John Brownlee - page 37

The iPhone 5c isn’t a failure by any means, but even so, it’s not selling as well as most people would have expected, with sales of the iPhone 5s believed to outpace its plastic midrange sibling by as much as three to one. And while it’s true that the iPhone 5c is still selling well enough to make it the second- or third-best-selling smartphone at every carrier, it’s still a middling success compared to the iPhone 5s.

Yet maybe that’s what Apple wants. In fact, maybe Apple realized that by selling the previous year’s phone for $100 less, they were cutting into their own margins by selling what was, in design, a luxury phone at a mid-tier cost. If so, the iPhone 5c is working exactly as designed.

Facebook’s always looking for the next thing, and the service it has its eye on now is mobile news reading and curation. The social network has the likes of Flipboard and Zite in its sights with a new app called Paper.

It’s possible to make a lot of money by writing an iOS app. In fact, the top iOS app makers each gross as much as $90,000 a day from their offerings. Yet despite these success stories, the vast majority of app developers are finding it difficult to make money on the App Store, and the bad news is, it’s only going to get worse, with a new forecast predicting that less than one app in 10,000 will make money by 2018. Woof.

We’ve been waiting for years for Apple to start using Liquidmetal in its products. The company has an exclusive licensing agreement to use the space-age alloy in its products, but until now, the only thing made by Apple of Liquidmetal is the SIM Ejector tool for the iPhone.

That’s not stopping Apple from dreaming about exciting new uses for their T-1000 alloy,, though. New patents from Apple published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office suggest that future pressure sensors, like the home button, could be made of Liquidmetal.

One of the most bizarre games of recent memory is The Binding Of Isaac. Inspired by both The Legend Of Zelda and the Old Testament, The Binding Of Isaac is rogue-like game that follows a deformed naked child as he explores a subterranean world of his own Freudian nightmares to try to escape his insane Christian fundamentalist mother. I told you it was weird, and playing it is even weirder.

The Binding Of Isaac is already available on the Mac, and thanks to a remake/sequel The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth, it may — may! — be coming to the iPad as well.

If Apple makes a larger iPhone this year — say, a 4.7-inch model — it’s unlikely that they will just phase out the 4-inch iPhone. Instead, they could take an approach similar to this year’s iPad Air and iPad mini: two functionally identical devices with different screen sizes.

So what would an iPhone Air look like? Designer Federico Ciccarese of SET Solution has put together some renders of his dream iPhone Air, and, well, to be honest, it’s pretty much a fantasy. But it’s a pretty one.

In Spike Jonze’s latest film, Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with a Siri-like “digital assistant,” the titular Her, played by Scarlett Johansson.

But there’s no love lost between the two. If you ask Siri about ‘Her’, she’ll claim that Johansson’s “portrayal of an intelligent agent is beyond artificial” and “gives artificial intelligence a bad name.”

Looks like Scarlett Johansson caught wind, and now, her feelings are hurt by Siri’s harsh words.

Last year, Apple made an important change to 80 percent of their Mac line-up, including the new iMac, MacBook Pro, Mac Air, and Mac Pro, that changed the type of flash storage of each of those systems to incorporate a PCI Express (or PCIe)-based storage system. It’s a much faster technology than the Serial ATA based storage Apple was using before, but there’s a rub: it also uses a non-standard connector, making upgrading any of these Mac’s flash storage impossible up until now.

At CES this year, however, it looks like Other World Computing (OWC) has made important strides to cracking the problem. They showed off flash storage prototypes that should enable users to upgrade their newer Mac’s SSDs.

If you tried to use Dropbox this weekend, chances are you noticed that the usually reliable cloud-storage service experienced an extended outage. What happened?

I’ve got a confession to make. I don’t like iOS 7’s new app switcher. Sure, it looks pretty, but the screenshots it provides are functionally useless, and closing apps is a much finnickier and hit-or-miss proposition than in iOS 6. It’s one of my least favorite changes in iOS 7.

But now that we’ve got a proper jailbreak thanks to Team Evasi0n, there’s no reason to live with any aspect of iOS 7 you don’t like. So I’m delighted to know that a new jailbreak tweak by iOS Developer Thomas Finch called ClassicSwitcher has brought the good old iOS 6 app switcher back, without its useless screenshots and “swipe up to close” functionality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiyIcz7wUH0

During the NFL playoff game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Carolina Panthers today, Apple has posted a new advertisement for the iPad, emphasing their tablet’s creative powers and the iPad’s ability to inspire and create.

The tagline is “What will your verse be?” The notion is that all of human life is a poem, and our individual lines are a verse in that poem. Depending on your own predisposition, you’ll likely either find it a little sappy and breathless or moving, but either way, Apple is right that far from just being for media consumers, the iPad is a profound creator’s device which can be used for filming, writing, 3D prototyping, and more.

There’s also a new Your Verse microsite, explaining the uses depicted in the commercial in greater detail. What do you think? How are you using your iPad to write your verse?

When the first series of benchmarks for the new Mac Pro popped up on Geekbench in early 2013, people were initially disappointed that Apple’s Vader helmet of a desktop didn’t have benchmarks that were much better than a top-of-the-line 2012 Mac Pro.

But as we cautioned at the time, the benchmarks reflected the performance of a prototype Mac that was still six months from release, and the version of Geekbench being run against it was 32-bit, not 64-bit, all of which could result in lowered performance. In fact, we said it was likely that when the new Mac Pro was actually released, it would break 30,000 on Geekbench’s benchmarks… making it a staggeringly fast machine almost 25% faster than the previous generation was capable of.

Over the weekend, the late 2013 12-core Mac Pro popped up on Geekbench, and what do you know: it comes in at an impressive 32,912 in Primate Labs’ metrics. To clarify, that means that the new Mac Pro is over six-and-a-half times faster than the latest MacBook Air. Not shabby.

Source: Geekbench

Between iTunes Radio, Pandora, Spotify, and Rdio, do you feel as if you don’t have enough options for streaming music? Well, good news: Beats Music — the new streaming service previously known as “Project Daisy” by the most overrated headphone manufacturer out there — will reportedly launch on January 21st.

Speaking of jailbreaks, the Evasi0n jailbreak allows any device running iOS 7 to crack open Apple’s stronghold and tweak any aspect of the system.

Unfortunately, when the Evasi0n jailbreak was released, the team behind it didn’t reach out to members of the jailbreak community, leading to an initial release that didn’t support Cydia, Mobile Substrate, and had a number of bugs that could cause unfortunate boot loops, especially on the iPad mini with Retina Display.

Yesterday, Team Evasi0n released a new version of their jailbreak that not only includes an updated Cydia bundle and fixes the iPad mini boot loop, but also makes the tool compatible with iOS 7.1 beta 3 so that Apple’s latest iOS beta can be jailbroken. That probably won’t last for long — Apple is likely to close the hole that makes the Evasi0n jailbreak possible when iOS 7.1 is released to the masses — but it’s nice for the time being.

Source: Evasi0n

The Evasi0n jailbreak may have opened up iOS 7 devices to Cydia tweaks, but due to the fact that Apple’s new A7 chip is 64-bit, many of the most popular tweaks have needed to be upgraded to support devices like the iPhone 5s, iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina Display.

One of the more popular reasons to jailbreak your device is Winterboard, a jailbreak tweak that makes you change the way iOS looks. For example, you can use Winterboard to make iOS look and feel like Windows Phone, Android, or even your Mac. But because of the aforementioned lack of 64-bit support, Winterboard didn’t work on the newest (jailbroken) iOS devices.

According to Cydia gatekeeper Jay Freeman, otherwise known as Saurik, the newest version of Winterboard is compatabile with 64-bit ARM processors, and should allow you to reskin any device with an A7 chip. You can download the update on Cydia.

Via: Redmond Pie

Early in 2013, the old aluminum Mac Pro was pulled from sale in the European Union due to the fact that their pro-level desktop fell afoul of new E.U. regulations that prohibit computers from having fans that spin so fast they can cut off your fingers. Really!

Instead of opting to redesign the old Mac Pro, Apple decided to pull it from sale for a few months until the new models made their debut. Since the new Mac Pro doesn’t have exposed fans, customers in Europe can now order Apple’s super-powerful trashcan Mac through Apple’s online store, and will start receiving their units in February. Neat!

Via: MacGeneration

When AT&T announced it’s new Sponsored Data program on Monday, they raised the grim spectre of Net Neutraility by suggesting a plan that would let advertisers pay for data. What people worried about was that AT&T’s new plan would slow data connections to non-partner sites, a big no-no according to the FCC.

So what does the FCC think of all this? Asked about AT&T’s new plans at CES, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler was surprisingly chill about the whole thing: let’s just wait and see before freaking out, shall we?

First debuted in 2005, the bring-your-own-monitor Mac mini has always been Apple’s entry-level Mac desktop, but at an entry level price starting at $599, the Mac mini isn’t exactly “cheap” compared to competing budget desktops out there.

Doubtlessly, Apple doesn’t consider this a problem — they’ve never tried to compete in the race to the bottom — but what if Apple did release a Mac mini that was cheaper? Over at Letemsvetemapplem.eu, they’ve taken a crack at imagining what such a 2014 Mac mini would look like, and they think it would look a lot like a double-stuffed Apple TV, and start at just $399.

More details below, including a close-up of the concept.

One of the maddeningly tiny details of iOS that has been completely broken for ages is the fact that page indicators — those little bubbles you see at the bottom of the home screen indicating there are more pages of apps to swipe to — have been off-center.

In fact, while the indicators have been screwed up since iOS 3.1.3 — a journey of drifting that seems to have started when Apple decided to put Spotlight search in iOS — iOS 7.1 is finally set to put things right, perfectly centering the page indicators for the first time in four years. You can all stop rioting in the streets now.

Source: Marc Edwards
Via: TUAW

iOS can support dynamic icons: just look at the subtly changing clock icon in iOS 7, where the minute hands change in real-time throughout the day according to the time. So why not do the same with weather?

It’s unknown why Apple didn’t think of this first, but if you have a jailbroken iOS 7 device, you can now have a live Weather icon anyway, thanks to a new jailbreak tweak.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxuacwotoQw

Terry Cavanaugh is one of the more talented developers in indie game development right now, with his famously difficult game Super Hexagon taking one of our top picks for 2012 Game Of The Year.

One of Cavanaugh’s previous games was a Metroid-like retro space platformer called VVVVVV. It’s available on Mac, and super fun, featuring a reversible gravity mechanic that makes the game one of the biggest charmers to hit the indie gaming scene in years. And now, it’s coming to the iPhone and iPad.

One of the most popular reasons to jailbreak an iPhone is BiteSMS, a jailbreak tweak that supper charges text messaging with better messaging alerts, quick reply and more. Unfortunately, ever since the iOS 7 jailbreak came along BiteSMS has been MIA, but that’s all changed with the release of BiteSMS for iOS 7, which not only updates the popular messaging app to be compatible with Apple’s latest mobile OS but also adds support for modern devices with 64-bit A7 processors.

We’ve seen famed Apple concept designer Martin Hajek’s take on Cupertino’s possibly mythical, believed-to-be-forthcoming iWatch before, but that was before iOS 7 came along. So Hajek decided to adapt his design for the post-Forstall age.

The result? The iWatch S and iWatch C, which have not only been updated to support iOS 7 (at least in Hajek’s head), but which have taken some new design cues from the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c.

We all know that the iPhone 6 will be thinner than the current model — Apple hasn’t released a major iteration of a product yet without making it at least a tiny bit svelter — but will it also be physically bigger? That’s the million dollar question, and a new rumor says ‘yes’, and that Apple may release a physically bigger iPhone as early as May.

The iPhone 5c is not a cheap phone. In fact, it costs $549 without a contract. Apple has 0% share of the sub-$400 “budget” smartphone market by sole dint of the fact it doesn’t sell a budget iPhone.

But hey, don’t let that get in the way of Microsoft trying to claim they are outselling the iPhone in the under-$400 market, which is sort of like saying that Louis Vuitton is outselling Apple in designer clothes.