Cult of Mac

We get slammed 24/7 with new Apple rumors. Some are accurate, most are not. To give you a clue about what’s really coming out of Cupertino in the future, we’re busting out our rumor debunker each week to blow up the nonsense.

Film or digital? Campfire or BBQ? Car or bike? Cable or wireless?

No matter which way you swing, this week’s gadgets have you covered. iPhoneographers can enjoy the Shoulderpod hand grip or slip the new iPad Olloclip onto their Mini or Air, and film nuts can get instant satisfaction with the new Lomo Instant Camera.

Camping? Take it easy in the giant Meriwether tent or go survivalist with the Blastmatch fire-starter. You can even choose how to arrive at the site, with accessories for your car or your bike. Happy traveling!

OS X 10.10, which Apple is expected to show at its Worldwide Developers Conference Monday morning, could very well be named after one of California’s most well-known national parks. While setting up for WWDC at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Apple has put up a banner for the next version of OS X that features Yosemite in the background.

As another week full of news passes, your host Joshua Smith is here to give you a wrap-up on some of the latest and biggest features. iOS devices held for ransom, Apple’s big Beats acquisition and a rumored Apple iWatch are among just some of the featured stories in today’s rundown.

Take a look at the video and be sure to return next week for another. Subscribe to CultOfMacTV on youtube.com to catch new episodes of the roundup and other great video reviews, how-to’s and more.

In case you somehow doubted that Apple would reveal iOS 8 next week at its Worldwide Developers Conference, here’s the confirmation. Apple has started putting up iOS 8 banners along with giant signage and logos outside the conference’s venue in downtown San Francisco.

How much C4 can you stuff in a Mac Pro?

That not a question most Mac Pro owners grapple with but the guys at RatedRR aren’t your average Apple fanboys. In their latest series of Apple destruction videos they’ve decided to pack an ungodly amount of C4 into Apple’s powerhouse machine just to see how big the explosion is.

Catch all the gory action in the video below:

Hours after Apple secured its $3 billion acquisition of Beats, Eddie Cue and Jimmy Iovine took the stage at Code Conference to talk about the new partnership along with the state of tech and the future of Apple.

Eddie boasted Apple’s 2014 product pipeline is the best he’s seen in his 25 years at Apple, but the duo also dished on their decade long relationship, the state of streaming music services and what Apple might do to make the TV experience a lot less sucky.

The interview has finally been posted in full by Re/code and while it’s slim on Apple secrets it does provide a fascinating look at where the company might be heading.

Check it out:

Robert Pfaff is a young illustrator living in Michigan. He’s also a hard-core gamer with a love for all things pixellated, so he decided to combine both passions together and create this amazingly evocative set of digital artwork.

We found his work to be compelling, so asked Pfaff to choose his favorites and tell us a little about what they meant to him.

Pfaff is thinking about printing and selling his work on posters; if you’d like to encourage him, be sure to visit his artist page on Adobe’s portfolio site, Behance.

Source: Robert Pfaff

The official unveiling of iOS 8 is less than three days away and even though I’m not expecting Jony Ive to debut huge overhauls to the UI, my six-year old homescreen of boring rows of app icons are desperate for something more. Something like widgets.

After deep diving into the mechanics of iOS, Jay Machalani has developed a phenomenal concept on how Apple could add widgets to iOS 8 similar to Windows Live tiles. It’s simple, functional, and doesn’t add unnecessary crap to your homescreen thanks to its novel pinch to expand feature.

Here’s how his widgets work on an iPhone:

Motorola has confirmed it will close its smartphone factory in Fort Worth, Texas, The Wall Street Journal reports. The plant, which employed 700 staff and was responsible for the assembly of devices customized with Moto Maker, is unsustainable due to weak sales and high costs.

The KICK is a revolutionary new way of lighting your photos and videos – and making sure you get perfect exposure every time.

It’s only about the size of your smartphone, but comes packed with a rechargeable panel of 40 completely adjustable RGB LEDs. At 400 Lumens (twice as bright as most Police flashlights) it’s powerful, but it’s also intelligent – once you pair it with the free KICK app (iOS and Android). And Cult of Mac Deals has the KICK for only $149 for a limited time.

Cole Rise has nearly one million followers on Instagram and the hottest new photography app in the App Store. He also made seven of Instagram’s built-in filters, which explains where the name for the “Rise” filter originates.

His app, Litely, is less than a month old with over 3 million downloads. Considering he was one of the first 100 people on Instagram, he really gets mobile photography and where it’s headed. During our conversation, Rise goes behind the scenes of Litely’s development, shares his influence on Instagram during its early days, and gives some great advice on how to take better pictures.

Bart van Olphen thinks he can conquer your fear of cooking fish if you’ll just give him 15 seconds.

The seafood chef from Amsterdam uses Instagram’s relatively new video feature for Fish Tales, which is probably the world’s fastest cooking show in this golden age of refined eating.

“People really like the simplicity of the recipes,” van Olphen told Cult of Mac. “You really can learn how to cook in only 15 seconds.”

Cooking shows have been simmering since the early days of television, with pioneers like James Beard and Julia Child unraveling the mysteries of the kitchen. With the emergence of the Food Network in 1993, the format boiled over into a ratings bonanza, turning chefs like Emeril Lagasse and Rachel Ray into celebrities. Now YouTube is home to dozens of shows featuring entrepreneurial cooks seeking to cash in on the foodie craze.

BlackBerry has today begun rolling out its version 2.2 update for BBM, which adds a bunch of new emoticons and makes some nice improvements. Signing up is easier than ever for new BBM users with this release — as is adding new friends to your BBM contacts list.

In an age of Facetime, Skype and Google Hangouts, video calling is pretty much ubiquitous — an aspect of technology that we simply take for granted. But it wasn’t always this way.

Eighteen years ago today, AT&T and Intel held a May 30 meeting to announce a system that would allow personal computers to make and receive video phone calls over standard telephone lines.

“It sounds futuristic, but it’s here,” Intel noted in its annual report for 1996. “For the first time, a simple low-cost, PC-based video phone.”

Aside from the odd controlled leaks, Apple isn’t a company known for letting out too much info about advance products (or, really, anything) these days. However, recently we’ve been seeing more and more information come from Apple’s less secretive supply chain — and it seems that Apple has had enough.

Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer were competitors during their time as CEOs of Apple and Microsoft respectively, and now it seems that the Jobs vs. Ballmer competition continues in an altogether different arena.

The competition in question concerns a quest to buy the L.A. Clippers from embattled Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Ballmer has reportedly placed a $2 billion for the basketball team: an offer which would triple the record for an NBA franchise.

One of the roadblocks in his acquisition plan? None other than Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. Jobs is partnering with several other tech and entertainment magnates, including Oracle software co-founder Larry Ellison, and new Apple employee (and reported special adviser to Tim Cook) Jimmy Iovine.

Everyone is talking about vast open world hacker game Watch Dogs since its release earlier this week, and that means one inevitable thing: it was only going to be so long before the parodies started rolling in.

This Machinima.com parody of the game imagines a scenario in which Watch Dogs‘ main protagonist is forced to ditch his smartphone — which allows him to hack into various electronic devices tied to the city’s central operating system — for an iPhone. For most people, switching to iPhone is a definite upgrade. For Watch Dogs’ Aiden Pearce, however, it’s a less clear-cut decision.

The proper iOS Game of Thrones was a bit rubbish, with a whole lot of sitting and waiting around unless you were happy to shell out money for in-app purchases. Fortunately the good folks over at Vulture have created a free-to-play game, which is a whole lot more fun.

You play the “Littlest Lannister” Tyrion Lannister, and the aim is to get as drunk as you can in a great approximation of an old-school arcade game. As games go, it’s a whole lot simpler than capturing the Iron Throne. You guide Tyrion back and forth across the screen using the arrow keys of your computer (or virtual controls for your iOS device) to catch as many goblets of wine as you can.

If you’re a fan of Disney’s Oscar-winning animated smash hit Frozen, you may experience excited chills at the news that you can now sing along to all your favorite songs from the movie on your iPad using the new Disney Karaoke: Frozen app.

As apps go, it’s pretty darn (n)ice, with nine songs and music videos from the film on which you can either listen to the original vocal performances, or mute the voices to sing by yourself.

When the Microsoft Surface was first unveiled, one of its “iPad killing” features was splitscreen app support. Just by dragging an app to the edge of the screen, you could dock it, and run another app to the left or right… for example, playing a game while watching a movie in the corner.

It was a move designed to make the Surface more laptop-like… and one that Apple has been heavily rumored to copy in iOS 8, as tablet sales flatline. But don’t expect to see splitscreen multitasking at WWDC on Monday. Apparently it’s just not ready for showtime yet.

Take this with a grain of salt, but an Australian iPhone repair site with a proven history of leaking upcoming iPhone and iPad parts early has posted what they are claiming is our first look at the aluminum rear shell of the upcoming iPhone 6.

The album is dead. So dead Amazon thinks customers won’t even care if all the songs in its new music-streaming service have been spun out of tune by DJs across the country for months.

To boost its digital offerings, Amazon is planning to launch its own music service, reports BuzzFeed, but rather than stocking up on the latest hit songs, Prime Music will shun new releases in favor of a potluck offering of songs and albums that are at least six months old.

The smartwatch race is on, and Microsoft has its own contender in the works.

Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch lineup is widely considered a dud, and many are waiting to see what Apple has up its sleeve with the iWatch. Not to be left behind, Microsoft is gunning for the fitness market with a wearable of its own that could arrive as early as this summer..

Perhaps most surprising of all is that Microsoft’s device will reportedly be platform agnostic, meaning it would work with Android and even the iPhone.

The real reason behind Apple’s $3 billion buy of Beats may be a plan for an epic mashup of music and tech by combining the hardware of headphones and Beats Music software.

Two notable patent applications published Thursday suggest that Apple could be thinking along exactly these lines.