John Brownlee - page 61

Last year, electronics supply company ETrade Supply lucked out and was one of the first companies to obtain parts of the iPhone 5 before release: first the FaceTime cam, then the front panel and then the back panel.

Whatever ETrade Supply’s sources, then, they clearly have a solid connection inside Foxconn. And now that source is telling them that the ‘budget’ iPhone is a very real product.

What better way than try to woo customers into buying a Prius Plug-In hybrid car than by drawing a parallel between charging your iPhone and screwing your iPhone?

That was Toyota’s, uh, “genius” idea. It’s a free game called Plug-In Championship, and it’s one of the most hysterically dumb iPhone games in recent memory, in which your goal is to plug your iPhone in to charge according to the position of a “fast-moving bar rising up the screen.”

It’s what happens when you do plug your iPhone in that is so hysterically, bizarrely sexualized, though. If you’ve ever seen the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, it’s a lot like that.

We’ve been talking a lot about the budget iPhone in recent months, mostly in relation to the emerging market (where the vast majority of the remaining smartphone growth is expected to happen in the next five years), but here’s a question: even if Apple, as they are rumored to do, release their first plastic iPhone since the iPhone 3GS, how are they going to price it low enough to actually penetrate third-world countries where the cost of the phone might be equal to someone’s salary for the month? Especially while maintaining Apple’s customary profit margins?

The truth is, it’s almost impossible to imagine Apple being able — or interested! — in doing any such thing. Current rumor pegs the “budget” iPhone as basically an iPhone 5 with a colorful plastic shell. If those rumors are true, that’s not really a budget phone: it’s a mid-range. It has to be if Apple wants to make money off of it.

Slowly but surely, that’s the realization dawning on some people on Wall Street. The “budget” iPhone isn’t going to be budget at all. And Apple’s going to make buttloads off of it.

In a characteristically terse reports, the ever-spotty DigiTimes is backing up recent reports that Apple is readying a plastic 4-inch iPhone with a colorful casing… but also claiming, bizarrely, that Apple doesn’t have much faith that such an iPhone would sell.

Romanian Apple fan Andrei was a straight-A student and promising C++ programmer whose 21-year life was tragically cut short before he could fulfill his dream of working for Cupertino, and possibly, if he was good enough, becoming Steve Jobs.

His passion for Apple was so much that when he died, his parents erected a tombstone with his honor, featuring the Apple logo on it. The message on the stone from his parents reads: “Our son, our hope, you are with us in every moment, and we are with you every moment. You are the champion!”

Source: Cancan.ro
Thanks: Victor!

We’ve talked before about all of the Braun products that have inspired Apple’s designs. Perhaps the best known is the Braun ET66 pocket calculator, first released in 1987 replacing the earlier ET22 model which inspired iOS’s own calculator app and has become a Dieter Rams design classic.

Outside of inside your iPhone, it’s hard to find a working ET66 these days, which is why it’s so great that Braun intends on re-releasing the original model later this year as an official replica. No word on price or exact availibility yet, but I know I’ll be getting one. Won’t you?

Source: Acquire

Apple has just released a surprise iOS 6.1.4 update! What’s new? What incredible new features and bug fixes can we portend?

Nothing, pretty much. The sole change in the log is “updated audio profile for speakerphone” with no other enhancesments or bug fixes listed.

A month ago or so, it was said that the iOS 6.1.4 patch would be pretty much dictated by the lawyers, but it looks like Apple has somehow avoided the change to the “Always On” VPN setting that was requred in the aftermath of its patent lawsuit with VirnetX.

The iOS 6.1.4 release seems to only be for the CDMA and GSM versions of the iPhone 5, at least right now. Let us know if you see anything new.

When you buy a 16GB iPhone, iOS 6 takes up roughly 1GB of space on the device, leaving about 15GB or so to spare. Buy a 16GB Samsung Galaxy S4, on the other hand, and you get just 8.49GB!

Why? Samsung says all the bloat is because of the nonsense, half-baked “software features” they keep on baking in.

A lot has been said and rumored lately about whether or not Intel would ever start making ARM-based chips. Current Intel CEO Paul Otellini was against it, but Otellini is stepping down this month, so ultimately the question was: “What would Intel’s next CEO think about making some ARM chips for partners like Apple?”

Ultimately, how the next CEO of Intel would feel about that prospect came down to whether or not he was promoted from within Intel (as all of Intel’s CEOs ever have been) or if he came from outside the company. What made the question of who Intel’s next CEO would be so interesting is that Intel’s board of directors was, for the first time ever, openly talking about looking outside of the company. Intel could have gained a much different perspective.

But it hasn’t.

Up until now, if you wanted a new 21.5-inch 2012 iMac from Apple, you had pretty dim prospects when it came to storage: your only options were a a stinky 1TB 5400RPM hard drive, or spending an additional $250 on a 1TB Fusion Drive. There were no options for a pure flash storage iMac, and on the 27-inch iMac side, things weren’t much better: the only thing you could opt for in a build-to-order iMac was a $900 768GB SSD.

That’s all changed for the better now, though. Apple has quietly updated build-to-order options across its iMac line to allow you to replace your new iMac’s 1TB hard drive with a 256GB or 512GB SSD for $300 and $600, accordingly. That’s actually pretty expensive for an SSD — which cost about $0.66 per GB on Amazon right now — but given what a royal pain-in-the-neck performing any surgery on Apple’s glued shut new iMacs is, it’s your only real option if you want a flash drive in your iMac.

Source: Apple.com

https://youtu.be/qKQAivS0xsE

Former Apple Retail Chief Ron Johnson’s time at JC Penney was not a good one for the company. Johnson tried to revamp the retailer’s image from a clearing house for cheap junk sold at discounted prices during an endless spree of “sales” and “coupons” into a refined boutique, a store-within-a-store retail concept similar to the Apple Store.

The result? A $12.99 billion year-over-year decline in revenue that got Johnson fired as CEO after his first year on the job. And if that’s not bad enough, JC Penney is now adding insult to injury by releasing a commercial apologizing for the changes he made.

It’s no secret that new MacBooks are coming at WWDC in June, but they’ll just be spec bumps, featuring a small ~8% performance boost thanks to Intel’s new Haswell processors, and a gain to battery efficiency. Nothing to get excited about, right?

Actually, no. Haswell’s hiding one super beefy update in its silicon: Iris, Intel’s super-charged integrated graphics that will boost Haswell’s polygon by 200% compared to the last generation… not to mention make the MacBook Air’s graphics beefy enough to support a Retina Display.

Want to know why Steve Ballmer wakes up in a sweat at night, screaming at the shadows and clutching his hogshead-sized heart? Look at this chart of year-over-year growth rates of Windows PCs since the iPad came out, put together by the ever nuanced Horace Dediu at Asymco. When the iPad debuted, it immediately killed the PC industry as we know it.

In fact, as Dediu makes clear later in his analysis, Microsoft’s doing so poorly in the PC market right now that even though the Surface was a flop, it’s still accounting for a third of all Windows revenues. Absolutely mind boggling.

Source: Asymco

CERN has given us many things in our day, most notable among them recent proof of the existence of the so-called ‘God particle’, the Higgs Boson… one of the most elusive objects in particle physics. But like the Higgs Boson, most of CERN’s achievements are pretty exotic.

On April 30 in 1993, though, CERN gave us something it gave all of us something we all use to this day: the worldwide web, software and technology that anyone could use (and everyone did) to build what we, today, called the Internet.

Like many of the revolutions of the computing age, though, the Internet owes a debt of gratitude to Steve Jobs.

Although I’m still stuck on the old version, Instacast by developer Vemedio is my go-to podcast manager on the iPhone and iPad… but on the Mac, I’m still using iTunes like a sucker. But hey, what’s this pretty shiny thing? Instacast Beta for Mac? GIMME.

That historic “grab a cuppa joe with Tim Cook” auction, which still has a couple of weeks to go and has already broken records, has had a little bit of a set back: credit card fraud that has set the auction back by thousands of dollars.

While the rear camera in the iPhone continues to improve by leaps and bounds — and we can expect the iPhone 5S to continue that trend — the front FaceTime camera improves at a far more glacial pace. In an age of selfies, the iPhone 5’s front facing camera isn’t that much better at offering the sort of fidelity of resolution necessary to deeply inspect our blackheads and pores than the iPhone 4 was.

That’s probably about to change though. Omnivision — maker of the iPhone 5’s front-facing camera sensor — have just announced the OV2724, which crams a full 1080p sensor (or 2MP, compared to the current camera’s 1.2MP sensor) into a tiny cube small enough to go into the next iPhone. And it even shoots at 60 frames per second and offers some impressive dynamic range to boot.

It’s going into production this summer. With decent yields and some luck, that should make it ready for the iPhone 5S when it lands in fall.

Source: Omnivision
Via: Gizmodo

Although it’s been less than a year since it’s debut, and though it was widely criticized at its debut for a beefy $329 price tag and a low-resolution display, the iPad mini has quickly become the one 7-inch tablet to rule them all.

A new supplier report out of Asia puts the iPad mini’s triumph into sharp relief. Not only is the iPad mini pretty much the only 7-inch tablet that isn’t running headfirst down a profitability cliff in a race to crater at the bottom, it’s actually putting iPad sales to the knife.

In Apple’s latest earnings call, CEO Tim Cook was suddenly equivocal about whether or not Apple would do an iPhone with a larger display.

“Our competitors have made some significant tradeoffs in many of these areas to ship a larger display,” Cook said on the earnings call. “We would not ship a larger display iPhone while these tradeoffs exist.”

What that hints is Apple doesn’t have a larger screen iPhone in its pipeline yet, but they’re working on one, without any of the tradeoffs of the competition. (What these tradeoffs actually are in Apple’s mind are anyone’s guess.)

A new analyst report suggests that this larger screen iPhone will be the iPhone 6, and it will land in summer of 2014. This year, we’ll just have to deal with an iPhone 5S in a bevy of peacock fan of different color options.

Sometimes, a product can really sneak into your heart. Such was the HEX Drake Origin backpack, which I gave a positive review.

Although I loved it from the first for being a backpack that a fashionably-inclined, full-grown man could wear without looking like a slobbering, buffoonish manchild — no mean feat — the Drake Origin has become even fonder to me in the months since, until I found that I was more inclined to hoist it up onto my shoulder as I left the house than I was some of my other cherished messenger and satchel bags.

What I loved about the HEX Drake Origin wasn’t just its incredibly solid stitching and construction, but the way it made me feel when I picked it up, I felt as if I suddenly went back in time, and becamed a dandyish Oxford student in the 1910s lugging a tweed backpack full of natural philosophy texts across a blustery, autumn-strewn quad. This may seem precious, and is in fact precious, but the way we all look at fashion is through the romanticized lens of nostalgia. Fashion is a way we tell other people a story about ourselves, and I liked the story I thought the HEX Drake Origins told about me.

I don’t feel the same way about the HEX Cabana Laptop Duffel, but it’s not really the bag’s fault. If the Drake turned me into an Oxford student from a hundred years ago, the Cabana Laptop Duffel turns me into that Oxford student’s girlfriend on a day out at the beach. It’s a very feminine bag that I love, but perhaps not the right bag for me.

Apple’s not expected to show much at WWDC that isn’t software. Tim Cook himself pretty much precluded seeing any major updates to Apple’s hardware line until fall. That doesn’t mean, however, that Apple won’t bump the specs of some existing Mac models, and it’s now expected by one of Apple’s more reliable activists that Cupertino will do just that, unveiling upgraded MacBooks across the line at the beginning of June.

One of the best apps to have in the toolkit of the privacy minded, developer Objective Development has just unveiled Little Snitch 3.1, their app that prevents other Mac programs from ‘phoning home’ under certain conditions.

The game in this video is called Super Monster Bros By Adventure Time Pocket Free Games. Yep, that’s the entire title. Bodes well, doesn’t it? I bet you’re itching to play it. Sadly, though, you can’t. Apple’s already yanked it from the App Store. You probably didn’t want to play it anyway, though: it has to be the most shamelessly abusive examples of in-app purchases that mortal mind can comprehend.

Although it’s been almost over a week since the carnage of the Boston Marathon Bombings and the related manhunt and shootout came to a close, but there are still a lot more questions than answers about what happened and why.

A new report from Boston.com, though, has filled in some of the blanks in regards to the three hours on April 18th in which the Tsarnaev brothers carjacked a Mercedes driven by a 26-year-old Chinese man… and it looks like an iPhone app helped save his life.

Ever since 2008, WWDC tickets have sold out faster and faster. In 2009, tickets to WWDC tickets sold out in a month. In 2010, it took eight days. In 2011, tickets sold out in 12 hours. Last year, they sold out in 2 hours.

This year, though? You needed to record the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it melee of WWDC ticket buying with one of those super highspeed cameras they use to show bullets blasting through fruit. 5,000 tickets to WWDC sold out in under two minutes, and even if you were there from the very first second, the sheer crush of developers trying to login to Apple’s system crashed it.

In essence, unless you got lucky and Apple’s login system didn’t barf all over you, there was simply no way to get a ticket this year.

What can Apple do about WWDC in the future to allow more people to attend? Honestly, probably not much.