The iPhone 6s Plus is already a monster phone. It boasts a 2,915mAh battery that can last up to two full days without recharging. But battery life could get even better with the iPhone 7 Plus. And storage space? It could double.
The internet is awash with knockoff bands for the Apple Watch that are almost as good as the genuine articles.
Knockoff products are traditionally cheap and nasty, but tons of these replica Apple Watch bands are so good, they rival Apple’s own products — at a fraction of the price.
We’ve taken a tour of knockoff band land, and found that there are lots of cheap, inexpensive bands on eBay and Amazon that are high in quality and are getting glowing reviews from customers.
“My black Apple Sport band has started flaking off, while the third-party knock-offs still look brand new,” said Neven Mrgan, a designer for Panic software in Portland, Oregon who bought a less-than-half-price band on Amazon.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. We take a look at them all from 2015 in this end-of-year issue of the delightful and informative Cult of Mac Magazine. We’ve got Apple’s best and worst wins and fails of the year, the must-have apps on Apple TV, Mac, iOS, and Apple Watch, how to keep your toughest New Year’s resolutions with your iPhone, a quick trick on adding emojis just about anywhere, and our thoughts on why 2015 was actually Apple’s most important year since 2007.
Dive in with your own copy of Cult of Mac Magazine. Below is the rundown for this week.
Happy New Year from all of us here at Cult of Mac.
You could say 2015 was a product-ive year for Apple. The company entered the wearable market with the Apple Watch, released a hugely updated version of the Apple TV streaming box, unveiled the massive iPad Pro (and considerably less massive iPad Mini 4), took on tune-streaming with the Apple Music service, and made its annual update to the iPhone with the 6s and 6s Plus.
We also saw updates to the operating systems that run all those things, as well as a new desktop OS in El Capitan, but it wasn’t all great news. Apple encountered lawsuits, shakeups and investigations by countries and entire federations thereof.
So whether we ultimately decide Cupertino had a good or bad year, at least it was pretty interesting. Relive the ups and downs with this Apple year in review 2015, Cult of Mac-style.
Remember Bendgate, the massively overblown period following the iPhone 6’s release, in which people acted like Apple’s handset was about as sturdy as a slice of processed cheese?
Well, destructive YouTuber TechRax is back with a new “stress test” designed to see how the studier iPhone 6s fares against 3,500 pounds of pressure. Answer: nNt very well at all.
If, to paraphrase Fight Club, you want to see out 2015 by watching the destruction of something beautiful, check out the video below.
Quarterbacks and running backs will often reward their offensive linemen with gifts, but veteran NFL Baltimore Ravens punter Sam Koch recently gave out a particularly welcome high-tech pressie to his teammates — when he handed out Apple Watches.
It’s no secret that Japan is a big fan of Steve Jobs, which goes some way to explaining why Apple’s late co-founder is being used as a (pretty tenuous) connection to help reinvigorate interest in the country’s Buddhist Zen tourism trade.
How? Because, as it turns out, the 13th century Eiheiji temple Japanese local authorities hope to drum up interest in happens to be the same place which trained Kobun Chino Otogawa, a.k.a. Jobs’ spiritual advisor and wedding officiator.
We warned you it was tenuous!
This time of year yields more Apple doom predictions than New Year’s resolutions, so it’s no surprise that Apple analysts have been naming 2016 as the year iPhone sales finally fall off a cliff.
But according to Brean Capital, not only is Apple stock still worth buying, with a $170 price target, but investors should look through the “supply chain ‘noise'” and see the potential for iPhone sales to hit around 250 million units next year — or 7 percent to 10 percent growth from Apple’s already stellar 2016.
The arrival of OLED displays for future iPhones is looking more of a sure thing than ever, with a new report stating that Apple is on the verge of finalizing an agreement with Samsung Display and LG Display to build its future screens.
According to sources, Samsung will produce around 90,000 OLED substrates per month for Apple, while LG will produce 60,000.
Total number of smartphone displays that should generate? The report doesn’t make it explicitly clear, but it is likely to be in the region of 400 million displays per year.
Apple could be forced to add more non-white executives and directors, due to a proposal put forward by an investor who thinks the current makeup of Apple execs is “a little bit too vanilla.”
The possible pro-diversity push was reportedly prompted after the son of investor Antonio Avian Maldonado II, who owns just 645 Apple shares, asked why nearly everyone on Apple’s board of directors was white.
If you want to buy the iPhone 6s on a two-year contract with AT&T you better hurry.
Internal documents from AT&T leaked online this morning revealing the carrier plans to finally kill the two-year contracts it’s offered long before it become the first carrier to sell the iPhone.
Twitter finally resurrected its Mac app with just about everything its users have been asking for over the past several… well, for a really long time. The update at long last looks much like the Twitter you’re familiar with on your smartphone or desktop browser. It’s complete with highly requested features like GIF support and group direct messages with up to 50 people, plus a dark theme for power users and more.
“Don’t call it a comeback!” Twitter wrote in the update description. “Twitter for Mac is getting the update you’ve been asking for.”
The new Apple TV may soon get some competition from Microsoft, which according to a new rumor is considering making slimmer, cheaper version of the Xbox One console in an effort to beat Apple in the living room.
When you’re counting down the seconds to New Year’s tomorrow night, make sure you’ve got an Apple Watch nearby.
“As a piece of hardware, [Apple Watch is] far more accurate as a timekeeping device than the iPhone,” Apple VP of Technology Kevin Lynch revealed in a new interview. “With New Year’s coming, those who have the Apple Watch will be the most accurate watch in the room. There will be no question about when New Year’s Eve actually is now.”
We aren’t going to pretend we’re perfect, but that doesn’t mean we have no appreciation for the mistakes of others. They make us feel better about our own glaring flaws, and they also make for some good fodder for “weirdest of 2015” news roundups.
This year, we saw some really impressive corporate blunders as well as some head-slapping moments from Apple fans.
Aside from a few big developers, no-one much likes in-app purchases, which have long been used to ruin mobile gaming on iOS.
However, the parents of 7-year-old Faisall Shugaa probably like them less than most — after their son racked up almost $6,000 in IAP bills, including $2,200 spent in just one hour.
We’ve heard enough at this point to be pretty sure that a 4-inch iPhone 6c is coming, but how will it stack up against the last 4-inch iPhone, the iPhone 5s? Pretty well, according to a new report: You can expect better battery life, better performance and better security!
Smart upgraders know that when a major new version of iOS drops, older devices might want to think twice about updating. That advice isn’t much comfort to people on the iPhone 4s, though, who pulled the trigger on iOS 9, and saw their devices slow down as a result. Now, a class-action lawsuit is targeting Apple on behalf of iPhone 4s owners, arguing that Cupertino essentially crippled their phones with the update.
The iPhone may have fundamentally changed Google’s plans for its Android smartphone platform, but according to Google’s design chief, the iOS homescreen layout — consisting of grids of apps icons — is disappointingly stagnant.
“[The iPhone] crystallised a lot of other things that were kind of stayed even by that point, like the rows of icons, which don’t scale very well,” Matias Duarte, Google’s vice president of design, told Wired. “This idea of a tiny grid that you manually curate starts to feel very heavy and burdensome.”
We’re still waiting for an official decision from European Commission regulators about Apple’s alleged tax avoidance through its Irish subsidiary, but in the meantime the company has agreed to pay €318 million ($347 million) to settle a tax investigation in Italy.
Apple is focused on expanding into new markets, and after its success in China, it seems the next focus is on the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region.
According to analysts at Counterpoint Research, Apple saw its market share in the region climb 3.9 percent in the third quarter of 2015, compared to 2.2 percent during the same period one year earlier. Overall, iPhone shipments grew 133 percent on-year in 2015 to enter the top 5 smartphone brands in the area.
If you haven’t suffered Steve Jobs overload already (and the disappointing box office results for Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs suggests that many people have), Oscar winner Alex Gibney’s controversial feature-length Jobs documentary, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, debuts this Sunday on CNN.
An Atlanta man claims his iPhone 6 Plus caught fire when he was charging it in his home, setting his bed on fire in the process.
“There were sparks and flames,” said David Grimsley. “The whole apartment could have burned down.”
We’ve heard for years that Apple could incorporate OLED displays into next-generation iPhones, but over the past few months, those rumors have ramped up, suggesting that the power-sipping display technology could land as early as the iPhone 7.
Now, a new report buttresses those rumors, saying Apple is close to finalizing a supply agreement with Samsung and LG to give future iPhones OLED displays.
Apple fans obsess over which new features will get added to the iPhone every year, but if the latest concept from designer Martin Hajek ever becomes a reality, the new iPhone will be more notable for the hardware it’s missing.
The iDot concept packs no camera, no internet connection, zero apps and minimal distractions, so you can focus on what’s really important instead of having your soul slowly sucked away by your iPhone screen.