Cult of Mac

Apple has been getting tougher and tougher on its supply chain. Just yesterday, for example, Apple banned suppliers who used ‘bonded servitude’ as a way to keep workers on assembly lines. Overall, under Tim Cook’s conscientious leadership, conditions just continue to improve for the employees who make our iPhones and iPads.

But there is one way in which conditions have gotten worse for Apple’s supply chain employees. Although Apple limits factory workers to a 60-hour-work week, more supply chain workers went over that amount in 2014 than in 2013. But don’t start pulling your knives out just yet.

As rumors that Apple is making a self-driving car rev up, a peek under the hood of the company’s famed Industrial Design studio reveals a crew of talented automobile designers.

An interest in futuristic cars is embedded deep within the DNA of Apple’s vaunted design team. Working under Jony Ive, Apple employs designers who worked on several fantastic concept cars, including a fabric-covered BMW that shifts shape depending on speed.

Ive has long been obsessed by cars. (He has quite a stable.) As a teenager, Ive wanted to be a car designer. He visited a U.K. design school that specialized in automotives with a view to studying there, but he found the other students too weird. They were making “vroom vroom” noises as they sketched. Instead, he went to Newcastle Polytechnic (which has since been renamed Northumbria University).

A look at other key members of Apple’s design team, and at a super-secret research-and-development facility planned for the company’s new campus, offers a few clues about how Cupertino might go about producing innovative and unconventional cars.

Let’s face it: Freemium games and games with an inordinate number of in-app purchases are out of control on the App Store. To a certain extent, that’s understandable: Developers are hard-pressed to get anyone to download their games if they charge money for them, which means it’s all a race to the bottom. The only way to get any visibility is for developers to release their games free, then hope they can make money later.

In a refreshing move, though, Apple is trying to do something about its freemium problem, by highlighting “Pay Once & Play” games that charge players once upfront, then never bug them for more money again.

Apple is turning away developers who try to submit apps with guns in their screenshots or icons. But this isn’t a case of Apple introducing new rules to the App Store, so much as it is one of the company finally enforcing rules that have been there all along.

Saturday Night Live turns forty this year, and what better way to celebrate than by making a sizeable portion of the show’s most classic sketches available to enjoy whenever you want? With that in mind, a newly-launched iOS app boats more than 5,500 freely-available sketches, spanning the show’s entire four-decade (and counting) run.

Although SNL is already available on Netflix, the free app not only allows you to easily enjoy classic sketches on your subway ride to work, but also lets you search for appearances by individual cast members or characters — as opposed to having to trawl through entire episodes to get there.

Rob takes a look at the historic milestone Apple reached this past week when it closed it’s earnings at a record market capitalization: $700 billion, Buster lays on you twelve nuggets of business wisdom that Tim Cook revealed during the Apple CEO’s Goldman Sachs tech conference appearance, Alex gets addicted to ZeptoLab’s next big “mid-core” mobile game, King of Thieves, the whole Cult of Mac team digs deep into albums that matter, and Luke shares all about JetBlue’s plan to bring Apple Pay to 35,000 feet.

All this, and much more, in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine. Click on through and subscribe to get everything you may have missed in one easy to access place.

iOS users have had plenty of reasons to crow about Apple handsets recently, but here’s one for the Android crowd: Android devices running the latest Android 5.0 Lollipop mobile OS have a lower application crash rate than devices running Apple’s much-vaunted iOS 8.

The data was pulled by mobile application performance management company Crittercism, which claims that Lollipop’s crash rate for apps is a miniscule 2 percent, compared to iOS 8 which crashes 2.2 percent of the time. The same study also shows that iOS 8 crashes more than its predecessor, iOS 7.

While many of us will be celebrating Valentine’s Day this Saturday, for Apple it represents the end of an era.

At 10pm today, Apple will close its existing Oakridge retail store in San Jose, California — with a new, larger one set to open Saturday morning at 10am. In the process, Apple will have marked the end of its mini-store experiment, with the Oakridge venue being the last of its kind.

First launched in 2004, Apple’s mini-stores were an effort to quickly roll out new Apple Stores to keep up with demand at a time when the company was unable to find enough of the larger sites it was looking for. Nine mini-stores were opened in all — ranging in size from 2,000-square-feet down to a tiny 500-square foot.

Despite being a brand targeted at creatives, along with Steve Jobs’ background as an acid-dropping hippie, Apple’s always been pretty resolutely anti-drug in its message. Perhaps that’s not such a surprise, really: When you become the most valuable publicly-traded company in history, it makes sense not to do things that could offend your investors.

Previously, Apple’s anti-drug ethos has meant that “Apps that encourage excessive consumption of alcohol or illegal substances, or encourage minors to consume alcohol or smoke cigarettes, will be rejected.” Even when apps like the controversial cannabis-growing game Weed Firm do somehow slip through the cracks and make it to the top of the free iPhone games chart, Apple has booted them out as soon as it’s made aware of their existence.

But as marijuana laws change, so too does Apple.

Adobe’s Lightroom app for iOS is actually pretty good, but you have to pay for a Creative Cloud subscription to use it.

What if you could have the power of an editing suite like Lightroom without all of the extra fuss? You want just one app for editing pictures on the go, but it needs to be easy to use and full featured.

Enter Darkroom, the hottest new photography app for iPhone.

Apple is making iMessage and FaceTime harder to hack by turning on two-step verification for both services in an effort to tighten security for iOS and Mac users.

The extra security goes into effect today and gives users an extra layer of protection against hackers or anyone else trying to log in to your iMessage account to either impersonate you or steal data.

The non-intuitively named Brother MFC-L2740DW multifunction black and white laser printer is ideal for that small office you have, you know the one. You’ve got all of a closet to put your desk, chair, Mac, printer, and maybe a small Bluetooth speaker, if you’re lucky.

What you need is a multifunction device that can get your documents scanned, printed and (if you’re still living in the 1990s) faxed without taking up a lot of space.

I brought this rectangular box of printing joy into my tiny home office, plugged it into the wall, added it to my Airport Wi-Fi network, and was printing from it within 10 minutes of taking it out of the box.

Along with doubling the max file size of apps, Apple introduced something else today for its third-party developer community.

TestFlight, the Apple-owned service devs use to beta test their apps before submitting them to the App Store, can now do controlled group testing.

Since the App Store’s debut in 2008, apps have never been able to be larger than 2GB. Today that changes.

Apple has notified third-party developers that they can now submit apps that are a max of 4GB in size. The change reflects the needs certain apps, namely games, have for larger file sizes as iOS becomes a more mature platform.

Apple Watch will borrow a lot of tech from the iPhone when it ships in April, but according to a new rumor from supply chain sources in China, Apple is planning to bring one of its wearable’s coolest features to the next iPhone.

The Economic Daily News has reported that Apple is considering adding ‘3D touch’ technology to the iPhone 6s, similar to Apple Watch’s Force Touch. According to the sources, Apple’s is planning to tap US-based Avago Tech as the main supplier for the iPhone 6S 3D touch technology.

When it comes to dying, who’s going to take over my Facebook account isn’t one of my biggest worries, but if you want to ensure that you’re killing it on social media from the grave, Facebook just rolled out a new feature that lets you give your account to someone when the Grim Reaper comes knocking.

The advent of iTunes 12.1 gave us a sweet new widget that lets you control iTunes from the Notification Center’s Today section, without ever having to switch to the app itself. You can even favorite songs and buy currently playing tracks if you’re listening to iTunes Radio.

Unfortunately, this widget doesn’t seem to appear by default. To enable it, you need to drop into System Preferences. Here’s how to get it up and running.

Arganalth can look at an old floppy disk drive and see in it a second act.

The 23-year-old engineer from Lille, France, uses old computer hardware long overdue for the landfill to assemble an electronic orchestra that he conducts out of a suitcase for a growing audience tuned into his YouTube channel.

Arganalth — he prefers to use his YouTube name in interviews — creates strange but recognizable music with a network of hard and floppy disk drives powered by a Raspberry Pi.

It would have been hard to don a Xybernaut Poma wearable PC in 2002 without uttering the phrase, “Resistance is futile.”

What was arguably the first wearable computer had the look of a Borg, a cybernetic villain from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The Borg’s design, a menacing mashup of species and technology, was badass, but Poma users just looked awkward. The computer’s processing unit was portable enough, fitting in a pocket or clipping to a belt. But once you added the keyboard to the forearm and a clunky-looking, head-mounted optical piece, your cool crashed like a bad hard drive.

Ever wanted to run Windows 98 on your iPad Air? Uh, chances are, probably not, and even if you did, it hasn’t been possible. At least not until now. Behold, Windows 98 running on an iPad Air 2!

I’ve always found the fetishistic quality of unboxing videos to be a bit strange, if I’m honest. Even weirder, though, are the quasi-sadomasochistic videos unleashed by “stress testers” like YouTube’s seemingly damaged Ukrainian tech lover hater TechRax, whose videos watch like an Apple ad directed by the Marquis de Sade.

Fifty Shades of Space Gray, amirite?

Anyway, TechRax’s latest video shows an innocent young iPhone 6 meeting its maker at the hands of some former soda cans heated into a hot liquid using a mini-furnace. If you’ve wondered whether it’s a good idea to store your beloved Apple handset in the same drawer as a puddle of molten metal, you’ll get your answer after the jump.

It’s not pretty.

Thanks to a groundbreaking deal between Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures, we’re finally about to see Spider-Man rejoin his Marvel brethren Captain America and Iron Man as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But having sat through a disappointingly botched reboot, how best should everyone’s favorite web-slinger be used? Forget about another tired origin story; 50 years of Spider-Man comics have given filmmakers plenty of great stories should they choose to adapt them–stories like the ones we’re about to suggest.

Without further ado, then, here are Cult of Mac’s picks for the Spider-Man comic arcs we’d love to see spun up on the big screen. Swing out past the jump for more details:

For those of us who have long been suffering under the tyrrany of iPhoto, Photos for Mac represents a beautiful new frontier of speedy and powerful photo-editing on the Mac. But if you’re an Aperture lover, Photos for Mac represents something more bitter: the total killing of Apple’s pro photo-editing suite in favor of a more consumer-oriented product.

If you’ve been hoping for a last minute reprieve, and for Tim Cook to step in and save Aperture, sorry, we’ve got bad news. Once Photos for Mac launches, you won’t even be able to buy Aperture on the App Store anymore.

Given Apple’s tendency to only do major redesigns for its iPhones every other year, we’re most likely not going to get a bold new iPhone form factor until late 2016.

With that said, however, Jony Ive’s design team don’t take too many days off — which means that there are constantly new ideas being churned out that may well radically change how we think of an iPhone looking. A new Apple patent application published today shows off an iPhone with a wraparound display, resembling something not a million miles away from a fourth- or fifth-generation iPod nano.

Until now, Apple’s been dead-set on making every iPhone thinner than the last, but the company’s proposed “wrap-around display” makes it seem like that strategy may no longer be on the cards.

Thanks to the wonder of drones, we’ve had a few airborne glimpses of Apple’s forthcoming Apple 2 campus in Cupertino. Until now, however, ground-level pictures have been in decidedly short supply.

That changed yesterday, when Apple gave reporters from San Francisco news outlet KQED an up-close-and-personal glimpse at its flying saucer-shaped headquarters, which will eventually house up to 15,000 employees.

Along with photos showing the development, the reporters also heard a few environmentally friendly factoids about the campus — such as the fact that it will use recycled water to flush toilets, solar arrays to meet the majority of energy needs, and that the older buildings Apple inherited when it bought the land were broken down and recycled for new building materials.

You can check out the images after the jump: