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Is Apple building James Bond’s car remote into your iPhone?

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James Bond takes his BMW for a spin in Tomorrow Never Dies. Photo: United Artists Pictures
James Bond takes his BMW for a spin in Tomorrow Never Dies. Photo: United Artists Pictures

Your iPhone can make payments, control your smart home, and track your health — and soon it might be able to control your car, as well.

A new patent published Thursday describes a way of using the iPhone’s geo-location capabilities to intelligently monitor and control certain car functions, based on “geofences.”

Likely pairing with Apple’s vehicle-based OS, CarPlay, the patent notes how your car could be tracked in relation to your iPhone — with appropriate signals, sent using Bluetooth LE, to execute functions like locking your car and arming its alarm when you are a certain distance from the vehicle.

Toggle Yosemite’s dark mode quicker with this little hack

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Yosemite's
Yosemite's "dark mode." Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

Yosemite’s new Dark Mode is one of my favorite new features in OS X 10.10, but toggling it on and off can be a pain.

Apple didn’t include a hotkey combo that lets you switch from Light to Dark mode, but with after digging through Yosemite’s code, someone has discovered a single line of code you can paste into Terminal that will allow you to dynamically switch to dark mode without digging through your System Preferences each time.

Here’s how to do it:

Tim Cook’s alma mater fires up T-shirt Gatling gun

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School spirit is seemingly alive and well at Tim Cook’s alma mater of Auburn University, courtesy of a, err, T-shirt Gatling gun.

The video appeared on YouTube, via Wall Street Journal Apple reporter Daisuke Wakabayashi, and shows free t-shirts being fired into the crowd at a recent Auburn Tigers game.

Two things leap out from the video. The first one: we hope no-one was hurt by what looks to be a military barrage of clothing. Secondly: was the above video shot using the new dazzling 240fps slo-mo feature of the iPhone 6?

People are bending iPhone 6 Plus display units in Apple Stores

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Bending an iPhone 6 Plus at the Apple Store is a stupid idea. Screenshot: Killian Bell/Cult of Mac
Bending an iPhone 6 Plus at the Apple Store is a stupid idea. Screenshot: Killian Bell/Cult of Mac

Apple insists “bendgate” isn’t an issue after receiving just 9 complaints about bent iPhones as of last week, and the vast majority seem to agree. But will the Cupertino company think differently when it discovers that people are walking into its retail stores and bending the iPhone 6 Plus units it has on display?

Smugglers claimed to have exhausted China’s iPhone 6 interest

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Apple couldn't be more popular in China -- among customers, that is!
Apple is likely to receive final approval for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus to go on sale in China in October.

Due to challenges receiving regulatory approval, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus has yet to make it into China through official channels.

That’s not enough to stop the New York Times running a story claiming that scalpers have already exhausted demand for Apple’s next gen handsets in the country that may one day overtake the U.S. in terms of iPhone sales, however.

The article notes that, despite the fact that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus will not officially go on sale for a few weeks (October 10, according to a leaked memo), the gray market has “already dried up” — with wholesalers who smuggled tens of thousands of iPhones into the country being forced to “[slash] prices to move inventory.”

Consumer Reports agrees with Apple: Bendgate is ‘overblown’

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Photo: Martin Hajek/Flickr CC
Suddenly everybody's talking about bendy smartphones. Photo: Martin Hajek/Flickr CC

With Bendgate causing some worrywarts to question the structural integrity of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Consumer Reports set out to answer the question: “How much force does it take for a phone to bend — and not bend back?”

The independent consumer-testing outfit took six smartphones — including both iPhone 6 models and an iPhone 5s — into the lab and subjected them to experiments using an Instron compression testing machine. The results are surprising.

Here’s what they found (along with a video showing Consumer Reports’ torture testing).

Bendgate, explained! It’s skinny jeans vs. iPhone 6 on our newest CultCast

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cultcast-phone-Bend

This week on The CultCast: Bendgate! Some say it’s Antennagate 2.0, but is there a legitimate issue happening here? We’ll tell you what we think about these “bent” iPhones… Then, we’ve used it for a whole week—catch our updated impressions of iPhone 6. Plus, why you should hold off on installing iOS 8.0.1, and what you can do if you already have. And finally, it’s not just the big screen, there might be another reason the iPhone 6 has been impossible to buy. We’ll tell you our stories from launch day…

Heartily guffaw your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the chuckles begin.

Our thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode! Learn virtually any application at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.

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Click on for the show notes.

The 5 methods Apple uses to test iPhone durability and bendiness

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Bendgate
Tests prior to launch showed the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus could have bending issues.
Photo: Cult of Mac

Today Apple spoke out on Bendgate, the international scandal that has set the world ablaze with questions about the iPhone 6 Plus like, “Will it bend?”

“With normal use a bend in iPhone is extremely rare and through our first six days of sale, a total of nine customers have contacted Apple with a bent iPhone 6 Plus,” said Apple in a statement. To further solidify its stance on not making bendy hardware, the company has laid out the five methods it uses to test iPhone durability.

iPhone 6 in final approval stage ahead of China launch

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Apple couldn't be more popular in China -- among customers, that is!
The iPhone 6 will be going on sale in China "very soon."

The iPhone 6 may be on the verge of officially going on sale in China, according to a top government regulator speaking on Tuesday.

As one of Apple’s most promising markets (which may one day even overtake the U.S. in terms of sales), the disappointing lack of iPhone 6 in China was the result of Apple incurring challenges receiving regulatory approval from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).