MacRumors' Mac Blog: Mac Apps, News and Rumors

Apple is opening a second retail store in Hangzhou, China on 701 Fuchun Road in the Jianggan District, less than three months after the company opened its first Apple Store in Hangzhou at West Lake in the Shangcheng District. The new Hangzhou location at the MixC shopping mall is set to open on April 24 at 9:00 AM local time, the same day that the Apple Watch goes on sale in China. Apple will now ...

Apple's recently announced 12-inch Retina MacBook has been met with both praise and criticism ahead of its upcoming release on April 10. The new MacBook, positioned at the lower end of Apple's notebook lineup, paves the way for the future with an ultra-thin design, one USB-C port, redesigned keyboard with an all-new butterfly mechanism, Force Touch trackpad, fanless architecture and all-day...

Job site Freelancer.com recently hosted a contest that called on designers to imagine what the rumored Apple Car might look like. We don't have any details on the car that Apple is said to be developing, so the designs submitted to the contest have no basis in reality. That said, it's a fun look at how different designers took Apple design aesthetics and applied them to imaginative,...

Grovemade today announced a new Laptop Stand, adding to its line of handmade wooden desk accessories. Available in Walnut and Maple like the company's other products, the Laptop Stand is made from sheets of wood veneer that have been molded into a curve. The Laptop Stand is designed to position a laptop at an angle that makes it easy to use on a desktop. There's an aluminum stop at the end...

All six Star Wars movies will be available digitally for the first time this Friday, April 10 on iTunes and other digital stores, Disney, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox have announced. The movies will be available to purchase separately and as a collection, and come with two never-before-seen special features. “We’re thrilled that fans will be able to enjoy the Star Wars saga on their...

A limited but growing number of 2015 MacBook Pro users have turned to the MacRumors discussion forums with complaints about user interface lag on OS X Yosemite. The lag results in slow or choppy animations and graphics across multiple areas of OS X, including opening Mission Control or Launchpad, launching full-size applications, resizing windows and scrolling through web pages. A pair of...

LaCie's new 4TB Rugged RAID Thunderbolt hard drive, first announced during CES, is the company's latest product in its iconic Rugged collection. Like all of the Rugged products from LaCie, the Rugged RAID is encased in a bright orange rubber for maximum protection. LaCie is calling its $419.99 Rugged RAID the one of the fastest HDs available on the market, with upload speeds that reach...

Despite the approach of the Easter holiday, there aren't too many deals available this week. We've had good prices on the iPad for the last few weeks, but most sales have ended, so if you're planning to buy one of Apple's newest tablets, you might want to hold off for a week or two until prices drop a bit further. That said, there are some good discounts on the Retina iMac and other iMacs, and ...

For this week's giveaway, we've partnered up with Satechi to give MacRumors readers a chance to win one of the company's $70 Aluminum Monitor Stands. Designed to match the iMac and other Macs in Apple's computer lineup, the stand has a clean aluminum design with four USB 3.0 ports built in to manage cables. The stand raises the monitor up by four inches to reduce eye and neck strain....

Apple today launched a new "Amazing Photo + Video Apps" promotion in the Mac and iOS App Stores, discounting a number of popular photo and video editing apps by 50 percent off or more. In the iOS App Store, there are 23 apps available at discounted prices, including options like Spark Camera ($0.99), ">Camera+ ($1.99), Over ($0.99), Mextures ($0.99), Word Swag ($1.99), Union ($1.99), and Juxtap...

Macphun is launching an early preview of its newest photo editing app Noiseless for Mac today and giving 20 MacRumors readers the chance to win a copy of the complete Pro version of the software ahead of its launch. Noiseless is designed to give users an easy way to improve low-light photos by removing the "noise" or graininess in those images. Noise often plagues photos taken with smartphones ...

Over the course of the last several weeks, Apple has been hiring new employees for its upcoming Apple Store in São Paulo, Brazil, and as of this week, barriers decorated with Apple logos have gone up around the store, suggesting the store's official launch is growing closer. Shared by Brazilian site Blog do iPhone [Google Translate], the barricades feature an Apple logo surrounded by dots in...

TweetDeck for Mac on Wednesday received its first significant update since August 2014, gaining several new features that have been long overdue for the standalone OS X app. The new features include support for TweetDeck Teams, group direct messages, the ability to add up to four images with every tweet, in-line GIF and video playback, the option to share a tweet via direct message to a group of...

EA today announced the first major expansion for The Sims 4, called "Get To Work", launching today. The expansion is aimed at introducing a handful of new interactive career options for Sims to explore alongside an update that allows users to create and run their own retail business. The three new careers included in the expansion are Doctor, Detective, and Scientist, with each providing...

Apple updated its investor relations page today to note that it will announce its earnings for the second fiscal quarter (first calendar quarter) of 2015 on Monday, April 27. The quarterly earnings statement will be released sometime 1:30 PM Pacific/4:30 PM Eastern, with a conference call to discuss the report taking place at 2:00 PM Pacific/5:00 PM Eastern. The earnings release will provide ...

For $24.99 per year, or about two dollars per month, iTunes Match keeps all of your music in iCloud so you can access any song at any time from any device instead of picking and downloading your favorite playlists every time you sync your device. Plus, Apple will provide you with high quality playback using 256 Kbps AAC DRM free versions of your music, even if your original copy was lower...

Deals continue to be good this week, with Best Buy offering deep discounts on a few iPad Air 2 models and iPad mini 2 models. B&H Photo is discounting some of the new MacBook Air models by $50, and there continue to be steep discounts on older MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models. We've got quite a few Mac-oriented Apple accessories available at a discount this week, including a backup battery...

Coppertino, the company behind the popular VOX Music Player for Mac, has some major announcements to share exclusively with MacRumors readers today, including its upcoming expansion to iOS, an update to the VOX Mac app, and the launch of an all new music storage service, LOOP. LOOP is a new cloud-based music locker service that will be built in to both the VOX Music Player for Mac and the...