Is the Apple Watch a good enough reason for breaking bad? Photo: AMC/Cult of Mac
Lust for Apple’s latest must-have gadget can make you do crazy things!
In what sounds like a cross between Breaking Bad and an Apple ad that I would totally watch, a story coming out China’s government-run Guangzhou Daily newspaper recounts the plight of a 21-year-old accused of orchestrating a crystal meth deal so as to be able to pay for an Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch has kicked Nike and Jawbone off the Apple Store. Photo: Nike
The Apple Watch is coming, and this means it’s time for Apple to put all the crappier fitness bands it’s been selling all these years into the airlock and flush them into deep space.
No surprise, then, that Apple’s retail stores are no longer selling the Jawbone UP and the Nike+ Fuelband.
The new MacBook is the biggest revolution to hit the laptop line in a decade, yet it’s not without its haters.
A mobile processor. One USB-C port. A 480p front camera. And a $1,299 price tag. “Just who the hell at Apple signed off on this thing?!” some fans might be asking. Well, thanks to some very rare footage of an Apple “engineer” speaking about the design process of the new MacBook, we finally know what was going through Jony and Tim’s heads when they signed off on production.
Whether you love or hate the new MacBook, you’ll laugh your ass off as the engineer tells a Spanish TV host all about the hilarious process.
Tim Cook really, really loves the latest Apple products. Photo: Apple
The Apple Watch? It’s incredible.
The new MacBook? It’s unbelievable.
Apple’s team? Amazing!
Tim Cook is either the world’s most positive CEO or he possesses the world’s greatest poker face. Just watch the string of superlatives he unleashed during Apple’s “Spring Forward” event Monday, as rounded up in Cult of Mac’s supercut video below.
Tim Cook eased some of our worries about Apple Watch’s battery on Monday by revealing you’ll get at least 18 hours of use from it. But if you’d like a wearable that looks just as good, and comes without the battery problems, Hini Mizushima has the perfect creation for you.
The slow crafter Mizushima created a wonderful ‘Super Low-Tech’ Apple Watch engineered to keep up with an active lifestyle with snap fasteners. The ultralight wearable doesn’t actually tell time, but it’s sure to turn heads just as quickly as the gold Apple Watch Edition.
Apple is diving into the luxury market for the first time ever with the exorbitantly expensive gold Apple Watch Edition. The pricey new timepiece has been met with criticism from Apple fans and haters a like, but according to Condé Nast, Apple is now a powerful player in the luxury industry and wants Jony Ive and Marc Newson to tell them all about it.
Jony Ive and Marc Newson will open the first ever Conde Nast Luxury Conference in Florence Italy in April 2015. The design duo will appear with event host, Vogue International editor Suzy Menkes, to discuss “21st century definition of luxury and their collaborative work to date.”
Google today announced its new Chromebook Pixel, which is just as pretty as its predecessor, only more powerful and less expensive. It’s powered by an Intel Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM, and just like Apple’s new MacBook, it uses do-it-all USB-C connectors.
Apple is suffering one of its worst iTunes outages ever today as users across the globe have been unable to access the App Store, iBooks, iCloud and iTunes for more than eight hours this morning.
In an official statement released by the company, Apple has blamed the ongoing outage on a DNS error, saying “We apologize to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning. The cause was an internal DNS error at Apple. We’re working to make all of the services available to customers as soon as possible, and we thank everyone for their patience.”
The people of the Internet are not patient however, and have flooded Twitter with gripes about the 8 hour long outage. It’s not just the App Store and iTunes that are affected either. Apple Pay has been rendered worthless and Apple Stores have had to pull out their old credit card machines like it’s 1999.
Here’s a sampling of some of the best Apple outage tweets:
Tim Cook greeting Foxconn workers in China. Photo: Apple
A Chinese workers’ rights group released a new report today that sheds light on the deplorable working conditions in factories that assemble the iPhone 6. According to China Labor Watch, on February 3, 2015, Pegatron assembly line worker Tian Fulei died while assembling the iPhone 6.
The hospital labeled the cause of death as “sudden death,” but fellow workers say Tian worked long overtime shifts day after day, which gave his family reason to believe that Tian died from overwork.
To smooth things over, Pegatron reportedly offered the family a measly $2,400 as compensation for their son’s death. Tian’s family of farmers couldn’t afford to pay for an expensive independent autopsy to prove the death was work-related. Eventually they took Pegatron’s next offer of $1,277 for his untimely death.
Cult of Mac Deals is pleased to offer The Ultra-Premium Mac Bundle, a unique collection of 8 elite software titles that have never before been offered together as a bundle. But, if you want it, you had better hurry. This is your last chance to get in on this deal because, as of tomorrow, it’ll be gone forever.
Samsung’s Super AMOLED displays have long been some of the best you can get on a mobile device, and they only get better with the new Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. According to the experts at DisplayMate, they are the “best mobile displays ever tested.”
Ahead of the Apple Watch going on sale April 24, the Chinese market is being flooded with fake versions of Apple’s wearable device — many of them bearing an uncanny likeness to Apple’s smartwatch, at a fraction of the cost.
Starting at less than $50, the “inspired by Apple” Apple Watch knockoffs are predominantly modelled on the cheaper Apple Watch Sport devices, but I’d be in no way surprised if we saw Apple Watch Edition replicas turn up at a later date, much as we routinely see fake Rolexes today.
The Apple Watch Edition's most useful app might be quickly showing people how much cash you have. Photo: Apple
As soon as Tim Cook announced that the Apple Watch Edition starts at $10,000, you could practically hear the scratch of jokes being written. This one, by YouTube’s CollegeHumor channel, is among the best so far. It describes the “groundbreaking” feature of letting wearers reveal with a single flash of the wrist that they have crazy amounts of money to spend.
Faux-Apple ads are well worn by now, to the point where they practically qualify as a comedy subgenre on their own. A few things made me chuckle about this one, however — from Jony Ive’s pronunciation of “aluminium,” to the foolproof method employed by the actor playing Tim Cook to check that he’s still rich.
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is back from its mid-season break to resolve some cliffhangers — and introduce new ones, because absolute closure has no place in TV shows based on comic books.
If you don’t like waiting a week between episodes and want to fill that time with more stories about secret agencies, government-sanctioned or otherwise, that are charged with sorting out the crazy junk your civilian brain just couldn’t even handle, we have a few suggestions for you. Kick your TV into super-secret-spy mode with these shows and movies that are guaranteed to give you your daily allowance of secrets, acronyms and people in suits with guns.
Apple Watch at actual size. Screenshots: Cult of Mac
One of the most difficult decisions you will need to make when choosing an Apple Watch is which case size to go for. But the Apple Store app for iPhone hopes to make the process easier by displaying both the 38mm and 42mm Watch cases at their actual size.
Derek Zoolander — the male model played by Ben Stiller who first appeared as a gag character in 1996’s VH1 Fashion Awards, and who later went on to star in 2001’s cult classic film — made a surprise appearance yesterday on a catwalk at Paris Fashion Week, where he stole some dude’s iPhone, then flashed Blue Steel all over Vine.
Ain't that just the way that life goes down, down, down, down. Photo: Apple
Update: Apple has updated its service status page to reflect the problem, although there’s still no word on when it will be fixed.
Apple is having problems with a number of its services, with the iTunes Store, App Store and Mac App Store all experiencing sporadic outages, while app submission service iTunes Connect is also down and beta testing platform TestFlight is unavailable to some.
A scene from A Taste of Austria, a hyperlapse trip by FilmSpektakel. Photo: FilmSpektakel/YouTube
If you only had about three minutes to spend in the country of Austria, let Thomas Pocksteiner and Peter Jablonowski give you the tour.
The filmmakers, who formed FilmSpektakel, have just released a breath-taking hyperlapse tour of their country. The two-minute, 54-second video took two years of filming and was winnowed down from 5 TB of raw footage.
Their travel Valentine, A Taste of Austria, awakens the senses with movement, sweeping and seamless color changes with day-to-night transitions and 360-degree views of architectural and natural wonders.
Despite its hefty price tag, the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition might actually be too cheap. Photo: Apple Photo: Apple
The tech world is completely aghast at the price of the gold Apple Watch Edition, which starts at $10,000 but is more likely to set buyers back $17,000 (plus tax!).
The pricing is baking everyone’s noodles. We can’t wrap our heads around a super-expensive watch that will soon be obsolete and is functionally identical to a $350 model. This is not how tech works.
But that’s the point. I wrote how the high-end Apple Watch winds me up — I argued that its very existence is antithetical to Apple’s democratic values. But after further research, it’s obvious that Apple knows exactly what it’s doing, and it’s very smart — even if I still don’t like the gold watch’s enormous price tag.
The Apple Watch Edition is a classic Veblen product. The outrageous price is the whole point. And the higher it gets, the more of them Apple will sell. It might even be priced too low.
Apple Stores are the new department stores. Photo: Foster + Partners Photo: Apple
I haven’t been to a mall in ages, except to go to an Apple Store. Turns out I’m not alone. Apple Stores have replaced the department stores of yore as the main driver of mall traffic.
Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla, has been aggressively poaching Apple engineers.
If you’re an Apple shareholder who wants the company to buy Tesla, you are not alone. At the iPhone maker’s annual shareholder meeting in Cupertino yesterday, Tim Cook dodged not one, but two questions about whether Apple has plans to buy the electric car company.
While Apple is the ultimate example of a corporation that refuses to comment on rumors or speculation, Cook could have given a flat-out “no” and that would have been the end of it.
Instead, the Apple CEO danced around the question like he had a secret to hide.
What, if anything, is going to be the Apple Watch's killer app? Photo: Apple
A new report for Reuters says that app makers are struggling to come up with the kind of “killer app” that will be a winner for the Apple Watch in the way that Instagram or, more recently, Snapchat was for the iPhone. The report notes that Apple has blocked certain features of the Apple Watch, including its gyroscope and accelerometer, on the initial WatchKit developers’ kit, but won’t reveal exactly why this has been done.
Other aspects of the Apple Watch third-party developers can now yet tap into include the ability to wake up companion iOS apps, using the Taptic Engine, heart rate tracking, Force Touch, and a variety of other innovations.
“The limitations are discouraging,” one engineer, developing a Watch app to control a Tesla Model S, is quoted as saying.
Samsung’s smartphone sales may have taken a plunge as of late, but its new Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge handsets could turn out to be just the devices the South Korean tech giant needs to rebuild its mobile division.
Following strong advance orders of more than 20 million handsets, Samsung is reportedly expected to ship 46 million S6 units this year — representing an increase of 8 million on the previous 38 million estimate.
Those may not be close to iPhone 6 numbers (which sold 74.5 million devices in the last quarter of 2014 alone), but it’s certainly enough to earn Samsung back some of the respect its lost.