Cult of Mac

Just like one of The Avengers — where bickering superheroes team up to fight a far more oppressive evil — Apple and Android fans on reddit have united forces to boycott what they see as the unethical blocking of NFC payment systems by a number of different retailers, affecting users of both Apple Pay and Google Wallet.

The reason for this blocking of the NFC service is that the retailers in question — including Gap, Old Navy, 7-Eleven, Sears, Kmart and others — are part of an organization called Merchant Customer Exchange, which uses its own payment system called CurrentC.

Do you take pictures of all your meals to share with your friends on Facebook and Instagram? Wish there was a way to share even more of it with your FOMO-ing virtual friends?

Well, you can’t share the taste, or the smell, but 3DAround is an upcoming iOS app that lets you share the food you’re eating in all of its three-dimensional glory. And you can do it with other things too.

Although he gets most of the blame for it, skeuomorphism wasn’t really Scott Forstall’s fault. He was just following the orders of his boss and mentor, Steve Jobs. The man who gave the world the first skeumorphic consumer operating system, the Macintosh, loved computer interfaces with gaudy textures that made them look more like real-world things.

In fact, if it were not for Steve Jobs’s love of skeuomorphism, Apple’s design language might have been a lot flatter a lot earlier. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1999, the company was moving away from skeuomorphic design… but Jobs bought it back, with the famous brushed metal texture in the Quicktime app.

Apple pays more attention to the details then anyone else. Sometimes the details they pay attention to are so small, you don’t notice them at all for a long time… but once you see what they’ve done, you can never unsee it, or accept anything less.

Here’s a great example from OS X Yosemite. Compare the two images above. The top is from OS X Yosemite, the bottom from Windows 7. Notice anything? One of these images has much better typography than the other. But can you tell why?

If both of your parents are unabashed Apple fans, there’s every chance that you’ll grow up as a Cupertino addict as well.

That appears to be the case for 16-month-old North West, a.k.a. the daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. With North’s dad having previously proclaimed himself the next Steve Jobs, and her mother likely to rake in an ungodly $200 million from her very own iOS app by the end of 2014, it’s no surprise that North seems to have a budding interest in all things Apple, as well.

What kind of interest? In an interview with PEOPLE.com, Kim Kardashian described her less-than-two-year-old daughter’s extreme iPod love, with her playlist apparently including a soothing mixture of lullabies and, well, Kanye West tracks.

With its candy-like icons, gradients, and transparencies, OS X Yosemite is a major departure from the look and feel of the Macintosh operating system. But if you don’t like that look and feel, here’s a few things you can do to make OS X look less candy-like, hearkening it back to the design language of OS 9.

I still think it’s a mini miracle that Rockstar Games managed to compress the gang-banging goodness of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas onto a device thinner than a deck of cards and capable of fitting in my pocket.

That’s exactly what happened last year, however, and courtesy of a new update, the game’s remastered, high-resolution graphics now look pristine on your brand new iPhone 6 or 6 Plus thanks to the addition of native-resolution support for Apple’s next-gen handsets.

Ever been annoyed by the placement of light switches in your house? Is there never one around when you need it? The Avi-on Switch is a new light switch (with an associated iPhone app) that you can literally just stick onto your wall like a Post-It Note, no wiring required.

There are dozens of hot deals on cool stuff every day at Cult of Mac Deals. Things like drones, bluetooth speakers, and training in software and app development can be had at pretty remarkable savings.

Today we feature 4 of the top deals right now, but you can always go to Cult of Mac Deals to see everything available.

Two major pharmacy chains have stopped supporting Apple Pay as merchants in the U.S. take sides on which mobile wallet platform to embrace.

Reports from a couple days ago revealed that Rite Aid had started disabling its NFC terminals, thereby forbidding the use of Apple Pay and Google Wallet. Now CVS has reportedly started shutting down its NFC terminals.

This week: the iPad Air 2 reviews are in, and not everyone’s feeling the love; Cult of Mac spends a day with Apple Pay; Yosemite and iOS 8.1 Continuity features delight; a potential cure for the painful #6PlusPinch; some welcome changes rumored for Beats Music; and we wrap with our favorite movie trilogies of all time on an all-new Get To Know Your Cultist.

Titter your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the chuckles begin.

Our thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode! Learn virtually any application at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.

Show notes ahead, mateys.

Apple Pay is here at last. With U.S. customers giving the new payment method a try, results — and opinions — vary widely.

In this week’s news roundup, we talk about Cult of Mac’s first day with Apple Pay, the new Marvel movie leak, Christian Bale landing the role of Steve Jobs in an upcoming biopic and much more. Get your weekly fix of news in just minutes.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.

There’s some extremely hot offers at Cult of Mac Deals that are ending in the coming hours. We thought it would be a smart idea to highlight those offers one last time.

Big savings can be had right now on The Creative Market WordPress Bundle, The Icon Bluetooth Speaker, the Flex Tripod Mount, and Motion Artist.

So you don’t have to slog through a lake of reviews and tips to find something you’re just going to put down after 10 minutes, Cult of Mac has waded through the web to compile our weekly list of the coolest new bits in movies, music, gadgets and anything else that should be on your radar.

This week we’ve been treated to a media blitz by Brad Pitt that’s produced one of the week’s funniest videos, an epic World War II tank movie, and a hilarious break-dancing competition. We’ve also found a nonfiction book with enough violence and betrayal to rival Game of Thrones, and a gorgeous iPhone 6 case that will replace your wallet much better than Apple Pay.

Take a look:

Critics are fond of saying Apple doesn’t innovate any more. But Apple’s new electronic payment system, Apple Pay, is innovation of the highest order. After a relatively smooth rollout this week, I honestly believe Apple Pay is the future of payments.

Even so, Apple Pay must clear some big hurdles if it’s to become the universal standard. For now, it’s limited to Apple’s latest iPhones and a relatively small number of retail partners, but the basic system — using your fingerprint to validate a purchase on your mobile phone — is the way we will pay for goods and services in the future.

Once again, Apple has shown the world how things should be done.

Nest has acquired Revolv, the Colarado-based startup which allowed users to control their smart home devices from a single interface using their smartphone.

No price has yet been announced for the purchase, which follows Nest’s $555 million Dropcam purchase back in June, and Nest’s own acquisition by Google for a massive $3.2 billion earlier this year.

Italian firearm maker Beretta has enlisted Apple’s new design guru, Marc Newson, to create a hunting double-barreled shotgun.

Newson has created a custom version of the classic double-barrelled 486 Parallelo shotgun for Beretta, which will be officially unveiled at an event in London on November 13th.

The Apple SIM in the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3 is based on an awesome idea—who doesn’t want to switch carriers with a tap of the screen? But the actual utility of the Apple SIM is pretty muddled, as evidenced by AT&T locking the SIM to its network.

Tired of the same old boring pitch that flight attendants have to give you in accordance with FAA regulations? Well, Air New Zealand decided to make its own briefing a lot more epic in the latest video for the official airline of Middle Earth stand-in country.

Watch as Elijah Wood and other cast members grace this light-hearted, good natured air safety briefing, complete with fake Gandalf explaining how to position yourself in the event of a crash landing.

In the past, using the Messages app on a Mac could be an irritating experience. And what if a friend dared to send a green-bubble text from an Android phone? When texting from your Mac, messaging those friends wasn’t possible until now.

In today’s Cult of Mac video, find out how to enable Text Message Forwarding between your iPhone and Mac. With iOS 8.1 and Yosemite installed, enjoying this seamless feature is just a few short taps and clicks away. Find out how to do it all in this speedy tutorial.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV to catch all our latest videos.

Ralph Nader has a message for Tim Cook: Stop listening to Carl Icahn.

In a scathing letter to Cook published in today’s Wall Street Journal, the former presidential candidate takes Apple’s CEO to task for bending to the will of billionaire investor Icahn and issuing more stock buybacks, rather than listening to its workers and addressing the horrendous working conditions at its factories in China.

Nader’s letter proposes Foxconn workers’ hours be cut to 40 a week and their pay doubled, which would only cost Apple an extra $5.4 billion annually.

Apple revolutionized the music industry with the introduction of iTunes in 2003, but even Cupertino is having trouble selling albums these days.

iTunes revenue dropped 13% over the last year reports the Wall Street Journal, marking the second straight year that Apple’s digital music sales have declined, after falling 5.7% in 2013.

Amazon added Apple Pay support today for its Amazon.com Rewards Visa.

Since Chase, the Amazon rewards card issuer, was an Apple Pay launch partner, some speculated that Amazon intentionally opted out of Apple’s mobile payments system. But Amazon quickly confirmed this week that it was working on adding support for its credit card in the near future. Now it’s followed through.

Apple will be holding on to its top executives until at least 2019, if the granting of new stock options by the Apple board has anything to do with it.

Angela Ahrendts, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, CFO Luca Maestri, VP of hardware engineering Daniel Riccio, lawyer Bruce Sewell and COO Jeffrey Williams all received stock grants potentially valued at a total of $27 million, based on the high closing price of AAPL stock Thursday.

Incandescent light bulbs are inefficient, last only a couple of years, and can emit light in one color only. It’s about time we brought interior lighting into the 21st century.

Today, people expect more from their interior lighting options. Those people use the ilumi LED Smartbulb, available at the discounted price of $79 at Cult of Mac Deals for a limited time.