Do you live in the European Union? Canada? Norway? Russia? Bad news, friends. Your App Store prices are about to shoot up. But hey, if you live in Iceland, great news: your app prices are going down!
YubiKey can make online security easy -- if it gains widespread adoption. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
LAS VEGAS — Nobody wants to get hacked like Jennifer Lawrence’s iCloud account. Everyone, including Apple, is pushing two-factor authentication in the wake of the high-profile hack that exposed dozens of celebrities nude selfies, but verifying an account login with a code sent to your phone is a total pain.
In the not-so-distant future, we might all be storing two-factor authentication on our keychains.
Yubico is already providing eight out of 10 Silicon Valley companies with a tiny USB dongle called YubiKey that securely verifies an employee’s online identity. You just plug it into a computer and tap it when it’s time to log in. Now that Gmail has started supporting YubiKey on the front end, anyone can use it as the second verification step for getting into their inbox.
Elio Motors' three-wheeler is easy on the eyes -- and the wallet. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo:
LAS VEGAS — It’s hard to say what’s most amazing about Elio Motors’ three-wheeled car: its sexy frame, its extreme fuel efficiency or its jaw-dropping $6,800 price tag.
That princely sum — a little less than a 12-core Mac Pro costs — gets you a sleek two-seater that looks like something you’d see in a sci-fi flick. It’s got two wheels up front, one in back and a built-in holder for your iPad.
And on the International CES show floor here, Elio’s got a team of breezy boosters who tout its many forward-looking features with the quick-witted humor of the best car salesmen.
“For $6,800, we ought to charge you for the air in the tires,” Elio Motors rep Don Harris told Cult of Mac when we asked if the iPad was included in the purchase price.
By our calculations, Facebook's $19 billion investment in WhatsApp works out at $27.14 per user. Photo: WhatsApp Photo: WhatsApp
WhatsApp has come a long way from its early days, when creators Jan Koum and Brian Acton were inspired to create a cross-platform messenger app by Apple’s addition of push notifications to iOS 3.0.
Having been snapped up by Facebook for a cer-azy $19 billion almost a year ago, the popular app has now announced a personal record-breaking 700 million monthly active users — a whole 100 million more than were using the service back in August.
iOS 8 adoption might not be breaking records for Apple, but it's way ahead of the competition. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo: Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
iOS 7, meanwhile, fell 3 percentage points to 29 percent of the total active iOS user base, while earlier versions of the OS now hover around 4 percent. (Yes, we know those numbers add up to slightly more than 100 percent: it’s likely due to rounding-up the figures involved.)
The Archt one wireless speaker uses patented technology to fill a room with sound. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo:
LAS VEGAS — With its wide base and gently sloping sides, the Archt one speaker looks a little like an egg pod from Alien or the business end of a bomb.
Its outer shell is sleek black plastic, with a flat ring around the top that gives it a space-age feel. If the killer looks aren’t enough to grab your attention, the speaker’s ground-thumping bass will.
“It gets really loud,” Archt CEO Evan Foo told Cult of Mac.
While the all-in-one wireless speaker is certainly loud — it was ballsy enough to cut through the background noise here at the International CES trade show — the goal is to deliver CD-quality sound, no matter the source of the audio.
The standing desk gets HealthKit. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac
LAS VEGAS — I’ve had a standing desk for two years now, and while it’s practically the greatest piece of furniture to ever enter my life, I somehow forget to actually stand at it while working.
HumanScale is all too familiar with lazy people like me using their ergonomic desks without reaping the full benefits, so the company teamed up with Detroit startup Tome to create a standing desk solution called OfficeIQ that syncs with HealthKit to tell you when you’re being too damn lazy.
Will the iPad rebound in 2015? Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Apple did amazing things in 2014, but when it comes to growth, the iPad wasn’t exactly a blockbuster success. In fact, they’ve been slumping. Although Cook views slowing iPad growth as a “speed bump,” iPad upgrades are inarguably closer to the upgrade rate of laptops than smartphones.
Cook’s optimistic. “Because we’ve only been in the market for four years, we don’t know how long the upgrade cycle will be for people,” Cook said during the October earnings call. “So that’s a difficult thing to call.”
So what does 2015 hold for the iPad? Sadly, it’s not clear.
Forget the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One — wouldn’t you rather play your PC games in your living room? Razer’s new Android-powered Forge TV allows you to do just that, thanks to a new technology called Cortex: Stream, which beams games from your PC to your television.
One of the biggest reasons why many app developers continue to snub Android is piracy. The platform’s “open” approach, which allows applications to be downloaded from third-party sources and installed manually, makes it incredibly easy for users to circumvent Google Play and obtain paid apps completely free.
Piracy on Android is so rampant right now that just 5 percent of installs of Monument Valley — one of the best mobile games of 2014, which is currently priced at $3.99 in the Play Store — have actually been paid for.