Apple Watch - page 32

Who needs Apple AR glasses? The era of Apple augmented reality is already here. You just might not have noticed it. Here’s a look at where we are — and where we might be headed.

Get that glimpse of the present/future, along with Apple how-tos and product reviews (including our take on one of the best metal Apple Watch bands yet), in this week’s issue of Cult of Mac Magazine. Grab your free download from the iOS App Store. Or hit the links below to read this week’s best Apple news, reviews and how-tos in your browser.

Plus, don’t miss your chance to enter our Apple Watch Series 5 giveaway. It ends soon!

If you need a charging hub that you can take with you everywhere, you want one that’s going to survive every trip. And you want one that charges all your devices simultaneously.

What you really want is the Elago 3-in-1 charging hub. It tops up your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods — and it’s virtually unbreakable. It’s also a steal at just $30 with free shipping.

“Apple is all-in on augmented reality. But where will it lead?” That’s a pretty standard view of Apple’s experiments with visual AR, aka overlaying virtual objects onto the real world, via the iPhone’s camera and screen.

But Apple is already providing a fully immersive AR overlay onto the real world, to millions of users — only it isn’t using a screen. AirPods are augmented reality. They are also a part of a new computing paradigm that Apple snuck into the world without telling anybody. This paradigm currently consists of AirPods, iPhone, Apple Watch and the HomePod. And it is as discreet and low-key as it is important.

You know how you can double-press the side button on your Apple Watch, and then wave it over a contactless terminal to pay with your credit card? Wouldn’t it be great if you could do the same with your Mac login password? Instead of having to type your password to authenticate yourself, you’d be able to double-tap the Apple Watch’s side button to do it instantly.

Well, now you can do exactly this — if you’re running macOS Catalina.

There are two buttons on the Apple Watch. You can press the Digital Crown, and you can press the side button. If you press the side button when your watch is displaying its watch face, then you’ll pop up the Dock. But what, exactly, is the Apple Watch Dock?

Just like the docks on macOS and iOS, it provides quick access to your most-used apps. But the Apple Watch Dock doesn’t work like the docks on Apple’s other devices. Here’s how to use it — and how to customize it.

Quanta Computer could stop making Apple Watches and give its dedicated assembly facility the boot sometime next year, according to sources in China.

It is believed the company currently has “profit concerns” with Watch manufacturing.

One of the defining characteristics of digital watches in the 1980s was the hourly chime. Every morning during school assembly, 9 o’clock would arrive, and with it a chorus of chimes, like electronic tweety birds at dawn. The double beeps filled the school hall. The teachers had long since given up trying to make us turn them off.

Now, you can experience the same thing with your Apple Watch. You can even make the chime sound like a real little birdie!

Frequent travelers need an Apple Watch stand that’s lightweight, compact, and always ready to go. And they don’t get much better than the terrific Wall Charging Stand from Wiplabs.

It should be an essential part of your carry wherever you go.

Seniors-focused health insurance startup Devoted Health is offering members valuable cash off the price of an Apple Watch. Devoted claims to be the first Medicare Advantage plan to do so.

The firm will help users buy the devices buy the device by contributing up to $150. Apple is also reportedly in talks with “a number” of other health insurers to carry Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch is an amazing fitness tracker, and a pretty good notification device. But it has other tricks — tricks that you maybe didn’t know about, or didn’t realize would be quite as useful as they are. One is the Camera app. The Apple Watch doesn’t have its own camera, but it does give you remote control of your iPhone’s camera.

This lets you trigger the camera’s shutter, or record a video, from anywhere in range of your iPhone’s Bluetooth radio. Why? Group self-portraits, without having to set the timer and run back to your friends in time to smile. Videos: I used the video camera function just this week to record my progress for my guitar teacher. Like I said, it might be more useful than you’d expect.

Here’s how to use the Apple Watch camera remote.

Ben Roethlisberger was hit with a fine for wearing an Apple Watch on the sidelines of the Steelers’ game last week. It’s against NFL rules for players or coaches to use devices that can transmit electronic messages unless they have been pre-approved.

References to an unreleased Sleep app for Apple Watch have been inadvertently leaked on the App Store. It’s further evidence of Apple’s plans to bring sleep tracking to its popular wearable.

John Hancock will start selling Apple Watch Series 5 for just $25 this fall.

The new wearable, which usually starts at $399, will be available to life insurance customers who vow to be more active. But you’ll need to stick to your promise of living a healthier lifestyle.

Apple’s recent watchOS 6 upgrade brought a host of new features and faces to Apple Watch. But it has also had a nasty impact on battery life for lots of upgraders.

Apple Watch Series 5 owners are reporting that their new wearable isn’t lasting as long as Apple promised it would in between charges. However, they’re not the only ones who are suffering.

Even though the Apple Watch is just a tiny little computer on your wrist, it still packs plenty of accessibility options. And one of the most useful — and accessible — of these options is Zoom. This built-in feature lets you hold a virtual magnifying glass over the watch’s display, and then scroll across this expanded view to make reading easy.

Today we’re going to see how to switch on Apple Watch Zoom, how to use it and — maybe most important — how to switch it off again.

During the past week with Apple Watch Series 5, I’ve been testing the device. Once again, I took a new watch on my family vacation to Disney World, using it whenever possible to make my life easier.

So does the Series 5, with its always-on display, live up to the hype? And is it worth the upgrade if you’re on an older version? Watch our video review, or read our full Apple Watch Series 5 review, to find out if the new watch is right for you.

Apple Watch Series 5 Review | Big Little Changes

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Apple’s wearable just received its first update since the debut on watchOS 6 earlier this month. This offers a handful of bug fixes for the most recent Apple Watch models, and unspecified performance improvements are also promised.

WatchOS 6 introduces a new Compass app (only for the Apple Watch Series 5), along with a couple of Compass complications. It works pretty much exactly like you’d expect, only with a few neat extras. You can access it from the All Apps screen, or by tapping the Compass complication on one of your Apple Watch faces. Let’s take a look.

A 30-year-old British dad and “fitness fanatic” was recently alerted to an irregular heart beat by his Apple Watch.

Chris Mint’s physician told him that it was unlikely that he was suffering from atrial fibrillation. However, using a five-minute ECG test on his Apple Watch convinced his doc otherwise.

Apple didn’t predict how important health-tracking tech would be to the Apple Watch, COO Jeff Williams said in an interview published over the weekend.

“It was very organic,” he said. “Most people think we had this major health initiative, well, we had some notions in the beginning but no idea where it would lead. And honestly, it’s a situation where we started pulling on threads and the more we pulled, the more we realised there’s such a huge opportunity for us to impact people with the information that’s on their wrist.”

The new Apple Watch series 5, running watchOS 6, can track just about any kind of activity. But one thing it doesn’t track is your sleep. Or at least, it doesn’t offer sleep-tracking in a native form. That’s left to third-party app makers. Today we’ll see two great apps to do just that. One is ultra-simple, and the other is super deep. Let’s take a look.

Disassembling the latest Apple Watch doesn’t find very much that’s different from last year’s model. That doesn’t mean there aren’t improvements in the new Series 5; they’re just not visible in a teardown, even one done by the experts at iFixit.

Did your Apple Watch’s Infograph face go monochromatic for seemingly no reason at all? If upgrading to watchOS 6 sapped your Apple Watch Series 4 of all its multicolored complications, there’s an quick way to bring back the glory … mostly.

It’s easy, but it’s not as obvious as it could be. Plus, some people aren’t happy about the way Apple changed the Infograph face’s customization options.

The first beta build of watchOS 6.1 was seeded to developers this morning, one day before Apple is set to release iOS 13.1 and iPadOS 13.1 to the public. WatchOS 6.1 beta 1 arrived alongside macOS Catalina 10.5 beta 9 which still doesn’t have an official launch date, but is supposed to launch publicly in October.

Now that you have your shiny new Apple Watch Series 5, it’s time to make back some of the money you just spent by selling your old model. But don’t take it to the Apple Store.

Apple will offer you just a fraction of what your old Apple Watch is really worth. Make a lot more by selling yours to Cult of Mac instead.