A new Apple TV set-top box is set to arrive this summer at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, according to a new report citing sources familiar with the situation.
The upgrade would represent a much-needed “significant overhaul” of the device, letting it go far beyond Apple’s current TV offering and crossing over into other areas such as music, apps and even home automation — with a nifty Siri-based interface, to boot.
Did you roll your eyes when you saw the latest MacBook had a new kind of USB port?
So did the website College Humor, which went to work satirizing Apple’s pride in its product design.
Under the headline Why Every New MacBook Needs a Different Goddam Charger, College Humor released a new video that pokes fun at the latest Apple laptop.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Zombeavers, but it’s out now. And, true to its name, it is about beavers who are also zombies, and they lay siege to a cabin full of hapless, idiot teens on a weekend trip to the woods.
Watch the Zombeavers trailer if you don’t believe me, but this is a thing that is happening to all of us. And I can’t actually speak to its quality without having seen it, but it absolutely looks like something I would watch on Netflix at 2 in the morning. But only then.
What I’m saying is that you can probably wait to see Zombeavers, which will screen in select theaters starting today and is also available to stream on demand. And while you’re doing that, you should check out these other films that blend horror and comedy into something special (and don’t forget to share all the ones I missed in the comments).
We grew up in homes with robust photo albums, reels of 8 mm home movies and stacks of VHS tapes. These represent the branches and blossoms of our growing family trees.
In the digital age, we’ve filled out the branches, capturing millions of pictures and video clips almost out of concern we will miss something.
And we rarely look at any of it.
Mok Oh wants to change that with Moju, an iPhone app that distills the essence of a life moment by taking a sequence of photos and creating seamless motion in a file that comes to life with a simple twist of your phone.
This week, Luke gives us a sneak peek inside the new Steve Jobs biography, Alex takes a good look at the upcoming Apple TV service, Leander helps us decide whether the new gold in Apple Watch is anything special, John figures out who invented USB-C (hint: it’s Apple), and Leander checks in with an Android user who made the funniest Apple parody video we’ve seen in a long time. All that and more in Cult of Mac Magazine, free to download (and subscribe to!) right now.
Touch ID might be a more convenient and secure security implementation than PIN codes, but for now at least PINs are sticking around — which makes your iPhone vulnerable to anyone who gets their hands on it.
Of course, your iPhone only gives you a certain number of failed guesses, which means that unless the hacker somehow quickly guesses the correct code out of the 10,000 possible combinations, your iPhone’s contents remain safe.
A new video which has surfaced online, however, shows off a brute-force machine capable of trying every possible four-digit numerical combination in turn, while also resetting your iPhone to try again when it runs out of attempts. You can check it out below.
Although the App Store is still full of freemium games like Angry Birds, Apple is pretty great when it comes to highlighting some of the more unusual titles that pop up on iOS — from the M.C. Escher gorgeousness of Monument Valley to the nihilistic weirdness of Sometimes You Die.
The company continues that trend with its latest pick for App of the Week, which would normally set you back a couple of bucks, but can be downloaded completely free of charge for the next seven days. It’s Dark Echo, a uniquely twisted puzzle game by RAC7 Games — and I’m here to tell you it’s excellent.
Check out the trailer and a description below. Trust me, if you like unusually minimalist puzzlers, you won’t be disappointed.
Given everything we know about him, you wouldn’t have ever expected Steve Jobs to tweet out his hotel room number, details of a greasy meal at Chili’s Grill & Bar, or brag about winning $300 at blackjack in Nevada.
That, in short, is what separates Jobs (and, indeed, Tim Cook) from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Woz recently took a road trip to Reno with his wife in his $100,000 Tesla — pausing only to send out a string of entertainingly wacky tweets to his 370,000 Twitter followers regarding hamburgers, Segways, an unnamed “blackjack system” he’s been working on and, naturally, a number puzzle that revealed exactly where he was staying.
Apple is beefing up its iAd network for iTunes Radio by making it easy for advertisers to target certain customers. Like iAds for apps, advertisers can also buy their own audio ads without having to go through Apple’s sales team.
The change seems geared towards making advertising on iTunes Radio a more attractive opportunity, especially now that brands can use Customer Match, Apple’s ad-targeting system.
Developers are making a mad dash to finish their first Apple Watch apps before the wearable goes on sale in April. Yahoo is among those looking to make a big splash with must-have apps, and when it comes to bringing you the news, the company is hoping you’ll want it in bite-size chunks.
Yahoo’s Nick D’Aloisio sat down with Bloomberg today to talk about how digesting the news is going to change once you slap a tiny Apple Watch screen to your wrist. To bring long-form news to wearers, D’Aloisio says Yahoo Digest will focus on giving you the most salient pieces of a story, accompanied by little visual elements called atoms.
Watch Nick explain the news revolution Yahoo plans to unleash:
Have you always wanted to own a piece of Steve Jobs history, while also disposing of $13,000 in a hurry?
If so, you may be the perfect buyer for an eBay copy of the high school yearbook for Steve Jobs’ graduating class, in which the long-haired future Apple co-founder looks more on course to be voted “Most likely to start a progressive rock band” than “Most likely to become CEO of the world’s most valuable company.”
Carrying a Buy It Now price of $12,999.98 (or an opening bid value of $4,999.98), the book currently belongs to a fellow student at Homestead High School, who spoke with Cult of Mac about the sale.
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It figures that the city known for generating the most Instagram selfles would open a museum to attract selfie shooters.
Art in Island, an interactive art museum in a suburban Manila, Philippines, has installations designed for visitors to incorporate themselves into master 3-D copies of some classic works.
Tony Stark isn’t just Iron Man — he’s The Avengers’ own personal Jony Ive.
“He’s the boss,” says Stark (referring to Captain America) in the new TV spot for The Avengers: Age of Ultron. “I just pay for everything … and design everything … make everyone look cooler.”
While Ive doesn’t pay for everything at Apple, the rest of that self-confident self-description sounds a lot like Cupertino’s design guru.
One of the biggest questions surrounding the Apple Watch is how well its value will stand the test of time. Will Apple offer some sort of upgrade program for the opulent 10K Edition model? Will the tech-laden timepiece on your wrist be obsolete in two years?
Gazelle is banking on there being a thriving market for used Apple Watches as early adopters upgrade, much like there already is for used iPhones and iPads. The company announced its new trade-in program today ahead of the Watch’s April release.
The future of automobiles is getting closer every day.
German auto maker Mercedes Benz showed off a “car of the future” prototype self-driving car in California on Wednesday and futurist and Steve Jobs wannabe Elon Musk’s new Tesla Model S is getting an autopilot mode within the next few months.
It’s only a matter of time before we’re all sitting in a living-room style automobile, sipping slow-brewed coffee and reading the latest social news from our iPads as we zip along to our next appointment or meeting, right?
Because as Musk famously said: “Someday, driving a car will be illegal.”
Tim Cook touted Apple Watch’s supreme timekeeping capabilities at last week’s Spring Forward event, but Rehabstudio plans to give wearers a unique look on time — by counting down to their death.
Life Clock is an upcoming Apple Watch app that’s like the reverse of an activity tracker. Rather than giving you a readout of actions you did in the past, Life Clock tracks all the positive and negative actions you take throughout the day to calculate when you’re going to kick the bucket.
With smartwatches set to take over the world, TAG Heuer is determined not to go down easy like other Swiss watchmakers. The company is teaming up with Google and Intel to build a high-end Android Wear watch that will give wealthy gadget lovers a premium alternative to Apple Watch.
It’s tough at the top.
Mobile video game publisher Rovio Entertainment detailed Thursday its first revenue drop since the Finnish company hit it big with the Angry Birds franchise in 2009.
Perhaps the saturation of the market with no less than 11 Angry Birds-themed games since then (and three spin-offs) and way too many toys and animation projects has something to do with the loss of revenue, down 9 percent to $170.6 million in 2014.
Of course, as Rovio’s mobile gaming business did rise a bit (16 percent), making the overall drop in revenue that more incredible, the company seems to be focused on doubling-down on its mobile game offerings.
“2014 results show that steps in the game portfolio, free to play competency building and advertising are going in the right direction. I am confident that with new simplified organisation and clearer vision, we will be back to the path of growth in 2015,” said CEO Pekka Rantala in a statement.
Apple officially joined the Dow Jones Industrial average today, placing the world’s most valuable company among historic brands like Coca-Cola, Boeing and 3M. But Apple’s first day with the big boys isn’t getting off to a great start.
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We have Apple products atop our desks, in our pockets and, soon, on our wrists. As if there aren’t enough Apples in our airspace, one man is nudging his favorite company to design a quadrocopter. He’s even taken a stab at designing his dream Apple drone — and was careful to remain faithful to the Jony Ive aesthetic.
Eric Huisman presents his Apple drone concept like a classic Apple ad, with the product photographed on a seamless white background, perfectly lit, with a subtle shadow.
There was a time when a device that had more than one function was something to behold.
It took a real feat of engineering to make a machine that could do several things without taking up a good chunk of your living room.
I don’t know if the Answer ATR-102 Triplecorder can be considered such a marvel of technology, but it is awfully cool to look at.
Having to do your background reading just to go and watch a movie sounds a whole lot like schoolwork, but thankfully when it comes to the world of comic books things ain’t so bad!
With theaters set to play host to a gorgeous buffet of superhero flicks over the next year, Cult of Mac took it upon ourselves to play teacher and instruct you on exactly which graphic novels you should be chowing down on before walking into Avengers: Age of Ultron or Batman V Superman.
Now you too can be the snide guy (or gal) in the back row, telling everyone why it wasn’t as good as it was on the page…
Apple’s magical Force Touch trackpad — which uses haptic technology to make the new MacBook trackpad feel like it’s clicking, even when it’s not — was unveiled at the company’s recent “Spring Forward” event.
But a patent application published today suggests that this is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the interest in haptic technology on the part of Tim Cook and co. The application describes a whole virtual keyboard for the iMac, meaning that users could type onto a flat glass or metallic plate, but would still be able to feel the individual keys.