Conventional wisdom is that while Beats has a lot of fashion credibility, the actual audio quality blows. So why does Apple want to buy them?
Rumors have swirled that it’s an acqui-hire, and that Apple wants Beats so that it can also own Beats executive Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, whose contacts in the music industry are unparalleled.
But there could be another reason, too. Apple might want to prevent Samsung from purchasing Beats.
It is often said that what separates Apple from companies like Samsung and Sony is that at Apple, design is law. Other companies put engineering first.
But that’s not true, according to former Apple senior designer and user experience evangelist Mark Kawano. Speaking to Fast Company’s design site, Co.Design, Kawano says that Apple is still an engineering first company.
The difference? Every engineer at Apple knows how to think like a designer.
You unlock your iPhone by either having it read your fingerprint or typing in a simple passcode. On Android, you unlock your device by drawing a pattern between a grid of dots.
But imagine being able to unlock your iPhone with art. Imagine painting a smiley face, or scrawling your signature, or heck, drawing a pornographic picture on your iPhone display and having it magically spring to life.
That’s just what a new jailbreak tweak lets you do.
Sick of in-flight WiFi that blows chunks? If you’re an AT&T customer, you could have LTE at 30,000 feet as early as late 2015.
Cramming something as complicated as a camera into a form factor as thin as that of a smartphone is difficult, and with smartphones getting thinner all the time, many smartphones — from Nokia’s PureView-equipped Lumia’s to Google’s Voltron-like Project Ara — are choosing better image quality over sleek form-factor by making their smartphone cameras protrude, at least a little bit.
Will Apple follow suit with the iPhone 6 if it means better image stabilization? Come on. That’s not their style. But the camera will be getting better.
When Tim Cook takes the stage at WWDC in a couple months, everyone is expecting him to unveil the latest iteration of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 8… the first major update to the OS since Jony Ive drastically overhauled it.
Most of us at this point have come around to iOS 7 being an improvement on iOS 6, but even so, there’s lots of room for improvement. And if iOS 8 ends up looking anything nearly as good as this concept video from TechRadar, I think we’ll all be very pleased indeed.
We’ve seen some incredible tattoos of Steve Jobs before, but this has to take the cake.
Yesterday, often reputable Japanese Apple rumor site Macotakara reported that like Marilyn Monroe, the iPhone 6 could be curvy.
Specifically, they said that the iPhone 6 would have curved edges, compared to the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5’s squared edges, as well as a curved display. The result would be a device that felt almost organic in the hand: an important consideration, given that, at 4.7-inches, the iPhone 6 will be more difficult for people to hold.
Today, famed Apple concept artist Martin Hajek has updated his iPhone 6 render based upon the ‘curvy’ rumor, and my god, does it look gorgeous. Check out more images after the jump.
In the past, we’ve seen at least one madman use his iPad as a cutting board. While the guy was clearly senile, it does raise an interesting point: the design of many Apple products, from the iPad to the Mac, look like they might have been inspired by cutting boards in Jony Ive’s kitchen.
If you’d like to show solidarity with the Cult of Mac in your kitchen, consider this: a cutting board made of Apple wood that is identical in shape and design with the unibody MacBook Pro. For a cutting board, it’s not cheap at $110, but on the positive side, that’s at least a grand cheaper than you’d buy a working aluminum MacBook Pro for.
More pics after the jump.
Compared to the likes of the Roku, which boasts a 1,000+ channel library, the Apple TV doesn’t exactly have a lot of different media channels. The Apple TV boasts only has around 33 third-party channels. Much of the reason the channel selection is so limited is because, unlike Roku, the Apple TV is a closed ecosystem: only Apple can release a new channel for its streaming set-top box.
Things, however, are getting rapidly better, as the above chart shows.
A new video uses an case out of China to show how a “speculative” iPhone 6 with a 4.7-inch display would measure up against the iPhone 5s, Nexus 5, and Galaxy Note 3. But how reliable is a leaked case, anyway?
So far, we know that the iPhone 6 will be the thinnest, lightest iPhone yet. We know it will pack a new 64-bit A8 processor. We know it will come in at least two sizes: a 4.7-inch model, and a 5.5-inch model. But is that it?
According to a new report out of Japan, no. Not only will the iPhone 6 have a bigger display, thinner profile, blazing fast processor, and ultra-light weight, but it will be the first iPhone since the 2G to boast an all-aluminum rear shell… and will also have a curved display. And that’s not where the curves stopped: like Marilyn Monroe, the iPhone 6 will also have curves that fit nicely in the hand.
A lot of rumors are swirling that Apple plans on radically updating its MacBook Air line-up this year. Impressively, Apple is said to be readying a thinner, lighter, 12-inch MacBook Air with Retina Display for release later this year.
Now a new report suggests that Apple will be releasing new MacBook Airs as early as next week. Could this be the 12-inch Retina model everyone’s been anticipating? Sadly, no. We’re going to have to wait a few months yet for that.
The iPod might be a dying business, but “dying” businesses for Apple are still businesses the competition would kill to have.
Apple’s iPod business, for example, is still worth $5 billion. Here’s an interesting metric to show how big the iPod still is in comparison to other companies, though. New mobile ad traffic data from Opera Mediaworks suggests that just a single iPod — the iPod touch — accounts for more web traffic than BlackBerry and Windows Phone combined.
Last month, we reported that always reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo was predicting that when Amazon finally gets into the smartphone business, it challenge the iPhone with a smartphone with as many as six different cameras. Kuo predicted that at least four of these cameras would be used for gesture control, allowing users to operate the smartphone without touching the touch panel.
We had a hard time wrapping our heads around it at the time, but now more data has come to light about how the system will work. And it sounds kind of dumb.
When Apple reveals its Q2 2014 sales numbers later today, few people are expecting any miracles: Mostly, Wall Street expects that growth will have stalled. All the more reason why Apple needs a major new product like the iWatch to give them some of their mojo back.
One business that everyone definitely expects to have declined this quarter, though, is the iPod. Apple CEO Tim Cook has himself said that the iPod is a “declining business” and sales have been dropping ever since 2008.
The bad news for iPod fans is that at least one analyst thinks the iPod business is in such serious decline for Apple that they won’t bother updating the line at all in 2014. But the good news? He thinks the iWatch will replace the iPod.
As rumors start to coalesce into likely fact that the iPhone 6 will come in two larger sizes — a 4.7-inch model and a 5.5-inch ‘iPhone Air’ — one big question that arises is what will happened to the iPhone 5c. Will Apple shelf their ‘budget’ iPhone, based upon poor sales? Or will they reinvent it when the iPhone 6s finally comes around?
Our favorite armchair iDevice designer Martin Hajek thinks the latter. He thinks that the iPhone c-series will live on, and in a stunning series of renders, he shows just how beautiful the iPhone 6c could be while still leaving room for the iPhone 6s to be the ‘luxury’ device with smaller bezels, TouchID and other perks.
More images after the jump. What do you think? Would you buy an iPhone 6c that looks like this?
Pretty much every Apple product has cannibalized sales from another one: the MacBook cannibalized the Mac, the iPhone cannibalized the iPod, the iPad cannibalized the MacBook, and the iPad mini cannibalized the iPad Air.
On its part, though, Apple has always been cavalier about cannibalizing its own sales. In February, 2013, Tim Cook told investors that “if we don’t cannibalize, someone else will.” Which is why Cupertino is unlikely to be worried about analyst concerns that a larger iPhone 6 could cannibalize sales of the iPad mini.
Streaming media services that want to sell subscriptions to users of their apps on the iPhone or iPad have to make a deal with the proverbial devil: if they want to sign up customers on an iOS device, they have to give Apple a 30% cut of the sale.
For music subscription services like Rdio and Spotify, where the margins are razor thin, giving up that 30% cut is enough to turn a subscription from a profit to a break-even proposition. So when a company goes this route, it’s easy to assume they are hurting.
By this logic, Beats Music — the new subscription music service launched in January — is hurting.
So far, the consensus is that while we will see a 4.7-inch iPhone 6 in September, we will have to wait until the holidays, or even later, to see the rumored 5.5-inch model. The culprit, claim reports, are those ever pesky “yields,” but what does that mean? Why is a 5.5-inch iPhone 6 so much harder to make than a 4.7-inch one?
A new report out of Taiwan sheds some light on the matter. The issue apparently is that the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 is meant to be super thin… even thinner than the 4.7-inch. And that requires perfecting a very special kind of battery.
Do you have an ancient first-gen iPod lying around? A candy-shelled iMac G3? An iPhone 2g? Heck, even a vintage Macintosh SE, or working Apple I?
Good news. Starting today, Apple’s retail stores will accept any of its old products for recycling, and if they think they can resell it, you’ll even get some store credit (although you may want to hold off on trading in that Apple I).
If you’re the owner of a jailbroken iOS device, a new tweak can give you a wealth of better power down options… and even graft iOS 7.1’s new power down slider onto stock iOS 7, or give you back iOS 6’s power-off slider. Keen!
First unveiled in iOS 6, Apple Maps has been known to distort reality before, but can it conjure a mythical prehistoric beast from the waters of Loch Ness?
Cryptozoologists are saying yes. They are claiming that Apple Maps has finally located the elusive Loch Ness Monster!
Wall Street consensus is that when Apple announces its Q2 2014 quarterly earnings on Wednesday, Apple’s year-over-year iPad numbers won’t look good. On the low end, at least one Wall Street analyst says that Apple will have sold 23% fewer iPads this year than last year in the same quarter; on average, Wall Street expects Apple’s iPad sales to have declined 0.7% year-over-year.
How can this be? This is the year that Apple unveiled the Retina iPad mini and the beautifully redesigned iPad Air, after all. How is it possible that these iPads can be selling worse than the inferior iPads a year ago?
Ex-Apple exec Jean-Louie Gassée has a theory, and it’s not one that Apple fans are going to be happy to hear: the iPad is a big tease, and fundamentally less useful than both a smartphone or a laptop.
Every aspect of Facebook’s entire business is essentially designed to target ads. Is anyone surprised, then, that the social networking giant intends on launching its own mobile ad network, similar to Apple’s iAds?
