Cult of Mac

Tim Cook is currently visiting Israel in conjunction with Apple opening a new office in Herzliya. As part of the trip, he met with the president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin.

The two leaders showed great respect for each other during a chat at the president’s residence. Along with recognizing an Israeli Apple VP in attendance with Cook, Rivlin thanked the Apple CEO repeatedly for “what you are doing for all humanity.” Cook talked about Apple’s love for Israel as an “ally for the U.S.” and a “place to do business.” Cook also praised Rivlin’s work to “bridge the gap” between nationalities and religions in the Middle East.

Ben Marcus attracts attention whenever he flies his quadcopter and sometimes he lets the curious take the controls.

During those exchanges, many say this: That’s cool, but what about the privacy issues?

Marcus sensed that the concern about camera-outfitted drones unknowingly hovering over our lives was real enough that it could stunt the potential applications of drones.

So he started a company that will let people restrict their own air space.

NoFlyZone launched on Feb. 10 and already has more than 20,000 homeowners signed up to request drone pilots steer clear of their property.

If you plan on seeing Focus starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie this weekend, you will be watching the first major studio film edited entirely with Final Cut Pro X.

Originally criticized as “iMovie Pro” for its incredibly simplistic interface and feature set, Final Cut Pro X has managed to start wooing Hollywood filmmakers by slowly adding back missed tools along with new ones. Now the directors behind Focus think it’s the future of movie editing.

Photographer and book publisher Rick Smolan was 25 when he made the best picture of his young career while on assignment in Australia. It was a group of aboriginal children playing in golden light with a balloon on a red dirt runway.

But when he looked down at his camera, he realized the shot would be grossly underexposed. Sure enough, when the Kodachrome 25 slides came back, the frame was dark and murky.

“I stuck the slide in a safe deposit box because I knew someday someone would invent something to save that picture,” Smolan, who created the Day in the Life photo book series and America 24/7, told Cult of Mac.

We’re still waiting for the final pricing details on the Apple Watch, but if recent reports that Apple plans to sell one million gold Edition units a month are true, Apple Watch could wreak havoc on gold prices and do who knows what to the global economy.

Josh Center at TidBits has done some math on Apple Watch and estimates that if production rumors are correct, Apple will be bidding for a third of the world’s annual gold supply to make enough gold watches to meet demand.

To put those numbers in perspective, Apple needs so much gold it could turn the all 7,000 metric tons of gold stored at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — you know, the one from the plot of Die Hard 3 — into gold watches in less than a decade.

Get ready to watch the epic slow burn in the official trailer for the upcoming conclusion to Rocksteady’s Arkham video game series, Batman: Arkham Knight. Scarecrow is uniting all of Batman’s enemies — Penguin, Two-Face, the Riddler, Harley Quinn, Poison, Ivy, and the Arkham Knight — to take Gotham City and take down The Bat.

Sure, there’s a little bit of Bane-like incomprehensibility in the Scarecrow’s voice-over, and (barring a miracle) the Joker won’t be in town this time around, but this game is looking pretty amazing. The in-game shots of Batman plunging down the skyscrapers of Gotham City, the brutal combat animations, and the just plain high-resolution glory of the fictional city and it’s lone hero make us want to play Batman: Arkham Knight right now.

Check out the epic trailer for the June 2, 2015 game below.

Apple can be an incredibly demanding company to work for, but just getting in the door is nearly impossible.

The hiring process for Apple retail is fairly lengthy, but according to UX designer Luis Abreu, landing a job at the mothership in Cupertino is an even longer, more grueling process — which he just suffered through firsthand.

Apple Watch still isn’t available for the masses, but Apple is ramping up its marketing efforts among fashionistas with a multipage spread in the March issue of Vogue.

Multiple versions of the Apple Watch are shown across the seven-page ad, which includes closeups of the watch bands as well as full-size pictures of the entire device to give readers a better idea about whether Jony Ive’s timepiece will fit in with their wardrobes.

Take a look at some of the other ads below:

Despite angering iOS users by forcing their album, Songs of Innocence, onto every iPhone and iPad in the world, U2’s iTunes exclusivity bet is paying off big time.

Nearly one in four of all music users on iOS devices listened to U2 in January, which was nearly double the second most popular artist, Taylor Swift. The force-fed album debuted last fall but its impact is still visible five months later, according to Kantar’s latest survey of iOS users, which found that 23% of all music users on iOS listened to at least one U2 track in January.

Here’s the top 10 artists in January:

Quadcopters are a lot of fun, especially when they come equipped with a high definition camera. They allow you to take professional looking video and offer a unique vantage point with which to view your surroundings.

Now you can get a quadcopter that has those exact characteristics with Cult of Mac Deals’ limited edition Code Black Drone with HD Camera. Pre-order yours now for only $89 with free US shipping. Hurry, this is your last chance to pre-order at this pricepoint.

The Apple Watch reveal back in September was big on excitement, but short on details. Among those things that Apple failed to mention was whether or not Cupertino’s new smartwatch will be able to withstand liquids — making it suitable for, say, swimming or washing the dishes.

While we still don’t have a final, definitive answer on what is and is not advisable with the Apple Watch, Tim Cook shed a bit of light on the mystery during a Q&A session with staff at the Kurfürstendamm Apple Store in Berlin, Germany, where he is currently visiting. Cook said that that he wears his Apple Watch “even in the shower.”

From minor controversies like Antennagate to being kicked out of his own company and then returning triumphantly, Steve Jobs got out of plenty of tight squeezes in his life.

Now that he’s gone, it seems that that same spirit of near-misses and daring triumphs is left to Venus, Jobs’ 256-foot, $120 million super-yacht.

Having visited Montenegro, Palma, Gibraltar, Horta Azores and many other exotic locations since Jobs’ death in 2011, the yacht recently had a close call while passing through a bridge in Saint Martin, an island in the northeast Caribbean, approximately 185 miles east of Puerto Rico.

Check out the video after the jump.

Allen Zderad lost a career in science because of a degenerative eye disease. Now, science is allowing him to see his wife for the first time in 10 years.

The 68-year-old former chemist from Minnesota recently became the recipient of a “bionic eye” implant, a chip with electrodes implanted in his retina that interacts with a camera in Zderad’s glasses. The camera and wearable computer pack sends information to the electrodes, which then send the information on to the optic nerve.

BlackBerry’s smartphone business is imploding in a big way in the U.K., where the company is currently losing around 56,000 users every month to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, new research shows.

Just two years ago, the Canadian company had around 8 million non-business users in the U.K., but that figure is expected to fall below 1 million by the end of this year.

Apple has been ordered to shell out $532.9 million to a patent troll after apparently infringing on intellectual property with iTunes features related to data storage and managing access through payment systems.

The fee was awarded by a Texas court, and was positioned between the $852 million Smartflash was seeking in damages and the $4.5 million Apple had argued for.

It was recently Chinese New Year, and to celebrate, thousands of people flocked to a well-known Buddhist temple in the country’s Guangdong province to make offerings.

One Apple super-fan apparently decided to eschew cash donations for something far more valuable, however: his new iPhone 6 Plus.

A shot of the man depositing the super-sized Apple smartphone in the temple’s donation box was featured in Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post. The saddest part? His generous offering was rejected.

Tonight, history is made as Modern Family becomes the first major TV show to ever air an episode shot almost entirely using Apple products — ranging from the iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2 to MacBook FaceTime cameras.

But while Apple products are famously easy to use, the episode itself contained numerous challenges: taking more than three months to complete, and a variety of nifty filmmaking tricks. To find out more details, BuzzFeed News reached out to the show’s executive producer and co-creator, Steve Levitan, to get some added insight about the challenges of making this unusual show.

The behind-the-scenes video is available to watch online, or download via iTunes.

When you’re a company the size of Apple, sometimes you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Having recently paved the way for racially diverse emoji by adding them to both Mac and iOS, Apple is now being attacked for the shade of yellow used for its Asian faces, which some critics claim is borderline racist.

Lenny Kravitz has designed a camera for Leica and you are going to need rock-star money to afford it.

Kravitz, whose life-long love for photography is evident by the Leica camera often slung on his shoulder, has collaborated with his favorite company to design a limited edition Leica M-P Correspondent digital rangefinder.

The “design” comes in the form of areas of the camera’s black enamel finish where the paint has been deliberately worn away to reveal flares of brass. It has the vintage appearance of a well-traveled workhorse that came from the bag of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Grumpy Cat, T-Shirt-guy, Leave Brittany alone! Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, Bill Gates. Music videos, TV episodes, vlogs, and — of course — PewDiePie.

That’s just a small sampling of the amazing video compilation edit you can see right now on YouTube, created by Luc Bergeron, director and video editor for YouTube, to celebrate ten years of the Google-owned video portal.

Take a look at this amazing edit of 198 YouTube videos below and be ready to thrill to all the video memes you already know, plus a ton you might have missed.

Can you imagine a time without the ubiquitous video service, available on every video device you have, from your iPhone and iPad to Mac to smart TV? YouTube has re-defined the way we create and consume video from the moment it came into being, and we love this retrospective for reminding us.

David Sherry and Allie Lehman are not out to kill anything. But when they named their growing photo agency Death to Stock, they were sending out a pretty strong signal. Not with malice toward this segment of the photo industry, but a tongue-in-cheek invitation to any person who has ever had to create something using expensive, mediocre photography from a stock agency.

The name as well as the pictures they produce have caught the eye of more than 230,000 subscribers since Sherry and Lehman started the agency in Columbus, Ohio, in 2013.

The value of the company, Sherry said, is growing fast — in large part because they distribute the work free of charge.

Picture this: You’ve lost your iPhone somewhere, but it’s run out of juice and it’s not ringing or vibrating when you call it.

You might think you’re out of luck, but there’s one function you can enable (or disable if you’re into privacy) that will keep track of your iPhone’s last location, even when the battery’s dead.

A good belt should hold your pants up and be fashionable doing so.

Piers Ridyard has raised the expectations of this simple but important mens fashion accessory: the belt as smart phone charger.

Ridyard’s XOO belt looked like any other belt when it made its debut at London Fashion Week in January as part of a new collection from men’s fashion house Casely-Hayford. The charging power is in layers of thin, flexible lithium ceramic polymer battery sewn into the leather.

A microUSB-to-USB charging cable stored on the inside of the band can be plugged into the belt to charge a pocketed iPhone or Android device. The belt can be recharged on a computer.

Adonit already makes some of the best styluses in the world, now it’s unleashing a new app that will help you make the most of them.

The company behind the popular Jot styluses line revealed today that it’s made a new app called Forge that’s not just a great place to sketch out drawings, but also doubles as a digital workspace for visual thinkers.

What happens to a bunch of weaponized high school kids recruited to fight intergalactic bad guys? They become some seriously disturbed adults.

That’s the message in this stylish, high-concept fan film that reboots the popular live-action television show for kids that first aired in the 1990s, Power Rangers.

This film by music video auteur Joseph Kahn, produced by Adi Shankar, stars Katee Sackhoff of Battlestar Galactica fame and James Van Der Beek (who also gets a writing credit) from Dawson’s Creek as two former Rangers on different sides of the long-running intergalactic war.

Check out the dark film below (NSFW warning: there are boobs and lots of violent scenes), and you’ll never think of this franchise in the same way again.