John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
After breaking the news that iPad mini Wi-Fi + Cellular units were slated to deliver to customers by November 16th, we’re now hearing reports that some lucky customers are receiving their LTE-equipped iPad minis a day earlier than expected, with units already out on FedEx trucks for delivery. We’re seeing lots of confirmation on Twitter as well, with some customers saying they’ve already received their units.So if you’re expecting a cellular iPad mini tomorrow, check your tracking info: you might just get it a little earlier than expected.
Flipboard’s already one of the best ways to read and discover web content on the iPad and iPhone, and now they’re taking that to the next level, integrating e-book discovery by tapping right into the Apple iBookstore. It’s like browsing in a virtual e-book shop.
Memory. Not only do you have one, but you’ve probably played any number of card-flipping memory games in your life… possibly on the App Store, where there are over 50 of such games that promise to test the limits of your recollections.
Those games are now under attack, as Apple is sending notices to developers demanding that they remove the word “Memory” from their titles. It’s not Apple’s fault, though: rather, a German company is gunning for them, claiming it owns the trademark for the word in dozens of European, African and South American countries.
Back in the good old days of the 20th Century, a person’s edge-beaten leather suitcase might be the accessory they traveled with the most, with which they had visited the most exotic of foreign, jasmine-scented climes, and it would be covered with stickers of all the places they’d visited.
These days, people don’t have as personal of a connection with their suitcases, and showing someone you’ve been somewhere is usually done by checking-in on Foursquare. Your iPhone is the accessory you’re most likely to travel the world with, which is why I love the iPhone (Suit)Case, a conceptual iPhone case by Dallas illustrators / artists David Soames and Dustin Taylor that makes your iPhone look like a miniature suitcase.
Sadly, it’s just a concept right now, but voting’s open on Threadless to turn this product into a reality. Hopefully one made with real leather.
Although the iPad mini is well-reviewed, a constant complaint that has been leveled against Apple’s smallest tablet is that the display isn’t Retina. In fact, in my review of the iPad mini, I could barely see past the terrible fuziness of the on-screen text, and considered it an otherwise perfect device’s Achilles’ Heel.
Summarized, the argument is this: A Retina iPad mini would be too expensive for Apple to make right now, and it would come with other tradeoffs, like a significantly reduced battery life and a much thicker and heavier form factor.
I was curious if this was actually true, so I decided to try an experiment: I’d build an imaginary Retina iPad mini out of technology that Apple already has access to, add up how much it would cost, and then see what the design tradeoffs would be.
What I found out was that Apple could indeed have shipped an iPad mini with Retina this generation without significantly changing the form or battery life of the device, but it would have cost $379. Here’s why.
One is an ugly ex-con with a face that looks like it weathered the apocalypse who is known for his gruff demeanor and insatiable appetite for ultra-violence. The other is a cuddly teddy bear of a man and co-founder of Apple.
It might seem unbelievable, but Machete star Danny Trejo and the lovable Steve Wozniak are apparently teaming up in a video game to promote Trejo’s upcoming movie, Vengeance. It’s called Vengeance: Woz With A Coz. And it looks like it’s coming to iPhone. What the heck is going on here?
Apple may be waging a thermonuclear war against Android in the courts, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t try to profit off of gadgets running Google’s competing operating system in their online store… even if the word ‘Android’ is nowhere on the item’s product page.
As they do every year, Apple has posted their annual holiday gift guide, a well-designed and laid-out section of the Apple.com online store that is dedicated to gift ideas for the loved ones in your life.
It’s a pretty page, but there’s no deals to be had here. Apple does usually offer some Black Friday savings, but they’re pretty conservative, usually topping out between 5-10% on select Macs, iDevices and accessories. We should start seeing those deals leaking out later this week or early next ahead of Black Friday, November 23rd.
If you’ve been following the back-and-forth over Apple’s court-mandated “apology” to Samsung in the UK, you know it’s been Cupertino at its cheekiest.
It’s also been Cupertino at its most dishonest, according to a London High Court, and they’re had enough, slamming Apple for false and misleading statements about the trial… and ordering Apple to pay all of Samsung’s legal bills on top of things.
Monolith's new wood skins for the iPhone 5 are every bit as good as the replacement backs they made for the iPhone 4... and that's saying something.
I like my iPhones in wood. Part of it’s to satisfy my Danish mid-century pretensions, but as I’ve said before, there’s something perfect about making a smartphone after wood. Wood implies an intimacy that metal or plastic doesn’t — that it was hand-crafted with you in mind — which makes it a natural (but not practical) material for a smartphone, which is the gadget with which most of us have our most personal relationships.
Back when I had an iPhone 4S, I replaced the glass back of my device with a replacement teak back by Monolith and never looked back. Not only was it more practical and more unique than the iPhone 4S’s easily shattered glass back, but it felt just sublime in the hand.
When the iPhone 5 came out, I was eager to know from Monolith whether they’d be doing replacement wood backs for Apple’s latest handsets. The response I got was a disappointment: while it was possible to replace the back of the iPhone 4/4S by just popping out two screws, it was impossible to replace the iPhone 5 ‘s back plate in the same way. The best Monolith could do, they said, was adhesives. My heart sank. Surely, wood stickers you slap on the back of your iPhone 5 would just suck.
They don’t. Defying both my expectations and experiences with similar products, Monolith’s wood iPhone 5 skins are every bit as amazing as their wood iPhone 4 backs. They’re beautifully made, wonderfully packaged, easy to apply, feel rich and luscious to the touch and are so thin as to make you have a hard time believing they can shave a tree this thin.
Try to make a reservation for the Genius Bar at your local Apple Store for a problem with your iPhone, and you’ll now have to complete an important step before you’ll be allowed to see a Genius: you’ll need to turn your iPhone off then on again and see if the problem goes away.
We’re starting to hear reports that people who preordered the iPad Mini with Wi-Fi + Cellular are having their shipping notifications updated, alerting them of a November 21 November 16 delivery date, with shipping to start in the next five business days.
The Apple Store official preorder page still says that the iPad mini Wi-Fi + Cellular will become available for shipping in mid-November, so these reports would seem to line up with Apple’s own promises on the matter. We’ll let you know when we hear more.
Update: Some of our readers are reporting delivery dates starting next Friday, the 16th:
If true, this would line up with our prediction that iTunes 11 will ship by the 16th. The iPad mini currently does not report as anything besides a regular iPad when plugged into iTunes, which isn’t very Apple-like: it makes sense that a new version of iTunes directly supporting the iPad mini would ship soon.
It’s been a couple of months since Apple released Lightning, and in two months, Apple has refreshed every iDevice that uses the old 30-Pin Dock Connector short of the iPod Classic. Despite this aggressive move to ditch the connector of the past, though, there has yet to be a single third-party accessory that supports Lightning.
Why? Because third-parties need to go through Apple for MFi (or Made for iPhone/iPad/iPod) certification, and the guidelines for getting that certification didn’t get announced until very recently at a secret meeting between Apple and accessory-makers in Shenzhen, China.
What’s going on at that meeting? According to a new intriguing report, Apple is making any accessory-maker who signs on for MFi certification to embrace their own supplier code, which should force accessory makers to manufacture their devices a lot more ethically.
"Coming in November." Probably November 14, and almost definitely not past November 16.
Last month, Apple failed to make its own self-imposed deadline to release iTunes 11 by the end of October.
iTunes 11 is a radical overhaul of Apple’s media management, shopping and syncing software for the Mac and PC that seemingly addresses the numerous complaints of bloat and convolutedness that have been leveled at the app over the years. It also has a much more attractive and modern design.
Consequently, numerous Apple fans — including ourselves — were disappointed when Cupertino quietly announced they were pushing back iTunes 11’s release by a month, into November. But when in November?
We have no inside information on when, exactly, iTunes 11 will be released, but we think there’s an excellent chance that it will be released by no later than the end of next week, and most likely next Wednesday. Here’s why.
These utterly gorgeous minimalist icons for the Mac are about to get installed on my iMac, and you should do the same. Featuring icons for all of OS X’s core apps as well as popular third-party apps like Spotify, Sparrow, VLC, Firefox and more, this custom icon set can easily be installed using Panic Software’s CandyBar, which is completely free.
We’ve been hearing that Microsoft has been working on a version of their Office suite specificall for iOS for a while now, but now it appears that the first screenshots have leaked, and it will be coming to the App Store in early 2013.
Steve Jobs didn’t found Pixar, but he did give $10 million to the fledgling company at a time when it was spinning itself off from Industial Light and Magic into its own corporation, and Jobs acted as an advisor — both business and spiritual — to the company ever since.
No wonder, then, that Pixar continues to pay tribute to Steve Jobs to this day. Their latest film, Brave, had a touching tribute to Steve Jobs in the credits, and now Pixar is naming the studio’s main building after him.
Okay, obviously, we’re big fans of the iPad here, and by all accounts, the Surface is a piece of hardware that isn’t quite ready for prime time. Still, this incredible fake advertisement for the Surface would — if officially sanctioned by Microsoft and aired during prime time — probably be enough to get us to buy one, if we ever were going to. Just awesome, and turns out that at least one of these guys has done a video we really liked before.
Our friend Roman Zavřel over at Letemsvetemapplem.eu emailed us to let us know that he’d spotted the first initial appearances of OS X 10.9 in his server logs. We checked ours, and what do you know: we’ve also gotten a handful of visitors reporting the next version of OS X as their operating system.
With OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion released just a few months ago, it would normally be too early to see the next version of OS X popping up in server logs, but with Mountain Lion, Apple has apparently moved to a yearly release schedule for their Mac operating system.
Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what Apple will call OS X 10.9? I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Space Lion and an official Voltron partnership.
I’ll never understand why the iPad doesn’t ship with the default iOS weather app, and that goes double for the iPad mini, which is even more portable than it’s bigger sibling. Consequently, I’m always on the look-out for good iPad-centric weather apps.
I’m delighted to see, then, that my favorite iPhone Weather app, Check The Weather, has now been updated to a universal version, keeping all of the swipe-friendly charm and navigation chops of the iPhone version, but elegantly blowing it up to the larger display.
It’s no secret that Apple often takes a puritanical view of art featuring human anatomy — the flapping genitalia, dewy folds and turgid protuberances that some of us find so arousing and others find a moral failing — at least when it comes to being submitted to the App Store or iBookstore.
So it’s no surprise that when Danish author Peter Øvig Knudsen submitted his latest work of non-fiction, Hippie 2, to the iBookstore, the e-book was rejected based upon the fact that it contained forty-seven photographs of hairy frolicking hippies with exposed breasts, buttocks and genitals.
What is more surprising is that they also rejected Knudsen’s resubmitted version of the text, which featured all of the photos censored with giant red apples.
Although the iPad mini is well-reviewed and seems to be something of a hint with early adopters, there is at least one complaint: the display isn’t Retina. In fact, not only is it not Retina, it’s actually decidedly lower resolution than even competing 7-inch tablets like the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD 7.
How does the display of the iPad mini stack up against the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD in objective terms, though? Not well, although there’s something Apple could do to make things better.
Microsoft may have the numbers, but one thing Apple is really good about is getting people to shift their Macs over to the latest and greatest version of OS X in a timely manner.
For example, even though OS X Mountain Lion was only released in July, over 25% of all Macs ran it by October. OS X 10.5 Leopard hovers at a little less than 10%, while OS X Lion is on about 30% of all Macs.
What’s most surprising, though, is what operating system ties OS X Lion for the most popular version of OS X: OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard.
Following the introduction of the new Evernote 5 design for Mac, the cloud-based note company has announced that a major redesign is coming to iOS as well, bringing a major new look along with changes that make it faster than ever to find the notes you want.
