Cult of Mac

This week on The CultCast: Apple — and the company’s entire supply chain — will be 100% carbon neutral by 2030, pushing the world of tech toward big changes. Plus: A powerful iOS 14 privacy feature will be great for consumers, but might kill the billion-dollar online ad industry. We’ll also tell you about some exciting new podcast features coming to Spotify, and wrap up with our favorite new gadgets on an all-new Under Review.

Our thanks to NETGEAR for supporting this episode. The Orbi WiFi 6 router gives you ultra-fast speeds and wider coverage throughout your home — it’s the biggest revolution in Wi-Fi ever. Check it out today at Netgear.com/bestwifi.

For the first time, Apple is manufacturing its current flagship iPhone in India, a Friday report from the Economic Times claims. The report says Foxconn is building the iPhone 11 at its plant near Chennai.

While many previous iPhones made in India have been manufactured for the local market, the story says Apple might export these devices internationally. Building some of its flagship iPhones in India would help lessen Apple’s reliance on China.

Going online amounts to inviting snoops, data thieves and other headaches, whether on mobile devices or your computer. Not so with a virtual private network, or VPN, which keeps your identity and activity anonymous while opening up new possibilities.

With travel picking up again following COVID-19 lockdown, Apple Maps is now alerting users who travel internationally of localized self-isolation guidance.

The feature was pointed out on Twitter by Kyle Seth Gray, who said he received a message after being at the airport. The pop-up notification pointed him to official guidance online. It also included a message that advised Gray to “stay home and watch [his] health for 14 days” in accordance with rules.

After an unexplained absence last Friday, Apple today released the latest episode of its series Little Voice.

The series, from producer J.J. Abrams, songwriter Sara Bareilles and writer Jessie Nelson, follows the journey of aspiring singer Bess King as she strives to live out her dreams.

Apple TV+ has the lowest overall experience score of major streaming platforms and customers are least likely to want to return, suggests a new report from UserTesting, a platform that connects organizations to their customers.

While the numbers aren’t appalling (Apple TV+ had a satisfaction score of 83% versus Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu’s 90% and HBO Now and Amazon Prime’s 87%), it’s still another indicator that Apple TV+ is not overwhelming customers the way it perhaps should.

The LikPok Hyper Mirror saves you the hassle of stringing wires between your computer and TV. It makes a wireless connection instead, using the extremely fast mmWave technology normally found in 5G networks rather than Wi-Fi.

Read on for the results of my tests with this replacement for HDMI cables.

Mark Davis is somewhat of a Renaissance man. He is an author of four novels, an entrepreneur, an engineer and a scientist. He is between startups right now but recently sold a data analytics platform to Dell. In order to perform all of his duties, he needs a setup that can match his tempo. Naturally, he has a dual-monitor setup.

His main monitor is a Samsung U28E590D 28-inch 4k UHD which has a one-millisecond response time that obliterates latency. He pairs it up with a LG 27-inch IPS Monitor which he mainly runs off of his 2018 iPad Pro. A 13-inch MacBook Pro is the backbone of the setup. It is covertly hidden on a Twelve South BookArc behind the monitors. His MacBook is specced out with 16GB of RAM storage, which is important to him “so I can run multiple virtual machines in parallel when needed,” he said.

Corning unveiled an improved version of Gorilla Glass on Thursday that it promises is much more scratch and shatter resistant than its predecessor. The new iteration, dubbed Victus, could lead to iPhones that survive both being dropped and being stuffed in a pocket with a set of a car keys.

You might be willing to share your iPhone’s passcode with other people, but what if you have sensitive notes you don’t want anyone else to see? Protect them with their own password.

Here’s how to secure individual notes on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Got an old Mac that’s crawling to a halt every time you browse the web? It might not be your hardware that’s in need of a change. Before splashing out on new components, try switching browsers instead—or consider what to do with old MacBook to give it a new lease on life.

Apple gave a series order to Shining Girls, a metaphysical thriller that’ll star Emmy Award winner Elisabeth Moss, perhaps best known for The Handmaid’s Tale.

The show will play on the Apple TV+ where it’ll join multiple other thrillers announced in recent weeks.

For nearly a decade, photographer Dimpy Bhalotia has been using iPhones to document captivating street scenes in luscious black and white. She’s used almost every model Apple ever released — and this week, she took home top honors in the prestigious iPhone Photography Awards.

Bhalotia, a full-time fine art street photographer based out of London, told Cult of Mac she loves shooting with an iPhone so much that it’s become second nature.

“It’s a lightweight butter slice always in my hand, which has the entire world in it,” she said. “It feels like I’m shooting with my palm.”

The Texas attorney general Ken Paxton is reportedly investigating Apple for deceptive trade practices.

At this point, the nature of the practices being looked into remains unknown.

AT&T’s 5G network expanded to cover 395 markets in the United States on Thursday. Which is coverage for 205 million current and potential customers. That puts the telecom close to T-Mobile in 5G coverage area, and well ahead of Verizon.

So at least some US carriers will be ready for the 5G iPhone if it debuts in a few months, as expected.

Plex began offering 80+ free channels of live TV on Thursday. The service is available on many types of Apple devices, and offers children’s programming, news, lifestyle shows and even sports.

There’s a catch, of course. There always is. In this case, it’s commercials. Plex Live TV is supported by advertising.

To promote its excellent Apple TV+ documentary Beastie Boys Story, Apple has debuted a short video featuring longtime artistic collaborator Geoff McFetridge discussing five posters he created for the band using an iPad and Apple Pencil. It’s pretty rad.

Check it out below.

Whether traveling or staying home, we’re all using our devices way more than we used to. More use means less juice, so we rounded up some of the best charging gear in the Cult of Mac Store. That includes a 3-in-1 charging cable, a combination power pack and phone stand, a combination speaker and charging hub, and more.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is suing YouTube for allegedly failing to remove a video in which his likeness was used by thieves to scam people out of money.

Woz was among a group of individuals who were fraudulently featured in videos posted to YouTube, supposedly offering a live giveaway of bitcoins. The video suggested that anyone who sent him bitcoins would receive double the number back. Of course, when people did transfer the funds, they inevitably got nothing in return.

Apple Watch already features heart rate-tracking technology. But Apple may go even further with its biometric-reading tech — and it could be used to make an eventual Apple Glass head-up display more reactive to users in the process.

Published Thursday, a new Apple patent application describes how the company could turn information such as temperature and brainwave-reading into an assessment of the “physiological condition of the user.”

If you’ve upgraded to iOS 13.6, there’s no going back! That’s because Apple has stopped signing iOS 13.5.1. This means that it’s no longer possible to download and install it on your device.

iOS 13.6 added audio versions of key stories from Apple News+, along with a new daily audio show called Apple News Today, available in the free version of the Apple News app. In addition, it introduced a new symptom-tracking feature to the Health app, plus a feature that lets you use your iPhone as a car key.

Apple reportedly participated in early stage conversations with SoftBank about acquiring its Arm Holdings.

Arm Holdings is the semiconductor conductor whose ARM architecture Apple licenses for everything from its A-series chips for iPhone and iPad to its upcoming Apple Silicon processors for Mac.

Facebook Messenger’s new App Lock feature lets you add an extra layer of security to the popular chat app. iPhone and iPad users can switch on Face ID or Touch ID so they never need to worry about anybody seeing their messages.

The previously rumored feature, which Facebook rolled out for iOS devices Wednesday, is easy to enable. Plus, you can tweak a setting to make sure App Lock works ideally for you. Here’s all you need to do to turn on Face ID or Touch ID for Facebook Messenger.

Apple continues to add new features to iOS 14 and the iPad equivalent in the third beta, which the company seeded to developers Wednesday. However, the latest betas brought no major changes.

There’s a new World Clock widget. And the Apple Music app returned to the same icon design it had years ago. Other than that, Apple seems to be concentrating on bug fixes.

Ryan Sebastyan is a video editor who until recently was on tour shooting Def Leppard gigs, back when we still had concerts. The tour seems to be on hold now, but he has a nice selection of shots on his Instagram page.

Back at home, he built himself a killer setup. The headliner of this tech festival is the impeccable 27-inch iMac Pro, a beast of a machine. The Grovemade Walnut Monitor Stand makes the iMac its own computer upon a hill. Naturally, he pairs the iMac with the Apple Magic Mouse and Keyboard (with Numeric Trackpad!). The matte black color stands out nicely against the walnut desk and stand.