My first impression? My goodness, this is the small one?

The iPhone 6 is a big step up. It makes older iPhones look small. Ridiculously small. Even after a few days, my old iPhone 5s feels positively Lilliputian. The 6 dwarfs the 5s, which felt big and expansive at the time. Now it looks like a little dolls’ phone.

I’ve been really digging the 6. It’s a big bright slab of glass and metal. It feels impossibly thin, almost like an oversize credit card in your hand. But it’s solid and stiff — it’s not going to snap in my back pocket if I sit on it.

The 6 is not a gob-smacker like the 6 Plus, which stops people in the street. But it’s more manageable, especially with one hand.

I’m a big fan. I like it a lot, except for one design flaw that’s been driving me crazy.

Given how constrained supplies of the iPhone 6 Plus have been, it should come as no surprise that Apple’s biggest smartphone isn’t being used the most right now.

While Apple won’t say how many of each model it’s sold, mobile analytics data shows that iPhone 6 sales are outpacing 6 Plus sales more than seven to one.

Apple’s first timepiece isn’t expected to hit stores until early 2015, but if you live in certain parts of Silicon Valley, you just might see Apple Watch dangling on a few lucky wrists.

Reports of Apple Watch sightings have started to hit Twitter with Apple engineer’s seen rocking the sport edition while waiting to be whisked to the mothership on a bus.

While the rest of us waited to get an iPhone 6 over launch weekend, an elite few were anticipating an exclusive variant: a custom 24-karat gold version of Apple’s next-generation handset.

The waiting list of exclusive customers includes music industry heavy hitters, boxing champ Floyd Mayweather Jr., Russian oligarchs and practically every royal family member in the United Arab Emirates — people for whom nothing short of a gold iPhone 6 is acceptable.

“Believe you me, we have a lot of very big-name clients, but we don’t like to publicly reveal their names,” says creator Amjad Ali. “As a British company, we just don’t think it’s the polite thing to do.”

Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronic was supposedly anchored by the killer music service Tim Cook has touted in recent interviews, but according to a report from TechCrunch, Apple’s brand new music streaming service is already scheduled to be shutdown.

I’ve pretty much become a full-time texter these days, using Apple’s Messages app on my Mac and iPhone to send iMessages (to friends and contacts who use iOS or OS X) as well as regular text messages (to people outside the Apple ecosystem).

iOS 8 brings great new changes to the mobile version of the Messages app, some of which might not be immediately apparent. Here’s a look at the new features and how best to use them.

One of the less frequent—yet just as persistent—rumors in the Apple universe is the notion of 12-inch MacBook Air with a completely redesigned exterior.

Much like how Apple has gone back to the rounded design of the original iPhone with the 6 and 6 Plus, reports have claimed that this new MacBook will feature a fanless, clamshell-like design in the three main iPhone colors: Space Grey, Silver, and Gold. Now more details about the unannounced laptop have emerged.

The Ukrainie-based indie band Brunettes Shoot Blondes have created a clever music video that uses iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, and even an iPod nano to tell a fascinating animated love story.

The video for the band’s single, ‘Knock Knock’, uses 14 different Apple screens in the delightfully elaborate dance of iDevices that probably took a million takes to pull off successfully. The entire video is playing on the screens in real-time and required pinpoint accuracy to pull off. It’s kind of like a lo-fi version of OK Go’s Rube Goldberg machine videos, only all Apple.

Watch it below:

Battery packs are a necessary evil in our modern lives. Devices that can’t get through a day without a charge surround us, but the thin-and-light profiles we take for granted can’t accommodate swappable batteries. Add battery-intensive tasks like gaming or video to the mix, and the result is that we often don’t feel safe leaving the house without an extra battery in our bags.

If you’re in the market for a necessary evil, I like Lumsing’s Harmonica Style Portable Power Bank. It looks good, feels great in the hand, works great, has tons of battery life and is super-cheap. What more do you want for an accessory that you really don’t want to have to carry around with you at all?

The display rating experts at DisplayMate got intimately acquainted with Apple’s bigger than big display over the weekend, and after thorough testing, the LCD experts pronounced Apple’s 5.5-inch display the best performing LCD display they’ve ever tested on a smartphone.

The iPhone 6 did pretty well too in their iPhone 6 Display Technology Shootout report released this morning.
Here’s the rave review they gave the iPhone 6 Plus display:

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are the thinnest iPhones Apple’s ever made, but all that design perfection is slightly tainted by the protruding camera that makes it annoying to use the smartphone on a flat surface.

Slapping on a case fixes the problem, but for those wanting to revel in the beauty of a nude iPhone 6, the PeripateticPandas have come up with an ingenious – though somewhat impractical – solution: Introduce your shiny new 6 to a grinding machine.

Checkout the horrific how-to video below:

Your iPhone makes a bold statement about you. No matter if you have the brand new iPhone 6 or an earlier version, it says that you are a person of style, who wants the best of the best at all times.

So, it stands to reason that you should outfit your iPhone with the best accessories available.  Take advantage of these statement making accessories that won’t break the bank.

The first batch of the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus have already made their hands to millions of consumers in the United States and other major markets of the world. There is no denying the fact that many among them will be long time Android users who have been patiently waiting for Apple to make the shift to a larger screen.

In 2004, at the height of the original iPod’s success, Apple started asking itself internally what would eventually kill the iPod. Whatever it was, Cupertino wanted to make sure they stayed ahead of the curve.

What did Apple think would doom the iPod? According to ex-iPod-chief Tony Fadell, Cupertino called it correctly: Music streaming would eventually kill the iPod. But Apple didn’t call it streaming, or even music in the cloud. They called it the “celestial music jukebox.”

Do you hate iOS 8? Maybe you’re an iPhone 4s owner who made the mistake of believing Apple when they said that iOS 8 supported your device, or maybe you’re just a luddite who hates change!

Either way, you’re in luck: If you regret your upgrade, you’ve got a rare opportunity to turn the clock back. You can downgrade your device from iOS 8 to iOS 7.1.2, if you act fast.

After an “unprecedented” order for manufacturers, record-breaking preorders, and a monster first day on sale, how did the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus do over its first weekend?

Incredibly well, says proud parent Apple, which put out a press release this morning noting that more than 10 million new iPhone 6 family devices were snapped up by customers at the weekend — signalling a new record for Apple.

“Sales for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus exceeded our expectations for the launch weekend, and we couldn’t be happier,” Tim Cook is quoted as saying. “We would like to thank all of our customers for making this our best launch ever, shattering all previous sell-through records by a large margin.”

It looks like Apple manufacturer Foxconn may not be entirely ready to displace its human workforce in favor of robots just yet.

According to a new report coming out of the Taiwanese media, Foxconn’s CEO Terry Gou is disappointed by the company’s current generation of so-called “Foxbots,” which supposedly fell short of expectations in terms of both proficiency and flexibility.

After claiming no one would buy big phones during his iPhone 4 reveal in 2010, Steve Jobs made it pretty clear Apple had no interest in making a substantially larger smartphone anytime soon. But fast-forward to 2014, and the company Jobs founded in his parents’ garage has been forced to do just that.

Having watched customers flock to Android in pursuit of bigger screens, Apple could no longer ignore our demands. It had to build new iPhones that would win back users it lost, and prevent any more from wandering.

And boy has Apple done that in style.

Tim Cook is set to take to the stage today as part of the opening ceremony of environmental event, Climate Week NYC, in New York.

The event is focused on driving change in business practices relating to the environment — particularly in terms of lowering carbon emissions.

Cook is one of several speakers who will appear at the event, alongside the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the President of World Bank, and executives from IKEA and Bloomberg.

In many places around the world, around the first 50 people in line waiting for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus last week appeared to be resellers — looking to make a quick (and relatively easy) buck selling Apple’s next generation iPhone on the gray/black market.

While we definitely noticed the phenomenon, YouTube filmmaker Casey Neistat took his camera out on the streets of New York to interview and film the crowds gathered waiting for the new handsets at various Apple Stores around the city.

“Gone are the spirit and excitement from years past,” Neistat observes. “These lines are now about something else entirely.”

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t really like it when people buy new iPhones just to destroy them on camera. It’s extraordinarily wasteful, not just of money but of the craftsmanship Apple puts into every device.

That said, even I have to admit this iPhone 6 torture test is awesome. Dude took an iPhone 6, froze it with liquid nitrogen, and then disintegrated it with a sledgehammer, like some cryogenic Thor.

Following on from a great weekend for its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus handsets, Apple has been named the coolest brand in Britain for the third year running.

The CoolBrands list is voted for by 2,000 consumers, alongside a panel of 37 people described as “key influencers” — including models Sophie Dahl and Jodie Kidd, and the fashion designer Julien Macdonald.

Voters are asked to consider a brand’s style, innovation, originality, authenticity, desirability and uniqueness when making their choices.

We just saw how incredibly far the iPhone’s display has come in seven short years. But if you think that’s impressive, check out how far the actual speed of the iPhone has come from the iPhone 2G to iPhone 6 Plus.

The iPhone has come a long way since its original 3.5-inch, 480 x 320 display. Now the iPhone 6 Plus ships with a massive 5.5-inch, 1920 x 1080 “Retina HD” display with individual pixels that are basically indiscernible to the human eye.

The above screenshot shows an original iPhone screenshot inside a 6 Plus screenshot. It doesn’t even fill a fourth of the new resolution.

It’s the end of the week and, as always, we are highlighting a few of the deals that were featured in the past seven days to ensure that you don’t miss out on anything.

If these deals don’t strike your fancy, be sure to check out the dozens of other gadgets, software, and services available every day at Cult of Mac Deals.