As is their wont, as if their drive, the lovely boys over at iFixIt have already ripped apart the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro to check out the gooey silicon insides of Apple’s latest laptops.
For decades, Apple had a long-running dispute going with the Beatles over their eponymous fruitarian trademark. Namely, Apple Corps. congolomerate — a mult-armed multimedia corporation founded by the Beatles in 1968 — had a problem with Apple Computers stepping all over their TM. In 1981, Apple settled the dispute for the first time by paying Apple Corps. $80,000 and promising to never enter the music business, but then in 2001, Apple launched both the iPod and iTunes, starting the hostilities anew.
Everything came to a resolution in 2007, when Apple took ownership of all trademarks related to “Apple”, including Apple Corps’s granny smith apple logo, and agreed to license them back to Apple Corps. for their continued use.
Today, we’re seeing the last apple fall from that treet, as the Canadian IP Office has just disclosed that the Beatles’ iconic recording label is now Apple, Inc. registered trademark. Isn’t that nice?
Source: PatentlyApple
Mondo’s latest is Steve Jobs: Back of the Line, an awesome rap sung by the ghost of Steve Jobs who, in the matter of a mere three-and-a-half minutes manages to school Jeff Bezos, teabag Bill Gates and one-up his successor, the awkward, stuttering M.C. Cook.
There were a couple of big surprises yesterday at Apple’s iPad mini event. The first was the pricing of the iPad mini itself: while everyone anticipated a $249 or $299 starting price, the iPad mini actually starts at $329… a good $70 higher than devices like the Google Nexus 7.
But there was another surprise. No one heard a peep in the last few months about Apple’s new Fusion Drive, a combination solid state and platter based hard drive that “fuses” the best aspects of flash and traditional hard drive storage.
Those aspects? Solid state drives (or SSDs) over much faster reading and write speed, as well as “instant-on” boot up from sleep or power down. This leads to huge performance boosts all across the Mac. Traditional hard drives, however, have a couple key advantages: they are both cheaper and have more capacity, allowing you to easily store massive media libraries.
So what’s the point of the Fusion Drive? Simple. It’s the best of both worlds: the speed and instant-on of an SSD, with all of the storage space of an HDD. But how does it work?
As a brand, China’s GooPhone has made a name for itself not only because of their laughably stupid branding, but by the fact that they consistently manage to rip off Apple’s next product design before Cupertino gets their product to market… then threaten to sue Apple for IP violations.
Saucy! And now GooPhone is at it again, announcing a $99 iPad mini clone called the GooPad that looks exactly like an iPad mini, right down to the icons.
Wondering which iPad is right for you: the iPad mini, the iPad 2, or the iPad with Retina Display? Apple now has a dedicated page explaining the difference between the models, for everything from spec to price.
Source: Apple
The fourth generation iPad is now here. That means the third-gen iPad you bought just six months ago is a big pile of silicon dust: twice as slow as the new iPad, without a new connector, with none of its advantages.
Hey, bummer. Apple feels for you, man. That’s why they’re discontinuing the third-gen iPad and selling you the iPad 4 starting at just $379 for the 16GB Wi-Fi only model, just $50 more than a base 16GB iPad mini.
The 32GB and 64GB models are $469 and $549. Want a top of the line 64GB iPad with LTE? It’ll cost you $679 refurbished. At the low end, you can buy a refurbished iPad 3 for the price of a brand new iPad 2.
Source: Apple
Ask iFixIt: the thinner Apple makes their products, the less user serviceable they are. That’s why the new 21.5-inch iMac doesn’t allow users to upgrade the RAM themselves. The 27-inch, though, apparently does, a consequence of the added space.
Source: Apple
Saying that it will allow users to use the iPad in places and environments they never could before, the iPad mini is the smallest and lightest device yet.
Capitalizing upon 100 million iPads sold in just two and a half years, Apple wants you to know that the iPad is a device that they want to have a huge educational focus.
iBooks Author already makes up 80% of U.S. High School core curriculum, according to Tim Cook. There are 2500 U.S. classrooms that are using iBooks textbooks.
So today iBooks Author has a new version, with embeddable fonts and embedded mathematical expressions for the math set.
Also, publishers can now update their books, just like in the App Store. This will allow publishers to keep kids up to date with the latest and most accurate information.
iBooks Author is just going to continue to be huge in education. The new version will be available in the App Store starting today.
All of this leads to the iPad mini.
Apple has just announced the Apple Fusion Drive. It’s a combo SSD/HDD, with smart software in the mix to maximize performance.
It includes 128GB flash storage, as well as a 1 terabyte or 3 terabyte hard drive.
This is essentially a standard SSD/HDD dual drive configuration. The difference is that Apple’s software figures out which files to automatically switch between SSD and HDD for the best performance on your machine.
There have been combo SSD/HDDs before, but never with this kind of smart operating system integration. This is a fantastic compromise, and the first big surprise of today’s event.
Fresh off of announcing a new Retina MacBook Pro, but the Mac mini is also getting a major new update. The design is the same, but there’s now four USB 3 ports.
Here’s the base configuration:
If you’ve been worried that Apple is going to forget about iBooks, you worried about nothing: today, Apple is announcing a new version of iBooks.
The first new feature of iBooks 3.0 has continuous scrolling, without pagination.
In addition, books now sync their reading position through iCloud across multiple devices. You can share passages and books across Twitter and Facebook.
iBooks is also getting more language support, namely for Asian languages like Korean, Japanese and Chinese.
The new version of iBooks is out today, and will be downloaded in the App Store.
(This story is developing.Check back for updates.)
It’s finally here. Returning to the California Theater in San Jose, California — a long neglected venue for Apple announcements — Tim Cook has just taken the stage for today’s ‘iPad mini’ event.
Not that they’ve confirmed the iPad mini, but we’ve got a good idea it’s coming, along with a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, new iMacs, a new Mac mini, iTunes 11, iBooks 3 and more.
“It’s great to be back at the California Theater. We have some great memories here, and we’re about to create some new ones.”
But first, the inevitable numbers.
Here it is: the iPad mini, shown in the flesh and fully constructed in this new video by E-Trade supply.
Disingenuously, the video is called a “Power-On” test but I’m pretty sure that this unit isn’t actually functional, since it looks to me like that boot-up logo at the end is simply superimposed.
Either way, though, this is a really good comparison video, and gives a great feel for what the iPad mini will actually feel like in your hand… where it will be very, very soon.
Earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook famously said that Cupertino was going to “double down on secrecy” this year. It hasn’t worked. Apple — once a company known for the surprise “one more thing” — had every single detail of the iPhone 5 leaked to the public before the actual event. Can Apple ever get its secrecy back?
Probably not. A new report talking to a number of Apple employees under the condition of anonymity suggests that while Apple HQ is as secretive of new products as ever, Cupertino can do nothing about leaks that come out of the Asian supply chain.
I despise iOS 6 Maps. Despite writing some initially favorable early impressions that now seem like they were written by a slathering moron demon who temporarily possessed my soul, ever since iOS 6 has been released, I have been frustrated by a fail rate on iOS 6 Maps that hovers somewhere around 70%. Not only can I most of the time not get iOS 6 Maps to give me a correct answer to a search query, I usually can’t get it to give me the same wrong answer twice in a row.
I realize a lot of people think iOS 6 Maps is just fine. Some of these are people I respect. I have a hard time reconciling their views on the matter with my reality. I have my suspicions that people who think iOS 6 Maps is just fine commute everywhere in their cars, and have a set pattern of destinations that rarely change: point A to point B to point C. I bike everywhere, I’m constantly going to new addresses, and for me, iOS 6 is just an utter disaster.
I yearn for the return of Google Maps to iOS 6, but I find their web app to be wanting, and most of the maps competition to be slow, ugly and just as bad as iOS 6 Maps when it comes to walking and biking instructions. Up until now, Mapquest (!) was the best app I found for getting me where I’m going.
That’s all changed, now that I’ve discovered Maps+. It’s based off of Google Maps, so it’s accurate. It uses the same tileset as iOS 5 Maps, so it’s pretty and familiar. It’s super fast, and it’s free.
The iPad mini will be announced next October 23rd, but when’s it actually going on sale? Common sense and looking at what Apple has done in the past would dictate November 2nd, which is what previous internet rumor suggested. Now we’re hearing confirmation of that date from loftier sources.
One of the consequences of the iPhone 5’s streamlined, ultra-thin design is that you can no longer just pop off the backplate of the device and replace it. That means no more Don-Draper-esque teak backs or glowing Apple logos or anything else that you could do to deeply personalize your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S.
So what do you do if you want to customize your iPhone 5 without having to slap a bulky case on it? You skin it. And RAW out of Brooklyn is making some of the best custom skins for the iPhone 5 around out of quality leather and wood grain to give your handset a classier look.
One thing’s clear: the iPhone 5 isn’t going to be a cakewalk to jailbreak. It’s based upon an all-new chip and an all-new operating system, and so far, the Dev Team has been stumped as to how to get a jailbreak out to the masses. But now Planetbeing, a member of the Chronic Dev Team, has given iPhone 5 owners a ray of hope: he says he’s almost figured out a full tethered jailbreak for the iPhone 5, and from there, an untethered jailbreak is on the horizon. But there’s a big catch: it can only be run from a developer account.
Although I’ve used a Mac exclusively since 2005, before that, I was a PC guy, which means I have lots of gauzy memories of halcyon days well-spent in front of a menagerie of beige boxes falling backwards in time through a decade of classic PC gaming, starting with the old 8-bit Ultima games and Nethack under DOS and continuing well into the Windows era with games like Grim Fandango, Half-Life, Planescape: Torment and System Shock 2.
I love the Mac, but the one thing I miss about having a PC is easily playing classic PC games without loading them up in Boot Camp or Parallels. Luckily, it looks like that’s about to change, as GOG.com — a digital distributor of classic PC games updated to work on modern machines and distributed without DRM — is now releasing their titles to work on Mac.
It’s finally here. After a long alpha and beta period, and months of teasing before it, Tapbot’s incredible Tweetbot client for Mac is finally here in polished, 1.0 form. That’s the good news. The bad news is the app in its final form costs $20, a price that is sure to scare off all but the most die-hard Twitter users.
If we were to name our most anticipated iOS game, it would easily be Epic’s upcoming Infinty Blade: Dungeons, a spin-off of the popular franchise that takes Infinity Blade’s existing world and makes a Diablo-like action RPG out of it. Epic and Apple have been showing off Dungeons since May, and we even thought there was a good chance it would be released after the iPhone 5 keynote.
It wasn’t, and unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it will be released after next week’s iPad mini keynote either. In fact, it won’t even ship this year.
To vastly simplify matters, every LCD screen is made up of a bunch of pixels connected to each other with a mesh of tiny little wires. These pixels don’t actually emit light themselves, but simply regulate the color of the light being displayed in that pixel. Behind this mesh is a lamp, and before a pixel can light up on your screen, the light from this lamp needs to shine through this mesh of wires. Because this mesh is so densely packed, though, the lamp needs to shine very, very brightly to get through… and the brighter an LED light shines, the more power it soaks up.
This is why the new iPad needs such a massive battery. The Retina display has over 3 million pixels in in a tiny area, which means the mesh behind the display is even thicker and more densely packed. To compensate, Apple needs to use a very bright light to shine through this extremely dense mesh, which results in worse battery performance over all.
What if there was a way to make the mesh of wires behind every pixel a lot less dense? That’s the idea behind Sharp’s IGZO technology, and the reason why we’ve been excited about it finally coming to Apple products since at least the beginning of the year. Now it looks possible that, with the iPad mini, we could finally get our wish, as Sharp is now announcing that their IGZO tech comes in 7-inch varieties… and they are releasing a tablet to prove it.
