Cult of Mac

Tim Cook and newly-apointed CFO Luca Maestri are getting ready for Apple’s Q3 2014 earnings call with investors. The call will reveal just how much cash the company raked in over the past three months and what they should expect later this year. We’ll be right here, liveblogging the whole thing.

Apple hasn’t released a new product this quarter, but investors on Wall Street are still bullish about the future of AAPL, sending the company’s stock price surging 26% since its last earnings report.

Whether Apple was able to beat expectations of $38.4 billion in revenue without an explosion of new sales will finally be known today at 2 p.m. Pacific, and we’ll be ready to dish out all the news and juicy tidbits Tim and the team tell investors.

So keep this page open for the full scoop on how ridiculously profitable Apple was last quarter, as well as what’s to come its “most exciting product pipeline in 25 years.”

With a great quarter behind Apple and massive refreshes of both iOS and OS X in the near future (along with a little something called the iPhone 6) Tim Cook is unlikely to have a lack of things to crow about during today’s earnings call.

If he is, however, maybe he can bring up the fact that — despite increased competition — the iPad is still driving a massive majority of tablet web usage, as measured through ad impressions.

The data was collected by research firm Chitika Insights, who sampled tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian ad impressions between July 1 and 7 this year. They found that the iPad accounts for 78.0% of all tablet ad impressions — up from the 77.2% the iPad represented back in April, and one of the largest quarter-over-quarter increases for any tablet brand.

Imagine a world in which you can watch, search, and share anything from every The Simpsons episode, ever. If you were Homer Simpson, the dim-witted but lovable (and alcoholic child-strangler) father on the 25-year-old animated sitcom created by Matt Groening, you might drool at the prospect.

For the rest of us, though, we might explode with glee with the upcoming Simpsons World, an app and service that will indeed contain every single episode of The Simpsons, ever, in a searchable and share-able format. Now you can finally use official clips to add meaning and cultural relevance to every one of your reddit comment threads with ease.

Facing the end of his long, dominant NBA career, Kobe Bryant is branching out into the business world with Kobe Inc., and while he’s picked the brains of people like Oprah, Hillary Swank and Arianna Huffington, it was a meeting with Jony Ive at Apple Campus earlier this summer that caught the web’s attention.

What could one of the greatest basketball players of all-time learn from the world’s most famous designer? According to an interview with Bloomberg, the Black Mamba simply wanted to know how Ive approaches design and how he manages to see the world differently than everyone that makes hardware.

An NBA superstar reaching out to the world’s tech designer for help sounds like an odd fit, but Bryant says building an iPhone isn’t too different from developing a world-class basketball game because like building products, you approach both sequentially, piece by piece, to make it unstoppable.

Here’s the full interview:

Apple’s Siri virtual assistant is getting better all the time, but Google Now still takes the biscuit, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

Munster ran both virtual assistants through a battery of tests, and shared the results in a new research note, published Tuesday. He concluded that Android’s voice search correctly answers questions asked 84 percent of the time, while Apple’s Siri follows up behind with a still impressive 82 percent correct rate.

Our world is a connected one. Nearly everyone has a mobile device and we are expected to be connected at all times. When we are driving, though, it’s not safe to be holding our smartphones while making calls. In some places it’s even illegal. That’s why it is important to have a mounting device in your car that keeps your attention on the road instead of on your phone.

For a mounting device, you can’t go wrong with either The Universal Car Mount or The GripGo, now available and priced right at Cult of Mac Deals.

Almost five years after the original Angry Birds game made its debut, Rovio is keeping things fresh with a new update that adds 15 brand new levels. All are based on fan-favorite episodes, and they’re available now on both Android and iOS.

If you have a MacBook Air from mid-2011, you may have noticed intermittent issues where your laptop has a harder time waking up from sleep mode than it normally would have done, and when it does, the fans might loudly blast as if the whole laptop were on fire.

Although rare, these issues have been afflicting customers for at least the last couple of years. But it seems like Apple has finally figured out what’s wrong, as a new update today specifically for mid-2011 MacBook Air owners fixes the longstanding issues.

If you’re an iPhone user based in Europe, you’re going to have greater control over data roaming when iOS 8 makes its public debut this fall. Apple has added the ability to toggle Internet connectivity specifically alongside the general data roaming switch in its latest iOS 8 beta.

A pretty sketchy rumor coming out of China claims that the new model iPad mini 3 might borrow the “Air” moniker of its bigger brother, and be a whopping 30 percent thinner than its predecessor.

The report also claims that this new iPad mini Air will rely on the as-yet-unnannounced A8 processor currently manufactured by TSMC.

Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is pretty much everything wrong with mobile development, in a nutshell. A freemium game that invites users to waste ungodly amounts of money on stupid in-app purchases, the game is on track to make $200 million this year alone.

But it does have its fans. For example. the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Office Of Water, which sent out a tweet Monday night telling everyone that it had reached the status of “C-List Celebrity” in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.

In what is quite possibly the strongest indication to date that Apple has been working on a smart watch for some time, on Tuesday the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published an Apple patent related to a “Wrist-worn electronic device” referred to as iTime.

The patent was first filed back in 2011, and describes a device reminiscent of the Pebble smart watch — which would act as a notifications system for other Apple devices such as your iPhone and iPad, with information communicated wirelessly between these devices by way of Bluetooth. Alerts such as phone calls, text messages, and push notifications could be sent to your watch, with the user then made aware of these by way of audio, visual, or vibration cues.

Apple has released a new TV ad for the MacBook entitled “Stickers.” It features music by Hudson Mohawke and a ton of cool decals and stickers that can spotted at an especially hipster coffee shop near you.

With most of its advertising efforts focused on the iPhone and iPad, Apple hasn’t had a Mac ad in a while. It’s nice to see the change of pace.

You can check out the full ad below:

Apple is asking its manufacturing partners to make a record 70-80 million units of the iPhone 6 for the holiday season, according to The Wall Street Journal. What’s interesting is that Apple isn’t having suppliers make the 4.7 and 5.5-inch models simultaneously.

While it looks like Apple is expecting to sell more iPhones than ever before in the coming months, new technology used in the iPhone 6 (especially the 5.5-inch version) is still making production difficult.

“You have no idea what loss is,” says Joel, the protagonist in the best game of 2013, The Last Of Us.

On July 28, you’ll be able to watch a live stream of the principal actors read select lines from Naughty Dog’s cinematic hit. Troy Baker, Ashley Johnson, Merle Dandridge, Hanna Hayes, and Annie Wersching — the main characters in the game — will take direction from none other than Neil Druckmann himself, the writer and director of The Last of Us. Academy Award-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla will be on hand as well to play selections from his game score.

Check out the promo trailer below for more details.

Don’t expect anything too exciting from Apple’s third quarter earnings tomorrow.

This is Apple’s slowest part of the year. The summer slump means no new hardware, which means no explosive sales growth. But that’s alright, because the best is yet to come.

Tim Cook and co. have promised that truly epic things are coming in the fall, and Wall Street is actually excited about Apple again.

Why make fun of existing Apple products when you could throw dirt on ones that haven’t come out yet? That’s Samsung’s latest approach in its newest TV ad titled “Screen Envy.”

Binge watchers rejoice! Netflix has answered one the biggest complaints many have had for its Apple TV app.

Netflix has finally brought “Post-Play” to the Apple TV, a feature that automatically queues up and plays the next episode of a TV show while the current one ends. Post-Play has been present on the web, Netflix’s iOS app in the App Store, and many other platforms that offer Netflix for a long time. It’s finally on the Apple TV.

With iOS 8’s expected September release getting closer and closer, anticipation for Apple’s updated mobile software is growing. Beta releases, pushed to developers every few weeks, show off the latest tweaks and new features, and today’s release of iOS 8 beta 4 is no exception.

In today’s video we go hands-on and take a quick look at everything new in the latest version of iOS 8. See a redesigned Control Center, the helpful new Tips app and other key upgrades to Apple’s mobile software.

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

Facebook is rolling out a new feature that will allow you save just about anything you come across on the social network for later.

Similar to the way services like Pocket and Instapaper save links on the web, Facebook’s Save will make it easy to bookmark articles, places, and other pages.

This week, the residents of Bon Temps confront their grief head on. Sookie mourns Alcide, Lettie Mae mourns Tara, and Arlene mourns Terry. Andy makes the biggest decision of his life, while Eric and Pam continue their quest to find — and kill — Sarah Newland, the crazy Christian we all love to hate.

This fifth episode of the final season of HBO’s True Blood series focuses on love and loss, while we all start to come to terms with the death of some of our favorite characters as well as the end of the long-running television show. It’s a more restrained — and less hilarious — episode than last week, but we can only hope that we’re being set up for more over the top fun in the weeks ahead.

Spoilers ahead – you’ve been warned!

Apple has included iTunes 12 in the newest OS X Yosemite beta released today. It’s a pretty clean redesign that focuses on de-chromifying a lot of the interface elements and introducing new icons.

The iconic iTunes icon has also been changed from blue to a reddish pink. Here’s more of what iTunes 12 looks like:

iOS 8 just got a little bit closer to completion for its launch this fall with the release of iOS 8 beta 4 this morning. Apple didn’t add any major new changes (unless you’re a hardcore lover of Control Center), but the new beta is full of tiny little tweaks that will make your iPhone feel like new when iOS 8 drops in September.

We’re still combing through all the new features Apple just added to iOS 8 beta 4, but there are already some big additions like the new Tips app, an improved Control Center, new Handoff settings and little tweaks galore.

Here are all the little features Apple added to iOS 8 beta 4: