John Brownlee - page 47

Are you looking to pick up an iPhone 5s or 5c in person on Friday? Good news: Apple and official carrier and retail partners will be opening their doors an hour early.

Although you can’t preorder an iPhone 5s here in the States, Apple opted to allow people to reserve the iPhone 5s in China in order to better handle the frenzy of the coming launch day. Less than 24 hours later, everything but the 16GB Space Gray iPhone 5s sold out, and the gold model sold quickest of all.

Apple fans are dedicated. Every single year, they brave the elements for sometimes weeks at a time, camping out in front of Apple Stores so that they can be first getting their hands on Cupertino’s latest iDevice.

Even by the standards of most Apple launches, though, the guys hanging out in front of Tokyo’s Ginza Apple Store are dedicated. They are braving a frickin’ typhoon to be first in line for the iPhone 5s.

Attention, all potential iPhone modders, casemakers, obsessives and tinkerers. Apple has just posted detailed schematics of its new iPhone 5s and 5c handsets to the Apple Developer Portal.

Get ready for a whole new way for Facebook to make navigating through your feed on your iPhone hell! Facebook is preparing to launch auto-playing videos in your News Feed… and, yup, they’ll eventually be available to advertisers.

Okay, we’ve had a bit of fun with the gold iPhone 5S, but in reality, it’s a pretty fantastic looking device… and hey, it can resist knife attacks, too. So there’s a lot to recommend the gold iPhone 5s.

If you’re considering buying a gold iPhone 5s, you might also considering throwing a few bucks towards the Juicies+ Kickstarter. They’re making a gold Lightning cable that would look absolutely perfect plugged into your new gold iPhone 5S.

https://youtu.be/6oV12xzErxg

Wondering what the new “slate gray” iPhone 5s will look like compared to the black-and-slate iPhone 5? A new video shows off the color as seen in Apple’s recently released slate gray iPod nano.

Hey kids! Overslept your alarm like we did? Well, don’t despair: the iPhone 5C is still available for pre-order, and still will deliver by next Friday, September 20th.

This is absolutely adorable. Mike McCue, the co-founder of Flipboard, bought his 14-year old son a new MacBook Air for his birthday. The kid wasted no time in setting it up, creating a new Apple ID and entering his birthday when prompted. Then this happened: his MacBook Air gave the junior McCue a birthday cupcake, complete with candle, to wish him a Happy Birthday. It really is the little details that Apple gets right, isn’t it?

Via: Finer Things

Do you remember this story, about how China’s network of scalpers were booking up all of Apple’s Genius Bar appointments en masse and then re-selling them on the black market to the highest bidder?

Well, Apple’s figured out a way to partially thwart it: they’re now asking you to sign in with your Apple ID if you want a Genius Bar appointment.

Over the past few years, Apple has always told people when they can start preording the next iPhone after it has been announced. This year, though, Apple is allowing preorders of only the iPhone 5c, and not allowing preorders of the iPhone 5s at all. And even on the iPhone 5c side of things, Apple is being a little obtuse, not actually clarifying when on Friday, September 13th preorders will begin. But now, thanks to the big mouths of Apple’s carrier partners, we know exactly when.

Good news for everyone: battery life for both the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c will be better than the iPhone 5, if new FCC filings are anything to go by.

Over and over again over, most of the pre-launch chatter about the iPhone 5c was that this was Apple’s “budget” iPhone, meant to help Cupertino squeeze into the mid-range, and especially penetrate the emerging market in countries like China by being released at a price around $349.

So imagine China’s surprise when it turned out that the iPhone 5c wasn’t meant to be any more of a budget iPhone than the year-old iPhones Apple has sold before. In fact, in China, an iPhone 5c will cost, in dollars, more than what an iPhone 5s would cost an American unsubsididized. And the Chinese are underwhelmed, to say the least.

Although Apple didn’t show off an Apple TV refresh yesterday (despite the secret shipment of new Apple TVs they got in last week), it’s still coming in the form of a software update, and All Things D has some new details on what we can expect.

Way back in 2011, Apple unveiled Cards, a new app that allowed you to create beautiful cards on your iPhone, then Apple would print them out and mail it out for you.

I always liked the idea of Cards, and kept it around on my iPhone for the last couple of years, thinking someday I might have the opportunity to actually use it. That opportunity never really came around for me, though, and I guess I’m not the only one: Apple has just quietly killed Cards for good.

For Americans, AppleCare+ is a fantastic service that takes a lot of the background stress out of having an iPhone. For just $99 and $49 per incident, Apple will replace your iPhone up to two times for accidents or damages, due to clumsiness, accidents, or whatever. I replaced a completely watersoaked iPhone 5 through AppleCare+, and a screen-cracked iPhone 4s. It really takes a load off.

Until now, AppleCare+ was only available to Americans, and was only available for iPhones and iPads. But yesterday, Apple unveiled some big changes to AppleCare+ that makes it accessible to Europeans for the first time.

With Apple set to unveil new iPhones today, we’re probably about a week away from a widescale release of iOS 7, which will mean that Apple’s seventh-generation operating system will end up dropping about a year after iOS 6. So 365 days later, how is iOS 6 doing?

Really well. In fact, according to data released by Chitika Insights, really well: it’s installed on 92% of all iOS devices.

Opera, the Norwegian web browser company that announced earlier this year that it was throwing in the towel on its own web-rendering technology and shifting to WebKit across all products has just released a new iPad browser: Coast.

According to Opera, Coast is “the browser your iPad deserves.”

It’s looking increasingly likely that when Apple takes the stage today at the official iPhone launch event today that they will actually be unveiling seven new iPhone colors.

It’s new iPhone announcement day! That customarily means a number of last-minute bombshells and leaks in the hours before the event, and this year is no exception: documentation for the new iPhone 5S has leaked out, giving us a closer look at the redesigned home button with fingerprint sensor… or, as Apple is calling it, the Touch ID sensor.

Simply put, Ona makes some of the nicest, most fashionable camera bags that Cult of Mac has ever had the pleasure of testing, and the Bolton Street camera backpack is no exception. But unlike their line-up of messenger bags, Ona’s Bolton Street is a bag for the kind of fashionable, London-trotting photog who can only carry his gear around by putting it on his back. It’s an expensive bag, and has a few niggles, but we love it. Read on.

https://youtu.be/E86uHpgWn4M

I am 100% on board this mock commercial of who will buy the gold iPhone 5S, from digital media company Andy Media. Even if the gold iPhone 5S does actually look pretty fantastic in real life, this is still largely the clientele I expect to be buying it. Absolutely hysterical.

Source: YouTube

Quick, tell me what you thought when Facebook bought Instagram last year. Your first thought — more of a feeling, really — was probably an impending sense of doom, as if a planet with the face of a demon had just been announced to be hurtling towards Earth. But after that passed and you realized Facebook buying Instagram wasn’t going to be the end of the world, my guess is you mostly just shrugged and said, “I wonder how long it will take them to mess it all up with ads.”

Well, Facebook is taking it slow. In fact, seventeen months after they first purchased Instagram, they’re only now starting to talk about how they’re going to mess it all up with ads! Thanks for the restraint, Facebook.

Are you a big user of the iOS Kindle app? If you intend on updating to iOS 7 first thing when it drops next week, you might want to update your Kindle app sooner rather than later. A new critical update has been released that Amazon says will prevent iOS 7 from messing your Kindle library up.

Go figure. Just a week and a half before Apple is set to launch iOS 7 out into the world, someone has finally succeeded in hacking iOS 6.1.4. Oh, the irony!