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Amazon’s Alexa is a big hit — and a huge money drain

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Connect the Amazon Echo Dot to your existing speaker system, and you bingo! -- your speakers just got smarts.
Expensive things come in small packages. From an R&D perspective, at least.
Photo: Leander Kahney / Cult of Mac

Amazon’s Alexa devices were some of the most exciting tech products of 2016, and immediately there were rumors that Apple was planning to follow suit with a standalone Siri — possibly even with the addition of facial recognition tech.

A new report, however, claims that despite its popularity, Alexa has been a massive money drain on Amazon so far. In 2016 alone, it lost Amazon $330 million, and this figure is set to rise to $600 million-plus this year.

Old iMacs don’t die. They become lamps and fish tanks in Nebraska.

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cult 2.0
Jake Harms in his Nebraska workshop, where he turns old iMacs into home furnishings.
Photo: Steph Harms

Cult of Mac 2.0 bugJake Harms was on his way to the warehouse when a supervisor asked him to take a cart full of garbage to the dumpster. On top of the cart was an old indigo blue iMac G3.

Crossing the warehouse floor, Harms needed to turn left toward the dumpster. Instead, he steered the cart right toward the parking lot so that he could offload the broken iMac into his car.

That rescued iMac would become the first of more than 700 to get a second life as an aquarium.

This is what a full-screen iPhone 7 could look like

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iPhone 6s
An edge-to-edge display would look great on the iPhone 7.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

There have been plenty of rumors about Apple creating a bezel-less iPhone, but a new concept by designers DeepMind, in collaboration with SvetApple, may be my favorite yet.

It’s a nifty feature which would keep the iPhone looking like the current model — only with the neat addition of letting users enlarge photos and video right to the edge of their devices.

Check out the video below.

FAQ: Everything you need to know about the XcodeGhost App Store hack

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Pirate Flag
Steve Jobs' old mantra about "It's better to be a pirate than join the navy" probably wasn't on Apple's application form.
Photo: George Hodan/Public Domain Pictures

If you’re as confused as we were when we first heard about the major App Store hack over the weekend, we’re here to help.

Here’s a compilation of everything we know about the XcodeGhost story, and we’ll be updating it as more develops.

Nest buys home-automation rival Revolv to shut it down

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Revolv was snapped up by Nest -- although it doesn't look like it'll remain revolving for long. Photo: Revolv
Revolv was snapped up by Nest -- although it doesn't look like it'll remain revolving for long. Photo: Revolv

Nest has acquired Revolv, the Colarado-based startup which allowed users to control their smart home devices from a single interface using their smartphone.

No price has yet been announced for the purchase, which follows Nest’s $555 million Dropcam purchase back in June, and Nest’s own acquisition by Google for a massive $3.2 billion earlier this year.

Microsoft to cut workforce by 18,000

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Current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has a reputation as someone who cuts middle management.
Current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has a reputation as someone who cuts middle management.

Microsoft is going through some major turbulence. Today it has announced major layoffs, beginning with 13,000 positions to go immediately, with a total of 18,000 expecting to find themselves out of a job sometime during 2014.

The vast majority of these sackings involve the company’s Nokia division. Microsoft acquired Nokia’s Devices and Services unit back in September 2013 for $7.2 billion. Along with taking ownership of the Finnish firm’s entire smartphone lineup — giving it complete control over both hardware and software– the acquisition saw 25,000 Nokia employees join the Microsoft ranks.

The current Microsoft layoffs means that up to half of the Nokia people will probably leave the company, although it will also likely signal the end for some previous Microsoft employees to allow for incoming Nokia talent.

Did Samsung Just Acquire A Fingerprint Scanning Firm For $650M? Nope.

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post-249271-image-41730cf88ba3527a86737685bf119ff1-jpg

Given Samsung’s habit of shamelessly copying everything Apple does, I wasn’t at all surprised to see this morning’s report that the South Korean company had just spent $650 million on a fingerprint scanning firm called FingerPrint Cards. In fact, I simply rolled my eyes when I saw the news and thought, “there’s a surprise.”

But it appears that the whole thing was completely fabricated. The press release that went out announcing the move was false, and both Samsung and FingerPrint Cards have denied the acquisition.