November 26, 1984: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates praises Apple’s newly arrived Macintosh as the future of personal computing.
“The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC,” Gates says in a BusinessWeek cover story.
This high praise for the Mac would seem almost unthinkable coming out of Gates’ mouth just a few years later. However, the interview arrives at a time when Microsoft is best known as one of the biggest Mac developers.
★★★★☆
The iLive Portable Bluetooth Multimedia Sound Bar/Speaker is ready to bring quality sound back to an old TV. Or connect it to your iPhone to add a soundtrack to your life. It’s portable and offers a multicolor light show when being used at a party.
Connect via Bluetooth or 3.5mm audio jack, and there are more options, too.
The speaker is only $30, and you’re probably reading this review to see if it’s terrible. Have no fear, I tested it out and you can expect decent quality sound, as long as you manage your expectations.
Apple’s smallest tablet may be getting a significant upgrade soon, with iPad mini 8 expected to adopt OLED display technology by late 2026, according to Chinese leaker Instant Digital. The third quarter of next year at the earliest, they said.
Liven up your Thanksgiving week with woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. The next chapter in the Apple TV award-winning natural history series Prehistoric Planet leaves dinosaurs behind in favor of megafauna that lived during the last ice age, when glaciers covered much of the Earth’s surface.
The streaming service premiered Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age on Wednesday.
Apple will reportedly surpass Samsung to become the world’s largest smartphone maker this year. The strong sales of Phone 17 will help the company reclaim the crown in more than a decade.
Strong consumer interest in the new iPhones has led to double-digit growth in sales, which will make this achievement possible.
For Black Friday 2025, Apple unleashed a promotion giving new and returning Apple TV subscribers a six-month subscription for $5.99 per month.
This Apple TV Black Friday deal slashes more than 50% off the regular price of $12.99 per month!
Additionally, Apple is offering a bundle deal with Peacock Premium/Premium Plus at a discounted rate. See all the details below.
Want a major car upgrade without buying a new vehicle? You can add a 7-inch dashboard display that works with Apple’s CarPlay and Android Auto for just $59.97 (regularly $139.99). That’s a great deal on an after-market wireless CarPlay display with a vivid touchscreen.
Designed to put your smartphone’s features and apps front and center in any car, this wireless car display makes road trips easier, safer and more fun. It’s incredibly easy to set up and widely compatible with various automobiles.
If your iPhone ever experiences odd technical problems, the first thing you should try is a good, old-fashioned restart. You’ll be surprised how many problems you can fix by simply rebooting your phone.
Restarting your iPhone is just like restarting a computer. All of the apps and software will be reset, and you shouldn’t lose any saved data.
If a particular app you’re using is acting up, you can always force-quit it and open it again to reset it. But if there’s a deeper underlying problem with your phone’s software, like if Bluetooth accessories aren’t working or phone calls suddenly won’t connect, you should restart your iPhone.
Here’s how to do it with any model of iPhone.
November 25, 1996: A midlevel manager at NeXT contacts Apple about the possibility of Cupertino licensing NeXT’s OpenStep operating system. The phone call sows the seeds of Mac OS X and Apple’s rejuvenation.
The talk in question takes place between NeXT’s Garrett L. Rice and Ellen Hancock, Apple’s chief technology officer. While just the first formal step in a long process, it ultimately leads to Apple buying NeXT, the creation of Mac OS X, and Steve Jobs returning to the company he co-founded.
From wild concept art to polished edits, Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro image creation and editing tool can spin up impressive visuals from a single prompt on your iPhone.
The featured image of this article itself serves as an amazing example of Nano Banana Pro’s capabilities. And it also showcases just how far behind Apple is in the AI race. (Sorry, Image Playground.)
If you’re itching to use Google’s Nano Banana Pro on your iPhone, this guide will show you how.
Black Friday 2025 delivers some of the steepest discounts yet on Apple’s latest AirPods 4, giving shoppers a chance to grab the wireless earbuds for well below their regular prices. A deal knocks a stunning 47% off the cost, making them just $69 — an amazing price! Or there’s the version that adds active noise cancellation, which is currently 44% off, dropping it below $100 for the first time ever.
These deals make Apple’s earbuds one of this year’s standout tech bargains.
★★★☆☆
After spending a few weeks with the new SoundPeats Air5 Pro+ earbuds as my daily audio drivers, I’ve come to appreciate what this Chinese audio brand accomplishes at the budget end of the wireless earbud market. These earbuds, released Tuesday, pack an xMEMS Labs’ silicon-based micro tweeter in addition to a more traditional dynamic driver. With a Black Friday sale price of just over $100, they deliver features and performance that can cost twice as much with more established brands.
But do the buds outshine pricier competitors? Not exactly. My experience with their sound quality and adaptive hybrid active noise cancellation (ANC) — “adaptive” being one of the new features that puts the “+” in the name — fell a little flat. I would not be tempted to choose these over AirPods Pro 3 for any reason other than cost.
Staying connected while traveling can feel like a nightmare, especially when those international roaming fees hit you like a ton of bricks after your trip. An international eSIM like aloSIM makes it easy to stay online while you travel abroad.
Sure, you could buy a SIM card for every new place you visit, but aloSIM is a simpler option. The company’s international eSIM plans let you tap into local data networks in more than 175 countries. That means you can ditch those pesky roaming fees and stay connected without worrying about your budget. It costs just $22.97 to get the base eSIM (which lasts for life), and you also get a $50 credit.
A great way to personalize your computer is to change your Mac icons. New in macOS Tahoe, you can give each folder a custom color or symbol.
In fact, you can change any icon on your Mac to customize it to your taste. That includes any app, folder, disk or file icon. For instance, I didn’t like the yellow icon of my external hard drive — so I changed it to blue. I’ve also edited a few app icons for better consistency in my Dock.
I’ll show you how to do it yourself.
As Black Friday 2025 rolls in, Apple fans and deal hunters are looking to save some cash on iPhone. We’re here to help by pointing you to savings on a variety of models.
And speaking of helping, we can also explain why you’re struggling to find big discounts on the iPhone 17 series.
For many Apple TV owners, there’s still one kink to be worked out: the remote. The Siri Remote is all about being skinny and putting Apple’s AI assistant front and center. But some people prefer an alternative Apple TV remote with lots of buttons, like the recently upgraded Button Remote from Function101 (see our hands-on review).
Upgraded with Bluetooth connectivity in addition to infrared, it works with Apple TVs and more than a hundred other television brands. And you can get one for only $24.97. That’s just two-thirds the price of a replacement sixth-gen Siri Remote from Apple.
November 24, 1999: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs gets another feather in his cap when Toy Story 2, the sequel to the 1995 Pixar hit, debuts in theaters. It goes on to become the first animated sequel in history to gross more than the original.
While more a piece of Steve Jobs history than Apple history, the release of Toy Story 2 caps a spectacular year for Apple’s interim CEO.
★★★★☆
Ugreen’s DH2300 and DH4300 Plus are network-attached storage devices for people who don’t want to handle the complexity associated with a NAS. They offer tons of local storage, simple setup and a price that makes ditching cloud subscriptions far more appealing.
I wanted a simple setup, since my family would use the NAS for backing up their devices and photos. So I tested both the Ugreen NASync DH2300 and the 4300 Plus to see how well they work.
A Black Friday deal makes this the best time to buy the iPad 11, the latest version of Apple’s entry-level tablet. You can take advantage of a sweet discount that takes $75 off the tablet’s usual price of $349. The 21%-off sale drops the entry-level tablet with an A16 processor to just $274, in (almost) any color you like.
The budget iPad, which launched this year, offers solid performance for tasks like surfing the web, streaming videos and handling email. Plus, it comes with a welcome boost over the iPad 10’s base level of storage.
It’s a great iPad for everyday users. Don’t hit snooze on this deal, though — this limited-time iPad deal could end at any time.
If you value intuitive design and smart learning tools, the Qlango language learning app might be your new favorite way to tackle a foreign language. This gamified app offers lifetime access to a whopping 71 languages for just $27.97 (regularly $119.99).
Yup, with just a one-time payment, a world of international vocabulary is available at your fingertips.
November 23, 2010: An early Apple-1 computer manufactured in 1976, complete with its original packaging and a letter signed by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, sells for $210,000.
At the time, it ranks as the most expensive personal computer ever sold at auction. That makes sense, because it’s an incredibly rare find. The working Apple-1 is thought to be one of only approximately 50 still in existence.
Apple’s iOS 27 developers have reportedly been tasked with bringing to iPhone a feature many users have asked for, and every one actually wants. And it’s not AI. No, it seems the focus of the next major upgrade will be on removing bugs and improving the performance of the operating system.
The same supposedly goes for the next major version of macOS, iPadOS and other Apple OSs.
This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: The latest rumor about Apple CEO Tim Cook‘s retirement says he could step down as early as next January. We discuss the likelihood of that, and Apple’s succession plans, as we debate the company’s future.
Also on The CultCast:
Listen to this week’s episode of The CultCast in the Podcasts app or your favorite podcast app. (Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review if you like it!) Or watch the video live stream, embedded below.
November 22, 2005: Two-and-a-half years after opening its virtual doors, the iTunes Music Store enters the list of top 10 U.S. music retailers. While iTunes sales numbers can’t yet match the selling power of established retail giants like Walmart, Best Buy and Circuit City (or fellow tech company Amazon), this milestone nonetheless represents big news for Apple — and digital music distribution as a whole.
Phone addiction is real. Constant iPhone use can literally change the makeup of your brain. Sure, people waved similar panic flags about the television, the radio and even the novel, but those were easily left at home. You carry the internet with you, and it’s constantly blasting a firehose of content, everywhere you go.
Luckily, you can make your iPhone less addictive.
If you feel the impulse to unlock your iPhone at every empty moment, or scroll through an app when you feel like you should be getting to bed, here are my tips for making your iPhone a bit more boring. And that, in turn, will help you curb your phone addiction.