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Beautiful renders of new iPhone 6 packaging make us drool

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Martin Hajek usually puts his considerable 3-D rendering skills to the task of creating conceptual models of Apple’s upcoming hardware. But after producing his highly-accurate rendering of the iPhone 6 last week, the Dutch artist has tried his hand at something a bit different: imagining a new kind of retail packaging for Apple’s next smartphone, as well as what the iPhone 6 will look like when it’s on display at your local Apple Store.

It’s nearly impossible to spy on iPhones, according to top surveillance firm

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The iPhone 5s introduced us to Touch ID.
Photo: Apple

iOS has always been more secure than Android, and new information that’s leaked out of one of the world’s leading surveillance companies reiterates that fact.

The Gamma Group has a piece of spyware called FinSpy that can hook into just about any Android, Blackberry, and older Microsoft phone. But it can’t touch an iPhone unless the user has changed its core security through the process of jailbreaking.

Production begins on new iPad Air with anti-reflection coating

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The successor to the iPad Air will feature a new anti-reflection coating designed to make reading easier, according to a report today from Bloomberg.

Apple has reportedly begun the production process for the next-gen 9.7-inch iPad and smaller iPad mini. As expected, both are on track to debut before the holidays.

iPad sales have been declining, and without some other whiz-bang new features, it’s difficult to imagine what will make new iPads interesting this fall.

iOS 8 privacy changes bring big layoffs to retail tracking startup

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iOS 8 is cruising through the final stages of development ahead of its fall release, and while most users can’t wait for its arrival, one NY-based startup already had to cut a third of its staff, after privacy changes in iOS 8 have threatened to already make its retail tracking technology obsolete.

Nomi, a startup that creates solutions for retail stores to track shoppers and their spending habits, has laid off 20 of its 60 or so employees, thanks in part to some small changes in iOS 8 that make make it impossible to identify repeat visits from shoppers with an iPhone.

Get buns of steel with these super fitness apps

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Our iPhones are known to help make our everyday activities easier and when it comes to fitness, it’s no different. Getting up and exercising is difficult, but downloading applications to help you along your fitness journey definitely isn’t.

In today’s video take a look at our top three apps that will transform your iPhone into the ultimate fitness trainer. Keep track of your movement, prevent dehydration and do so much more, just by using these super-fitness apps.

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

Italy’s Prime Minister wants to learn from Jony Ive

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Italian premier Matteo Renzi's desk. Photo: La Stampa.

Summer reading tends to lean towards the frothy or the ambitious. It looks like Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is definitely in the ambitious camp.

His summer reads, as shown on his desk, include a work by an economist about innovation, a tome on the power of the labor force, and, oh yeah, Leander Kahney’s Jony Ive The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products.

Intel Broadwell processors could slim MacBook Air to just 9mm thick

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Grab a great deal on a refurbished MacBook Pro Ivy i5 Dual 13
Grab a great deal on a refurbished MacBook Pro Ivy i5 Dual 13" Laptop.
Photo: Cult of Mac

The Apple rumor mill has been abuzz for months with whispers that the company plans to release an even thinner MacBook Air with a Retina display, and Intel’s new line of Broadwell processors could be the vital component that makes that makes wafer-thin MacBooks a reality.

Intel’s Broadwell chips have been delayed b early manufacturing problems, but today Intel revealed new details on its new 14-nanometer processors that combine the high-performance of the Haswell Core i3, i5, and i7 processors, with low power improvements that may allow Jony Ive to slim the next MacBook Air down to just 9mm thick.

Watch Walking Dead’s scary season 5 trailer recreated with LEGOs

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Take a moment to watch the above trailer for The Walking Dead’s upcoming season five. It’s got all the things that make a Walking Dead trailer great – scary music, tight editing, and enough little details to keep the fans guessing and excited.

Consider our excitement, then, when we found the amazing trailer below: a shot-by-shot recreation of the entire Walking Dead trailer above, made with LEGOs.

Even better, we’re still excited to see the upcoming season, even if we’d just watched the LEGO trailer – it’s that good. Check it out below.

Apple features Detroit riders and Chinese DJs in new ‘Your Verse’ ads

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Microsoft is arming its Surface marketing campaign with a heavy dose of Apple-hate, but Apple is continuing to take the opposite approach by highlighting the amazing things people do with their iPads.

In the latest additions to the Your Verse campaign – Striking a new Chord and Organizing a Movement – Apple has included segments that highlight how Jason Hall has helped revitalize Detroit by organizing massive bike rallies from his iPad, while the Chinese electro-pop duo Yaoband are blazing into a new musical frontiers aided by the iPad Air.

Apple Maps is dominating Google in the U.K.

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TomTom will continue to power Apple Maps.
TomTom will continue to power Apple Maps.
Photo: Apple

When Apple Maps disastrously launched in 2012 even the most faithful of Apple fanboys thought it’d never be competitive against the obviously superior Google Maps. But just two years after it announced its own mapping platform, Apple is now dominating Google in mapping traffic on 4G, at least on one U.K. carrier.

iPhone 6 could get round True Tone flash with four LEDs

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We’ve already seen two new iPhone part leaks out coming out of China this morning, but to complete today’s hat trick a new set of images show that Apple could be looking to make some serious improvements to the iPhone’s True Tone flash module.

Several new iPhone 6 parts have been leaked according to Nowhereelse.fr, among which is an alleged iPhone 6 flex cable that shows Apple has created a round True Tone flash module.

Take better photographs today with the Fantastic Photography Bundle [Deals]

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Cameras: We all have them. Some of us just use the camera feature built into our mobile phones. Some have simple and cost effective point and click cameras. While others have more expensive and feature laden digital SLR units. What do they all have in common? The ability to take breath taking photographs – provided the user has the right training, that is.

Now anyone can get the training necessary to take jaw dropping photos no matter what type of camera they are using with The Fantastic Photography Bundle, just $49 at Cult of Mac Deals.

Microsoft’s newest app lets you stalk your favorite celebrities with your iPhone

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Can’t get enough of celebrity gossip? You’re not alone. Up in Redmond, Microsoft is so obsessed with keeping up with the Kardashians that they have just released a custom-built an attractive new celebrity news app called Snipp3t. And while the use to which Snipp3t is meant to be put may look a little tawdry, the app design itself is actually really nice.

Cubical‘s color-matching puzzler is frantic iOS fun

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From the mathematical brilliance of Threes to the insanely addictive, Design Award-winning Blek, iOS users are spoiled for choice when it comes to great puzzle games on their iOS.

Does that mean developers should throw in the towel and stop making them, then? On the contrary, as the great Alan Partridge once said about regional detective shows: “Another way of looking at it is, people like them, let’s make some more of them.”

The “more of them” in question is Cubical, a seemingly straightforward puzzler that asks you to match the colours of different cubes by tapping them before the time runs out. And it’s a whole lot of fun.

Ex-Apple executive says the App Store should be more like Reddit

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iOS App Store.
iOS App Store.

Since it first opened up in Julu of 2008, the App Store has paid developers over $13 billion at last count, and the marketplace hosts are over 1 million third-party programs. That makes the App Store a success by almost any measure… except discoverability.

Even today, the App Store can be extremely hard to navigate. Dominated by clones of popular apps and freemium crapware, good apps often get buried at the bottom of the App Store thanks to the App Store’s notoriously bad search engine and almost non-existent curation.

But former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée has a suggestion. Make the App Store more like Reddit. Let anonymous humans curate it.

iPhone 6 may not feature light-up Apple logo after all

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Aside from the larger phablet-sized display, one of the most visually obvious changes we’d heard about for the iPhone 6 was the possibility that the cutout Apple logo on its rear would enable LED-powered user notifications, or MacBook-style illumination.

Well, that may not be happening after all, according to newly leaked images from Taiwanese Apple blog AppleClub. The website has posted what appears to be a stack of Apple logos, ready to be fitted to the back panel of the next generation iPhone, featuring nothing in the way of LEDs or connectors.

The person who posted the image also confirms that the logo is not planned to emit light as previously speculated about.

Smart toys for grown-ups with back-to-school blues

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Many an architect built the foundation of his or her career with Legos, now the Danish toymaker tops its architecture series with a new kit especially for the grown-ups. The Lego Architecture Studio comes with 1,200 components plus a manual penned by architecture luminaries including Sou Fujimoto, Ma Yansong and Moshe Safdie. Lego suggests making your own masterpiece, from the Eiffel Tower to the Trevi Fountain. When you do, send us the pics.
Many an architect built the foundation of his or her career with Legos, now the Danish toymaker tops its architecture series with a new kit especially for the grown-ups. The Lego Architecture Studio comes with 1,200 components plus a manual penned by architecture luminaries including Sou Fujimoto, Ma Yansong and Moshe Safdie. Lego suggests making your own masterpiece, from the Eiffel Tower to the Trevi Fountain.
When you do, send us the pics.

Happy birthday, Woz: Apple’s co-founder turns 64 today

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Apple’s beloved co-founder Steve Wozniak turns 64 years old today. Steve Jobs may be the most admired figure to come out of Apple, but with his imperious distance from us mere mortals, he was hard to love.

Wozniak, on the other hand, is well and truly beloved by the tech community.

A true Silicon Valley original, he’s the genius who invented the personal computer, got rich, and then spent his fortune having fun rather than taking over the world. It doesn’t hurt that he’s also a practical joker, all-around nerd, and someone who has never been afraid to speak his mind about technology’s power to change the world.

UK tabloid publishes fake looking pics of the iPhone 6 in retail box

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Over the weekend, UK newspaper The Mirror published a series of photos which they claim is a working unit of Apple’s 4.7-inch iPhone 6, complete with retail box.

“There’s no 100% proof that the photos are authentic, but the details on show line up with the dozens of details already seeping onto the web about the next generation Apple handset,” the paper said.

Saying that the photos may not be 100% authentic is quite the overstatement. In fact, considering the fact that iOS 8’s biggest new app — Healthbook — is entirely missing from the screen, we’re going to say we’re about 100% sure that The Mirror got had.

More photos after the jump. What do you think?

New photos highlight front panel of 4.7-inch iPhone 6

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Another day, another apparent leak of the forthcoming iPhone 6, expected to be unveiled by Apple on September 9.

The photos appeared on the Taiwanese website AppleClub, and look to show the exterior and interior of the 4.7-inch iPhone’s front panel.

Although they don’t offer us anything revelatory that we’ve not seen before in grainy leaked-photo detail, they do does further give us one of the clearest looks yet at some of the changes we’re expecting to see with the next generation Apple handset: namely a larger display and rounded edges.

Production problems lead Foxconn to disappointing July earnings

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iPhone 6 maker Foxconn is looking to lower its reliance on Apple.
iPhone 6 maker Foxconn is looking to lower its reliance on Apple.

Despite its role as a manufacturer for the eagerly-anticipated iPhone 6, Apple manufacturer Foxconn has announced July as being responsible for its lowest monthly earnings since March 2013.

Surprisingly this comes not long after Foxconn posted record earnings of $131.82 billion for 2013, while company chairman Terry Gou claimed that this year’s earnings would be even greater. Nonetheless the company’s consolidated revenues of just (!) $8.66 billion for the month of July represents a decrease of 17.91 percent on month, and 13.3 percent year-on-year.

So what’s responsible for the drop?