Cult of Mac

I can’t wait to read Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader. The upcoming biography, by veteran reporters Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, promises to be the definitive telling of Steve Jobs’ life.

The writers scored interviews with major players including Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Eddy Cue, Pixar’s John Lasseter, Disney CEO Bob Iger and Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. The result is a book loaded with interesting anecdotes and insights about the former Apple CEO.

I haven’t yet read the whole thing (it comes out March 24), but while pre-ordering my copy on Amazon, I could initially access a significant portion of the biography through the site’s “Look Inside the Book” feature. (Amazon later blocked out far more of the book’s contents.)

From what I’ve seen, some of the stories are pretty sensational — providing new details into the close relationship between Jobs and Cook, revealing Jobs’ secret plan to buy Yahoo!, and much more.

Want a few of the highlights? Check them out below.

The battle of Mac versus PC is raging strong, thanks to the new MacBook. While Apple fans are still debating whether they really want Jony Ive’s minimalist gold notebook, rival PC markers have been quick to shoot down Apple’s latest innovation on Twitter.

ASUS, Lenovo and Dell all took shots at the super-thin MacBook, quickly pointing out that while terraced batteries and gold paint are nice, these notebook companies have been selling even thinner laptops for over a year now.

Take a look at their tweets calling out the new MacBook:

A new beta build of OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 has been seeded to developers this morning alongside the release of iOS 8.3 beta 3. The new update is available in the Mac Dev Center or via a software update, and comes two weeks after Apple released the second OS X 10.10.3 beta to developers.

The biggest new feature added in today’s beta is the inclusion of a new set of developers APIs that work with the Force Touch trackpad in the new MacBook and Macbook Pro. The new APIs will allow developers to add a new dimension of control and interactivity to their apps.

Here’s some of the new features developers can add:

Apple has released the third iOS 8.3 beta to developers this morning. The free download is available both in the iOS Developer Center, and as an over-the-air update for developers still running iOS 8.3 beta 2.

The release notes for iOS 8.3 beta 3 don’t mention any new features, however previous beta’s have included a new emoji pane, as well as racially diverse emoji. Two-factor authentication for Google was also added in the first beta, along with numerous bug fixes.

We’ll let you know what new features we find as soon as the update is installed on our device. Until then, you can grab a direct download from the links below:

We’re still waiting for the unbelievably gorgeous 12-inch MacBook to ship, but our friends at iFixit have already done a teardown on the updated MacBook Pro, revealing the secret sauce behind the new Force Touch Trackpad and Taptic Engine that both new Macs share.

The teardown shows that the Pro’s new trackpad is supported by four spring mounts and a panel that isn’t likely to be present on the 12-inch MacBook. It does have the same Force Touch engine, which is really just a bunch of wire coils wrapped around a ferromagnetic core to create the clicky vibrations.

Check out the full gory details below:

The nightmare of tangled wires strikes all too often when you want to listen to your favorite tunes. The Bluetooth Cloud Buds fix that by going wireless, and they offer some other great features, too.

Don’t just listen to your music; immserse yourself in it with a pair of Wireless Bluetooth Cloud Buds equipped with noice cancelling technology, available right now at Cult of Mac Deals at a great price.

Tablet sales are on the decline, and the iPad is “the weakest leak,” according to the latest report from International Data Corporation.

The organization has scaled back its five-year forecast for tablets, expecting market growth to come to a near standstill. With 234.5 million units expected to be sold in 2015, the tablet market will only gain a modest 2.1 percent year-over-year.

After years of rumors, the Apple Watch is finally shipping next month, but according to a new report coming out of China, it’s not likely to be a relaxing month for Tim Cook and pals to spend clinking champagne flutes and celebrating a job well done.

That’s because Apple Watch manufacturer Quanta apparently continues to have yield problems with the debuting wearable device, causing a defect-free rate of less than 30 percent. In other words, really, really bad.

Yesterday’s Apple outages brought digital sales for services like iTunes to a standstill, but it also caused things to grind to a halt in some brick-and-mortar Apple Stores. The down time sent retail back to the days before, well, Apple was there to shake it up.

For a window of approximately two hours, Apple Store employees in certain places were unable to check in to work, stores were unable to make sales and Genius Bar appointments were unable to be kept. Employees were apparently unable to check email for even longer.

British singer Sarah Brightman has a five-octave vocal range and millions have paid top dollar to hear her sing. But to hit the highest note of her career, Brightman is spending her own money.

Brightman is paying a reported $52 million to become the first singer to travel in space. She will board a Soyuz spacecraft on Sept. 1 for a 10-day trip aboard the International Space Station. It is the most expensive space tourist trip on record, according to the TASS Russian News Agency.

Photos of Brightman’s training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City near Moscow, can be found on her website and in Wednesday’s Daily Mail, which gave a detailed account of her training.

Mitch Silverstein would have many visions of the future in 1964 and the first would appear in full-color wonder, his big 6-year-old eyes staring back at him in disbelief.

He was seeing himself on a color television at the RCA Pavilion at the World’s Fair at Corona Park in Queens, New York.

“It left such a big impression on me,” Silverstein said. “That was a first for most people because that was a pretty major technological step.”

For all the things the New York World’s Fair of 1964-65 was said to get wrong, the fair showcased several technological wonders that, some 50 years later, we take for granted.

Lat Ware is a pretty loquacious dude, without a bit of shyness in his persona. We came across Ware at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco the first week of March and tried out his upcoming game, Throw Trucks With Your Mind. He was strapping headsets onto conference attendees and keeping up a steady stream of patter to keep them off balance when trying to manage their character in-game.

You see, Throw Trucks With Your Mind uses an $80 headset from NeuroSky to actually read your brainwaves. Ware has set it up in the game to track opposite parameters: focus and relaxation. When you focus intensely, the onscreen red bar will fill up, allowing you to do things like jump, push, and toss heavy in-game objects. When you relax, a blue bar fills up and lets you do four other cool things for a total of eight different ways to interact with the game using your mind.

Try that while some chatty indie dev is all up in your ear, trying to distract you.

I’m not sure about you, but even with the aid of the Apple Store app, I’ve sort of intuitively felt that the Apple Watch just must be huge, and certainly way too huge to put on my wrist.

Well, maybe it is. I won’t know until I go into an Apple Store and actually try one one, which I intend on doing at the first opportunity. But as this image proves, even the biggest Apple Watch is positively tiny compared to the Asus Zenwatch.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average measures the strength of American industry based upon how 30 large, publicly owned companies in the United States have traded in the stock markets. Companies come in and out the Dow periodically, according to whether their fortunes are waxing or waning.

When Apple joins the Dow Jones Industrial Average next week — replacing AT&T, which has been on the index since 1916 — the Dow will be at a historic high (assuming nothing catastrophic happens between now and then). But if Apple had joined the Dow in 2008, that value would be even more historic. It would have added more than 4,300 points to the Dow.

You can keep your new ultra-thin MacBook and your high-priced Apple Watch; for me, the most exciting thing at Monday’s “Spring Forward” Apple keynote was the announcement of ResearchKit, a new open-source iOS framework that essentially turns your sensor-filled iPhone into a crowdsourcing medical diagnostic device.

The idea is that researchers will be able to tap into Apple’s enormous base of iPhone users to gather medical data. Users simply sign up to participate in huge global studies about diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes, letting researchers build up giant data sets in a fraction of the amount of time it would normally take. Think Kickstarter for medicine!

And according to Bloomberg, initial reports are really, really positive.

We all know that professional industry analysts often say the darndest things, but the Apple Watch has unleashed some truly muddleheaded commentary, especially from people who get paid to know better.

There are the customary and entirely predictable predictions that the Watch will fail — just as the pundits predicted the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad would bomb. This kind of commentary is so knee-jerk and silly, it’s best to just ignore. But then there’s a higher tier of analysis that says the Watch’s success depends on apps (duh, yeah) or the device’s potential for upgrades (completely wrong).

I’m interested in smarter takes on Apple’s strategy, pricing and marketing. Surprisingly, some of the most insightful commentary I’ve seen is on reddit — known generally as a salty hangout for spotty teens and weirdos. Here are some key points outlined by reddit users.

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 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.

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.

The shiny new watch on Tim Cook’s wrist wasn’t the item that tipped Apple’s hand as it bets on the future of computing.

The really big development was what wasn’t in the room: multiple ports on the new ultrathin MacBook.

The future lies in a single port for powering the device and seemingly not much else. It’s called USB-C. And the “C,” for now, stands for confusion.

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.

Take a closer look:

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: