Cult of Mac

Cloud storage is an essential tool these days. But unfortunately, it can cost sky-high prices (see what we did there?). So we rounded up three incredible price drops on top-tier cloud storage solutions, including options for 2, 5 and a mind-boggling 10 terabytes of storage. We’re not even sure how to use that much storage, but at more than 90% off, we’re pretty sure you can afford it.

Apple is removing all 181 vaping-related apps from the App Store. This is the result of mounting health concerns about the impact of e-cigarettes.

At least 42 people have died as the result of vaping-related lung illnesses. Apple, it seems, does not want to be in any way responsible for contributing to any more.

This week on The CultCast: Everything you need to know about the new 16-inch MacBook Pro! Plus, our first impressions of this hot new machine. And we discuss Disney+, and why it may beat Netflix and Amazon as the best streaming service today.

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.

The money Apple earns from advertising could rise to a whopping $11 billion a year by 2025, one analyst says.

Cupertino currently rakes in around $2 billion a year from ad revenue. The recent launch of Apple TV+ provides an opportunity for that to skyrocket over the next six years.

But will Apple really take advantage of it?

Fortnite’s latest crossover sees Star Wars stormtroopers invading the game for the first time. Players will also see a Star Destroyer hovering above the Battle Royale map.

The event celebrates today’s release of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, the newest title from EA Games. And if you plan to pick that up, you could get Fortnite’s new stormtrooper outfit free.

Apple has hired a pro-Trump lobbyist to lobby on its behalf to help it avoid tariffs.

Jeffrey Miller was vice finance chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee prior to becoming a fundraiser for President Trump’s reelection campaign.

It’s Friday, which means that the weekend is almost here, and — more important — new episodes of the top Apple TV+ shows are up.

As expected, Apple debuted episodes of See, The Morning Show and For All Mankind at midnight Eastern time. Here’s what you can expect in this week’s episodes.

The Mophie Juice Pack Access for the iPhone 11 extends the battery life of Apple’s latest handset while also protecting it. This hard case leaves the iPhone’s Lightning port available, while also letting you charge you phone with your MacBook’s cable.

Discover if this is the right iPhone 11 battery case for you in our hands-on review.

Influencer Andrew Levitt and friends spent a summer week recreating Apple’s famous wallpaper landscapes for the Mac operating systems.

Not long after, Apple released macOS Catalina. What was finished business now had a loose end.

Apple will beat out Samsung and Huawei in 5G handsets next year, according to a forecast by industry analysts. This despite accusations by some critics that not putting 5G in the iPhone 11 would put Apple far behind its rivals.

The Escape key is pretty essential to the Mac. You can use it to, well, escape from the current window/view/text field. You can use it to dismiss some dialog boxes. It can even be used to force-quit an unresponsive app. And that’s before we get to the Vim text editor, which is as dependent on the Escape key as Jony Ive is on new kinds of aluminum. So why did Apple remove the physical MacBook Pro Escape key when it introduced the Touch Bar?

Apple made that move, much to the despair of some users, back in 2016. Now, in the new 16-inch MacBook Pro, the Escape key is back. But what if you have a perfectly good previous-gen MacBook Pro? Are you really going to spend close to $3,000 just to get your Escape key back? No, you are not. Instead, you are going to repurpose the Caps Lock key, and turn it into an Escape key.

Apple News+ has been struggling to ramp up its subscriber numbers since launching in March, according to a new report that claims growth has been stuck in neutral for months.

News came out this morning that Apple is considering bundling services like Apple Music, Apple News+ and Apple TV+ together for a monthly fee. At this point, the company might need to do that to get more people onto the Apple News+ platform in order to make it worthwhile for publishers.

Anxious influencers worldwide opened their Instagram feeds to a new reality today: the “like” tally on their posts won’t be seen by their followers.

Instagram started removing public-face “likes” this summer as a test in a few countries. The test is now global and Instagram took to Twitter this morning in hopes of reassuring content creators who make money off their posts.

The new 16-inch MacBook Pro launched yesterday, and by all accounts, it’s fantastic. But it arrives at a time when the MacBook (Pro or otherwise) is no longer the default choice for a portable Apple computer. Regular readers will know that several Cult of Mac writers use an iPad Pro as their main machine. Killian, Ed, Ian and I all ditched the Mac awhile ago in favor of iOS.

And I haven’t bought a Mac since 2013. It was a MacBook Air that has since moved on. The only Mac I still own is a 2010 iMac. And yet I have already ordered the new MacBook Pro. Why? What changed?

The flip phone is back, baby! A vastly updated — and very expensive — 2019 Motorola Razr uses a flexible display to make an Android-based smartphone with the same basic design as the iconic handset of 2004.

It’s another option in the growing selection of foldable phones — a formfactor Apple is also considering.

Police arrested nine suspects in England after a raid on an Apple Store. The dramatic incident saw authorities employ a helicopter and officers on the ground during the search for the thieves.

The robbery took place in Basingstoke, the largest town in the county of Hampshire. Three thieves involved in the incident attacked a security guard, before making off with seven iPhones.

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has chimed in on the allegedly sexist Apple Card debacle. Warren criticized Apple Card partner Goldman Sachs, saying that if the bank can’t explain how the algorithm used to determine credit score works, it should “pull it down.”

The complaints about Apple Card began last week when entrepreneur David Heinemeier Hansson said he was offered a credit limit 20 times that of his wife. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak claimed something similar.

Well, here’s a reason to listen to the recommendations of Apple’s Screen Time feature! A woman in China reportedly suffered a grisly injury after going temporarily blind in one eye due to excessive strain from overuse of her smartphone.

The female patient’s retina burst from “excessive strain” after spending too long using her mobile device.

Apple today unveiled its brand-new Research app for iPhone, with three new health studies for users in the United States.

The Apple Women’s Health Study, the Apple Heart and Movement Study, and the Apple Hearing Study are available from today. They give participants the opportunity to contribute to “groundbreaking medical discoveries with iPhone and Apple Watch.”

Apple could roll almost all its entertainment services into one subscription bundle next year. News+, Music, and TV+ will be available for a single monthly fee, according to sources “familiar with the matter.”

Cupertino hopes the package will help it attract more subscribers as the smartphone market stagnates.

The latest trailer for Servant, M. Night Shyamalan’s eagerly anticipated Apple TV+ show, may just be the creepiest yet.

With music swelling, it shows a bespectacled man putting together Jericho, the “fake baby” doll that plays a big role in the series. Prepare to be unnerved!

A new Apple Music feature called Apple Music Replay lets subscribers take a trip down memory lane with a look back at their favorite music from 2019 so far.

The feature is similar in concept to Spotify’s Wrapped feature — but with an important difference.

The electrocardiogram built into recent Apple Watch models isn’t likely to give wearers false notifications that they have atrial fibrillation, a potentially dangerous heart condition. A clean bill of health for this wearable’s ECG is the conclusion of a study involving over 400,000 participants that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

A prototype Apple Macintosh used in the development of MacWrite can be yours, if you can scratch up about $180,000. It’s almost unique because of a disk drive different from the one used when this revolutionary  computer shipped.

iPad Pro fans hoping for new models before the end of 2019 are likely out of luck.

Today’s launch of the new 16-inch MacBook Pro (and slight delay of the Mac Pro launch) are likely to be the last major Apple hardware announcements this year, according to TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The often-reliable Apple analyst told investors today that new iPad Pros won’t come out until the first half of 2020 — but new features might make the wait worth it.