Cult of Mac

An anti-discrimination bill designed to protect LGBT employees is set to be named after Tim Cook, according to a new report from Reuters.

The bill was put forward by Alabama’s only openly gay lawmaker, Democratic state Representative Patricia Todd. Given Cook’s status as not only the head of the world’s most valuable company, but also an Alabama native, the suggestion to put his name on the bill was first made by Todd “in jest” — only for the comments to be taken seriously and published.

Soon after, she heard from Apple, which was initially hesitant about Cook’s name being associated so publicly with such a politically sensitive issue. However, Apple apparently reconsidered, and Todd received a positive call from Apple’s general counsel, Bruce Sewell, saying Cook was happy to lend his name to the cause.

In a statement, Apple said that, “Tim was honored to hear that State Rep. Todd wanted to name an anti-discrimination bill after him, and we’re sorry if there was any miscommunication about it. We have a long history of support for LGBT rights and we hope every state will embrace workplace equality for all.”

Tim Cook and U2 just got roasted for forcing music onto customers’ iPhones, but from 2007 to 2009, Steve Jobs’ Apple was allegedly playing a different tune, and deleted music off of iPods that was purchased on rival music services.

That wouldn’t have been so bad if it were just your embarrassing Nickelband albums, but attorneys for consumers at the ongoing antitrust lawsuit, say iTunes deleted all rival files without ever giving users a warning that they were about to lose their tunes.

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GQ Magazine has named Apple exec and Beats cofounder, Jimmy Iovine, as one its Men of the Year. To go with the annual honors, the music legend sat down for an interview to discuss how he went from sweeping floors in a New York recording studio at 19, to creating the iconic Beats brand at 55.

Apple acquired Iovine’s company for a record $3 billion earlier this year, but according to Jimmy, it took him about two years to convince Apple that they needed him to plug the musical hole Steve Jobs left when he died in 2011.

In what seems to be a new pattern of movie promotion, the next entry in the Terminator film series, Genisys, got a teaser trailer Wednesday for the official trailer coming the following day.

Take a look at this tiny trailer, which features a liquid-metal Terminator that looks a lot like ex-Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The research reads like a Surgeon General’s warning: Prolonged periods of sitting can lead to obesity, heart disease, blood clots and spinal compression, according to the latest medical studies.

To combat this modern office horror, an artist and an architecture firm from the Netherlands have re-imagined the office with all the chairs pulled out from under us. The exhibit, called The End of Sitting, is a geometric landscape of surfaces of varying heights on which to lean.

“The chair and desk are no longer unquestionable starting points,” Erik and Ronald Rietveld, partners at Dutch firm Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances, told Cult of Mac. “In our society, almost the entirety of our surroundings have been for sitting while evidence from medical research suggests that too much sitting has adverse health effects.”

The iPhone 6 Plus has only been on the market for a few months, but according to a report from Kantar, Apple’s bigger than big device captured 41% of U.S. phablet sales in the quarter ending with October 2014.

What’s even more impressive is that Apple managed to take a huge chunk of the market with only one full month of sales in the quarter. Kantar reports that among smartphones with a 5.5-inch screen or larger, Apple is absolutely dominating the trendy new category that now represents ten percent of all smartphone sales.

Disneyland is the happiest place on earth, but in 2014 it was also the most Instagrammed spot in the universe.

Instagram revealed its list of the top 10 geotagged locations in 2014 with Cult of Mac this morning, and the Mouse is the King this year, after the Siam Paragon shopping mall in Bangkok took the top spot in 2013.

New York City managed to land three locations in the top 10, while Moscow had two iconic areas on Instagram’s list. Take a look at the full list below and see if there’s a spot that you snapped this year:

Tim Cook made a visit to Washington D.C. this week to discuss the U.S. technology policy with one of the most tech-focused Senators on Capitol Hill.

The Apple CEO met with Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah on Tuesday, reports The Hill, after Cook paid a visit to the nearby Georgetown Apple Store the previous day for Worlds AIDS day. Senator Hatch’s Innovation Agenda for the 114th Congress was the focus of the conversation, as Hatch currently serves as the chairman of the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force.

In some bad news for Apple, Australia’s Federal Court has rejected an appeal by the company to trademark the term “App Store.”

In a ruling made Wednesday, judge Justice Yates dismissed Apple’s case and ordered it to pay the court costs of Registrar of Trade Marks.

Apple has been locked in a long-standing tug of war with Oz’s Registrar of Trade Marks over whether it should have ownership over the term it popularized on Mac and iOS. The company first took the registrar to court in March 2013, after the “App Store” trademark was revoked following its initial accepted. Since then, Apple has lost a total of three appeals: firstly by the trademark examiner, then by the Australian Trade Marks Office, and now today’s ruling.

The Los Angeles school board has officially shelved the $1.3 billion contract that would have provided iPads to every student, teacher and campus administrator in the district.

The deal first stalled back in July, after which it was reported that former Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent John Deasy and his then-chief deputy, Jaime Aquino, had been unlawfully discussing the deal with Apple up to two years before the bidding process was finished and contracts were approved.

Steve Jobs made an appearance Monday as a key witness in Apple’s most recent antitrust lawsuit — courtesy of a video deposition taped shortly prior to his death in 2011.

The lawsuit concerns a long-running class action antitrust lawsuit dating back to 2005. It is argued by the plaintiffs that Apple gained an unfairly monopolistic position by blocking competitors from putting their music on iPods.

Jobs avoided many of the questions he was asked during the 2-hour video deposition, saying that “I don’t remember,” “I don’t know” or “I don’t recall” a total of 74 times — including when he was asked if he was familiar with what the lawsuit was about.

A few typically snappy Steve Jobs moments did crop up, however. Responding to a question about the former iTunes rival Real Networks, Jobs replied, “Do they still exist?”

In a universe where things worked out a bit differently, Ronald Wayne would be a billionaire.

When Apple was incorporated on April 2, 1976, Wayne was named alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as one of three founders. Wayne owned a 10 percent stake in the company, a fact that raises questions about who owned apple.

However, just 12 days after Apple started up — feeling out of his depth because he “was standing in the shadow of intellectual giants” — Wayne threw in the towel and sold his shares for just $800.

“I was 40 and these kids were in their 20s,” Wayne told Cult of Mac. “They were whirlwinds — it was like having a tiger by the tail. If I had stayed with Apple I probably would have wound up the richest man in the cemetery.”

Apple is no stranger to filing lawsuits against iPhone cloners, but in a twisted turn of events, an Chinese Android manufacturer with a handset that looks suspiciously similar to the iPhone 6 is claiming that Apple ripped off its designs.

Little known Chinese smartphone maker DigiOne published a letter today that the company’s lawyers sent to Apple in September. The letter contests that “the design of Apple’s mobile device with the brand name “iPhone 6”, may infringe on one of Baili’s Chinese patents” filed in January of 2014.

Digione’s cheap handset, which is being sold by subsidiary brand 100+, was granted the patent in July. The patent in question does look similar to an iPhone, in that it features a device that is thin and rectangular shaped, with a flat back, rounded edges, and glass screen.

Check out their weird ad for the V6 see for yourself:

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Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is about to become a reality TV star. If you’re curious to see what watching The Woz might be like when it airs, Starwood Hotels just shot a quick video of Woz demonstrating their SPG app to magically unlock his hotel room at the W in Hollywood.

The SPG app seeks makes hotel keys obsolete by giving visitors a Bluetooth key upon checkin within the app, allowing  you to skip the front desk altogether and unlock your room with the iPhone 6’s new NFC chip. The new SPG keyless entry system has only been around for a month, but Woz says its so easy to use, you don’t even need someone to teach you what to do.

Watch Woz demo the keyless entry app in the video below:

A guy will go to great lengths to impress a woman. But pufferfish and Bowerbirds make us all look a little cheap.

More than just a bag of air, a male pufferfish works nonstop for a week straight creating an ornate design on the seabed in an apparent move to attract a female and create a safe and elegant place for her to lay eggs.

In Australia, Bowerbirds build elaborate homes with twig-thatched roofs and carefully arranged gifts on the outside in hopes a girl will come a-knocking.

Microsoft released its list of the top Bing searches of 2014 this week, and among tech companies, Apple appears to be this year’s big winner, again.

The iPhone 6 and iPad both ranked among the top 5 tech search words of 2014, according to BingTrends. Other top searches included Fitbit and the Xbox One, but the iPhone 6’s biggest competitor – the Samsung Galaxy S5 – didn’t even place in the top 10.

Here are the complete rankings:

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Banks and credit card companies have been making a big push to get customer to use Apple Pay, but perhaps no one is trying harder than Wells Fargo.

So far the bank has been doing everything from emailing customers to use Apple Pay, and even paying people just to try it out. In it’s newest effort to get card holders to activate Apple Pay, Wells Fargo has released a new ad showing how wicked fast it is to pay with your iPhone 6, rather than a credit card. So fast in fact, it might actually ruin your surprise birthday party.

Check out the funny ad below:

Apple’s negotiator-in-chief, Eddy Cue is out to clear the air surrounding the price-fixing conspiracy Apple was found guilty of by U.S. federal court in 2013, before the case hits an appeals court later this month.

In a rare interview, Cue sat down with Fortune to talk about the ebook controversythat has embroiled Apple and the six top book publishers ever since the iPad launched with the iBookstore in 2011.

Apple was found guilty of conspiring to raise ebook prices in 2011, after the launch of the iBookstore saw price of ebook new releases spike 17% overnight. Apple has maintained its innocence through the entire ordeal, and though the company has been criticized for its litigious nature, Cue says the company has to “fight for the truth,” no matter what.

Famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has a better way to talk now, thanks to a new custom predictive text software upgrade from SwiftKey and Intel Labs. The technology that Professor Hawking was currently using was going on 20 years old, and needed a fix to help him communicate and work faster and more efficiently.

His life-long motor neurone disease of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) has necessitated his use of communications technology, and this new system will allow him to choose words rather than individual letters, which lets him type less than 20 percent of all needed characters in his messages. It also makes him 10 times more efficient with other computing tasks like browsing the web, working with files, and switching between tasks on the computer.

Well, that didn’t take long.

It’s only been four days since The Force Awakens trailer appeared on all of our computer and iPhone screens, and here we have the entire thing recreated with the ubiquitous plastic building toy.

Why did this YouTuber build his stop-motion homage?

“Made this out of boredom,” he says, “… enjoy!”

It’s been over two and a half years since Apple TV was updated, and while Apple’s been happy resting on its laurels, its biggest competitors are passing it by.

Google’s Chromecast is now more popular than Apple TV, reports Parks Associates, which says streaming media players become more popular than ever in the first three quarters of 2014, as 10 percent of U.S. households bought at least one new streaming device.

HP just announced its newest business laptops today – the HP EliteBook Folio 1020 – and even though the company is touting them as the thinnest and lightest ‘business-class’ notebooks ever made, they certainly look a hell of lot like the MacBook Air.

This isn’t the first time HP’s design team ripped off Apple’s work, but the copycats have fine-tuned the design of their previous MacBook Air rip-off, the 1040, by removing the unsightly ventilation fan on the side, so it looks even more Apple-esque.

Here’s another look: