The nightmare of tangled wires strikes all too often when you want to listen to your favorite tunes. The Bluetooth Cloud Buds fix that by going wireless, and they offer some other great features, too.
Don’t just listen to your music; immserse yourself in it with a pair of Wireless Bluetooth Cloud Buds equipped with noice cancelling technology, available right now at Cult of Mac Deals at a great price.
Will the iPad rebound in 2015? Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Tablet sales are on the decline, and the iPad is “the weakest leak,” according to the latest report from International Data Corporation.
The organization has scaled back its five-year forecast for tablets, expecting market growth to come to a near standstill. With 234.5 million units expected to be sold in 2015, the tablet market will only gain a modest 2.1 percent year-over-year.
Apple Watch is here... almost. Photo: Leander Kahney
After years of rumors, the Apple Watch is finally shipping next month, but according to a new report coming out of China, it’s not likely to be a relaxing month for Tim Cook and pals to spend clinking champagne flutes and celebrating a job well done.
That’s because Apple Watch manufacturer Quanta apparently continues to have yield problems with the debuting wearable device, causing a defect-free rate of less than 30 percent. In other words, really, really bad.
Anyone want to work out what yesterday's mishap cost Apple? Photo: The Dark Knight Photo: The Dark Knight
Yesterday’s Apple outages brought digital sales for services like iTunes to a standstill, but it also caused things to grind to a halt in some brick-and-mortar Apple Stores. The down time sent retail back to the days before, well, Apple was there to shake it up.
For a window of approximately two hours, Apple Store employees in certain places were unable to check in to work, stores were unable to make sales and Genius Bar appointments were unable to be kept. Employees were apparently unable to check email for even longer.
British singer Sarah Brightman during training at Star City in Russia. Photo: Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center
British singer Sarah Brightman has a five-octave vocal range and millions have paid top dollar to hear her sing. But to hit the highest note of her career, Brightman is spending her own money.
Brightman is paying a reported $52 million to become the first singer to travel in space. She will board a Soyuz spacecraft on Sept. 1 for a 10-day trip aboard the International Space Station. It is the most expensive space tourist trip on record, according to the TASS Russian News Agency.
Photos of Brightman’s training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City near Moscow, can be found on her website and in Wednesday’s Daily Mail, which gave a detailed account of her training.
The 1964-65 World's Fair served up a midcentury snapshot of American industry and a first look at today's technological wonders. Photo: After the Fair
Mitch Silverstein would have many visions of the future in 1964 and the first would appear in full-color wonder, his big 6-year-old eyes staring back at him in disbelief.
He was seeing himself on a color television at the RCA Pavilion at the World’s Fair at Corona Park in Queens, New York.
“It left such a big impression on me,” Silverstein said. “That was a first for most people because that was a pretty major technological step.”
For all the things the New York World’s Fair of 1964-65 was said to get wrong, the fair showcased several technological wonders that, some 50 years later, we take for granted.
Lat Ware is quite the character, and his game reflects his humor. Photo: Jim Merithew, Cult of Mac
Lat Ware is a pretty loquacious dude, without a bit of shyness in his persona. We came across Ware at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco the first week of March and tried out his upcoming game, Throw Trucks With Your Mind. He was strapping headsets onto conference attendees and keeping up a steady stream of patter to keep them off balance when trying to manage their character in-game.
You see, Throw Trucks With Your Mind uses an $80 headset from NeuroSky to actually read your brainwaves. Ware has set it up in the game to track opposite parameters: focus and relaxation. When you focus intensely, the onscreen red bar will fill up, allowing you to do things like jump, push, and toss heavy in-game objects. When you relax, a blue bar fills up and lets you do four other cool things for a total of eight different ways to interact with the game using your mind.
Try that while some chatty indie dev is all up in your ear, trying to distract you.
I’m not sure about you, but even with the aid of the Apple Store app, I’ve sort of intuitively felt that the Apple Watch just must be huge, and certainly way too huge to put on my wrist.
Well, maybe it is. I won’t know until I go into an Apple Store and actually try one one, which I intend on doing at the first opportunity. But as this image proves, even the biggest Apple Watch is positively tiny compared to the Asus Zenwatch.
This is what the Dow would look like if Apple had joined in 2008. Photo: Bloomberg
The Dow Jones Industrial Average measures the strength of American industry based upon how 30 large, publicly owned companies in the United States have traded in the stock markets. Companies come in and out the Dow periodically, according to whether their fortunes are waxing or waning.
When Apple joins the Dow Jones Industrial Average next week — replacing AT&T, which has been on the index since 1916 — the Dow will be at a historic high (assuming nothing catastrophic happens between now and then). But if Apple had joined the Dow in 2008, that value would be even more historic. It would have added more than 4,300 points to the Dow.
ResearchKit is already living up to its promise. Photo: Apple Photo: Apple
You can keep your new ultra-thin MacBook and your high-priced Apple Watch; for me, the most exciting thing at Monday’s “Spring Forward” Apple keynote was the announcement of ResearchKit, a new open-source iOS framework that essentially turns your sensor-filled iPhone into a crowdsourcing medical diagnostic device.
The idea is that researchers will be able to tap into Apple’s enormous base of iPhone users to gather medical data. Users simply sign up to participate in huge global studies about diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes, letting researchers build up giant data sets in a fraction of the amount of time it would normally take. Think Kickstarter for medicine!
And according to Bloomberg, initial reports are really, really positive.
Ladies and gentlemen, the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition, which is an aspirational price anchor, according to reddit's users. Credit: Apple Photo: Apple
We all know that professional industry analysts often say the darndest things, but the Apple Watch has unleashed some truly muddleheaded commentary, especially from people who get paid to know better.
There are the customary and entirely predictable predictions that the Watch will fail — just as the pundits predicted the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad would bomb. This kind of commentary is so knee-jerk and silly, it’s best to just ignore. But then there’s a higher tier of analysis that says the Watch’s success depends on apps (duh, yeah) or the device’s potential for upgrades (completely wrong).
I’m interested in smarter takes on Apple’s strategy, pricing and marketing. Surprisingly, some of the most insightful commentary I’ve seen is on reddit — known generally as a salty hangout for spotty teens and weirdos. Here are some key points outlined by reddit users.
Is the Apple Watch a good enough reason for breaking bad? Photo: AMC/Cult of Mac
Lust for Apple’s latest must-have gadget can make you do crazy things!
In what sounds like a cross between Breaking Bad and an Apple ad that I would totally watch, a story coming out China’s government-run Guangzhou Daily newspaper recounts the plight of a 21-year-old accused of orchestrating a crystal meth deal so as to be able to pay for an Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch has kicked Nike and Jawbone off the Apple Store. Photo: Nike
The Apple Watch is coming, and this means it’s time for Apple to put all the crappier fitness bands it’s been selling all these years into the airlock and flush them into deep space.
No surprise, then, that Apple’s retail stores are no longer selling the Jawbone UP and the Nike+ Fuelband.
The new MacBook is the biggest revolution to hit the laptop line in a decade, yet it’s not without its haters.
A mobile processor. One USB-C port. A 480p front camera. And a $1,299 price tag. “Just who the hell at Apple signed off on this thing?!” some fans might be asking. Well, thanks to some very rare footage of an Apple “engineer” speaking about the design process of the new MacBook, we finally know what was going through Jony and Tim’s heads when they signed off on production.
Whether you love or hate the new MacBook, you’ll laugh your ass off as the engineer tells a Spanish TV host all about the hilarious process.
Tim Cook really, really loves the latest Apple products. Photo: Apple
The Apple Watch? It’s incredible.
The new MacBook? It’s unbelievable.
Apple’s team? Amazing!
Tim Cook is either the world’s most positive CEO or he possesses the world’s greatest poker face. Just watch the string of superlatives he unleashed during Apple’s “Spring Forward” event Monday, as rounded up in Cult of Mac’s supercut video below.
Tim Cook eased some of our worries about Apple Watch’s battery on Monday by revealing you’ll get at least 18 hours of use from it. But if you’d like a wearable that looks just as good, and comes without the battery problems, Hini Mizushima has the perfect creation for you.
The slow crafter Mizushima created a wonderful ‘Super Low-Tech’ Apple Watch engineered to keep up with an active lifestyle with snap fasteners. The ultralight wearable doesn’t actually tell time, but it’s sure to turn heads just as quickly as the gold Apple Watch Edition.
Apple is diving into the luxury market for the first time ever with the exorbitantly expensive gold Apple Watch Edition. The pricey new timepiece has been met with criticism from Apple fans and haters a like, but according to Condé Nast, Apple is now a powerful player in the luxury industry and wants Jony Ive and Marc Newson to tell them all about it.
Jony Ive and Marc Newson will open the first ever Conde Nast Luxury Conference in Florence Italy in April 2015. The design duo will appear with event host, Vogue International editor Suzy Menkes, to discuss “21st century definition of luxury and their collaborative work to date.”
Google today announced its new Chromebook Pixel, which is just as pretty as its predecessor, only more powerful and less expensive. It’s powered by an Intel Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM, and just like Apple’s new MacBook, it uses do-it-all USB-C connectors.
Apple is suffering one of its worst iTunes outages ever today as users across the globe have been unable to access the App Store, iBooks, iCloud and iTunes for more than eight hours this morning.
In an official statement released by the company, Apple has blamed the ongoing outage on a DNS error, saying “We apologize to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning. The cause was an internal DNS error at Apple. We’re working to make all of the services available to customers as soon as possible, and we thank everyone for their patience.”
The people of the Internet are not patient however, and have flooded Twitter with gripes about the 8 hour long outage. It’s not just the App Store and iTunes that are affected either. Apple Pay has been rendered worthless and Apple Stores have had to pull out their old credit card machines like it’s 1999.
Here’s a sampling of some of the best Apple outage tweets:
Tim Cook greeting Foxconn workers in China. Photo: Apple
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.”
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.