Cult of Mac

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.”

Apple is allegedly planning even more variations of its Watch, with up to three casings in the works for later this year.

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.

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.

Check out the video below.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Apple Watch’s Force Touch technology and rose gold finish might not stay exclusive to the smartwatch for long.

A new report from The Wall Street Journal says that when the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus come around, they’ll have Force Touch screens, and come in pink gold.

Nerds and regular folks across the globe paused yesterday while Tim Cook unveiled Apple’s newest products. While everyone else was busying talking about the Apple Watch and new MacBook, your favorite brands were trying to get in on the buzz with a tweetstorm of puns and jokes.

Makers of everything from Twinkies to Miller Lite were ready to go viral with their witty tweets. Most fell flat, but there were a couple clever ones mixed in with the noise.

Here are the hottest Apple Watch-related tweets from social media marketers looking to cash in on Apple’s cachet:

Actress Anna Kendrick can probably afford a $10,000 gold watch, but that didn’t stop her from taking a bite out of Apple after it flexed its wrist-computing power Monday.

Known for her brutal Twitter truths, Kendrick offered a sour evaluation of the high-end Apple Watch, which is made of 18-karat gold and comes with a matching luxury price tag.

“We should be thanking Apple for launching the $10,000 ‘apple watch’ as the new gold standard in douchebag detection,” wrote Kendrick.

The internet is up in arms about the price of the higher-end Apple Watch models, with a grand level of snark and wit in the various Twitter rants and reaction pieces. The aggro response will most likely fade away, but if there were an equally large group of apologists, the resulting flame war might become a larger-than-life conflagration.

If you’ve ever wondered why some internet arguments go large, this video may have the answer. It turns out that the best way to get the attention of the internet is to get angry. Or, rather, angry reactions can almost guarantee the potential of an argument to go viral.

Because of Apple Watch, Jony Ive thinks Swiss watch makers are screwed. Even Swatch’s inventor agrees. But Switzerland’s top athlete isn’t sold quite yet.

When asked whether he think athletes will embrace Apple’s wearable, 17-time Grand Slam champion Roger Federer said he’s interested to check out Apple Watch, but he doesn’t use “those type of things” and doubts “it’s going to have a big impact on the Swiss watch industry.”

“I don’t quite understand how much you need to know about all of these little things—about how much energy you burn, about how much spin you put on the ball,” Federer told CNBC. “I think it might be interesting to some people, but at the end of the day I believe in hard work.”

Watch the full interview below:

Apple has one of the most iconic logos in pop culture. Go into any coffee shop and you’ll be assaulted by an array of glowing MacBook lids and shiny iPhone screens, but it turns out that drawing the Apple logo from memory is shockingly hard.

A new study conducted by UCLA researchers found only one out of 85 undergraduate students could accurately draw the iconic logo from memory. If you’re think maybe they just weren’t familiar with the Apple logo, you haven’t been to a college campus in a while.

The difficulty of drawing Apple’s ubiquitous logo actually tells us something about human memory and how we form a ‘gist memory’ of objects and symbols we become too familiar with.

Swatch may be just a couple of months from launching its own Apple Watch rival, but the 61-year old co-creator of the low cost Swatch wristwatch, Elmar Mock, isn’t being shy about describing the havoc he thinks Apple’s debut wearable device is going to wreak on the watch industry.

“Apple will succeed quickly,” Mock told Bloomberg. “It will put a lot of pressure on the traditional watch industry and jobs in Switzerland.”

Although other brands are now starting to investigate the possibilities of smartwatches, Mock thinks people are still selling the Apple Watch short, saying that the Apple Watch is going to bring about an “Ice Age” for makers of mid-priced Swiss watches when it ships in April.

Google’s gorgeous redesign of the Calendar app has finally made its way to iPhone. The Android version of Google Calendar’s redesign was released last fall, but iPhone users can now get their fingers on the official Google Calendar app too.

Like on the new Android version, you get new features like Events from Gmail, to turn emails into events on your calendar. Assists makes adding events quicker by recommending information to insert, and the new Schedule View makes it easier to scan your calendar and see what events you have coming up.

Take a tour of the new app below:

The new MacBook is one of the most impressive pieces of technology Apple has unleashed in five years. It boasts a Retina display, USB-C, butterfly-hinged keyboard, Force Touch trackpad and terraced batteries. All crammed inside a body that’s smaller than the MacBook Air, made possible by a new fanless processor.

Despite being an unapologetically gorgeous piece of hardware, the new MacBook’s biggest weapon — the fanless processor — is also its greatest weakness.

Apple has placed the new MacBook in a category most people shouldn’t even consider buying, and that’s OK. The new MacBook isn’t for you and me, it’s for the future.