I wasn’t expecting to laugh at a confessional song about how good one man was at Apple’s iWork and iLife suites, and how it ended up resulting in the loss of his cherished cat, Winslow. But laugh I did. Long and hard. Happy hump day, everyone.
Via: Reddit
At yesterday’s second U.S. Presidential Debate, President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney were both asked about the iPad, the Mac and the iPhone, specifically in relation to how to get Apple to start manufacturing their products in America again. The two candidates’ answers differed, with Romney opining it was because China “cheated” and Obama saying that “there are some jobs that are not going to come back.”
When Apple sends out invitations for their media events, they often include little hints as to what people can expect to be announced. The iPhone 5 event nvitation had the shadow of a gigantic five emerging from underneath the date, and the iPad 3 invitation showed off the clarity of the tablet’s still-unannounced Retina display.
In comparison, today’s invite for the October 23rd event doesn’t seem to have many clues as to what Apple is announcing. The design of the invitation doesn’t seem to mean much. However, the writers of Apple’s invitation have tipped their hat a little bit in the wording of the invitation: “We’ve got a little more to show you.”
What does it mean? Well, everything Apple is expected to announce next week is either a smaller version of an existing product (thinner iMacs, a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro tear) or ‘mini’ (the iPad mini, a new Mac mini). It’s not a lot to go on, but it’s definitely a purposeful choice and a nod to the products we’ll see next week.
Apple’s iMac line hasn’t been updated since May 3rd, 2011. On average, that makes an update almost a year overdue. So you know a big update is coming, and rumor has it that when it comes, the new iMac will jettison the the optical drive to achieve a vastly thinner, teardrop form factor.
We were curious what that would look like, so we asked our designer Dan Draper to mock-up what a revised iMac with a thinner design would look like while largely retaining the iMac’s iconic portrait. The answer is familiar, and yet entirely new… the best iMac yet.
The new iMac is believed to be announced next week at Apple’s October 23rd event. Check out the full concept after the jump, and let us know what you think in the comments.
Pricing details for Microsoft’s anticipated entry into the tablet market have emerged, and it looks as if the Surface will be very competitively priced against the iPad, right out of the gate: a 32GB Surface will cost the same as a 16GB new iPad at $499. And if you bundle the 32GB Surface with the new Touch cover, the 32GB Surface costs exactly the same as a 32GB iPad without a Smart Cover.
Ever since Apple first introduced the Lightning adapter, much attention has been given to the mysterious chip used inside every Lightning Cable. Some speculated that the chip’s purpose was to merely “flip” the path the digital signals take from pin topin depending upon which orientation he cable was plugged into a device, while others have insisted that it is, in fact, a security chip meant to thwart counterfeit Lightning accessory makers.
What’s the truth? It looks like the chip inside every Lightning cable is a security chip, but it’s a simple one, less advanced even than the security chips you would find in today’s printer cartridges! And since those can be faked, so can Lightning.
It often seems that many of Apple’s competitors decide to launch products based upon what Cupertino is rumored to do, hoping to get a head start on Apple. It’s funny how often this fails. Remember when all of Apple’s competitors announced their own “slates” ahead of the 2010 debut of the original iPad? Or how Amazon launched a crappy cloud locker service for MP3s ahead of iTunes Match?
With rumors swirling that Apple is planning on launching its own streaming music service, it seems curious that Microsoft is now choosing to relaunch their own answer to iTunes, the Zune Music Store, under the Xbox brand, while simultaneously introducing their own… wait for it… streaming music service. And it’s coming to iOS.
The new fifth-generation iPod touch is the thinnest, most advanced iPod touch yet, boasting a 4-inch display, an A5 chip and an incredibly small form factor, but it’s not an upgrade in every way from the models that preceded it.
In fact, in one key way, it’s a serious downgrade from previous iPod touches: the new iPo touch no longer has an ambient light sensor, meaning that it can’t adjust screen brightness depending upon the brightness in the room around you. That could mean you’ll spend a lot more time manually juggling brightness in the new iPod touch.
Last year, Apple announced that a “small number” of 1TB Seagate hard drives used in 2011 iMacs could fail under certain conditions, and were eligible for a free replacement. Now Apple’s extended that program to all iMacs sold between October 2009 and July 2011.
According to the new support page, if you have a 21.5 or 27-inch iMac with a 1TB Seagate hard drive, Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider will replace the hard drive free of charge. They’ve even included a handy little form to figure out if your iMac is affected. (My 2009 27-inch iMac luckily isn’t).
One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t necessarily have to bring your iMac back to the Apple Store: in some areas, if you contact an AppleCare representative, you can take advantage of an in-office or home repair option, so if you are going to get your hard drive replaced and don’t want to lug forty pounds of aluminum and silicon to your local Apple Store, ask about this option.
Source: Apple
Yesterday, sky adventurer Felix Baumgartner hurled himself out of a 30 million cubic foot helium balloon hovering at the edge of outer space and fell 24 miles down to the earth, making him the first human outside of a vehicle to break the sound barrier. What else is there to say except the man has balls of steel?
Well, maybe this: Felix Baumgartner uses a MacBook. And like everything else he does, he does it like a boss.
You mess with the bull, you’re going to get the horns. Google discovered this when they launched Android, their own competitor to iOS, a move which ultimately resulted in Apple jettisoning the search giant’s products almost entirely from iOS 6. Now Samsung is finding out the same thing: not only has it been found guilty of infringing Apple’s intellectual property and been told to pony up a $1 billion fine, but now Apple is now taking away their portion of Samsung’s multi-billion dollar manufacturing business.
After much speculation, the last piece of the iPad mini puzzle has fallen into place, as a complete list of European prices of the iPad mini have leaked to the Internet, confirming that the iPad mini will come in multiple variations and ship with LTE capability.
Grove has long made some of the sexiest Apple accessories around, hewing them out of polished bamboo and then laser etching them with attractive designs of your choice, so it’s no surprise that the Portland, Oregon based outfit now have cases available for the iPhone 5. Also unsurprising is just how gorgeous they are, especially in their etched incarnations.
You’ll pay, of course — Grove’s iPhone 5 cases start at $79 without any engraving, and go up from there to $99 for one with a design and $129 for a custom engraving. Fashion never comes cheap.
Source: Grove
When Apple first unveiled the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro back in July of this year, they used two images to specifically highlight the incredible resolution of the new display. The first was a shot of a herd of zebras running through the grass captured by photographer Steve Bloom. And the second? A photograph of an eye in full Ziggy Stardust make-up, taken by Swiss photographe Sabine Liewald.
The only problem with that latter photograph? According to the photographer, Apple never properly licensed it to be used in Retina MacBook Pro marketing materials. And she’s now suing over it.
What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander. Apple gives other companies a lot of flack for ripping off their intellectual property, but in iOS 6, they ripped off the design of a classic clock designed by Hans Hilfiker which has been both trademarked and copyrighted by the Swiss Federal Railway Service.
It seems unlikely that the transgression was willful, but it was still sloppy of Apple to not do their due dilligence when it came to researching the clock, or seeing if its design was trademarked.
Luckily, Apple has now chosen to do the right thing, having reached out to to the Swiss Federal Railway Service, who today announced that the companies have signed a licensing deal for the famous clock. It’s unknown what the terms are, but it’s good to see Cupertino do the right thing here.
With iOS 6, Apple has officially deprecated the UDID as a valid means for advertisers to track app users. The UDID functioned sort of like a Social Security Number for your iPhone, allowing advertisers and third parties to track your behavior across multiple apps… a troubling privacy concern for many. But UDID tracking also had many beneficial advantages, like allowing developers to troubleshoot crashing apps and the like, which inspired some third-parties when their many companies started releasing their own alternatives to UDID.
Apple wasn’t going to leave advertisers and developers without an alternative to use in their apps, though. New in iOS 6 is two new IDs: IDFA and IDFV. Yes, both IDs still track you, and the IDFA is specifically used by advertisers to collect data on you. But the good news is that this tracking can easily be turned off, and it’s much less invasive than the UDID.
The new Lightning-to-30-pin adapter is a tiny thing, just a little dongle that routes signals from your old iPhone dock or connector to the appropriate pins in the new Lightning adapter. It’s smaller than the size of a matchbook.
Despite this, however, reader Doug P. emailed us with an image of how much packaging the adapter comes in: not only is Apple’s retail packaging for the adapter six times bigger than the adapter itself, but the shipping box it comes in looks like could easily hold up to thirty adapters without their packaging.
It seems right now like Apple has a lot of prospective new products on the horizon. The 7.85-inch iPad mini. The 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. Updated iMacs. Yet despite the fact that all of these products have been highly rumored to debut this month in time of a busy holiday season, we’ve yet to see any of them. Now one report is suggesting a reason why: Apple’s having production problems on both the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro and iPad mini.
In the real world, as related in Walter Isaacson’s biography, the name of Apple Computers came when Steve Jobs was one one of his fruitarian diets, and was inspired to name his company after coming back from a mysterious commune in Oregon called “the Apple Orchard” because it sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”
In an alternate dimension filled with psychadelic bio-horror, though, what if Steve Jobs named his company Apple because he bit into an Apple and cut his mouth on a microchip inside, after which he began to be haunted by squiggling, biomechanical creatures with lurid, prehensile appendages strung together from silicon and copper wire.
The latter is the origin of Apple Computers as conveyed in Ryan Patrick’s new music video for Miike Snow’s “Pretender,” and while it may seem all a bit surreal, behind the best surrealism is another way of looking at the truth. Our friend Mark Wilson says over at FastCo. Design that maybe the best way to summarize Jobs’s life story is “as a gifted wild child who earnestly searched life for meaning and found computers.” Weird as it is, that’s what the video to “Pretender” is about too.
Via: Fast Co. Design
There’s no denying that Apple’s success with iOS has influenced every aspect of their business, but it goes even further than you might think: Apple’s now even modeling its packaging after iOS app icons!
You see more and more of them every day: iPads, doubling as cash registers in businesses small and large, thanks to forward-thinking mobile payment companies like Square. Now Groupon, the deals-and-couponing social network, is getting in on the game with Breadcrumb, an incredible point-of-sale system which makes integrating an iPad into your business as simple as if Apple made the product themselves.
One of the things I miss most about the design of the iPhone 4S is the ability to easily change the back of my iPhone to something different, like a non-standard color, or even teak.
You simply can’t do that with the iPhone 5, but Gizmodo just pointed out an even better idea: you can laser engrave the back of your iPhone 5 with your own custom design.
This is awesome, and there’s a laser engraving place right around the corner. I might just have to give it a try. The only questions are, which design should I get, and is this going to void my AppleCare+? After all, technically, it’s just a bunch of scratches.
There’s more laser-engraved iPhones at the link below, so check them out.
Source: Gizmodo
iOS 6 Maps. An unmitigated disaster, right? That’s what I’d say as I struggle to get Maps to even give me correct directions from work to my house, but apparently, I’m in the minority: a recent poll suggests that most people don’t think Maps has degraded at all in iOS 6.
One of the things that was fantastic about vintage PCs is the way your hands never had to leave the keyboard: everything was just a command away. The graphic user interface first introduced to the world with the Macintosh is obviously a big step forward when it comes to general accessibility, pointing an onscreen at an object to click on it can often be a step backwards when it comes to speed for die-hard power users.
If that sounds like you, Shortcat is a new, free app that you should download which aims to bring the command line to the GUI.
Speculating in vintage computers isn’t exactly the same as putting money into a blue chip. Here’s the proof: a rare Apple I being sold at auction at Christie’s has just failed to make its minimum bid of 50,000 British pounds (or about $80,000), despite the fact that a similar machine sold for $374,500 in June.