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This $2 App Brings Amazon Alexa to Your Apple Watch...Sort Of

An Apple Watch app called Voice in a Can is seeking to satisfy the desires of those who love Apple hardware but rely on Amazon Alexa for its home automation capabilities. As a standalone app, Voice in a Can runs entirely on the Apple Watch without needing to pair with the iPhone. With just a Wi-Fi or LTE connection you ask Alexa to control your home lights, unlock the door, or set your thermostat. However, since Apple prevents third party apps from replacing Siri, you can’t use Voice in a Can to have Alexa make calls or control the audio playback on your watch. It’s by no means a perfect solution, but it’s the best Alexa users have thus far until Amazon and Apple work out an official solution. Grab it now on the App Store for $1.99.

The Awesome Insanity of Rackmounting the iMac Pro

Do you have a powerful new iMac Pro? If so, do you want to rackmount it? No, of course you don’t, because that would be bananapants crazy. But there’s at least one company that has need for such a monstrosity: MacStadium, the Mac-based hosting provider. Spotted by Zac Cichy on Twitter, the iMac Pro rack lets MacStadium offer remote access to the powerful capabilities of Apple’s newest Mac in a way that fits their existing equipment infrastructure. Of course, this isn’t the first time that a company has laughed in the face of Apple’s mission to destroy industry standard form factors.

This Dead Macintosh SE/30 is Transformed into a RetroPie Gaming Station

When reddit user EvilAlbinoid picked up an old Macintosh SE/30, he had hopes of restoring the little guy to its former glory. But when he discovered that the system was damaged beyond repair, he did the next best thing to restoring an old Mac: converting it into a RetroPie-based classic gaming system! Check out his Imgur album for the build process and final design, and stay tuned because his next project is to give his “Raspintosh” a battery for truly portable use!

Brace Yourselves, the iPad is Getting a Notch

The launch of iOS 12 beta this week indicates that we’ll see more than a simple performance upgrade to the iPad this year, with several changes pointing to a new design that looks a lot more like the iPhone X, including Face ID, no home button, and a notch.

Automatic System Updates Coming to iOS 12

Automatic updates may soon be available to iPhone and iPad users as part of iOS 12, enabling system and security updates to install without user intervention. But the risks of having your iPhone unexpectedly unavailable may mean that this will be an exclusively opt-in feature.

Leaks Show Dark Mode, Apple News App in macOS 10.14

Apple this weekend leaked a Mac App Store preview video of a new version of Xcode, which happened to also show off new features in the upcoming macOS 10.14 update, including a new dark mode, Mac App Store video previews, and a strong suggestion that the next version will be called macOS Mojave.

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