Foxconn is no fan of Samsung. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Foxconn’s CEO Terry Gou is no fan of Samsung. In fact, according to a new report, he’s been trying to use his influence as Apple’s biggest manufacturing partner to get Apple to lessen its dependency on Samsung — while a giving a shot to other companies.
The reason? He thinks Taiwanese manufacturers need to work together to overcome the growing threat of the South Korean tech giant, which could potentially swallow all of their jobs.
Now that the Samsung Galaxy S6 has finally gone on sale the Android world is turning its attention to LG’s new flagship smartphone, the G4.
We’ve seen a few glimpses of the leather-clad phone which will make its debut on Wednesday, and according to LG’s spokes person, it’s so gorgeous, even Steve Jobs would love it.
Tap your way to wherever you want. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo:
As a sufferer from dysmappia (not a real word), I still get lost in a town I’ve lived in for 15 years. The iPhone and GPS accessibility has allowed me to find my way around pretty much any urban center I’ve been in, and even some rural ones as well.
Now that Maps is on Apple Watch, I’m going to be navigating around even more easily, lifting my wrist to see which way to go instead of burying my head in an iPhone. It’s sure to at least be a ton safer.
Here’s how to get from point A to point Z using just your Apple Watch.
Apple Pay is coming to Best Buy. And that's just one small piece of good news from Apple's latest earnings call. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
The iPhone 6 is a monster hit, China is now bigger than US for iPhone sales, and Tim Cook is delighted with the world’s response to the Apple Watch. And those are just some of the key insights from today’s Apple earnings call.
Here are the top 11 takeaways about Cupertino’s blockbuster second quarter, which once again set financial records.
Shareholders are getting a huge payday from Apple. Illustration: 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.”
The iPhone is still a money printing machine for Apple. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
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:
Tim Cook knows that haters gonna hate, hate, hate. Photo: Apple
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.
Apple earnings are on the way. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo:
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.
Lark, Reyes and Juno are three new filters for Instagram. Photo: Instagram
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.
In short film Life on Trial, a gamer deals with the devastating effects of lag. Photo: Life on Trial Photo:
This post is brought to you by TeliaSonera International Carrier.
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.
Apple Watch already has a ton of apps. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
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.
Tom Dickson put the new Apple Watch in a blender for his show, Will It Blend? Photo: Will It Blend?
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.
Beats redesign is coming to WWDC 2015. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
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.
Apple released new security updates to keep malicious hackers out. Photo: Cult of Mac
Learn to think like a hacker with the Wi-Fi Hacking & Penetration Testing from Scratch course.
For just $29 on Cult of Mac Deals, you’ll get access to over 47 lectures and 5 hours of content from industry professionals. Learn how to use more than 20 penetration testing tools, crack WEP/WPA/WPA2 encryptions, and extract information like passwords, cookies, urls, and more. Beginners are welcome—you’ll start by learning the theory behind the attacks before working with your instructor to carry out attacks using Linux.
Discover a whole new world of Apple Pay. Photo: Apple Photo: Apple
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.
Jarvis Siri, schedule a date with Pepper Potts. Photo: Marvel Studios
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.
Instapaper for the Apple Watch is here. Photo: Instapaper
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.
Even a broken Apple Watch is right zero times a day. Photo: Weibo
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.
Tidal could end up having a bit of a 'Hard Knock Life'. Photo: NRK P3/Flickr CC Photo: Flickr/NRK P3
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 reputation as a mobile health company is growing. Photo: Apple
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.
The Apple Watch glass going through a torture test. Screenshot: Cult of Mac
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).