sharing app. It added five filters in December and last month, rolled out a new app called Layout, which allows users to combine multiple images in a single post.

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If your internet service provider faced a trial, would it be found guilty of sucking?

That’s the cheeky question posed by satirical short film Life on Trial, a goofball riff on classic courtroom dramas. Only in this trial, the victim is a video game character — Poanbone the Smashivator — and the defendant is the game’s creator, who skimped on network services.

The murder weapon? A serious case of lag.

Apple is pushing into new territory with the Apple Watch, by making it the first device to come from Cupertino that uses an OLED display. One of the reasons Apple’s never brought OLED displays to the iPhone is they’re more challenging to engineer than long-established LCDs.

Apple hasn’t given us too many details about the Apple Watch’s display yet, other than telling us it’s a ‘Flexible Retina Display’ but the team over at DisplayMate have put the new display to the test, and came away with a shocking discovery: Apple Watch Sport has a better display than the Apple Watch Edition.

Facebook Messenger is today launching its assault on Skype with a new update that brings video calling to users on Android and iOS. The feature works over Wi-Fi and LTE, and it’s completely free.

Former super model Christy Turlington Burns has been counting down the weeks leading up the London Marathon by blogging about her experience training with the Apple Watch.

Burns revealed new details about the Apple Watch leading up to its release, but now that the marathon is over and she’s crossed the finish line, Burns can add awesome another feature to her blog: it helped her break a personal record.

The glass may be scratch-proof, but the Apple Watch is not durable enough to withstand a blender.

Tom Dickson wasted no time having the Apple Watch as a guest on his YouTube show, Will It Blend?Sure enough, it didn’t.

Dickson – maybe all too cheerfully – placed the watch in one of his Blendtec blenders and gave it a whirl. It seemed to take the beating from the initial revolutions of the blade before pieces began flying off the watch. The session ended with black smoke and a pile of what looked like ashes.

We got our first taste of Apple’s updated music app two weeks ago with the release of iOS 8.4 beta 1, but Apple’s already seeding a new update to its mobile operating system.

The iOS 8.4 beta 2 update is available now in the iOS Dev Center as well as via an over-the-air update for all public beta testers. Apple also pushed out Xcode 6.4 beta 2 to developers this morning.

Every smartphone maker promises us great photos from its latest devices, but few Android handsets are actually capable of taking them consistently. That’s not the case with the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge, which are just as impressive as Samsung said they would be.

In the latest DxOMark tests, the trusted industry standard for camera and lens quality ratings, the Galaxy S6 edge’s 16-megapixel camera beats out the iPhone 6, the Galaxy Note 4, and all other competitors with top marks.

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Good news, Discover credit and debit users! The company today announced that, from this fall, it will enable Apple Pay support across the United States.

This means that Discover customers with a Apple Pay-enabled iPhone or Apple Watch will have the ability to add their card to the mobile payment service — for use in all Apple Pay-accepting retailers.

Apple is using a revamped, custom Apache Mesos scheduler to power its Siri search queries.

It’s been given the backronym “J.A.R.V.I.S.” — apparently standing for Just A Rather Very Intelligent Scheduler — and Marvel movie fans will likely recognize the name as a geeky nod to Tony Stark’s intelligent computer assistant from the Iron Man movies.

The Apple Watch may be good at telling you how healthy you are, tracking your steps, propelling you to move, and reminding you of upcoming appoints, but conventional wisdom says it’s rubbish for reading. The 38mm and 42mm screens are just too tiny to read anything more than a sentence or two long on, and certainly not any longreads.

So on paper (no pun intended), Instapaper for Apple Watch is a terrible idea. Amazingly, though, it looks like the Instapaper team at Betaworks has made it work.

There’s an old adage about most sports car crashes happening within minutes of leaving the automobile showroom for the first time, and apparently the same is true of clumsy (or unfortunate) Apple fans enjoying their first weekend with a brand new Apple Watch on their wrist.

Almost like a badge of honor, social media already shows multiple people who managed to break their Apple Watches before most of us even got our hands on one of the devices.

Jay Z has long described himself as the boss of the Big Apple, but right now it seems the Tidal CEO is butting heads with Apple and other music companies over an alleged multimillion-dollar “smear campaign.”

In a string of tweets over the weekend, Jay Z took issue with tech giants trying to make him out to be the bad guy — acknowledging that, “We may not be perfect – but we are determined” and that “We are here for the long haul.”

Although perhaps not if Apple has anything to say about it!

Apple’s ambitions as a mobile health company took a giant leap forward over the weekend, as HealthKit was connected to more than 80,000 patient files at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

This means that Cedars-Sinai doctors now have the ability to take iOS Health data into account when making clinical and medical judgments — allowing physicians to easily access patients’  weight, blood pressure, steps taken, glucose levels, and oxygen saturation levels as gathered from their iOS devices.

Consumer Reports has a history of being hard on Apple. They famously refused to recommend the iPhone 4 because of a so-called “flawed” antenna design.

To test the Apple Watch, though, Consumer Reports is being harder on Apple than ever. They’ve run a gamut of torture tests on Apple’s new wearable to see just how hard the sapphire display actually is. Here’s a spoiler: You won’t be able to scratch it with anything short of a nuke. And even the Apple Watch Sport’s display is nearly unscratchable (although it can be cracked).

It’s too early to tell exactly how well the Apple Watch will do in the grand scheme of things, or even if it will ultimately win the wearable war. But one thing’s for sure, it’s off to a hell of a good start, with statistics indicating that the Apple Watch sold more units in one day than Android Wear devices have sold. Period.

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There are plenty of great apps for the Apple Watch, but what about the weird ones?

Developers have some interesting ideas for what you’d want to do on your wrist. Here are some of the weirdest, goofiest and most downright bizarre Watch apps:

Apple Watch, inbound! And now that it is, we’ll take a look at some of the most useful Watch apps available, and just for fun, some of the stinkiest. Plus: the noteworthy differences between the Sport and steel editions; why those “scratch test” videos shouldn’t trouble you; and finally, you’ll never believe what our ol’ pal and ex-Apple exec Scott Forstall is up to now…

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Full show notes ahead!

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