Imagine riding the subway when you realize you’re not quite sure of the changes you need to make on your journey. No problem! Simply whip out your smartphone, aim it at your travel pass, and watch a virtual map pop up in front of you.

Science fiction? Nope. It’s a proof-of-concept AR demo created by computer science student Gerald Nash. It gives a taste of the future, courtesy of a Snapchat filter, that will turn your Washington DC SmarTrip card into a trigger for a floating AR map of the area. Check out the video below.

Apple TV+ secured another handsomely produced, blandly pleasant, absolute mediocrity when it purchased Bryce Dallas Howard’s feature documentary debut, Dads. What’s Dads about, you ask? Why dads, of course. Next question.

Up until now, Apple TV+ hasn’t been the most cautious content provider. Apple execs lavished money on a lot of utter nonsense with enormous price tags because they seemed to aesthetically fit in with the rest of the company’s design scheme. Home, Central Park, See — none of them are good television, but they’d look good testing TVs on a showroom floor, which seems to be the prevailing ethos for a lot of the Apple TV+ purchases.

Dads, released Friday just in time to remind you to forget Father’s Day, is much the same and quite a bit less.

Apple execs won’t get to feed off the usual live audience’s energy during next Monday’s WWDC 2020 keynote, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to get excited about.

As usual, Apple will stream the big event for all the world to see. But, due to health concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire Worldwide Developers Conference will take place online this year. Read on for our rundown of what we expect to see during the WWDC 2020 keynote, which kicks off at 10 a.m. Pacific on June 22.

The iPhone 12 will take a giant step closer to reality when TSMC begins producing the Apple A14 processor later this month, according to an unconfirmed report coming out of Asia on Friday. This reportedly will be the first A-series chip made with a 5-nanometer process, which should bring an increase in performance while improving battery life.

The A14 will supposedly use Qualcomm’s X60 modem, potentially giving it access to every type of 5G network.

To mark Juneteenth, a holiday to celebrate the official end of slavery in the U.S., Apple has made its original Apple TV+ movie The Banker available to watch for free.

The movie, which is based on a true story, stars Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson as Bernard Garrett and Joe Morris, two of the first black bankers in the United States. At a time when discriminatory Jim Crow-era laws were in effect in the U.S., the pair hired a white man (played by Nicholas Hoult) to portray the face of their business, while the pair posed as a chauffeur and janitor.

This week on The CultCast: We discuss our WWDC 2020 hardware and software predictions, and there’s a lot to say. Plus: A new leak details a next-generation iPhone with dual displays; the new 5600M MacBook Pro GPU is an absolute monster; and Apple’s back-to-school promo is back for the summer, but with an interesting twist.

Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. Easily create a beautiful website all by yourself, at Squarespace.com/cultcast. Use offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Learning and playing music can be hard, especially if you’re not able to dedicate every waking hour to the craft. But there are ways to make music fun and easy.

Take, for instance, interactive sheet music app Tomplay. It offers great features and tools that prove useful to musicians of all levels.


Tomplay makes learning and playing music easier and more fun. Just choose the track for the song you want, and press play. A high-quality recording will accompany you as you play along, with more than 18,000 titles to choose from.

The score scrolls automatically in time with the music, so you don’t have to mess around with flipping pages. Plus, you can change the speed to work your way up to full tempo.

Tomplay also lets you add annotations for performance notes, loop specific passages for practice, and lots more. Little wonder it’s earned 4.4 out of 5 stars on the App Store.

Buy now: Get a year of Tomplay Interactive Sheet Music for $49.99. That’s half off the usual price.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers recently seized a shipment of counterfeit AirPods coming from China, carrying a retail price (at least, if they were authentic) of $3,975.

Officers discovered the shipment of AirPod knockoffs June 1. The packaging said the parcel contained lithium ion batteries. However, officers inspecting the package reportedly grew suspicious because of giveaways with the packaging and marking used on the shipment.

Apple’s VR and AR headset ambitions fueled a clash between Apple Technology Development Group executive Mike Rockwell and former design boss Jony Ive, who left Apple last year, a new Bloomberg report claims.

The article traces the development of an Apple VR and AR headset to late 2015. It claims Apple dedicated up to 1,000 engineers to work on a project aiming to be the first major new product since the Apple Watch. However, the project has been subject to disagreements about its direction.

Apple’s latest round of Apple Pay promotions offers a variety of summer-themed discounts in assorted apps and online retail stores. Apple and partners are offering up to 20% off at a variety of retailers, selling everything from sportswear to sunglasses. Oh, there’s a $1 whopper at Burger King, too.

Check out the full list of Apple Pay summer offers below.

Woot’s crazy discounts on iPhone refurbs are back! A bunch of models are available with prices starting at just $149.99 today only. Stock is selling fast, so don’t miss out!

Days before WWDC kicks off, Apple had shuttered its Apple Events app on tvOS, instead folding it into the Apple TV app, streamlining the process of finding and watching Monday’s keynote event.

The wording on the app confirms that, “Apple Events is now part of the Apple TV app.” Using the app, you can watch both current and past Apple special events.

iPad setups are often seen as limiting and hard to work with. They require a lot of accessories and peripherals. They do have some advantages though, besides a lower price point. They are more versatile and travel-friendly. And as iPads are getting bigger and more powerful, iPad-based setups are becoming less bohemian.

Photographer Ryszard Sikorski has one of the cleanest setups I have seen. He actually finds an iPad setup quite liberating. “What I like is that I can use [the iPad] how I need it,” he said. “It’s not static.”

There are no plans to modify the rules of the iOS App Store that would allow Basecamp’s Hey mail app to avoid paying to be listed, according to Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of marketing.

The creators of Hey made news recently by calling Apple “gangsters” for requiring companies to pay 30% of their revenue to have software appear in the App Store.

You’ll be amazed at what you can do with keyboard shortcuts on YouTube. There’s a key for almost everything you could ever need while watching videos. Learn them all in this how-to.

The Apple Podcasts app is reportedly getting a facelift. The version debuting in iOS 14 will supposedly include a “For You” tab with suggestions based on podcasts the user is already subscribed to.

Need to share a Pages document that you don’t want others to edit? Turn it into a PDF before sending it. It takes just a minute and doesn’t require any additional software. Simply follow the steps in this pro tip.

Ordinary things become extraordinary when seen close up and in slow motion. The Slow Mo Guys present an amazing video of an Apple Watch using sound to blast water out of its tiny speakers after a dip in the pool.

Watch it now.

Apple’s newest MacBook Air with its brilliant Magic Keyboard is back to its lowest price yet. Order yours from Amazon today to enjoy $100 off the usual price. The discount applies to both 256GB and 512GB models.

Before there was iOS, early Apple handsets ran iPhone OS. A frequent Apple leaker apparently suggested on Thursday that the next version of this operating system will return to that classic name.

While this might seem like a seismic shift to some, if Apple really is prepping iPhone OS 14 — or perhaps iPhoneOS 14 — it’ll simply be using the same pattern for this operating systems as it does for all its others.

Stand All from Spigen is the new, ultra-affordable charging station that every desk needs. It tops up iPhone and Apple Watch (or AirPods and Apple Watch) simultaneously, and it’s a steal at under $20.

Apple reportedly cracked one of the big problems with its ill-fated AirPower charging mat — specifically the question of how to charge the Apple Watch. That’s according to top Apple leaker Jon Prosser, who posted pictures on Twitter Thursday to prove his point.

“Remember how I said that the main problem was that current prototypes didn’t support Apple Watch?” Prosser wrote. “Yeah. Well. They got the Watch working.”

Treat yourself to some terrific home technology with big discounts from Amazon. You can save $130 on the outstanding Nebula Mars II portable projector from Anker, and $100 on the high-end Deebot T5 robot vacuum.

These are limited-time discounts, so enjoy them while you can.

Two separate leaks Thursday provide new details about Apple’s forthcoming AirTags, circular Bluetooth tracking devices that will help users find lost keys and other items.

iOS leaker @Soybeys posted what supposedly are some of the sound effects Apple will use for AirTags. A second report from Twitter user @blue_kanikam says AirTags will utilize a custom R1 chip, similar to the iPhone 11’s U1 chip, to know where the tiny tracking tags are spatially in order to work with other devices.

Lightning cables are the life lines of our iOS devices. So it’s a drag that Apple’s own cables prove so prone to fraying, breaking and tangling. Not so with these braided, extra-long, stylish alternatives — which you can get for a lot less!