This week on The CultCast: From the hottest gift of 2019, to our favorite tech and travel locations, catch our picks for Best of the Year!
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It’s the last Friday before the holidays, and appropriately enough, two of Apple’s most popular Apple TV+ Originals are wrapping up. On Friday, Apple debuted the season finale for both The Morning Show and For All Mankind.
There are new episodes of both Servant and Truth Be Told as well. That’s plenty to keep you entertained between frantic bits of last-minute shopping!
If you’ve beaten the computer a thousand times on Mario Kart Tour (which, let’s face it, is pretty tough not to do), you can finally pit your Mario and Luigi-steering abilities against other flesh-and-blood players.
That’s because Nintendo has launched the eagerly anticipated multiplayer online beta for Mario Kart Tour. You’ll need to sign up to the Gold Pass to play it, though.
Some AirPods Pro owners report an unusual smell emanating from the plastic and rubber casings of Apple’s hot new earbuds. Of all things, they say they detect a whiff of … blueberries.
One expert tells Cult of Mac the aroma could be deliberate, or simply a result of chemical compounds in the plastics.
Cubasis, the audio workstation app from Steinberg, just got rewritten as a brand new app. Cubasis 3 looks just like the old version, but is all-new, and includes support for the iPhone as well as the iPad. And hopefully, this rewrite also means that in the future, updates that adjust the user interface for new iOS features and screen sizes will be supported a lot faster. It took more than a year for Cubasis to support the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, for example.
So, what’s new in Cubasis 3?
Our new book about the Apple community, The Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition, is finally available in book stores and on Amazon.
To celebrate, we’re throwing a book-signing party tonight at the publisher’s HQ in San Francisco — and all Cult of Mac readers are invited. Please join me and the book’s award-winning designer, Derek Yee, at the No Starch Press offices. There will be a big sale (and free Chinese food, too)!
In macOS Catalina, iTunes has disappeared. It’s been replaced by the new Music app, which is a version of the iOS Music app. You could never call iTunes “beloved,” but it did its job, and had plenty of power hidden inside its confusing and bloated interface. The Apple Music app, on the other hand, is rather basic. But it still lets you do one thing that remains impossible on iOS: You can add your own music to your library. And yes, it will then sync that music to your iDevices. Let’s see how.
The first trailer for Little America, Apple’s anthology series about immigrants, is finally here, and it might just be the antidote we need for these wildly divisive impeachment days.
Clocking in at just over two minutes, the Little America trailer starts with a round table discussion among immigrants from various nations talking about things you’ll only see in America. The trailer then dives into glimpses from the eight different episodes that show the uniqueness of all immigrant stories.
Check it out:
Making your Mac more productive can be as easy as getting the right app. So we’ve rounded up four of the best deals on some great software, from a useful screen capture tool to a speed reading helper, an intuitive data syncing tool and a powerful PDF editor. Each one is already discounted, but you can save an extra 15% off when you use the promo code MERRYSAVE15 at checkout.
Nothing expands the capabilities of your Mac or iPad Pro more than a good USB-C hub. Plug one in and you can connect to TVs and tons of other peripherals, including external storage.
There’s an immense variety of these, depending on whether you want portability or a huge number of ports. There are even hubs designed specifically to clip to the side of an iPad.
To help you find the best USB-C hubs, Cult of Mac compiled this list of our favorites.