News - page 1174

After confirming that its terminals aren’t currently working with Apple Pay, Home Depot has said it plans to fully support Apple’s mobile payments service after its systems have been upgraded.

Stealing Angela Ahrendts away from Burberry didn’t come cheap for Apple. The new VP of retail operations quickly became one of the top paid execs at Apple in 2014, and according to a new report, the former Burberry CEO has already become the highest paid woman in the U.S., beating out Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer.

Apple is planning to unveil its big redesign and rebranding of Beats Music this summer at WWDC, but according to a new report citing industry insiders, Jimmy Iovine and Eddy Cue are having a hard time finalizing deals with major labels.

Emoji have gone from cute little pictograms only teens use, to a near-universal method of expression for all languages in about four years. Instagram has been tracking the use of emoji in posts and noticed an explosion of emoji after Apple added the keyboard to iOS in October 2011.

Today, nearly 60% of all Instagram posts in Finland use emoji, while users in countries like France, U.K., Russia, Italy and U.S.A. include emoji in 40% – 50% of posts. Using a tool called word2vec that reads through text and predicts the context around a given emoji, Instagram’s engineers have combed through millions of posts to decipher the true meaning of emoji.

Here are the most popular emoji and their definitions:

If you’re like us, you’ve been playing the crap out of the amazingly addictive online arena game, Vainglory, since it came out for the iPad and iPhone, ganking enemies from the safety of the bushes, releasing the Kraken, and pushing down the lane to smash the opposing team’s base crystal to win the game.

While the development team at Super Evil Megacorp has released updates in the past, they’ve just dropped the most major update yet: the introduction of a character skin system to customize the look of your heroes as they dash across the map, wreaking havoc and crushing the enemy team.

There are six new heroes with two tiers of customization out in the update today, with a ton more to come.

Here’s how it’s going to work.

An outcry from customers who found that Home Depot no longer accepts Apple Pay resulted from an upgrade to the hardware chain’s in-store payment systems.

Stephen Holmes, Home Depot’s director of corporate communications, told Cult of Mac the problem is not specific to Apple Pay. This means that nobody, including Google Wallet users, can make electronic payments right now because the company is working on its NFC terminals.

“We don’t have the capability to accept [Apple Pay] online, and our NFC is currently inactive as we upgrade our systems,” he said.

The redesigned Apple TV and its accompanying streaming service are still nowhere to be seen, but Apple beefed up its channel offerings for its little black box today, adding new icons for USA Now and CBS Sports.

The new Apple TV’s channels offer viewers access to on-demand sports, TV shows, and movies to customers in the United States, and Apple’s also added Shomi and Crave TV for users in Canada. Both new channels are available as an over-the-air update and should be showing up on users’ boxes today.

Here’s a look at what you can watch:

If you need more evidence that the luxury Swiss watchmakers are as truly screwed as Jony Ive predicted, look no further than IWC’s laughable answer for keeping up with the Apple Watch.

The luxury watch company is adding a smart sensor called IWC Connect to the strap of its Big Pilot watch, a favorite of horologist collectors including John Mayer. Details on what the fitness sensor can actually do haven’t been revealed, but IWC created a ridiculously dramatic teaser trailer for the new strap that you can watch below:

One of the most original features of the Apple Watch is the ability to send your heartbeat to a friend or loved one. With only a small fraction of Watches having shipped, however, early adopters are turning to the Internet to try and find other Apple fans willing to test out the new feature.

I can’t quite work out whether this is depressing, or the perfect hook for a 2015 update of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan’s You’ve Got Mail.

With its small screen and 0.46-inch thickness, the original iPhone from 2007 looks like an antique these days. Put it next to the Apple Watch, however, and it’s remarkable how similar the two devices look in terms of their design language.

At 0.45 inches, the Apple Watch is ever so slightly thinner, but its rounded edges, color and overall aesthetic certainly appear reminiscent of the first-generation Apple handset, don’t you think?

The iPad has had five consecutive quarters of negative shipment growth, and according to Apple’s supply chain, that’s not changing any time soon!

According to a new report coming out of Asia, Apple’s supply chain manufacturers expect iPad shipments to fall another 20 percent on-year in 2015 — and they’re pinning the blame on the increased demand for plus-sized smartphones.

Rick Smolan, creator of the Day in the Life series, has made a career out of turning complicated ideas into groundbreaking photography books. His latest book is more personal — and equally innovative. It’s a collection of photographs he made in 1977 that seemingly come to life with a smartphone app.

Inside Tracks combines Smolan’s photographs of a woman’s trek across the Australian Outback with a smartphone app that, when pointed at one of the pictures, brings the reader to a corresponding scene from a movie about the epic journey.

“It’s the best book I’ve ever done,” said Smolan, a New York Times best-selling author. “It has done amazingly well, especially for it being self-published. The smartphone feature has fascinated people. It’s an inspiring story with cool technology.”

One of the hundreds of great touches I love about Grand Theft Auto V is the way that it uses in-game smartphones as menus for added realism — giving players the opportunity of sending and receiving messages, taking photos, and managing their contacts in a way that feels real-world authentic.

With the arrival of GTA V on PC, some smart iPhone-using modders have taken this as the basis for a nifty Xcode tweak, which allows the user to control the in-game phone via a real iPhone app.

Check out the video below.

One of the biggest questions surrounding the Apple Watch has been what kind of accessories will be allowed to work with the device. Several third-party companies have already started advertising their own bands and cases, but Apple has yet to introduce any kind of formal guidelines.

Until now.

Like its iPhone counterpart, the new “Made for Apple Watch” program outlines how third-party manufacturers can make their own bands. Here are some of the key takeaways:

Apple has been gearing up to launch a redesigned Apple TV to go with its rumored streaming service, and a new report claims the new black box will also include a redesigned TV remote with a trackpad.

16 hours to make, mere seconds to destroy this huge LEGO model of Darth Vader’s Super Star Destroyer from Return of the Jedi.

If there’s anything more symptomatic of our consumer culture — aside from the iPhone and Apple Watch destruction videos out there — it’s this.

On the bright side, these folks over at Wired filmed their wanton destruction at a whopping 1,000 frames per second so you could see every little smashed brick as this plastic masterpiece hits the ground. All to celebrate Star Wars day.

Although it’s poised to win the smart home war eventually, Apple’s HomeKit is still half-baked. Case in point: hardly any smart home accessories officially integrate with it yet, let alone Apple’s own products.

Despite its parent company’s rivalry with Apple in the smartphone race, the SmartThings platform has beat HomeKit to the Apple Watch, and it makes the idea of controlling your home from your wrist look pretty useful.

Snapchat plans to start showing up in more places than just your iPhone. After introducing Snapcodes for easily adding friends from within the app, the social network is now letting users customize and print their own branded ghosts to share in the real world.

Apple and Star Wars are forces to be reckoned with. These two cultural powerhouses deliver endless entertainment and inspire extreme fandom.

Mash the two of them together and you’ve got the technocultural equivalent of an atom smasher. Or a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Or something.

Got an shiny new Apple watch but hate the band it came with? You could order a new one from Apple’s website and wait a few months for it to come it. Or if you bought the Apple Watch with the Classic or Modern buckle, there’s a simple way to modify it so you can add any strap you want.

Lewis Hilsenteger at UnBox Therapy published a new video revealing a dead-easy way to add third-party bands to your Apple Watch. The best part is it doesn’t even require a third-party connector, and you don’t have to destroy your current band in the process. All you need is a pentalobe screw driver, an Apple Watch, and your new band of choice.

Watch the full how-to below:

You’ve seen the latest Star Wars trailer like 50 times, and you’re probably still wondering, “Who is that guy under the sick mask?!”

OK, well, there are a couple of awesome masked characters in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but the most talked about has to be the three-pronged-lightsaber-wielding Sith named Kylo Ren. As part of today’s May the Fourth festivities, Vanity Fair sent famed photographer Annie Leibovitz to reveal that Adam Driver will play the new villain.

Apple Watch owners may have noticed there’s a tiny port hidden inside the groove of the bottom band connector. Before the watch’s release there was some speculations whether the port just be used for diagnostics, but the Reserve Strap have discovered third-parties can use it to recharge the smartwatch.

The company originally developed an Apple Watch battery band that used the inductive charge to transfer power. Now that they’ve had time to dissect the Apple Watch they’ve found out you can just transfer battery power straight through the port, and they’ve come up with a much more elegant design to work with it.

Manny Pacquiao is expected to have made $80 million off the very boring ‘fight of the Century’ this past weekend just off the ticket sales. Pac-Man made a few extra million on the side too by becoming the latest iPhone-loving celebrity to convert to a Samsung salesman.

As part of the sponsorship, Pacquiao – who’s tweeted from an iPhone from years – crafted his tweets on a Samsung Galaxy S6, including two selfies he posted at weigh-in and on his way to the ring with Jimmy Kimmel. Samsung also filmed an entire behind-the-scenes video of Pacquiao on a Galaxy S6 Edge. But now that the fight’s over and Pac-Man’s cashed in, he’s back to using Apple devices.

Here’s the Samsung spokesman’s latest tweet, sent from an iPhone.

Some purists will recoil in horror at the idea of covering up their new Apple Watch in any way, but based on the broken Apple Watches we’re already seeing, perhaps a little protection isn’t such a bad idea.

Whether you play sports or just want to garden without having to worry, these Apple Watch protectors will ensure your wearable remains as pristine as the day it came out of the box.

Apple’s big Beats Music relaunch might be revealed next month at WWDC, and Apple is trying to clear a path through Spotify and YouTube by strong-arming labels into killing freemium music services.

The aggressive tactics have triggered the Department of Justice to look into Apple’s business practices for its upcoming music streaming service, according to a report from the Verge, claiming high-ranking music industry execs have already been interviewed.