Cult of Mac

The thing about robots in science fiction, especially recently, is that they’re often portrayed as living in a clean, distant future.

The brilliance of Neill Blomkamp is his gritty, dirty, realistic portrayal of the future, and he’s bringing us a new robot to live there, named Chappie.

Chappie, motion captured by Blomkamp favorite Sharlto Copley, is a gifted young robot, an artistic and emotional prodigy. In the trailer below, you can see how much of the real world Blomkamp sets around Chappie: He-Man on the television, a wristwatch on the main propellerhead kid that befriends the robot, and a variety of militaristic types trying to blow up the special kid.

Check it out.

Google Maps for Android is the latest Google app to get a Material Design makeover for Android 5.0 Lollipop, following the improvements to Calendar on Monday. It’s not just more colorful than it was before, however; you’ll also find new services built–in, including Uber and Open Table.

Microsoft proudly announced last month that it would be paying CNN to use its Surface tablets for the historic Mid-Term 2014 coverage, but when it came time to actually use Microsoft’s tablet last night, CNN political commentators discovered an incredible new Surface feature: it doubles as an iPad kickstand.

CNN’s talking heads tried to hide their iPad Airs and minis behind a barricade of Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablets, but it didn’t take long for some observant viewers to notice their preferred tablets are made by Apple.

Check out this guy working on his iPad mini behind the scenes:

It’s been a great year for Apple in China, and to top it off the China Brand Research Center just released its China Brand Power Index for the year — placing Apple in the no 1 position over long-time rival Samsung.

While Samsung Electronics took home brand value prizes in both the TV and monitor categories, Apple roundly beat it in the all-important mobile category, which Samsung has occupied for the previous two years.

With today’s tech devices becoming obsolete so quickly, it’s easy to think older models are forgotten by their creators the moment a follow-up rolls off the factory floor.

While this may be true in some instances, it’s apparently not the case for Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. In a recent email exchange with a vintage computer expert, Woz revealed that almost 40 years after the Apple II shipped he still agonizes about ways it could have been improved.

If you’re searching for further evidence that music streaming is overtaking downloads, look no further than a new report claiming that over the last quarter European revenue from Spotify streams were 13% higher than revenues from iTunes downloads.

The report comes from Kobalt, a company that helps collect music royalties on behalf of thousands of big-name artist. Currently it only collects earnings from Spotify streams in Europe — which means it’s unknown if similar figures are true in the U.S.

This time last year, iTunes’ earnings were 32% higher than that of Spotify in Europe, although streaming revenues have tripled over the past two years.

Although Apple has given us our first peek at the Apple Watch, so far we don’t know much about it, including when it will be released or how much its many versions will cost.

A new report, however, provides some possible answers to these questions. According to a French website, the Apple Watch will start at around $500 for the steel model. And gold? Gold will be even more expensive.

The Nest Learning Thermostat is getting a whole lot smarter thanks to a new firmware update.

The biggest new feature in the update is an added Auto-Schedule mode, which learns new schedules and adapts more quickly to change — potentially saving you up to 6% on your heating and cooling bills.

I love interactive Notification Center widgets. Widgets that let me use Notification Center like a quick entry form for my best used apps. Stuff like PCalc’s calculator widget that gives functionality to users that Apple seems conflicted about.

That’s why I love Neato. It’s a quick jot notepad for Notification Center that lets you speedily enter notes no matter where you are in iOS 8.

Your Mac is an awesome machine. What’s even more awesome? Getting Mac apps that you absolutely have to have at huge discounts.

It’s Mac App Madness at Cult of Mac Deals. There’s giant savings to be had on The MacX DVD Video Converter Pro Pack, Time Doctor Lifetime, and NetSpot Pro.

Today AT&T announced a Next 24 plan that allows you to pay for your phone in small payments over the course of 30 months, with the option to upgrade after two years.

The new 24-month plan joins Next’s current 12 and 18-month upgrade options, which AT&T has been promoting heavily to get subscribers off traditional two-year contracts.

The hot potato game of who will play Steve Jobs in Sony’s biopic continues. Christian Bale was attached to the role until yesterday, and before that Leonardo DiCaprio’s name was in the mix.

Now it’s being reported that Michael Fassbender is considering filling the Apple co-founder’s shoes. Sony is “moving quickly” to find a replacement for Bale, and Fassbender has entered “early talks,” reports Variety.

CVS and Rite Aid kicked off the Apple Pay War last week by disabling Apple’s mobile wallet solution from working at stores, even though it was supported at launch, but a team of class action lawyers are helping fanboys fight back by hitting the companies with an antitrust investigation.

Schubert, Jonckheer & Kolbe announced that it is launching an investigation into the conduct of  CVS and Rite Aid, and if they violated federal antitrust laws by colluding with one another and other MCX members to boycott competing payment systems at the same time.

A sketchy report from Business Korea claims that Apple might be facing an enormous iPhone 6 and 6 Plus recall due to an issue affecting the 128GB configuration models.

Particularly on iPhones with very large app libraries, some users are supposedly discovering that their new handsets crash and reboot for apparently no reason. This is said to be the result of the “controller IC of the TLC NAND flash.”

Bendgate is back. A new website is spotlighting the malleability of Apple’s new super-slim smartphone by posting hundreds of pictures of bent iPhone 6 and 6 Plus units.

More than 350 images of deformed Apple phones have been posted by grassroots site One of the Nine, and the submissions keep on coming despite Apple’s claim that a bend in the iPhone 6 is “extremely rare” with normal use.

Steve Jobs’ monument in Russia was torn down the day after CEO Tim Cook opened up about being gay last week. The incident was immediately blamed on homophobic Russians and the country’s anti-gay laws, but the school where the monument was destroyed, says that’s not actually what happened.

School officials told Russian news outlets today that the iPhone statue was removed for a reason any Apple fan can relate to: its screen was broken.

Advanced Warfare, the latest shooter form Activision’s hugely successful Call of Duty series, is out now on PC and consoles, and just like last year’s title, there’s a mobile companion app to go with it. Available now for Android and iOS, the free download lets you access your clan stats, edit your emblems, customize your classes, and more.

The seemingly never-ending saga of Apple vs. CurrentC may come to an end sooner than expected. When CVS and Rite Aid turned off NFC support to block Apple Pay, it became clear that were backing CurrentC, a rival mobile wallet service coming in 2015.

Despite repeatedly denying any sort of enforced Apple Pay ban, MCX, the consortium behind CurrentC, is holding its merchant partners to an exclusivity agreement. The good news is that the agreement is set to expire in less than a year.

Samsung as good as pioneered the “bigger is better” approach to mobile device display size, so what do you do when Apple plans to launch a 12.9-inch iPad to compete with your Galaxy Note Pro 12.2? Build a bigger tablet, of course.

According to new reports coming out of Korea, Samsung is planning to launch a new 13-inch tablet by the end of the year. Although details currently remain scarce, it is reported that Samsung may adopt an LCD display for its 13-inch tablet, rather than the Super AMOLED used for devices like the Galaxy Tab S series.

Racial diversity has been a problem for emoji for years now, but the Unicode Consortium has finally proposed a new solution that will add more than 755 new character options to the little pictograms that have quickly replaced all our words.

Five new skin tones will added to the mostly white faces of the emoji character set, according to a draft for Unicode Version 8.0 that will hopefully get adopted pretty quickly to get, after Apple and others began to push for characters that reflect the diversity of its users.

Amazon Prime has always been a pretty incredible deal, and it just keeps getting better. As of today, Amazon is giving all subscribers unlimited photo storage at no extra cost with a new cloud-based backup service called Prime Photos.

Apple may be blamed for hurting Finland with its success, but according to new figures from Australia’s Bureau of Statistics the popularity of the iPhone can help rescue economies, too.

Retail turnover in the country jumped 1.2% in September, compared to a minuscule 0.1% increase the month before. What could have prompted this?

“This figure was influenced by the release of the iPhone 6 during the month,” noted the Bureau of Statistics in its press release. “The increase in electrical and electronic goods retailing represents about half of the total Australian sales movement of 1.2 per cent in seasonally adjusted terms.”

Competition is heating up between Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to build Apple’s next generation A9 chips, according to a new report citing industry sources.

TSMC is currently manufacturing the majority of the A8 chips used in Apple’s latest iPhones, thanks to a deal inked in 2013. Samsung, however, is keen to reestablish its previous position as the sole provider of Apple’s A-series chips — and is willing to lower its quotes to do so.

Samsung is also pushing the fact that it can provide other services to Apple, including the manufacture of flash memory and backend services in-house.