Cult of Mac

The person who named the first television remote control in 1950 knew exactly how it would transform Americans. It was called “Lazy Bones.”

 Sure enough, we became couch potatoes. But television today without a remote would be near impossible and far from relaxing. Who would want to stand at the set pressing the up arrow button to go through the infinite number of channels brought to us by cable and satellite TV?

You probably grew up with parents that referred to the remote as a “clicker.” That’s because early models had big buttons that made a percussive sound when pressed. The first TV remotes, like Zenith’s Lazy Bones, were tethered to the set with a long cord.

Apple is clearly expecting the Apple Watch to be a big hit, because it’s already limiting orders to just its online store.

In an effort to help meet expected demand, Apple has announced that you won’t be able to go into your local store and walk out with a Watch for the foreseeable future.

Here’s a couple of tips should you decide to hire an octopus as your photographer.

If it asks you to “watch the birdie,” be sure to know exactly which tentacle is holding it. Also, don’t let it charge you double for the shots where a tentacle got in front of the lens.

An animal trainer at an aquarium in Aukland, New Zealand has trained an octopus named Rambo to photograph visitors to her tank. Considering the intelligence of these sea creatures, it may only be a matter of time before she raises her prices. For now, she charges $2.

While you’re at work today, Tim Cook is enjoying croissants and chocolat chaud at a chic French eatery. Probably.

That’s because the Apple CEO is reportedly in Paris: most likely for the Apple Watch’s official public unveiling tomorrow at one of the city’s fanciest department stores, Galeries Lafayette Haussmann.

A destroyed MacBook Air is now on display as part of an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Wondering how it got there? Two words: Edward Snowden.

The Apple Watch launch might be Cupertino’s most innovative — and complicated — product rollout ever. Usually you just pick between a colors and tech specs, but for Apple’s “most personal device yet,” things aren’t so straightforward.

Even the actual purchasing process is different: Lining up at the store a couple days early isn’t going to help you this time, but this guide to buying an Apple Watch definitely will. It’s loaded with tips for beating the odds and wrapping an Apple Watch around your wrist on launch day.

Here’s everything you need to know about how to preorder and buy an Apple Watch.

(Editor’s note: This post has been updated and stickied to the top of Cult of Mac’s homepage. You’ll find fresh Apple news by scrolling down the page.)

You probably knew this already, but if you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone or iPad, don’t upgrade to iOS 8.3. Not only does it break existing jailbreaks, but it patches a huge number of security holes in the operating system, making an iOS 8.3 jailbreak farther off than ever.

Shooting ultra slo-mo videos are one of my favorite things about the iPhone 6 Plus, and thanks to Twitter, it’s now far easier to share them via social media.

That’s because the micro-blogging network now supports the posting and embedding of slow-motion iPhone clips; opening up whole new possibilities when it comes to making sure that video of your office work party, your pet running across a field, or your kid practicing skateboard stunts looks as dramatic as possible.

Slow-motion enthusiasts like director John Woo are going to have a field day…

Apple Pay continues its march to becoming the standard mobile payment solution, adding ten new participating retail partners in the United States, to bring its total number of merchants to 68.

Major new Apple Pay adoptees include GameStop, T-Mobile Stores and the Golden State Warriors, Orlando Magic, and Phoenix Suns NBA franchises.

Check out the full list of new participating companies below.

It’s well known that Samsung is happy to take a bit of inspiration from Apple when it comes to the look and feel of its mobile devices, but it’s also willing to splash the cash to try and match Apple’s strategy of establishing itself as an upmarket designer brand.

At a time when Apple is focusing on getting its Apple Watch sold alongside luxury fashion brands in department stores, Samsung’s new Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge smartphones have popped up in full-window displays as the chic Harrods store in London, where they will be displayed until April 26.

Last year, right around when iOS 8 was released, Apple quietly snatched up Dryft, a startup that made a popular Android keyboard that seems perfect for the iPad. Not only that, but the CTO of Dryft now heads up iOS keyboard development.

Apple released big updates to iOS and OS X today, and among the changes is a whole lot of new emojis.

There are over 300 emojis added by Apple as part of an update to the Unicode standard, and most of them focus on racially diversifying the existing emojis we all know and love. There’s also an awesome Spock emoji for when you’re wanting the world to live long and prosper.

But the catch is that if you’re not on the newest iOS 8.3 and OS X 10.10.3, you won’t see these new emojis. Instead, you’ll see an alien or an empty box!

There are a ton of Mac keyboard shortcuts to make your digital life easier and more productive. Last week, we showed you 10 of the best shortcuts to keep in mind when using your Mac, and you responded with even more.

Here are Cult of Mac readers’ suggestions for even more fantastic Mac keyboard shortcuts.

There are plenty of Apple Watch reviews out in the wild now, but we have yet to see a solid unboxing of the hottest new wearable in tech.

French newspaper Metronews did the honor, and here’s what opening an Apple Watch for the first time is like:

The Spock emoji is here — sort of. Apple added support today for the Vulcan salute emoji, the Star Trek-inspired emoji approved as a new Unicode symbol last year.

The new emoji, described by Emojipedia as “a raised hand, with the fingers separated between the ring finger and the middle finger,” is now visible to users on iOS 8.3 and OS X 10.10.3. However, you can’t actually pick the Vulcan salute out of the emoji character sheet just yet.

There’s no word on when Apple will officially add the Spock emoji to the keyboard, but you can start using it right now by following these quick steps.

The first wave of Apple Watch reviews landed this morning with the consensus that Apple has created the best smartwatch ever. Now whether you actually need a smartwatch is still being heavily debated, but the early Apple Watch reviews have highlighted some pretty compelling cases.

Reviews from tech news sites have praised Apple Watch for its innovative UI and incredible design. After slogging through the first reviews though, the most interesting insights I found about Apple Watch came from non-tech sites. What will it be like for normal, non-tech nerds to use Apple’s timepiece?

Here’s everything new I learned about Apple Watch from reading all the reviews:

Space travel is bound to be essentially lonely. Even in our one galaxy, there’s something like 300 billion star systems. Three hundred billion. It’s hard to even conceive of that number, to be honest.

Frontier Developments, the developer of Elite: Dangerous, has gone to great lengths to give players that feeling of loneliness, balanced with the excitement and multiplayer action that current gamers expect when they launch a video game.

“With a real full scale galaxy it’s easy to head off into unexplored space,” executive producer Michael Brookes told us. “We think that’s a good thing; players can choose the life of a pioneer on the unexplored frontier, or stick to more populated places for cooperative and competitive play with other players.”

Even better, this stunningly gorgeous fourth entry in the Elite game franchise is coming to your Mac soon.

The Apple Watch isn’t available for preorder until this Friday, and it’s already looking like certain models won’t ship by April 24.

Apple released the third major update to iOS 8 today with the public launch of 8.3, which brings a host of new features to iPhones and iPads.

The iOS 8.3 update is available as an over-the-air update or via iTunes. Some of the new features include racially diverse emoji, two-factor authentication for Google, new Siri languages, and tons of bug fixes.

Here’s a run down of the biggest features you’ll find:

Apple has released OS X 10.10.3 to the public. The update includes the all-new Photos app, which has been in beta for the last several weeks.

Hundreds of new emojis have also been added, along with improvements to Spotlight, Safari, Wi-Fi connectivity and more.

The batteries in an iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2 can hold 1810mAh and 7340mAh of power respectively. Even with those fairly generous capacities, these devices sometimes don’t make it through an entire day before they require a recharge, especially after heavy usage.

Now your devices can make it through the day – and the night, plus the following day – when you have the indispensible Innori 22400mAh Portable Battery Pack, available at a special price for a limited time at Cult of Mac Deals.

The first reactions to the Apple Watch are hot off the presses and, to be honest, they’re pretty much what I was expecting.

There are some nice revelations (battery life isn’t as bad as we feared), some areas to improve on (activating the screen carries a lag, although Apple promises it can fix it though software updates), praise for how easy it is to manage notifications, and a general sense of reviewers trying desperately to figure out what the hell a smartwatch should try and do.

And concluding that — despite being unclear about quite what that is — Apple has done it pretty well.

Check out the highlights of the early hands-on impressions from Re/Code, the Wall Street Journal, David Pogue, and the other people lucky enough to get an early review unit:

There are self-help books and expensive seminars that can give powerful inspiration to raise your career profile, be a better leader or grow your business.

Then there’s the free app that could potentially be a game-changer in less than three minutes.

The ambitious can gain bits of advice from more than 100 corporate gurus, best-selling authors and motivational speakers with Audvisor, a library of curated expertise brought to IOS and Android users in short audio clips.

The Resident Evil franchise has suffered a bit of an identity crisis in recent years, straying from its survival-horror roots toward something considerably more action-based. The latest entry, Resident Evil: Revelations 2, tries to have it both ways by splitting its four-chapter tale between two storylines. One features two frantic survivors struggling for resources, and the other has you playing as a heavily armed man of action.

It seems like mixing these two extremes would end up diluting them both, but somehow developer Capcom managed to take the best of both play styles and create something distinctive, harrowing and still damned scary.

Having first been made available to developers back in February, OS X 10.10.3 may be arriving for the rest of us today, according to a new report in the Associated Press.

The article in question concerns the new (free) Photos app for Mac, which serves as a replacement for iPhoto and Aperture. Photos makes it easy to organize and edit your photos using professional grade tools, such as granular color correction and a slew of other functions, previously available only in pro-grade apps like Adobe Lightroom.