John Brownlee - page 55

With the iPhone 5S shaping up to be pretty much an identical device to last year’s iPhone 5 except a marginally faster processor and (fingers crossed!) some cool new fingerprint sensor technology, eyes are on the so-called “budget iPhone” as 2013’s new hotness.

Although the ‘budget iPhone’ will address the mid-market, it’s still an exciting device, rumored to be the first iPhone to come in an iPod-palette of colors. Otherwise, though, we don’t know a lot about what it looks like.

Far East case makers might, though. MGM Corporation, an Asian casemaker, has posted a first look at a case for the budget iPhone. It doesn’t show much, except that the budget iPhone is about 2mm thicker than the iPhone 5, and has rounded corners instead of the iPhone 5’s square shape.

Here’s some video, showing it from all sides.

In October of last year, Apple underwent an executive shake-up that saw Scott Forstall’s head rolling down the Cupertino aisles and Jony Ive being put in charge of both software and hardware design in Apple… but his title, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, never changed.

Now that iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks have been unveiled, Apple has apparently formalized Jony Ive’s new role, giving him a new title, Senior Vice President, Design. The smouldering look on Jony’s pretty face is the same as it ever was, though.

Thanks: Rachel C.

This is probably the front assembly of the iPhone 5S. Sadly, it looks pretty much the same as the iPhone 5, which is to be expected: the iPhone 5S is anticipated to be an incremental release over the iPhone 5, sharing the same look as the previous generation device just like the iPhone 4S and iPhone 3GS before it.

So nothing to be excited about? It’s hard to tell, but we have yet to see the home button array for the iPhone 5S, and that’s where rumor has all the new hardware in the next-gen iPhone going: namely, a fingerprint sensor under the home button which lets you lock out anyone who isn’t you… or who has cut off your finger.

Source: ETradeSupply

Skype for iOS and Skype for Machas been updated today with support for a new feature: video messaging. But don’t think video chat. Skype’s new video messaging is all about recording brief, meaningful moments and sending them to other Skype users, not as a stream, but as a self-contained message that will reach them, even if they aren’t online.

Japanese part firms Mounantai has turned up three photos of what they’re emphatically claiming is the logic board for the iPhone 5S. There’s nothing soldered or plugged into this part, meaning no early peek at the iPhone 5S’s (presumed) A7 chip.

There’s not much to go on here, except that it looks like the iPhone 5S circuit board might be slightly narrower than that in the iPhone 5, and that while the iPhone 5S might just be a small speed-bump before the debut of the iPhone 6 next year, it’s still gotten a major overhaul on the inside.

Source: Electronista

This is another small but great feature in iOS 7: you can now scrub through songs from the lockscreen if you are playing them through the official Music app. This doesn’t work with third-party music apps, like Rdio, and in practice in the first beta, it can be a little difficult to scrub (the touch target is too small). Still a very nice addition indeed.

Via: Reddit

We’ve all seen iOS 7 running on the iPhone 5 now, but Apple’s still holding back showing it off on the iPad… at least, everywhere except on their site, where the eagle-eyed boys over at iGen.fr spotted Apple’s official shots of iOS 7 running on the iPad 2, iPad 3 & 4, and iPad mini.

There’s even a shot of what the official Music app looks like running on the iPad. Looking good!

Source: iGen.fr
Thanks: Anthony N!

The new Mac Pro is tiny. How tiny? It’s only slightly bigger than a roll of paper towels. And yet inside it is the power to render, I dunno, a jillion 3D models of them.

Via: Reddit

Remember when the Smart Cover for iPad was first announced, and it turned out Apple was apparently inspired by Japanese bath mats when coming up with their design? Looks like Jony Ive looked around his hotel room during a recent trip to Tokyo and let another everyday Japanese object influence the design of one of Apple’s latest products.

If Apple is going to update the iPad mini with a Retina Display a year after it’s debut, they need to get cracking on sourcing the 2,048 x 1,536 resolution, 7.9-inch displays that will drive them. Now a new rumor suggests that Apple has contracted good ol’ frenemy Samsung to make them for them.

Last week, a story about the NSA’s top-secret PRISM program broke. According to leaked documents, PRISM is a program in which the NSA is directly able to survey all data stored on the servers of pretty much every tech company under the sun, including Apple.

Apple has firmly denied even hearing about PRISM, but intriguingly, they might be required by law to do so.

Either way, it was only a matter of time when the first class-action lawsuit suing Apple for its participation in PRISM hit the courts.

iOS 7 is a bold, radical departure from Apple’s previous design aesthetic, and as such, there’s a lot of controversy right now as people struggle to figure out what they think of the new look. It’s only natural that we’re in such flux to come to terms with what we think about iOS 7: what could be more personal than the interface of the one gadget with which we have our most personal connection?

One person who has no such reservations about the design of iOS 7, though, is Susan Kare, the woman who designed many of the original Macintosh operating system’s timeless and most beloved icon.

Wandering between public Wi-Fi networks and never having your service interrupted, the same way you can walk in and out of the range of local cellular towers and never have your signal drop. That’s the dream for Wi-Fi, and with iOS 7, Apple’s going to help make it happen.

iAd has not been a big hit for Apple. Although the service was launched with a lot of fanfare about ads that you truly want to play around with and unheard-of levels of engagement, iAds hasn’t really taken off.

Part of the issue was Apple’s strategy: they focused on targeting large companies and demanded they make huge minimum buys-in. There was no dipping a toe in iAd: you either didn’t use it at all, or plunged right into your neck for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Apple’s waffled on that before, allowing ad developers to start hocking their own apps on the iAd network starting in 2010. Today, however, Apple has added an iAd Workbench, making it even easier (and way, way cheaper) for developers to advertise with the network.

One thing’s for sure: once you have iOS 7 installed, OS X Mavericks sticks out like a sore thumb. iOS 7 is where Apple’s software design is headed, and OS X Mavericks is what Apple’s software design aesthetic is fleeing from.

Clearly, OS X Mavericks was left alone this year because Apple couldn’t concentrate on two design overhauls at once. Instead, Ive & Co. simply satisfied themselves with stripping out some of OS X’s more Forstallian flourishes, like the Corinthian leather and gray linen textures.

But what about next year? What would OS X 10.10 look like if brought in line with the design of iOS 7? DeviantArt user Ohsneezeme‘s concept, while not perfect — he hasn’t touched the icons or the dock — is a strong guess.

I like it. What about you?

This is a neat little new detail in OS X Mavericks: if there are updates available for your system, the Notification will allow you to delay installing them for an hour, or until the evening when your system isn’t busy. And you can actually dismiss the damn thing now without it just immediately popping back up!

For other things new in OS X Mavericks, check out our gallery round-up.

Yesterday, Apple unveiled OS X 10.9 and joked that after a decade, they were ditching their scheme of naming OS X releases after cats because they’d simply run out of big cat names to use. Instead, from now on, they’d name future versions of OS X after places in California, starting with OS X Mavericks, named after a famous Californian surfing spot.

What’s pretty funny about the choice of ‘Mavericks’ as a name for OS X, though, is that the real-world location is named after a German Shephard, meaning that argue switched from naming their OS X releases after cats to naming them after dogs instead!

In the words of Apple itself, iOS 7 is the biggest change to their mobile operating system since the introduction of the original iPhone back in 2007. It’s more functional then ever, it’s prettier than ever: it’s the very definition of digital design purified and clarified down to the very basics of form merged with function.

Understandably, that means that many people are tempted to install it on their devices, either by forking over $99 for an Apple developer account or paying five or ten bucks to someone online to register your UDID for you.

We know it’s hard to wait, but you really shouldn’t do it. Here’s why.

Although it’s not quite the overhaul we’re seeing in iOS 7, OS X 10.9 Mavericks is an exciting new update to OS X that crams a lot of new features into the Mac operating system, including Maps, iBooks, iCloud Keychain, a new Safari, a more powerful Finder with tabbed windows and tagging, better Notifications, far improved battery life support, and much, much more.

We’re still delving into Maverick and spotting the best features. Here’s everything new we’ve spotted so far, and we’ll be updating this post with more screenshots of the new shiny in OS X Mavericks.

iOS 7’s new Multitasking app switcher is pretty nifty, and also pretty obviously inspired by popular jailbreak app switcher Auxo. One of the many ways in which iOS 7 Multitasking borrows cues from Auxo is how you actually kill running background apps: with a swipe! We’ve made a nice little animated GIF showing how it works.

If you want to make your Mac look like it’s running OS X Mavericks but don’t want to wait for fall (or for the Apple developer site to stop crapping itself), here’s the default wallpaper OS X 10.9 now uses.

Looks great, doesn’t it? Download it in high-resolution here or here directly from Apple.

When Apple unveiled iOS 6’s new Maps icon, it became an emblem for everything that was wrong with Apple Maps, a service that — at launch — was widely criticized as being inferior to Google’s own maps data, which every previous version of iOS had shipped with.

Why the icon? Because it gave directions that would probably end up killing you if you followed them in real life. But that’s all changed in iOS 7.

Update: This post is wrong. Once we downloaded iOS 7, it was clear that the carrier name is still very much a part of iOS, even though Apple didn’t show it in their keynote. Mea culpa!

With iOS 7, Apple is getting rid of the signal bars in the top left-hand corner and replacing them with five dots to represent signal strength.

This is a good move, because the iOS signal bars have been incredibly misleading for years, although it remains to be seen if the new dots will come with controversies of their own.

Here’s the thing I really found interesting about it, though. Notice there’s no room for a carrier name anymore. Apple has finally succeeded in removing every trace of carrier branding from every iPhone they sell.

iOS 7 has been radically redesigned, and there’s going to be a lot of acclimiatization to the new brighter, more vibrant design.

That’s why Apple has posted a new site which allows anyone to preview the new operating system in their browser, with tons of videos of iOS 7’s new features, like Control Center, Notification Center, Multitasking, iTunes Radio, AirDrop, Siri and more.

If you want to see what iOS 7 is going to look like in your hand come fall, this is where you should start familiarizing yourself with Jony Ive’s radical new OS.

Source: iOS 7

The Apple Store is back online after a five hour downtime, and all of the exciting new products Apple unveiled today are there for sale.

There’s the new MacBook Air, with Haswell processors delivering all-day battery life, starting at $999. The new Haswell processors start at 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, up from the Core i3s of the past generation. These are underclocked to save battery life compared to the previous generation, but it shouldn’t be an issue, due to the upgrade in the speed of the flash internals, which is the real bottleneck these days. Still, you can upgrade the processor to a 1.7GHz Intel Core i7 for just $150 more.

In addition the new AirPort Time Capsule (starts at $299) and AirPort Extreme (starts at $199) are up.

The new Mac Pro doesn’t have a page yet, but you can see a small shot of it in the top navigation bar of the Apple Store Mac section