John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
iMac and MacBook updates tend to happen on a fairly predictable cycle that isn’t determined by Apple so much as it is by the release of suitable new Intel chips. Since Intel leaks info about upcoming chips a lot more than Apple leaks about upcoming products, this makes it a fairly easy thing to predict when updated Apple laptops and desktops are going to come down the pipeline.
Now Intel has gone and leaked a load of dates on when consumers can expect to see the oft-delayed Ivy Bridge quad-core desktop and mobile processors landing on shelves: April 29th. Don’t expect new MacBooks or iMacs until then.
In Norwegian, Siri means "beautiful woman who leads you to victory."
Most people seem roughly pretty happy with Siri, but you’ve got to admit: the name is a little bit un-Apple-like. Modern Apple product names tend to be strongly evocative of what the product actually does, or what it looks like. The iPod, for example, looks like something out of Kubrick’s 2001. iCloud stores your documents in the cloud. The iPad is a digital pad of paper. And so on. Compared to Apple’s usual flair for product names, Siri’s name isn’t self-explanatory.
Looks like Steve Jobs agreed. He reportedly wasn’t happy with the name Siri, but couldn’t ever figure out a better name before the iPhone 4S launched.
Technically, this is the most your new iPad's battery should ever be charged.
Last week, Dr. Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies discovered that when he charged his new iPad, it continued to draw current long after iOS reported its lithium-ion polymer battery as being 100% charged.
Doing some experiments, Dr. Soneira discovered that if allowed to charge until the point where the 10W charger stopped drawing full current from the mains, his iPad could last 11.6 hours on a single charge, compared to just 10.4 hours if he unplugged it the second it reached 100%.
Why does the new iPad do this? Dr. Soneira believes that it’s a bug in the way the new iPad reports its battery charge. Apple has since spoken out and called it a “great feature” in iOS. But what the heck is really going on?
The truth is more complicated. Apple’s being disingenuous calling this a “feature” of iOS. In fact, technically it harms your new iPad’s battery. That said, it’s certainly not a bug, as Dr. Soneira emphatically suggests. Rather, this is the way all gadget batteries charge. To understand why this is, and how you can maximize your device’s battery life and longevity, you first need to understand a little bit about how batteries charge.
Do you like the pull-to-refresh feature found in many popular iOS apps? Well, you might want to prepare to see it go the way of the dodo, as Twitter is now trying to patent it.
Zynga hated the game ex-OMGPOP dev made for his wife, so he told them to get bent.
Zynga — the publisher of some of your favorites games on iOS and Facebook — is a pretty scummy company, well known for ripping off other companies’ games wholesale and then having their own employees vote it up in the rankings. Sleazy!
So when they purchased OMGPOP, the company behind the wildly addictive and stupendously successful iOS and Android game Draw Something, eyebrows arched all over the blogosphere. Surely it was only a matter of time before Draw Something transformed from a good-natured game of remote Pictionary into something that makes babies’ brains into slurpees. How long until evil struck OMGPOP? Less than a week!
Don't expect Harry Potter or Near-Dead Dumbledore to appear on the iBookstore.
J.K. Rowling’s enormously successful Harry Potter series is about an incompetent orphan who lucks his way through a series of magical adventures despite being essentially inept. Tens of millions of people — myself included! — have enjoyed them over the course of the last decade, but only in dead tree form. Bizarrely, Harry Potter has never officially come to e-books up until now.
Of course, no longer. As one last magical trick, Harry Potter has made the jump to a number of e-book stores, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google and Sony. The only company left out? Apple’s iBookstore.
This video is old — it hails from the original iPad’s 2010 debut — but it’s still a gorgeous piece of eye candy: a 3D, CGI tour through 35 years of Apple product design. Absolutely stunning.
On “Them, Robot”, last Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons, Mr. Burns briefly pulled out his iPad and gave us all a quick glimpse of his homescreen. So what kind of apps does an old coot like Burns download? Medical apps like Am I Alive and Google Naps, home automation apps like Trap Door and games like Ukelele Hero and Captain Billy’s Whiz-Bang.
My favorite, though? Angry Burns. Fox should actually make that game happen.
This image of the NGC 3190 Galaxy is the one Apple altered for Mountain Lion.
Back when OS X Lion first came out, amateur and pro astronomers alike noted with bemusement that Apple had used their new operating system as an excuse to alter the Universe according to their whim. Most notably, when picking a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy as OS X Lion’s default wallpaper, Apple photoshopped several stars and an entire separate galaxy out of the picture.
When Apple debuted the next version of OS X, Mountain Lion, with a brand new galactic image as the default wallpaper, we wondered if Apple had done it again. As it turns out, they have.
The likelihood of Apple significantly expanding the size of the next iPhone to make way for a bigger display is pretty laughable, but LTE seems like a lock for the next iPhone. That’s why we’ve got a good feeling about a new report that says that while the next iPhone will be truly 4G in every sense of the term, the biggest change to the overall form factor of the device will be a new micro dock connector.
Apple stock just keeps going up, up, up… except when some computer goes bananas, starts screaming “SELL SELL SELL” and all of Wall Street panics. Which is pretty much what happened earlier today, when Apple stock lost 9% of its value in just a blink of an eye.
Way back in September, we told you about a “forthcoming” mod by U.K. based iPatch that would turn the Apple logo on the back of your iPhone into a glowing cutout illuminated by the back of the display, just like on a MacBook. iPatch promised the mod would cost around $160 and be available in about a month.
Well, six months later, and we still don’t have glowing iPhones, but the guys at iPatch are still apparently tinkering with their perpetually imminent mod, and have now shown off how it will allow them to make a miniature torch out of the headphone jack. The iPatch guys talk about how you could then use transparent earbuds to make glow-in-the-dark headphones, but I think they’re missing the true potential here. Can anyone say “laser pointer”?
When we saw Nokia’s 808 PureView at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we were grudgingly — but decidedly — impressed. Nokia’s 41MP+ camera phone seemed like a joke at first blush, but using satellite imaging technology and pixel oversampling, Nokia has managed to get SLR-quality shots out of a cameraphone. It simply blows the iPhone 4S’s camera out of the water.
But is the 808 PureView just a great camera strapped to a mediocre phone? Not entirely. Sure, as an actual device, the iPhone 4S is leaps and bounds above the Symbian (!) based 808 PureView, but if you want a great multimedia recording device in your pocket that’s also a phone, the 808 PureView comes out ahead.
One of the best D&D games ever is heading to iPad.
One of my favorite games of all time is the sprawling Advanced Dungeons & Dragons based RPG, Baldur’s Gate II. Featuring over 200+ hours of content, the game sees your character raised from a hero to a god as he takes on vampires, Beholders, dragons and drow. It’s the closest thing to a real nerds-and-basement tabletop RPG session you’ll ever have on a computer, and in the ten years since it has been released, nothing else has come close to its scope or its writing, and since all of the game’s levels were hand-painted, it still even looks pretty good.
Now Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II are coming to the iPad. Excuse me while I tear off my clothes, smear myself in vasoline and go absolutel bananas.
iOS users in Germany will no longer see iCloud emails pushed to their devices thanks to Motorola. Photo: Apple
Sure, iCloud’s convenient, but how safe is your data? No need to be alarmed: it’s actually about as well secured as it can possibly be, as long as you’re not an idiot.
It might not be an issue for you, but some users who have purchased new iPads have found that the magnets of their existing cases won’t turn the display on and off. This doesn’t just go for third-parties, either: even some old Smart Covers won’t turn the screen off.
What the heck’s going on? As it turns out, there’s a small change in the way the new iPad that only applies to magnetic cases: polarity now counts.
The Father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, could also have been the godfather of OS X
Built upon the DNA of NeXT OS, OS X is already one of the most well known Unix-based operating systems, but it could have been supercharged if the father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, had accepted a job offer from Steve Jobs back in 2000.
Now that Apple’s brought LTE to the iPad, it seems a certainty it’ll come to the next iPhone in October as well. Lurking deep in the iOS 5.1 plist files, though, may be proof that Apple’s already building support for LTE into their mobile operating system. Or it might just be more confusion over what 4G actually means: LTE or HSPA+.
Give most elderly people an iPad and even if they are not tech savvy, they suddenly just get it. Unfortunately, not so for this guy from a German comedy show, who puts his iPad’s Gorilla Glass coating and liquid damage indicators to the test by using his brand new tablet as a chopping board. His daughter’s expression at the end pretty much covers the same surge of horror I feel at the idea of using my new $829 iPad Wi-Fi + LTE for similar ends.
Despite the promise of royalty-free licensing, Nokia is still against Apple's nano-SIM proposal.
Sandwiched between two layers of Gorilla Glass, your iPhone’s innards are a thickly packed tissue of silicon, precious metals, plastic and Li-Ion power cells. Space is at such a premium inside an iPhone that literally every milimeter counts, which is why Apple is always at the forefront of technologies that will make a critical component just a little smaller, a little thinner.
Foremost among these is the venerable SIM card. Apple first managed to reduce the physical footprint of the SIM card with the iPhone 4 with the micro SIM, and now they want to do it again with the nanoSIM.
The only problem? The rest of the industry doesn’t like the nano SIM, and now Nokia is speaking out against it.
It looks like a full battery, but with your new iPad, looks can be deceiving. Photo: Apple
It’s a well known fact that the new iPad takes significantly longer to charge than the iPad 2. You can chalk that problem up to the fact that the new iPad has approximately 70% more battery in the same form factor than the iPad 2, requiring almost twice as long to charge. Consequently, the iPad has gone from being something you could charge up in just a few hours to a tablet that needs all night to charge to 100%.
But you shouldn’t stop charging your iPad at 100%. No sirree bob. If you want the most battery life from your new iPad, you should keep the device plugged in for at least an hour after it reports full. Why? The iPad battery gauge lies.
The Boostcase Hybrid is a battery case that's only bulky when it's charging your iPhone.
The iPhone gets great battery life, but we no longer live in the era of simple cell phones with week long battery life. That smartphone in your pocket isn’t just a way to make calls, but a real humming along inside your pocket, checking email, playing music, keeping an eye on your location, accepting text messages, sucking up push notifications, running Skype and a million other uses beside. That all takes up precious charge, and the more you pull that iPhone out of your pocket, the more quickly you use your battery up.
Given the realities of smartphone power management, battery cases like the Mophie Juice Pack are a necessary evil. Sure, they double and sometimes triple your battery life, but they also double and sometimes triple the size of your iPhone in your pocket. Worse, they are all-or-nothing affairs: if you want to use one, you need to take your existing case off your phone and put the juice pack on instead.
Boostcase’s new Hybrid Case does away with all that. It’s really two cases in one: a lightweight plastic protective case that can snap onto a beefy battery upgrade pack as needed that can juice your iPhone back up. And it’s a pretty great choice for anyone who doesn’t want to juggle cases on the go.
In the desktop and laptop world, computer chips tend to get smaller over time, but with the A5X, Apple has gone a different route: they’ve actually made the chip bigger than its predecessors.
How big is the A5X? Over 310 percent bigger than the A4 shipped in the iPhone 4 and original iPad.
When you've finished filling in our 3G/LTE survey, your entry should look like this.
Here at Cult of Mac, we’re interested in building a data set which we can use to determine which networks offer the fastest and most reliable 3G & LTE coverage to new iPad owners. We’ll then use this data to report on which new iPad carrier is the best in each country or territory where it’s available.
Will LTE networks be crushed by demand, or will the upgrade to true 4G be as dramatic as the likes of AT&T and Verizon would like us to be. Finally, will most people who buy an iPad Wi-Fi + 4G even live within an LTE coverage area?
If you’ve got a new iPad Wi-Fi + 4G, could you take a couple minutes out of playing with your new, shiny tablet and help us out?
Air Display for iPad will soon give you a small taste of future Retina Display Macs to come.
Do you use your iPad as a second monitor using Air Display to wirelessly extend your desktop? If so, bet you wish you could harness your new iPad’s retina display, don’t you? Unfortunately, the functionality currently isn’t baked into Air Display, but that’ll soon change… and for the first time let millions of OS X users experiment with the hidden HiDPI mode in Lion and Mountain Lion.
