Cult of Mac

One big difference between the Mac and iOS is that, on the Mac, open tabs stay open (more or less¹), whereas on the iPad and iPhone, switching away to another app, or even another browser tab, can mean disaster. iOS dumps all those Safari tabs, and they must reload when you return.

For partially watched YouTube videos, this means you automatically go back to the beginning. But what if there was a way to force Safari to remember your watching progress, and reload the page to the exact spot you left off? There is now! I got sick of losing my spot in videos, so I made a bookmarklet that will save your current spot in a YouTube video. Even if you reboot your iPhone or iPad, it’ll reload in the exact same spot.

Lovingly wrap your MacBook in a gorgeous Mujjo Sleeve for protection on the go.

Made from soft felt and high-grade leather, it keeps your pricey notebook from picking up scuffs and scratches. It’s also beautifully slim, so it won’t take up too much room in your backpack.

Samsung is doubling down on its efforts to make smartphones with a folding display a thing.

During Samsung’s annual developers conference this morning, the company unveiled a new folding phone concept that’s drastically different than the Galaxy Fold. Instead of folding from a regular-sized smartphone into a tablet, the new concept folds into a clamshell, kind of like a futuristic version of Motorola’s Razr phone.

Take a look:

A relatively simple technique can double the resolution of an iPhone image. Shockingly, the trick is best executed with shaky hands.

What sounds counterintuitive will make sense when you see the steps in the video at the end of this post. It shows how a little hand movement helps make a sharper image.

Excerpted from Live from Cupertino: How Apple Used Words, Music, and Performance to Build the World’s Best Sales Machine by Michael Hageloh and Tim Vandehey.

Prologue: What were once devices are now habits

When I set out to write this book, one of my goals was to see if I could insult fifty million people in one sentence. Here goes. Years ago, before I was excommunicated from New York City and became a resident of Texas (a state so backward that someone in our town once asked my wife and me if being Jewish was like being Catholic), I lived in Florida, which is so appealing to the unbalanced that when I took the “Florida Challenge” (where you google “Florida man” and your birthday to see what kind of headlines pop up) for April 24, the first result read, “Florida man kisses venomous snake and is immediately bitten on the lips.”

Mission accomplished. Now, let’s move on.

Just a few weeks after the debut of macOS Catalina, Apple already has an update with features that had been planned for the original version.

On the list of enhancements are support for additional emoji, the just-launched AirPods Pro, HomeKit Secure Video and more.

Here’s a short list of things that are wrong with regular AirPods:

• They don’t fit in the ears properly.
• They don’t seal out environmental noise.
• Those grilles get gunked up with earwax really easily.
• They lack a volume control.

The new AirPods Pro fix all of these problems, apart from the last point on the list. And to be honest, it’s so easy to change the volume by squeezing your iPhone through your pocket, or by using an Apple Watch, that the lack of a volume control isn’t that big of a deal.

The original AirPods (and the faster, updated version) might be the most-loved new Apple product in recent years, and the AirPods Pro improve on them in almost every way. So, are the AirPods Pro perfect? Maybe …

Apple today rolled out watchOS 6.1 after more than a month of beta testing. The update adds support for the brand-new AirPods Pro headphones — out tomorrow.

It also makes watchOS 6 available to Apple Watch Series 1 and Series 2 owners for the first time.

The first slate of Apple TV+ shows would seem to have little in common — they range from a teen comedy to a sci-fi epic — but the company’s top entertainment programming execs say they are all about relationships.

They also worked hard to make this new streaming service fit with the rest of Apple.

Imagine being able to touch your iPad or iPhone screen and feeling like you’re touching metal, wood, or fur — despite the fact it’s just a flat glass display. Impossible, surely? Not if a new haptic feedback patent Apple has filed comes to pass.

This haptic feedback technology could complete the sensory AR experience Apple is aiming for. Slap on some AirPods and summon up some ARKit visuals, and you’d have truly immersive augmented reality.

For some HomePod owners, the latest software update really was a killer upgrade. Loads of irritated people say the update bricked their HomePods.

New HomePod features like voice recognition for multiple users and the ability to send messages and make calls might sound awesome. But having your smart speaker go belly up sucks out loud. If you previously turned on automatic HomePod updates, you might want to flip the switch and wait until Apple gets to the bottom of the problem.

Update: Apple pulled Monday’s HomePod update after owners reported unresponsive devices. If you managed to successfully update your HomePod, you should be careful. An updated Apple support document warns that you should not reset your smart speaker for any reason. You also should not attempt to remove your HomePod from the Home app.

Apple fans will start getting their hands on its brand-new AirPods Pro headphones this week. And they’ll want to make sure they don’t lose them. Replacing a lost bud or charging case is a pricey affair.

Apple’s biggest copycat nuisance, Xiaomi, is at again.

The Chinese tech firm, known for its design knockoffs of Apple products, will roll out a new wearable device next week that, by the looks of a teaser ad, resembles the Apple Watch.

Fortnite’s newest update is out, bringing Halloween back to Battle Royale. The version 10.10 release kicks off this year’s Fortnitemares event — and there’s plenty to enjoy.

Just because you’re in another country shouldn’t mean you can’t watch your favorite shows and movies. So it’s a bummer when Hulu. HBO, or Amazon says the country you’re in doesn’t support their content. With this simple tool, you can avoid that annoyance and get back to binging anywhere in the world.

Apple is reportedly going all-in on OLED displays with the 2020 iPhones. But despite the big advances OLED represent, it seems that many users aren’t yet ready to part ways with their LCD screens.

At least, that’s one takeaway from a new report which claims that Apple is putting in more orders for the LCD iPhone 11, while sales of the higher-end iPhone 11 Pro Max remain flat.

Apple is seemingly taking a mixed approach to the way it will debut new Apple TV+ shows. According to the company, it will release three episodes of The Morning Show, one of its flagship series, when the service launches on November 1. After that, new episodes will debut every Friday.

That’s a change from Netflix’s approach of dumping every episode of a new season at once. It’s also a change from Apple’s plan for Dickinson, which star Hailee Steinfeld recently revealed will debut all 10 episodes straight out of the gate.

Mario Kart Tour, Nintendo’s long-awaited Mario Kart game for iOS, enjoyed the second-biggest mobile game launch month in history. (And Nintendo’s biggest.) Across both Android and iOS, the game racked up 123.9 million unique downloads in its first four weeks.

That’s more than 5x the downloads that Super Mario Run‘s 21.8 million downloads.

Rather than having an October event, Apple unveiled AirPods Pro today via press release. This sparked speculation that the company plans to quietly take the wraps off more products this week.

A release date for the Mac Pro, fresh Apple TV hardware, and other items could be announced, one each day.

You know how when you swipe an email on your iPhone or iPad, and depending on the direction you swipe, you get a bunch of options? Mark as read, move, archive — that kind of thing. But how do you customize these options? And how do you access the ridiculously well-hidden option to archive and/or delete?

Let’s find out.

The first Apple TV+ reviews are out — and, broadly speaking, they’re not great. Critics generally slammed the marquee shows on the Apple TV+ slate. Anyone wanting to pull together a movie poster with positive pull-quotes would need to do some serious wading through bile to emerge with choice excerpts.

That’s a shame. And while it might seem easy to write off the bad reviews — based on the just the first few episodes of four shows, all shown to critics prior to the service’s launch — the poor reception might suggest deep-seated problems for Apple TV+. It sounds like a service that suffers from a lack of vision.

Details of at least two unreleased Apple products may have been spilled by Apple’s big iOS 13.2 update that came out to the public this morning.

Apple has been rumored for months to be working on Bluetooth tracker tags similar to Tile’s. The official unveiling of Apple’s tracker could come by the end of the year, but references in iOS 13.2 may have just revealed its name.

Apple Watch could soon get some new competition from Google which has reportedly made an offer to buy Fitbit.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is supposedly aiming to get a slice of the fitness trackers and smartwatch market after ramping up its hardware efforts in recent years. Smartwatch arena Google doesn’t compete with Apple in but buy Fitbit could give the search engine giant a big boost to catch up.

Today’s release of iOS 13.2 brings Apple’s new Deep Fusion feature, so iPhone 11 owners can start taking beautifully detailed photographs of sweaters. But if you have an older iPhone, Halide has you covered. The iOS photo app’s new Smartest Processing update brings Deep Fusion-style detail to anybody’s sweater shots.

Samsung has stolen one of the iPhone’s newest features in record time. Its latest Android 10 update adds the ability to shoot “slofies,” or slow-motion selfies, with a front-facing camera.