Cult of Mac

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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The weird thing about all the promotional videos for the Apple Watch is how perfect the hand models are. The people wearing the watches look like citizens from Logan’s Run: fresh and young and perfect.

What you won’t see is a parade of hairy arms.

But now that the Apple Watch is out in the wild, that’s exactly what you get on Instagram. These pictures tell the real story.

My friends, family and even complete strangers are constantly asking me how to get their million-dollar app idea in the App Store.

This is always a shocker for me because, after countless hours of hard work over the past two years, my app is barely breaking even.

But I can offer one solid piece of advice for anybody hoping to turn a clever idea into a world-beating app: Find yourself an amazing developer and hold on tight.

Those of you who were hoping the Apple Watch would usher in a new era of flatulence apps, prepare to be disappointed: Apple has already rejected the first app that serves no purpose other than to allow people to make fart sounds from their wrist.

It’s time for the Cult of Mac to mobilize. Apple co-founder, Segway enthusiast and all-around snuggly bear Steve Wozniak has won many honors and awards over the years, but this could be the greatest one yet: He’s up to be turned into a wax figure at Madame Tussauds!

For anybody who wants a detailed look at what makes the Apple Watch’s chip tick, the silicon experts at Chipworks have posted an X-ray look inside the S1 processor.

Notifications are why we all got an Apple Watch, right? We want to be able to know what’s going on in our digital lives all the time, but we want to do it faster, without having to pull out an iPhone. Because that’s just rude.

However, getting every single Notification that you get on your iPhone shunted automatically over to your Apple Watch is going to get tiresome. No one wants to deal with a wrist tap every time someone takes a turn in Evil Apples.

Here’s how to manage all of the notification cruft a little bit better.

Lusting after the gold Apple Watch Edition but don’t have the funds for Jony Ive’s $17,000 timepiece? You could take out a second mortgage on the house, or sell a kidney. Or you could do what artist Casey Neistat did and manually turn an Apple Watch Sport into a golden beauty.

Neistat only had $399, so he decided to preorder the black Sport model and then carefully painted it gold. Sure, his method might void your warrant, and it doesn’t look perfect, but it’s better than spending your kid’s college savings just to be as fly as Drake.

You can do it too, just follow the steps in the video below:

Jony Ive and his BFF Marc Newson launched Apple into the luxury market this week with the Apple Watch, which expertly straddles the line between gadget and fashion accessory.

Apple’s dynamic designing duo sat down with Vogue’s Suzy Meeks this week to talk about their first foray into the fashion world — as well as what inspired them to create the Apple Watch. We rounded up the top 8 revelations from the pair’s appearance earlier this week, but Vogue just made the full interview available online, and it’s full of juicy insights into Jony and Marc’s thought processes.

Watch the full interview below:

Apps on the Apple Watch appear as a honeycomb on the Home Screen. It’s fun and easy to use, but it quickly fills up with a dizzying array of icons.

Here’s how to tame it.