Cult of Mac

Want to know if that nasty mole on your shoulder is cancerous? There’s an app for that!

Errr… Actually, no. No, there’s not.

The Federal Trade Commission announced today that apps like Mole Detective and Mel App that are marketed as ways for iPhone users to snap pictures of moles to determine if they’re cancerous aren’t based on actual real-world science.

The two app makers reached a settlement with the FTC after the feds alleged that the apps lacked adequate evidence to support claims that they could calculate your mole’s melanoma risk as low, medium, or high without ever visiting a doctors office.

Call it Newton’s third law of Apple analysts: For every extreme reaction one way, there is an equally extreme reaction the other.

In this case, what that means is that while some doomsayers are happy to write off the Apple Watch as the worst thing Apple has done since building its own smartphone, taking on the music industry with iTunes, [insert actual bad decision], others go in totally the opposite direction and predict a landslide victory in Apple’s favor.

Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research falls somewhat into the latter category. His prediction? That the Apple Watch will have 100,000 apps ready to go when it launches in April, and that 42 million units will have sold by the end of December.

Mercedes-Benz already lost a key employee to Apple’s project Titan, but Daimler AG chairman Dieter Zetsche says he’s not losing any sleep thinking about Cupertino’s rumored self-driving car.

At the launch of the new Mercedes-AMG C63 sports sedan in Portugal last night, the Mercedes boss dismissed the threat an iCar could pose to established car manufacturers, saying Apple wouldn’t be worried about a Mercedes-Benz smartphone so his company is not worried about an Apple car.

The internet is a competitive space where only the best designed sites succeed. The best sites are the ones that do their job well and provide the user with an enjoyable experience that’ll keep them coming back.

To be the best, you need a vast array of web development skills. Get that knowledge with the Full Stack Hacker Bundle, severely discounted right now at Cult of Mac Deals. But you better hurry – this deal closes really soon.

Pebble’s brand new smartwatch is here, and it’s a huge improvement over its immensely popular predecessors. Pebble Time boasts a color display and a slimmer design, the same great battery life we’ve come to expect from Pebble watches, and a brand new operating system.

Intel’s Broadwell chips are late. The 14-nanometer wafers, which are believed to be integral to the much-rumored Retina MacBook Air, are due soon, but still not here.

But Intel’s already looking forward. At this week’s 2015 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the chipmaker will announce a switch to a 10-nanometer process by early 2017 and to 7-nanometer chips shortly thereafter … a transition that means your Mac’s guts will soon no longer be made out of silicon, but another material entirely.

It may sound like the definition of #firstworldproblems, but some residents of New York’s Upper East Side aren’t happy that they’re about to get a gorgeous new Apple Store on their doorstep, according to a petition.

In fact, they’re mad as hell — and they’re not gonna take it anymore!

For the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, Samsung is ditching all of its tacky plastic in favor of an all-new design made entirely from premium materials — and already its efforts are paying off.

According to carrier partners that have been given a sneak peek at the next-generation devices ahead of their official debuts on March 1, the Galaxy S6 beats the iPhone 6 in terms of design.

The question of when European iPhone owners can expect to start using Apple Pay may be answered sooner rather than later. Visa Europe has announced that it is putting in place the infrastructure to allow contactless payment terminals to support the “tokenization” service used by Apple Pay.

The technology will be in place by mid-April, after which Apple could theoretically introduce Apple Pay anytime it wishes.

Many of us have had AOL accounts throughout the years, but if you’re still using your AOL account to log into iTunes, you’re soon to be S-O-L: Apple has just announced that customers who use an AOL username to sign-in to iTunes will need to convert to an Apple ID before March 31st.

Late last week, we reported on the newest leak from Edward Snowden, indicating that the NSA had hacked the SIM cards of pretty much every smartphone on Earth. iPhones included.

It looked bad. The hack allowed the NSA to tap into your phone without a court order. But today, the Dutch company responsible for 2 billion SIM cards released a statement, saying that as far as they can tell, fears of a massive NSA invasion are overblown.

People hoping that Apple will drop the Samsung albatross from around its neck for the forthcoming iPhone 6s may be disappointed.

According to a new report coming from the Asian supply chain, Samsung has come to an agreement with Apple to supply new 20nm LPDDR4 DRAM memory chips for the next generation iPhone, expected this September. Samsung will reportedly provide half of the chips Apple needs for its next iPhone, and has no problems upping the order if more are required.

Apple’s second iOS 8.3 beta, which was pushed out to registered developers on Monday ahead of a public release later this year, enables Siri to speak seven new languages, testers have found. It also brings more performance improvements for older iOS devices like the iPhone 4s.

Had he lived, today would have marked the 60th birthday of Steve Jobs, who was born February 24, 1955.

While most of the tributes to Jobs will no doubt highlight later events in his life — the unveiling of the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone or the iPad — I instead wanted to mark the occasion with one of the lesser-known Jobs videos: his first television interview, recorded around the time the Apple II was making waves.

If you never thought you’d see the day when Jobs would geek out over seeing himself on a television screen, check out the video after the jump.

It was only a matter of time before Samsung did something to try and thwart Apple’s unconfirmed automotive aspirations.

The Korean iPhone competitor has bought the battery pack division of a leading automative supplier only a couple of weeks after it was reported that Apple had met with the company.

There are plenty of reasons why you might need to make an OS X bootable drive. Maybe you’re updating numerous Macs in your house and don’t want to download the installer every time. Perhaps you’ve replaced the hard drive in your iMac and need to install a fresh copy of OS X.

In the video below, I’ll show you how easy it is to create a bootable OS X Yosemite drive using software you can download for free.

Apple paved the way for racially diverse emoji to come to the Mac two week ago, and now with the release of iOS 8.3 beta 2, Apple has added access to 300 new emoji for iPad and iPhone users.

With iOS 8.3 beta 2 Apple now allows users to choose between five different skin tones for 60 different emoji. Switching between the different skin tones is just as easy as adding an accent mark to letters: simply press and hold an emoji to reveal the the entire palette of color options.

Here are some of the new emojis in action:

The third season of Netflix’s amazing political drama House of Cards drops on February 27, and our friends at Sesame Street are apparently pretty excited. They put out a parody video today that recasts Kevin Spacey’s conniving, political shark as Frank Underwolf, a drawling villain with eyes on the “White Brick House” currently occupied by one of three pigs. Of course, he has to go through a couple of other little house-hogs first….

Not only does this video perfectly capture the tone and winking evil of the show, but it also will teach you a valuable lesson about counting to three. Check it out below.

You may have noticed recently that the Facebook app makes sounds. Like a post? Chirp. Refresh the news feed? Swoosh. It’s like your iPhone got suddenly chatty and wants you to know that you’re tapping on the screen with every blip and bloop.

Surely you’d like to turn these things off. You could just mute your whole iPhone with the sound toggle button, but if you want to have other audio come through, like video, music, or (gasp) phone calls, you can dip into your Facebook app settings and soon experience the bliss of a blip-free Facebook browsing experience.

Here’s how.

When you’re one of the closest things the programming world has to a rock star, you might assume that — when the time comes to pass your godly coding powers onto the next generation — you’d hand your offspring a brand new iPad and a crash course in the likes of Swift: the insanely popular state-of-the-art iOS language unveiled at last year’s WWDC.

Try telling that to John Carmack! The legendary coder behind the smash hit games Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake (today working at Oculus VR) recently shared a picture of his young son’s home computer lessons. Carmack’s choice for suitable hardware and software? BASIC on the 1984-era Apple IIc.

He’s kicking it old-school!

Along with today’s release of iOS 8.3 beta 2 to developers, Apple has also seeded a new version of OS X 10.10.3 on the Mac Dev Center.

The second beta preview comes two weeks after Apple released the OS X 10.10.3 to developers with a preview of the new Photos app. The new preview build 14D87h can be found in the Mac App Store or in the dev center.

Apple added two-factor authentication, an improved emoji layout, and paved the way for racially diverse in emoji in the last beta build. The release notes don’t mention any new features, but we’ll let you know what we find once it’s installed on our machines.

We’re still waiting for the release of iOS 8.2 but Apple just pushed out the second beta build of iOS 8.3 to developers.

The software update was made available this morning in the iOS Dev Center. Along with iOS 8.3 beta 2, Apple released beta build 2 of Xcode 6.3, which includes Swift 1.2. There’s also a new pre-release version of Apple TV beta for the third-generation Apple TV.

The iOS 8.3 beta 2 release notes don’t mention any new features, but we’ll tell you about all the goodies we find as soon as it’s installed on our iPhones. In the meantime, check out our feature on the new additions in iOS 8.3 beta 1, which included a new emoji layout, CarPlay features, two-factor authentication for Google, and Apple Pay support for China. Or use  the direct download links below to jump into iOS 8.3 beta 2:

Google is stepping up its game in the mobile payments space this year by striking a deal with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile to pre-install Google Wallet on all Android phones.

The move comes after Apple Pay has started to take over the mobile payments space, despite launching less than six months ago. With the new pre-installed Google Wallet deal, Google will hopefully add more consumers to the feature that’s been around since 2011 but hasn’t grown as quickly as the company hoped.

If you were a fan of The Jetsons cartoon, you probably marvelled at the home automation features that George Jetson and his brood enjoyed. While we may not yet have robot maids who can console us after our daily firing from Spacely Sprockets, there have been a number of advancements in home automation technology.

Check out these gadgets at Cult of Mac Deals that are sure to streamline your home and get you on the road to one day having your own contraption that’ll automatically put on your clothes for you. Man, that’d be sweet.

Toyota was one of the first car manufacturers to announce it would support CarPlay, but the company is pulling back on its plans to embrace Apple’s car infotainment system. Despite still being listed among Apple’s CarPlay partners, Toyota says it’s sticking with its own Entune systems.

The company says that while it has talked frequently to both Apple and Google about CarPlay and Android Auto, it has no plans to bring the technologies to its cars in the United States anytime soon. Toyota’s manager of advanced technology communications, John Hanson, told the New York Times, “We may all eventually wind up there, but right now we prefer to use our in-house proprietary platforms for those kinds of functions,” Mr. Hanson said.

While Toyota’s not so hot on CarPlay, other manufacturers like Ford, BMW, Volkswagon, and GM are more bullish on Apple’s car offerings. Here’s a full breakdown of which service auto makers currently support: