John Brownlee - page 48

We have heard a lot of rumors and leaks over the last year that Apple would install a fingerprint sensor underneath the home button of the iPhone 5S this year, but what does the leaked hardware actually say?

Earlier this week, a number of images were posted showing the part for a new iPhone 5S home button and associated flex cable… and it was radically different than previous home button configurations.

But does it confirm the iPhone 5S has a fingerprint sensor? iFixIt CEO Kyle Wiens sure thinks so.

One of the problems that Apple has launching new iPhones in late September is that even though every iPhone release sells more than the release before it, they don’t actually bump Apple’s quarterly numbers as much as they could.

Why? Let’s take this year as an example. All signs point to the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C launching on September 20th, but Apple’s financial quarter ends on September 30th. That gives Apple just ten days to sell as many iPhones as possible to bump up their quarterly results. It’s the October – December quarter where Apple sees the most iPhone sales.

So how many iPhones can Apple sell in just ten days? According to Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves, a lot. He thinks Apple can sell up to 13 million iPhones before the quarter closes.

Earlier this week, we posted evidence that even after Apple unveils its new mid-range iPhone 5C device, it could keep the 16GB iPhone 5 around for customers who want a classier, more solid phone at a discounted price. Here’s some more confirmation.

Late last night, a verified account for China Telecom popped up on Weibo and posted an advertisement for the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C… and it seems to imply that iPhone 5C is a much different design than we think.

https://youtu.be/0sJDQt3XwSw

We think of Steve Jobs as one of the most media-savvy guys around, but as this video shows, the first time he appeared on camera, he thought he was going to puke.

Way back in 1978, a very young Jobs appeared on San Francisco news station KGO-TV to talk about the Apple II. The footage of the interview itself seems to have been lost by time, so we don’t really know how he did, but the prep footage of his interview still exists… and boy, is he new at this.

It’s kind of endearing. He’s totally amazed to be on television at all. In fact, he says he’s “deathly ill, actually, and ready to throw up at any moment.” Was he actually sick, or just nervous to the point of vomiting?

Via: Mental Floss

One of the big problems from a developer perspective about the Mac App Store is that it doesn’t allow developers to sell paid upgrades to their apps. Similarly to the iOS App Store, if a developer wants to make money off of a particularly juicy update, they need to sell it as an entirely new app or else… tough beans. Especially on the Mac, this is an issue, since many developers monetize on-going development of apps by selling paid upgrades. But if you sell in the Mac App Store, it’s just not an option.

Last week, the Omni Group released a little app called OmniKeyMaster. The ingenious little app essentially allowed people who had purchased versions of Omni’s apps on the Mac App Store to essentially “break out” their apps from the MAS into standalone licenses which were eligible for paid app upgrades. Guess who didn’t like that idea?

Sadly, whenever Apple is about to launch a new product, we tend to hear about violations of workers’ rights in Apple’s supply chain. It makes sense. A lot of companies bid against each other for Apple’s business in Asia, then don’t have the money to hire enough workers to fulfill Apple’s huge orders. The result? They force the workers they have to do more work over longer hours for less pay. It’s scummy, but as long as Apple isn’t operating every aspect of its manufacturing itself, it’s probably unavoidable.

This year’s no different. According to the China Labor Watch, employees at a Chinese factory owned by Florida-based Jabil Circuit which is reportedly making Apple’s iPhone 5C are being given inadequate training, and being forced to work long hours without overtime.

Speaking of the iPad 5 and the next iPad mini, a YouTube user has post a new video online comparing the rear shells of the iPad 5 with the next-gen iPad mini.

Everyone agrees that Apple will unveil the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C next week at their September 10th event. It’s not in contention. What is in contention is when Apple will release the next iPad and iPad mini. Furthermore, what about the million-dollar question: will the iPad mini 2 have a Retina Display, and if so, will Apple be able to ship it before Christmas?

According to respected, usually accurate analyst Ming-Chi Kuo from KGI Securities, the answer is yes.

There are some truly awful things happening in Syria right now. For more information on exactly what is happening, and why, I suggest this excellent Washington Post round-up of what exactly is going on, and why Congress is now considering an intervention. But the takeaway is pretty bleak, and basically comes down to the notion that there’s not a lot America can do to stop what’s happening in Syria.

That doesn’t mean, though, that the hearings going on in the Senate about whether or not America should intervene aren’t important. Far from it. Which is why Senator John McCain is getting a lot of flack for being caught playing an iPhone poker app during the hearings.

iOS 7 isn’t for everyone. With its brightly-colored, flat candy chiclet design, it’s an update that many people are going to find jarring after playing in Scott Forstall’s skeuomorphic playground for so long. In fact, given how polarizing iOS 7 is, I imagine some long-time iOS users might decide not to come along for the ride at all.

Even if you hate iOS 7, though, there are some elements to love. For example, the new dock. Sure, functionally, it’s exactly the same, but the frosty two-dimensional glass looks just so much better than the faux-3D nonsense that was going on before.

Enter CopyDock. For jailbroken iDevice owners, CopyDock strips out the iOS 6 dock and replaces it with the iOS 7 dock. Simple, beautiful, and free. You can find it in the BigBoss repo on Cydia. Now how about bringing Control Center to iOS 6, jailbreak devs?

Via: ModMyi

Right now, Apple sells three generations of iPhone. The iPhone 5 is the high-end phone, starting at $199 on contract. The iPhone 4S is the mid-tier device, and costs $99 on contract. Finally, there’s the iPhone 4, which is free on contract.

Come September 10th, though, Apple’s going to change things up with the colorful iPhone 5C, a device that Cupertino has designed from the ground up to be a modern budget iPhone (rather than just a hand-me-down iPhone a couple generations old). So the iPhone 5S will take the high-tier, and the iPhone 5C will take the lower-tier.

What about the mid-tier, though? Evidence suggests it’ll be the iPhone 5.

With all the hubbub about new iPhones and new iPads coming, it wouldn’t be surprising if Apple slipped a small Apple TV update in there too. Although Apple dismisses it as their “hobby,” the Apple TV usually inherits the previous generation A-series chip when a new iPhone or iPad comes out. In this case, it’s the A6. In addition, Apple’s been building up steam when it comes to the Apple TV lately, releasing a number of entirely new channels in the last few months. It would be natural to follow that wth an update.

These are all good reasons to believe that Apple might try to slip in an update to their set-top box on September 10th, and lo and behold, a new report seemingly confirms that new Apple TVs are already making their way into the country.

Last year, the classic PC Dungeons & Dragons RPG Baldur’s Gate finally made its way to the Mac in an enhanced port put together by Beamdog Entertainment, and from there, the iPad. We were excited about it at the time, but only because it paved the way for Baldur’s Gate II, which to this day might be the finest PC RPG game ever made. Baldur’s Gate is pretty good, but it hasn’t aged well. Baldur’s Gate II and its expansion, Throne of Bhaal, still hold up.

Time to get psyched, then. Beamdog is bringing Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition to the Mac on November 15. And if history is anything to judge by, an iPad version should follow a few months later.

Investment tycoon Carl Icahn has been bullish on Apple lately. In mid-August, Icahn unexpectedly tweeted that Icahn Enterprises, his diversified holding company, believed Apple to be “extremely undervalued.” Immediately, share prices jumped 5.6%. The next week, Icahn announced on Twitter that he and Tim Cook would be meeting in September to discuss a larger buyback program of AAPL shares.

That’s all nice, but Icahn is a business magnate, not an Apple fanboy. So what the heck is he up to here? A new theory being put forward by some investors is that Icahn has ulterior motives for his sudden Apple love affair: he wants Apple to buy Nuance, a company Icahn has a large stake in.

If you asked any Apple fan what they thought of Windows 8, they’d probably laugh and say it was a total dud, the perfect example on why Microsoft is just too hopeless to survive in the post-PC age. And you know what, there’d be something to that argument. After all, when Windows 8 shipped, it was fragmented between ARM and x86 versions from the start, and Windows 8 has been much lambasted from a usability perspective by both pros and casual users alike.

However, to call Windows 8 a total flop is probably going a little overboard. The latest operating system market share numbers suggest that Windows 8 is now installed on more computers than all versions of Mac OS X combined.

Case makers don’t always know more than the rest of us when it comes to when the next iPhone will come out, or even what it will look like. In a highly competitive market, case makers will routinely bet tens of thousands of dollars readying cases for iPhones that may not even exist, just in the hopes of being on the shelves at launch. Sometimes, though, case makers sometimes do have Far East assembly line sources who can give them leaked schematics of Apple’s upcoming devices.

So how to qualify this leaked render from Case-Mate, showing off a couple of iPhone 5C cases along with a very specific launch window.

With the forthcoming iPhone 5C, Apple is finally embracing color in the iPhone line-up. What better time for Mophie, battery pack makers extraordinaire, to introduce an entire rainbow of colors to their low-end Helium model of juice pack.

When SimCity launched for the PC earlier this year, it was a total debacle. Huge swathes of players could not actually play the game they’d purchased at launch, because SimCity perversely required a persistent Internet connection to play. The result was that players experienced long loading times, constant disconnections, crashing and the loss of saved game data. It was such a bad launch that Amazon actually stopped selling SimCity temporarily in response to the criticisms.

Yesterday, SimCity for the Mac launched. And surprise, surprise! The Mac launch is turning out to be just as much of a disaster as the PC one!

It’s the day before Labor Day Weekend starts in the United States, and news is a little slow this morning. It appears to be slow for the Maryland Police, too. They are claiming that they “busted” two Maryland stores and recovered hundreds of “counterfeit” Apple produces that were being sold as the real thing.

That’s overstating things a tad.

Patent trolls are everywhere these days, swaming over the hills of Silicon Valleys on the back of their patent wargs. Everyone is dealing with the frivolous lawsuits patent trolls make a living bringing against any technology company that experiences even a modicum of success, but hey, go figure: ultimately, patent trolls are more interested in suing Apple than anyone else.

Evidence is mounting that Apple plans on releasing the next iPhone on September 20th. The latest proof? T-Mobile, the latest official American iPhone carrier, has told all of their employees to not even bother asking for any days off between Friday, September 20th and Sunday, September 22nd.

This might just be the kind of rumor only a Hutt could love. According to self-professed “intergalactic” news site Jedi News, the Apple TV could soon get a new channel dedicated entirely to Star Wars on-demand programming.

The virtualization maestros over at Parallels have long offered Mac owners a slick, easy way to run Windows apps on their Macs, but now they’re extending their mission in the other direction with a new app that lets you run Mac & PC apps… on your iPad.

If you purchased an iPhone 5 last year, you might remember how easily the black iPhone scratched and chipped. Christened ‘Scuffgate’ by upset owners, the black iPhone 5’s propensity for scratching even prompted Phil Schiller to comment upon the issue, saying such scratches were “normal.”

Well, no, they’re not, Phil. The white iPhone 5, for example, isn’t nearly as scratch prone as the black iPhone 5. Be that as it may, at this point, the iPhone 5’s scratchability can be taken as read. But what about the gold iPhone 5S? Will it be as scratchable as its black brother, or as pristine and unscuffable as the white model?