Cult of Mac

You rarely see Google Glass anymore, but if Recon Instruments has its way, you’ll be seeing plenty more head-mounted displays in the future.

The Recon Jet, launched Thursday, is a pair of smart eyeglasses for sporty activities like running and biking. Bristling with sensors, the device shows all kinds of biometric data and social stats on its tiny heads-up display. Paired with a smartphone, it can take pictures and video, send and receive status updates, find friends and family on the piste and much more.

But sports is just a start. If Recon is successful — and that’s a big if — we may be seeing smart glasses in a lot more places. Recon is betting hard that the face is the place for smart wearables.

Anastasia Medrano was anxious about her father’s health and it was an iPhone app that helped deliver peace of mind within seconds of the doctor giving him a good prognosis.

When the doctor said the cancer was in remission, her brother immediately alerted Medrano and another sibling with a new app called GrandmaSays, which allows families of a sick or elderly loved one to communicate medical updates, coordinate visits and share memories with text and photos.

“We’re kind of scattered and it falls on my one brother to take my dad to appointments,” said Medrano, of Irvine, Calif. “Rather than make severals calls, he can share the information in one place. We were hoping for the all clear and it was nice to get that ping on my phone.”

“The Force is strong in my family,” says Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker voices over this second teaser trailer for the hotly anticipated Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie that will hit the big screen this coming December. “My father has it, I have it, my sister has it. You have that power, too.”

That’s how the nerdgasmic second trailer begins, and then slams into some seriously amazing scenes from the upcoming film, including a massive, crashed Star Destroyer, close ups of new stars Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, and Daisy Ridley, and a brilliant moment of fan service with everyone’s favorite smuggler and his humongous furry sidekick.

“Chewie,” says Han Solo, “We’re home.”

As part of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, Jony Ive penned a short essay praising Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky for creating a “remarkable startup.”

“The service that Brian and his partners imagined is soaringly ambitious and utterly practical,” said Ive, who didn’t make Time’s list himself this year.

Being pals with Jony Ive definitely has its benefits. Just ask J.J. Abrams, the director of the upcoming Star Wars movie.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is the fourth person on Time‘s list of “The 100 Most Influential People,” a self-referential grouping of important figures from technology, music, politics, and our global culture.

Cook’s short essay focuses on his business acumen as well as his socially responsible world-view.

“It could not have been easy for Tim Cook to step into the immense shadow cast by the late Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs,” writes Congressman John Lewis for Time. “But with grace and courage and an unabashed willingness to be his own man, Tim has pushed Apple to unimaginable profitability—and greater social responsibility.”

Though there are many places that offer WiFi, the signal can often be unreliable, which renders your connection spotty at best. And, even if you do find a hotspot, you never know just how secure it is.

Now you can get a secure WiFi signal anywhere you need it with the MiFi 2 Unlocked Global Hotspot, only half price for a limited time at Cult of Mac Deals.

It’s been rumored for months that the iPhone 6S might pick up Apple Watch’s Force Touch feature when it’s updated this Fall, but according to the Chinese media Jony Ive is also planning to use the same aluminum used in the Apple Watch Sport.

If Apple pulls it off, it could solve the Bendgate controversy.

When you’re the richest company in the world you can afford to do crazy things: build a spaceship campus, start secret electric car projects, or buy an entire forest.

Apple announced today that it’s buying up 36,000 acres of private forest land that will be sustainably harvested and used for its packaging.

The land is broken into two tracts in Maine and North Carolina and will be managed by the Conservation Fund. Combined, the two tracts are more that two times the size of Manhattan. The pulp from the trees will go toward Apple’s packaging needs, but other companies will be able to buy fiber from them too.

New photos of cases reportedly designed for an upcoming 12.9-inch iPad Pro may reveal interesting tidbits about Apple’s long-rumored giant tablet.

Check out the possible details, based on photos from renowned Apple leaker Sonny Dickson, below.

This week’s ode to a technological marvel of the past would be a better read on an iPhone 6. How else to fully appreciate the design of the device in your hand than to read about when function and form first met on the telephone?

 Among the many items found in my aunt’s home when she died last year in a small town in Michigan’s upper peninsula were two telephones that are examples of the first dial phone.

If the once-common rotary dial phone seems strange today, behold the calling function on this 10-pound candlestick phone. On a circular base are 100 numbers. In communities too small to have a full-time operator, each home was assigned a number.

There was more to Walt Disney than Mickey Mouse. He was an obsessive futurist who used his theme parks to stage ideas of what a world filled with cutting-edge technology and the fruits of scientific ambition might look like.

The upcoming movie Tomorrowland is not only a nod to Disney, it re-imagines his vision with the full 21st-century CGI treatment of a world with robots, flying cars and towers reaching into the clouds.

There have been some Apple Watch games announced — mostly simple affairs, like Nimblebit’s upcoming Letterpad — but nothing truly epic.

WayForward Technologies, the veteran developer behind Ducktales Remasters, wants to change that. They’ve just announced that their latest adventure game, Watch Quest, will be available exclusively for the Apple Watch, starting next week.

After Steve Jobs, the original Mac, and the iPhone, launch day queues have to be one of the most recognisably Apple phenomenons of them all: something which speaks not only to the crazy number of sales Apple makes, but also to the devotion of its fanbase.

Recently it looked as if Angela Ahrendts was trying to permanently change-up Apple culture — sending an email to Apple Store employees which proclaimed, “The days of waiting in line and crossing fingers for a product are over for our customers.”

Fortunately, to paraphrase Mark Twain, it seems fears that Apple would do away with the excitement of launch day lines have been greatly exaggerated.

You know how the iPhone and iPad plays a little chime when you plug it in? The new MacBook also does that. But sadly, the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro remain completely silent when they connect to juice — which can make it hard to tell when you’ve accidentally knocked the MagSafe loose.

If you’ve got a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, though, it’s easy to hack in the new MacBook’s power-charging sound. Here’s how.

We’re living in a golden age for comic book movies, but even with that being the case, it can be kind of rare for a film to arrive in multiplexes, faithfully guided there by its original creator.

Having the original creator also show up as a writer or even director can work wonders, however, as this sextet of comic book cinematic gems prove.

IFTTT’s already dead simple Do collection of apps is about to get even better: two of the apps have just been supercharged with Apple Watch support, allowing you to run an IFTTT recipe on your watch face with just a single tap.

We all know that the pope has an iPad, but even popes upgrade. While we normal, unblessed humans tend to simply pass our old iPads down to a family member or sell them on Craigslist when we upgrade, the pontiff’s old iPad went straight to auction, where it sold for a staggering $30,500.

If you missed out on placing a preorder for an Apple Watch because you thought you’d be able to wait until April 24 and then buy one from your local Apple Store, prepare to be disappointed.

That’s because — according to a new memo sent to Apple Store employees by retail chief Angela Ahrendts — no Apple Watches at all will be available to buy as walk-in purchases until June at the earliest: five weeks after Apple’s wearable devices begin shipping.

Apple is reportedly testing two different designs for incorporating Apple Watch-style Force Touch technology into its next iPhone, according to a new report citing the Taiwanese supply chain.

With around five months until the next iPhone is unveiled, Apple is apparently experimenting with different placements for the Force Touch sensor — either locating it between the handset’s outermost protective screen cover and the in-cell touch panel, or else underneath the touch panel backlighting layer.

While Apple isn’t saying how many Watches it’s sold, estimates so far are that more than 1 million preorders have been placed.

Now the industry’s leading Apple analyst is weighing in with his own findings, including why preorder estimates have already been pushed back to June.

After showing us how to use the Messages app, clock faces, and Digital Touch on the Apple Watch, more guided tours have been posted by Apple online.

In its latest round of video tours, Apple takes a look at how to take phone calls, use Siri, get directions, and play music with the Watch.

With strong reviews and positive word of mouth behind both the iPhone 6 and the Samsung Galaxy S6, the battle between the two flagship devices is what the smartphone-watching world deserves.

But there’s one more question that precisely nobody’s been asking up until now: Which one would survive longer in a tub of boiling water?

Yep, as wacky stress tests go, you can forget about accusations of bending — this one takes the cake.

Comparing two impressive new quadcopters is like comparing a hawk to a falcon. Both birds are impressive.

That might make a tough choice for drone enthusiasts looking to upgrade, but for the rest of us, it’s easy: Just watch the awesome marketing videos and drool.

With the advent of Apple’s motion coprocessor chip (the M8 in recent iOS devices), any apps that you download and grant permission to can use this data to enhance their offerings.

This lets apps like RunKeeper, Carrot Fitness and others both gather fitness data from your iPhone as well as send it to the Health app.

This could raise privacy concerns for some, so being able to decide which apps we allow to access our fitness-tracking data — or whether the iPhone tracks these activities at all — can be a helpful.

Here’s our recipe for getting finer-grained control over your fitness-tracking data.