Apple TV’s big redesign has been rumored for over a year now, but the long wait might pay off big time, for shareholders at least.
By blowing up the cable industry with its subscription TV streaming service, Apple could add up to $30 billion in global annual revenue to its bottom line, according to projections released by Baird Equity Research.
Sure, it’s an Adam Sandler/Kevin James summer blockbuster with a ridiculous premise: the Earth is besieged by huge video game characters bent on destroying everything by turning stuff into pixels.
While Peter Dinklage and Jane Krakowski might elevate this potentially awful movie, Pixels, to something more cult status than forgettable popcorn fodder, it’s the nostalgic use of Pac-Man himself that made us watch the trailer in the first place.
First up, we’ve got the Mini Coopers all painted up to look like the iconic Pac-Man ghosts, Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde, which is all kinds of awesome. However, it’s the lovely tribute to Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani, portrayed by Denis Akiyama (Johnny Mnemonic, Dead Ringers) at about 1:52 in.
Apple’s new open source platform, ResearchKit, could change our lives more than Apple Watch, and according to a report from Fusion detailing the inside story of ResearchKit, Apple may have got some outside inspiration for the project.
A lecture given by renowned medical researcher Dr. Stephen Friend was possibly the driving force behind Apple’s push into the industry. During a presentation at Stanford’s MedX conference, Friend asked attendees to imagine a future where researchers could run ten trials, with several thousand patients.
“Here you have genetic information, and you have what drugs they took, how they did. Put that up in the cloud, and you have a place where people can go and query it, [where] they can make discoveries,” Friend told the crowd, completely unaware that Apple’s newly appointed VP for medical technologies, Mike O’Reilly, was among those catching Friend’s vision for a medical research utopia.
“I can’t tell you where I work, and I can’t tell you what I do, but I need to talk to you,” O’Reilly told Friend after his presentation.
Do you remember the first time you saw one of these cool iPod & iTunes commercials? Surely you were impressed with the motion, the cool white earbuds and silhouetted dancers, and the hip soundtrack pulsing out from your TV. It was like nothing we’d ever seen before.
Ciat/Day’s iconic silhouette ads captured the cool of the iPod brand without trying to make us identify with any specific actor or band (at least at first). The iPod came out in 2001, but it wasn’t until 2004 that it had any kind of mass-market success, due to both the fact that iTunes went PC, and these ads.
You can now watch all 22 of these iconic ads in one long, 13 minute stretch, thanks to the Steve Jobs Documentary YouTube Channel.
There’s been a lot of talk that Apple invented USB-C, even though the company hasn’t made any official claims yet. The evidence is already compelling, but here’s another sign Apple had its hand in USB-C: It looks just like the company’s Cinema Display power cable.
Check out the comparison below:
While recent rumors have claimed that Google is working on bringing Android Wear support to the iPhone, the company hasn’t actually made anything official. But code found inside its firmware could prove that it has been working on making Android Wear devices compatible with iOS for some time.
In the market for a new MacBook Pro? We urge you not to buy one… because, why buy when you can win one instead?
Cult of Mac Deals is offering the chance for one lucky person to win a shiny new MacBook Pro with the aptly named MacBook Pro Giveaway. Drop whatever you are doing and enter now, because this contest closes on March 18, 2015 – That’s tonight!
An Australian indie developer who was flown to Cupertino by Apple to work on an Apple Watch app alongside giants like Twitter and BMW has come under fire for reportedly falsifying a story about suffering from terminal cancer.
Created by healthy-living proponent Belle Gibson, iPhone food app The Whole Pantry has been pulled from the App Store, while an accompanying Apple Watch app has vanished from Apple’s list of “coming soon” apps for its upcoming wearable.
Cameras and sensors assist us with backing up, parallel parking and eliminating blind spots, but technology that makes sure drivers don’t nod off still hasn’t found traction.
Australian company Seeing Machines wants to change that with its dashboard device that pays rapt attention to a driver’s head movements, blinking patterns and eyeball rotations, then alerts the motorist if a dangerous “microsleep event” is imminent.
“Unless you are a soldier, driving is the most dangerous thing we do day-to-day,” Rama Myers, business development manager for Seeing Machines, told Cult of Mac.
The more we hear, the more Apple’s reported web TV service sounds like a dream come true for cord-cutters!
With previous reports suggesting the subscription service will offer around 25 channels in total, a new Wall Street Journal report claims Apple is busy talking with both Discovery and Viacom about the venture. Deals with those companies could bringing channels including Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, TLC, MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon to viewers.
My Cult of Mac colleague Buster Hein recently wrote that the new impossibly-thin, gorgeously Retina displayed MacBook “isn’t for you, it’s for the future” — meaning that it’s there to show us where the MacBook will go in the next few years, rather than being 2015’s “must own” notebook.
That may well be true, but according to supply chain sources, it’s still likely to make up a pretty sizeable slice of Apple’s overall Mac sales in the year to come.
Citing panel supply chains, the 12-inch beauty is expected to represent between 15-20 percent of Apple’s overall MacBook shipments this year: making it the single largest source of growth in the MacBook series throughout 2015 in the process.
Over and over you hear stories about Steve Jobs being, well, a jerk. A recently released anecdote, however, tells a different story: Jobs apparently cared so much about workaholic Tim Cook having a life outside Apple that he phoned Cook’s mom to talk about it.
It’s pretty charming — and just about the polar opposite of the clichéd anecdotes that paint Jobs as a screaming, slave-driving perfectionist who only looked up from his work long enough to yell at some poor, quivering employee.
Tim Cook tells how Apple avoids Microsoft-style screw-ups, how many Apple Watches the company plans to sell, and why he keeps Steve Jobs’ office exactly as he left it in a new interview filled with fascinating tidbits.
The interview in Fast Company comes in the run-up to the March 24 launch of Becoming Steve Jobs, a biography by veteran journalists Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. The book is viewed by some Apple execs as a corrective following Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio, and this is Cook’s well-timed salvo in the campaign to set the record straight.
Here are the parts we found most interesting.
The video game world rejoiced yesterday at the news that Nintendo is finally backing down on its anti-smartphone and tablet stance, and is working to bring its most beloved franchises to Android and iOS.
But gamers aren’t the only ones celebrating!
Nintendo shares shot up 21 percent in the 24 hours after the company said it was teaming with Tokyo-based mobile company DeNA to develop smartphone games. The result was Nintendo’s value on the Tokyo Stock Exchange rising to its best closing price since June 2011.
Young Apple fans may not remember the unveiling of the original iMac that put Apple back on the map, but now you can experience what it was like to learn all about Jony and Steve’s candy-colored creation on the World Wide Web like it’s 1997 all over again.
Relive the thrills and horrors of what it was like the surf Apple.com back in 1997, thanks to the folks at Open University who created a series of GIFs that capture the the web of the late-90’s thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
Apple’s old website didn’t look too bad back then, especially s hideous compared to most websites at the time, which heavily featured crappy graphics, block graphic links, and clumsy navigation, Apple’s website stands out from the other options at the time.
For a full run-down on the history of Apple.com’s design changes through the years, check out our feature here.
The name’s Jobs, Steve Jobs.
Sony has released the teaser poster for its upcoming, eagerly-anticipated new Bond movie, Spectre, and — correct us if we’re wrong — but doesn’t it look as though 007 has ditched the customary tux to slip into something a little more… Jobsian?
In what may be the most exciting James Bond/Apple crossover since the famous fake letter from Sean Connery to Steve Jobs, style icon James Bond cosplaying as Apple’s late CEO is perhaps the best compliment Apple can be paid as it continues to take on the fashion world. Certainly, the likeness hasn’t escaped the Interwebz, whose denizens have already jumped into action with the appropriate parodies:
Citizen George is slated to be a full-length independent film about a director who creates a hugely popular space opera film trilogy (read, George Lucas and Star Wars), only to end up releasing disappointing film prequels 20 years later.
So far, so basic, right? The catch here is that you have to choose the type of movie this fan film will end up being. Want a dramatic story about a serious film auteur and the perils of fame and fortune, like Citizen Kane? Drop some cash into the Drama tip jar. Want a wacky, time-travel comedy like Austin Powers? Slide your money into the Comedy tip jar.
Apple is planning its own cable-free TV service for a fall launch, and it’s pulling out all the stops to lure potential content partners.
According to a new report, networks Apple is courting have been offered complete access to viewer data, such as what shows they watch and when they watch them. It’s an unusually friendly negotiating approach for Apple that signals the company really wants to get the service off the ground soon.
Facebook is taking on Square, PayPal, and Venmo with its own digital payments service. Starting today, Facebook Messenger will allow users to instantaneously transfer real money at zero cost.
Google is said to be working on bringing Android Wear support to iPhone, but in the meantime, it’s up to third-party developers to marry the two.
One hack has already made it possible to display iOS notifications on Wear watches, and now it has been improved to take calls from your iPhone, too.
Filming for the upcoming Steve Jobs moving got underway yesterday at the San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House for a major scene in the movie where Steve Jobs unveils the NeXT computer in October 1988.
The set was crowded as hundreds of people arrived to be extras in the picture, and Danny Boyle’s production crew tried to make the scene as authentic-looking as possible. They even put up fake NeXT posters around the opera house, showing Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs posing with the NeXT cube.
It seemed like it took accessory makers forever to make battery pack cases for the iPhone, but companies are wasting no time with Apple Watch accessories, and the first portable battery for Apple’s wearable is already here.
Nomad introduced its answer for the Apple Watch’s battery woes with the Pod, a small portable power station for your Apple Watch that will keep it ticking well past the 18 hour battery life Tim Cook promised.
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What’s good for endangered birds of prey might actually prey on GoPro’s hold on the point-of-view camera market.
Sony’s 2-ounce Action Cam Mini has been flying high since its release in September, thanks to an organization that has been strapping the tiny HD video camera on the backs of eagles to raise awareness about threatened species.
Darshan, an imperial eagle, flew Saturday from the world’s talent building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. As he sought his handler, he gave BBC viewers a breathtaking five-minute live view before making a quick drop, following a signal to land.
These days, Apple has one of the better cloud infrastructures in the world. Even so, the sheer demand for a new version of iOS or OS X on release day can bring Apple’s network to its knees. Apple’s servers simply can’t keep up with the demand.
But Microsoft might have found a better way. In the latest version of the Windows 10 operating system beta, there’s an option to download app and OS updates from multiple sources: not just Microsoft’s cloud servers, but all local network or PCs on the internet.
In other words? The future of updating operating systems might be a lot like updating World of Warcraft.
