After a brush with cancer prompted me to take my health more seriously, I began using run trackers to start my journey from dad bod to six pack.
At first, running was the only exercise I did. It helped me lose my love handles, but I ended up looking too skinny. I decided it was time to put on some muscle. While Apple Watch and other wearables are great for running, they’re not much help when it comes to bulking up. As I soon discovered, some of the best fitness gadgets don’t fit on your wrist.
Apple has become the most valuable company in the world thanks to the incredible success of the iPhone. Over half a billion iPhones have been sold since the original was released in 2007, but do you ever wonder what the smartphone would look like had Apple made it back in 1984?
Pierre Cerveau reimagined Apple’s flagship product in his neat “Macintosh Phone Concept” that takes inspiration from one of Apple’s other killer products — the Macintosh 512k.
Take a closer look:
You know something’s up at Cult of Mac headquarters when you see Leander sitting with his fingers steepled, exuding an air of complete calm.
It’s like a zen garden around here ever since I told him about ASMR videos, the strangely addictive YouTube phenomenon that turns quiet sounds into something like an aural orgasm.
Now he can’t get enough of the weirdly creepy clips — and I feel a little like a guy who inadvertently turned his friend on to crack.
One man’s astonishing collection of Apple gear is for sale on eBay right now, making an instant Mac museum just a click away for the right bidder. The auction starts at $100,000, with a Buy It Now price of $300,000 — a drop in the bucket for a certain CEO who’s on his way to the billionaire’s club.
“I would love for Tim Cook to buy it all,” said seller Steve “Mac” Abbott in an email to Cult of Mac running down his list of ideal buyers. “First it means he would want to display it, unlike Steve [Jobs], and that Apple would sponsor its own history…. Next would be a well-heeled Apple guy, and after that whoever can convince me that it can be seen. Then, ‘Show me the money.'”
Apple is such a strange and secretive company, the news that Jony Ive has been promoted is instead widely interpreted that he’s on his way out.
The Telegraph revealed Monday that Ive has been promoted to Chief Design Officer and freed from the day-to-day running of Apple’s Industrial Design studio.
This was greeted with speculation that Ive is actually stepping back. He’s taking it easy, many theorized, easing into semi-retirement. He’s already halfway out the door, and will soon move back to the United Kingdom, seems to be the consensus among pundits.
I think this is Kremlinology in the extreme. And a little perverse. Apple is often obtuse, and sometimes disingenuous or even dishonest, but I think this news should be taken at face value.
Apple has characterized the move as a promotion, and it is. Ive has been moved up into a rare position that gives him a ton of freedom. He now has the breathing room to be what he really wants to be: a pure designer.
In fact, the promotion allows him to take on an even stronger and more Steve Jobs-like role. We will see more design work from him, not less.
Google announced a new version of its low-cost Cardboard virtual-reality headsets today at its I/O developers conference, and it’s giving some attendees a wicked case of déjà vu.
The best way to check the weather is usually pulling up an app or website, turning on a TV, or simply going to a window and looking outside. But what if you had a gorgeous device on your desk that could actually show you what’s going on out there?
Tempescope is that pretty little thing; it simulates present and future weather conditions inside of a clear acrylic case.
Anyone you exchange messages with via Facebook Messenger could know where you’ve been at any point. Chatted with your boss? He could use a newly discovered hack to figure out your sick days weren’t spent at home.
Facebook intern Aran Khanna found he could figure out where his friends were going daily with a bit of code, based solely on whether he had Facebook Messenger conversations with them. It even worked with people he wasn’t Facebook friends with if he had been in the same Facebook Messenger chat group.
He calls this code Marauders Map, and anyone can use it. Luckily, it’s fairly simple to hide your location from potential stalkers.
From smartphones to the Internet of Things, Google wants to be woven into the fabric of our lives.
The company detailed some of its latest hardware and software projects — some truly innovative, some strictly playing catch-up — during the annual Google I/O developer conference Thursday.
From the iterative improvements coming in Android M to the blue-sky thinking of Project Brillo, everything plays into Mountain View’s master plan, which Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president in charge of Android, Chrome and apps described as “putting technology and computer science to work on important problems that users face” — and doing it “at scale for everyone in the world.”
Google’s goals are similar to Apple’s: Both companies are trying to integrate their products (and possibly their worldviews) into every facet of our lives to make tech personal and useful. In many ways, Google’s approach is far more ambitious.
Here are the six things you need to know from the Google I/O 2015 keynote.
Google’s first attempt to revolutionize mobile payments didn’t work out so well. Nearly four years after introducing Google Wallet, the company announced at Google IO this morning that it’s replacing its first mobile wallet solution with a new app called Android Pay, and it basically works just like Apple Pay.
Organizing the flood of photos and videos we all have is the central challenge of today’s photos apps.
Director of Photos for Google, Anil Sabharwal, took the stage Thursday morning at the annual I/O conference to detail the company’s new offering that aims to solve this problem: Google Photos.
While initial screenshots on stage looked quite a bit like Apple’s own Photos app, the functionality of Google Photos uses machine learning and algorithms to create what may be turn out to be the most useful way to store and share your photos.
The potato is one of the least colorful of the good Lord’s creations. But somehow, two French inventors figured out how the dud spud could help put color in our photographs using a process they called Autochrome.
Before brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere tinkered with taters, photographers were shooting three different pictures of the same scene through colored filters — red, blue and green — and then sandwiching the images for projection.
In 1904, the Lumieres pulverized potatoes into a starchy powder, which they then divided into three separate batches for dying violet-blue, green and orange-red. When mixed together and applied to a glass plate, the microscopic grains of potato filtered the light, creating a negative that could produce a color photo. That was Autochrome.
The rumor mill continues to churn about what the hell Apple is going to do with Beats Music. It’s been a year since Apple paid $3 billion to acquire the upstart music service and headphone maker, but we are no closer to understanding why Cupertino laid out the cash.
When Apple purchased Beats Music and Beats Electronics, it did so with a splash it generally reserves for the unveiling of a game-changing product like the Apple Watch. Since then, it’s basically been crickets.
It is clear Apple has a way to go to compete in the streaming music game against Spotify, Pandora and the other services scrambling to get a piece of the music industry pie. But what form will Apple’s next music play take?
In case you hadn’t noticed, Apple is pretty darn keen on making Apple Pay into the de facto mobile payments solution.
With that in mind, the company is reportedly set to announce a new Apple Pay Rewards Program at next month’s Worldwide Developers Conference, offering exclusive perks to customers who use the service, while driving people to return to participating merchants.
If you have more than one credit card, chances are you’ll want to put them all into Apple Pay so you can use any of them when the mood strikes, or your card balance dictates.
If you’ve got an Apple Watch, you’ll need to add them to the Watch via a separate process than the way you added them to the iPhone.
Once you’ve added more than one card, though, you might want to change the default Apple Pay card. Here’s how to do just that.
Apple Watch is one the most incredible watch I’ve ever owned, but there’s just one problem — the apps are all soooo slow.
That could change pretty soon, according to Apple VP of Operations Jeff Williams, who says Apple will give developers a preview of native Apple Watch apps at next month’s Worldwide Developers Conference.
The phenomenal success of the iPhone 6 has catapulted Apple back to the spot of “world’s most valuable brand” in the 2015 BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands list, after it temporarily lost the title to Google last year.
According to organizers Millward Brown, Apple increased its brand value by a whopping 67 percent to $247 billion in the last year, compared to 2014’s winner Google, which achieved “only” a 9 percent value increase during that same time.
Some iPhone users are getting a flashback to 2013 as a new version of the so-called “Unicode of Death” has returned to wreak havoc with their iMessages.
The security exploit, which activates when someone sends you the message in the image above, reportedly forces jailbroken handsets into Safe Mode and completely removes other units’ ability to access the Messages app.
Clear, high definition video is all about a frame rate of 60 frames per second (fps).
Luckily, your iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus can shoot in this high-speed format that will smooth out your videos as well as make the results of your slo-motion editing a much more watchable experience.
If you want to set your iPhone 6 or 6 Plus up to shoot 60 fps video, here’s how to do it.
This is Richard Howarth, Apple’s newly appointed vice president of industrial design, and the man who has to fill Jony Ive’s (calf-leather) shoes.
Ive has been promoted to chief design officer to do more “blue sky thinking,” leaving Howarth to run the legendary Industrial Design studio that has been Apple’s ideas factory and product foundry for more than two decades.
Howarth is no stranger to the studio. He’s worked there for 20 years, heading up the design of the iPod, iPhone and a string of MacBooks, among many other products. He’s African-born, London-educated and has been Ive’s second-in-command for some time, earning a reputation among colleagues as a “badass.”
The man charged with keeping Apple user interfaces looking and working beautifully made his bones by suggesting hand-painted boxes for the original iPhone.
That’s just one shimmery detail from the resume of Alan Dye, Apple’s new vice president of user interface design. Here’s everything else you need to know about the man taking over from Jony Ive when it comes to the day-to-day running of all things UI.
I’ve started cheating on my Apple Watch. It’s not that I don’t love it. It’s amazingly beautiful. It does stuff I didn’t even know I’d like. But when it comes to running wild in the outdoors, I’ve found a smartwatch that satisfies me more than Jony Ive’s wearable does.
For the past week I’ve been testing the Garmin Fenix 3, a top-of-the-line smartwatch from a company that’s made a name for itself by providing runners and outdoorsmen with some of the best wrist-worn fitness tech. I hate wearing the Fenix 3. While Apple Watch gently caresses my wrist, the Fenix 3 feels like I’ve strapped a tank to it. Yet it boasts features Apple Watch doesn’t have that I’m starting to think I can’t live without on runs and hikes.
I don’t plan to completely break up with the Apple Watch anytime soon, but I’m ditching it during my four-day trek through the Grand Canyon this weekend because there are still a couple things it needs to learn before it can truly be the best all-around fitness tracker.
If Apple’s former CEO had been more sentimental, we’d be referring to the company’s upcoming “Spaceship” headquarters as the Steve Jobs campus, according to an interesting tidbit in Stephen Fry’s Telegraph article about Jony Ive’s promotion.
While being given a tour of the rapidly advancing Apple Campus 2 site, Fry suggested it should be named after Jobs, who died in 2011 but was heavily involved with the early stages of planning.
“Oh, Steve made his views on that very clear,” said Tim Cook — hinting that the idea was discussed, but that Jobs wasn’t a massive fan of it.
Jony Ive received a nice gift for the Memorial Day weekend: a promotion to the role of Chief Design Officer at Apple, which will broaden his design duties at Apple while handing day-to-day running of the design team to long-time Apple employees Alan Dye and Richard Howarth.
Congrats, Jony!
Rumors that the iPhone 6s will be getting a vastly improved camera are picking up steam.
According to a new report coming out of China, the next-generation Apple handset will boast a 12MP camera with a special Sony sensor to improve the performance of shooting in low-light conditions.