Cult of Mac

A previously quiet town in California, today Cupertino is synonymous with Apple in the same way that Redmond is with Microsoft, Compton is with rapper and Beats founder Dr. Dre, and Gotham City is associated with Batman.

A fascinating new article for the Columbus Dispatch reveals the double-edged sword of being a town so closely tied in with the rise-and-fall fortunes of a single company. While it’s certainly great when times are good, it also means that a major stumble could have major repercussions for the 58,000-person city Steve Jobs grew up in and called home.

With the long-awaited “spaceship” Apple Campus 2 set for completion in 2016, Cupertino’s reliance on Apple is only going to increase over the coming years. And one thing’s for sure: the once sleepy city needs Apple a whole lot more than Apple needs it!

Apple’s Touch ID sensor has been the best and most reliable fingerprint scanner since it made its debut in the iPhone 5s, but competing products announced at Mobile World Congress this week could give the Cupertino company some concern.

Not only has Samsung made huge improvements to its own fingerprint sensor for the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, but Qualcomm has delivered an even more impressive alternative called Sense ID that works through aluminum, stainless steel, and more.

After China, India is the next big frontier for Apple: with a massive 1.2 billion citizens, and an impressively growing smartphone market that is far from saturated.

So far Apple has had great success in the country, as the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have sold roughly twice the volume of previous generation iPhones, and Apple has even proved willing to take a short-term hit on the earnings front to get more iPhones into people’s hands in the long run.

But one company isn’t happy about the iPhone’s success in India — and it’s doubling its efforts to get Apple barred from using the popular smartphone name in the country altogether.

Whether Apple is actually building a car, or it’s just a controlled leak to show that the company has more planned after the Apple Watch, isn’t known yet. What is sure, though, is that Apple is now legally covered if it wants to slap its name and logo onto an automobile.

Using its regular law firm Baker & McKenzie in Zurich, Apple recently expanded its corporate description to not just include the current array of watches, smartphones, tablets and computers, but vehicles, too. And Apple’s lawyers aren’t taking any chances, either. Apple aircraft, anyone?

Apple’s new ad campaign might be its best yet, especially if you’re one of the iPhone owners that’s about to have your photo on a billboard.

Simply called “Shot on iPhone,” it’s hard to call Apple’s campaign an ad at all — at least in the traditional sense. Apple crowdsourced photos shot with the iPhone by normal people around the world, and the result is a testament to just how incredible iPhone photography has become.

The Apple Watch will have a special battery-saving feature that will essentially turn it into a basic timepiece.

The previously unreleased detail about the smartwatch’s functionality showed up Sunday in a New York Times story that digs into Apple’s development of the long-awaited wearable.

Samsung’s love affair with cheap, tacky plastic is on hold for its stunning new Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge.

Unveiled today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the new handsets pull out all the stops in an effort to reverse Samsung’s declining smartphone sales and mount a new challenge against Apple’s most popular iPhones to date.

They sport all-new designs made out of premium materials, and vastly improved software that promises a better user experience. But they aren’t without their own compromises.

Look out, hot stuff coming through!

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The One M9 isn’t the only exciting new product HTC has to show off in Barcelona today. The Taiwanese company also announced Vive, a new standalone virtual reality headset developed in partnership with Valve that wants to change the way you game — and more.

This week: Apple might be eyeing 2020 for their first car, but you can catch our most wanted features and price expectations right now. Plus: Cupertino pay massive bonuses to poach top talent; the insane acceleration of Tesla’s new electric car; the new and notable from iOS 8.3 beta; Toyota says “no thanks” to CarPlay; and finally, your listener questions, answered!

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Full show notes ahead!

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Forget Comcast, ZTE takes the cake with the most blatant Apple-ripoff-of-the-month award. The Chinese company’s latest handset, the Blade S6, is clearly… inspired by the iPhone.

While it doesn’t have the identical chamfered edges of Samsung’s upcoming phone, it does copy the most iconic part of every Apple product.

We get slammed 24/7 with new Apple rumors. Some are accurate, most are not. To give you a clue about what’s really coming out of Cupertino in the future, we’re busting out our rumor debunker each week to blow up the nonsense.

This week the Apple Watch rumors have reached a crescendo as invites to a not-so-mysterious event in March were released. Will the Apple Watch really launch with 100,000 apps? Will demand for the gold Apple Watch wreak havoc on the world’s gold supply? And don’t forget about the Apple car either. New rumors are claiming Samsung could be the biggest boost or roadblock for project Titan.

Find out the truth behind the week’s wildest Apple rumors below:

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During his whirlwind tour of the Middle East and Europe, Apple CEO Tim Cook has been leaving little breadcrumbs of Apple Watch revelations.

There was the confirmation that the Watch will be showerproof in Germany, and now Cook has said it will eventually replace your car keys.

Samsung’s three-sided display may make the Galaxy S6 Edge a little different, but it won’t be the most unique smartphone at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week.

Monohm, a company based in Berkeley, California, that makes “heirloom electronics,” will announce a perfectly round smartphone called the Runcible that’s designed to look like a pocket watch.

At our current place on the evolutionary chart, we are a species that carries more things in the pockets of tighter pants.

Michael Tunney understood this every time he went to a bar and saw patrons pull out their cell phones and bulky wads of keys before sitting down. Tunney, himself bothered by keys in the pocket, set out to solve this problem.

The 28-year-old Chicagoan with a manufacturing engineer background invented Key Smart, a holder that keeps keys from jabbing your thigh and removes the unsightly pocket bulge out of form-fitting pants.

Think of a Swiss Army knife, but with keys that fold out of a slim handle.

Fancy a .app web address? You’re going to be buying it from Google. The search giant has splashed out just over $25 million on the entire .app web domain, which is around $19 million more than any other company has paid for a top-level domain so far.

iOS developers are constantly spitting on Android. But that’s not necessarily the way it should be. The developers behind iA Writer, one of the most beautiful distraction-free writing apps for iOS and Mac, have just ported their app to Android. And they seem really positive about Android so far.

Many of us have been eagerly awaiting a new version of Tweetbot for iPad for quite a while now, as well as an updated version of Tweetbot for Mac. The wait seems like it’s drawing to a close though. Today, developer Tapbots shared some updates, giving us a roadmap for the next updates to both Tweetbots for Mac and Tweetbot for iOS.

Former Apple retail boss Ron Johnson is taking on a new mission: helping online retailer Nasty Gal move into the brick-and-mortar retail space.

According to Re/code, Johnson is leading a $16 million investment in the ultra-chic brand, which started out in 2006 as an eBay store, and has risen to bring in more than $100 million in annual revenue. Johnson will also be joining the company’s board of directors, while simultaneously acting as the CEO of his as-yet-unlaunched e-commerce startup, Enjoy.

Steve Jobs would have been 60 years old this week, a sad fact we didn’t want to let pass unnoticed. Luke takes a look at this milestone year for the late Apple co-founder and ultimate savior. Buster tours the 300 racially diverse emojis Apple added to the latest iOS update, and then gives you an inside peek at the grueling hiring process all Apple employees must go through to work for our favorite company. Rob shows you how to find your lost iPhone–even when its battery is dead, and then takes a quick peek at the stunningly gorgeous new remastered version of stealth game République.

Be sure to hop into this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine for all this and more!

When Apple’s Greg Joswiak first introduced the EarPods on stage at the iPhone 5 event in 2012, he said they “look unlike any headphone you’ve ever seen before.” Samsung won’t be able to say the same for its new earphones, however, because they are essentially EarPods clones.

It has taken a lot longer than we anticipated, but the South Korean company has finally gotten around to launching an EarPods ripoff of its own, and it’s expected to come bundled with the upcoming Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge.

“What color is this stupid dress?”

That’s the question I (as well as most of the Internet) asked friends tonight at the local bar, after a picture of an ugly gold-and-white … errr … black and blue bridesmaid’s dress swept the Internet late Thursday night.

An impassioned fight broke out between my buddy, the bartender and myself. “It’s gold and white!” they said emphatically.

“Are you blind?! It’s clearly navy and black,” I burst out, baffled, between bits of burrito and brew. I called the waitress over to win her over to my side, but surprise, she says, “It’s like, kind of copper and gray.”

Nearly 75 percent of people surveyed see the dress pictured above as gold and white, according to Buzzfeed. In reality, it’s navy and black.

The Internet completely blew its mind trying to explain why some people saw the #Dressgate dress in different colors. Experts are still struggling to come to a scientific consensus as to why you might see the fabric in a completely different color scheme than your friend. I feel like I’m going insane because it’s definitely blue and black, but most won’t agree.

To make it clearer, here’s the image with different color balances to show what others see: