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Apple Music Connect is like another version of Apple’s failed Ping service. It’s being promoted as a way to keep in touch with your favorite artists, but man is it impersonal.

My Connect page is full of bland PR-style stuff and links to buy music from artists I’m following. There’s just not enough quality posts in there to justify checking it each day.

Until now. Jonathan Poritsky has a fantastic idea over at his music blog: why not follow the folks on Apple Music who actually share and curate music? Follow Julie Adenuga, Zane Lowe, or any of the genre or curator profiles hidden in Apple Music.

These are the folks that are sharing amazing music. Here’s how to follow them.

Let’s be clear: It is incredibly dangerous to do anything with your phone while you’re driving. You shouldn’t be texting, checking your mail, or swiping through Tinder when you should be focused on all of the people and giant, dangerous machines around you.

But Toyota knows that despite all of the warnings and common sense, some people are just going to chance it anyway. So a new radio ad it’s running in Sweden is taking the choice out of their hands.

You can see the promotional video about the ad below.

Along with releasing the first ever public beta of iOS 9, Apple has also opened up OS X El Capitan to the public for beta testing as well.

Developers have been toying around with Apple’s latest iOS 9 betas for over a month now, but starting today, everyone can download and install the latest iOS 9 beta, even if you’re not a developer.

Another day, another iOS beta. Two weeks after Apple released iOS 9 beta 2, here arrives iOS 9 beta 3 for developers. If you haven’t already yet, go download it on your iPhone and iPad. Most notably, this is the first iOS 9 beta that includes support for Apple Music and the redesigned Music app. However, iOS 9 beta 3 brings many other changes and improvements like Apple News and even a photo album just for your selfies. Take a look.

Jay Z’s music service, Tidal, is still trying to keep up with Apple Music, but instead of offering a new differentiating feature, the music streamer is playing catch up by coming out with Family plans of its own.

Apple’s beta testers usually get early access to upcoming features, but with last week’s public release of iOS 8.4, users on iOS 9 betas found themselves shut out of the new Apple Music service. That changes today with the release of iOS 9.0 beta 3 which brings support for Apple Music to the upcoming mobile operating system for the first time.

The incremental “s” iPhones are usually considered fairly minor compared to the full-number models (iPhone 5, 6, etc.). That’s not looking like it will be the case this year, however, with a new report claiming that Apple has placed an extra-large order for its initial wave of iPhone 6s and 6s Plus handsets.

Whereas Apple ordered 70-80 million iPhones for last year’s new iPhones, this year the company has increased that to 85-90 million units, representing a new all-time record for Apple.

Nobody’s really sure what to do with wearables like the Apple Watch, and we don’t just mean in the “How does this improve my life?” sense of it. Safety and cheating concerns are putting it on a lot of people’s ban radar, and laws are scrambling to incorporate the new tech as needed.

But some researchers at Penn State are about to see if the Apple Watch might find a home in the classroom, after all.

Opening a new Apple product for the first time is pretty close to a holy experience. Part of that is because Apple spends so much time perfecting product packaging so it’s simple, elegant and secure without compromising on intuitiveness.

However, it’s a mistake to think Apple is the only company that pours thought and care into something as basic as a box. In light of the recent rumor that Apple will be working with third-party accessory makers to co-design packaging for their products in Apple retail stores, it’s clear many other companies care as well. It’s about being eye-catching without straying from uniformity, it’s about being simple yet still adorned.

With this spirit in mind, take a look at some of the other electronic companies out there getting extremely creative with their product packaging. The goal for these seems to be making the boxes as gorgeous as the products themselves – and they succeed.

Get ready to waste entire days of your life as Don’t Starve, an endlessly life-threatening survival game from Klei Entertainment, is headed to your iPad as of July 9.

Don’t Starve: Pocket Edition will only run you a tasty $4.99, and it’ll be worth every penny. I can’t count the number of hours I’ve spent walking my little Edward Gorey-inspired characters around the various environments in game, dodging spiders, avoiding fish-men and collecting tons of resources to make sure I don’t actually starve to death.

To have this sweet time-suck of a game on my iPad? Pure bliss.

The Apple Watch went on sale just over two months ago, but it appears that consumer interest in Apple’s wearable has taken a huge dive since launch week.

Apple kicked off launch week in April selling an average of 200,000 watches a day, however a new report from Slice Intelligence claims sales have dropped to fewer than 20,000 a day in the U.S., marking a 90% drop off since the week of April 10th.

You can see how interest has slowly dropped in the chart below:

Apple TV owners can finally access all of Showtime’s series and movie without a cable subscription starting today.

Following in the path of HBO Now, the company just launched it’s stand-alone streaming package that works on iOS devices and Apple TV, and its cheaper than HBO.

If you live in the Queens area of New York you can welcome your very own Apple Store this Saturday — when the latest brick-and-mortar retail store opens at the Queens Center mall.

The store itself is set to be one of the largest mall-located Apple Stores in New York.

Apple Music is at heart a streaming solution, designed so that you can listen to any of the tens of millions of songs in its library at any time, assuming you have a data connection.

These days, though, unlimited data plans are the exception rather than the rule, so you might want to be a little less profligate with your use of such a data-heavy solution.

Apple Music allows you to save your songs, albums and playlists to your iPhone or Mac for offline listening, which could be a boon if you’re watching your data cap.

Here’s how to make that happen.

My biggest gripe with Instagram is the app takes my big beautiful pictures and compresses them down to a low 640×640 resolution. It looks like the company is preparing to change that in near future though, by now storing images in a higher 1080 x 1080 size.

Apple tends to focus on internal components rather than external changes when it comes to its incremental “s” releases.

However according to a new leaked schematic, this year the company might think a bit different — with a slightly redesigned iPhone body that, surprisingly enough, could turn out to be marginally thicker than last year’s model.

With just two full months to go until the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are officially unveiled, a Chinese gadget blog has allegedly revealed the launch dates of both the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus — courtesy of sources inside the Foxconn supply chain.

If you bought an Apple Watch hoping it would help you get fit, but you haven’t been on your first run yet, maybe you need of a little more encouragement. So here’s some advice from a reformed couch potato.

The first workout is the hardest. It gets progressively easier and more rewarding from there. You just need to know how to get started.

Apple Music probably couldn’t have gotten off to a much better start. Following its launch on Tuesday, the service has been widely praised by fans and critics for its user experience and terrific Beats 1 radio — but what’s next for Apple and its Beats team?

Could the Cupertino company launch its very own music label? It has the talent, it has the resources, and it has already revolutionized the music industry once before. But does the move make sense?

Join us as we discuss that very question in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac.

Beats 1 is live 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it’s a fantastic way to get your dose of what’s happening right now in urban music.

Problem is, just like the terrestrial radio that it uses as its model, Beats 1 doesn’t have an archived recording of its shows. If you want to hear a specific DJ or interview, you have to tune in.

There are ways, however, of recording the audio stream with varying degrees of “free” and “easy.” Two of them involve some technical know how while the third will require you to drop some cash. Check it out.

I’ve had the Amazon Echo sitting on my desk for the last couple of months and it’s an odd device – and I actually think it’s pretty great.

It’s a voice-controlled, speaker-cum-shopping tube that can go in your kitchen, living room or bedroom. You use it for simple queries like, “How’s the weather?” or “How is my commute? or “What is Barack Obama’s middle name?”

Listen to me interact with this device on this week’s edition of Kahney’s Korner.

Cult of Mac’s Photo Famous series introduces you to the groundbreaking photographers featured in Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 6” ad campaign.

Brad Mangin’s friends gave him a good ribbing as “the last photographer on the planet” to carry a flip phone. They all had iPhones and couldn’t believe it took him so long to not only own one but discover the picture quality of the phone’s camera.

 
Laughter would turn to admiration in less than a year’s time. Mangin would go on to use his first iPhone to produce a robust baseball essay for Sports Illustrated and get a book deal with his iPhone pictures.

We’ve had a couple days to check out Apple Music, Apple’s song-streaming platform that launched Tuesday. It comes loaded with 30 million songs that you can listen to on demand with a quick search or a request to Siri.

But all that choice and tech power may come at a price, as some users are reporting that the new Music app is killing their iPhone’s battery life.