John Brownlee - page 85

We thought we’d had it all figured out.

When Apple bucked the trend of numerically naming the iPad by calling the Retina iPad the “new iPad” instead of the iPad 3, we thought it was a sure thing that they’d do the same thing for the next iPhone. The next iPhone, then, would be “the new iPhone” or the “2012 iPhone”, not the iPhone 5.

It made total sense, in a way: Apple doesn’t add a numeral to the end of its other products, like the MacBook Pro or the iPod Classic. They don’t even do it for the iPod touch, which is basically the most current iPod with all the phone guts stripped out. Why continue setting apart the iPhone as a sequel to the handsets that have come before when you can position it, not as an incremental update, but a timeless product in its own right: the Mercedes of smartphones?

That’s the way Apple handles the rest of its products, but with the invitation for today’s, and now Apple accidentally spilling the official name of the next iPhone on their website, it now seems clear that Apple is going to call the sixth-generation iPhone the ‘iPhone 5’ after all. Why would they do that?

In case there was any doubt, Apple has just accidentally confirmed the next iPhone will indeed be called the iPhone 5, as a search inputted into the official Apple.com website looking for “iPhone 5” calls up (non-functioning) results for an upcoming “Apple Introduces iPhone 5” press release.

Via: MacRumors

The Apple Store goes down for many reasons throughout any given month, and not all of them mean big updates, but the fact that it went down four and a half hours before Apple’s iPhone 5 announcement event pretty much guarantees we’re going to see sweeping changes and awesome new products when it goes back up, including the iPhone 5, the new iPod touch, new Lightning adapters, new Earpods, and maybe, just maybe, new iMacs and a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro?

Who knows? What do you want to see in the Apple Store when it comes back up? Let us know in the comments.

The way Apple handles preorders depends on a couple of things: how much stock they have and how in-demand they think their latest gadget will be. For example, when the third-gen iPad debuted in March of this year, Apple started taking preorders almost immediately, but last year, when they debuted the iPhone 4S, they waited for three days until midnight PST on Friday before taking preorders.

It’s easy to see why. Even though there were enough third-gen iPads to go around, preordering the iPad was madness, and brought Apple’s server to its knees. By starting preorders in the middle of the night, Apple can mitigate server load, since most people won’t wake up in the middle of the night to get a new phone.

No surprise, then, that it’s looking increasingly likely that Apple will follow the same strategy this year, with the iPhone 5 not becoming available for preorder until Friday, September 14th at 12:00AM PST.

Hate skeuomorphism? Hate the way Apple’s slathering all of its apps with faux dead cow skin? Tough luck, because you know whose idea it was? Steve Jobs himself.

Created and animated by Sam Becket, this cheery video of all the features the next iPhone 5 will pack when Apple announces it tomorrow.

Unlike some of the videos that have gone around lately, it’s remarkably down-to-earth, emphasizing (as Apple will) the device’s extraordnary thinness, its new antenna, the new 9-pin Dock Connector, LTE, the new nanoSIM, the longer screen and more.

Everyone knows that the “upgrade” to OS X Mountain Lion severely reduced the battery life in Mac laptops by up to 38%. And while OS X 10.8.1 helped things some, the fix was still meager compared to the oceans of juice you comparatively got on the same machine running OS X Lion.

OS X 10.8.2, though? Much, much better. In fact, according to The Mac Observer, in the latest Build 12C35 of OS X 10.8.2, not only does the latest development version of Mountain Lion give users a bigger upgrade in battery life than OS X 10.8.0 or OS X 10.8.1, but their test system — a 2011 15-Inch MacBook Pro 2.0GHz i7 — now has more battery life than it did running OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard, the previous champ Mac operating system when it came to conserving juice.

In fact, while their test system lost 105.5 and 80.5 minutes of battery life compared to 10.6.8 in OS X 10.8.0 and OS X 10.8.1, respectively, it actually gained eight minutes against OS X 10.6.8 in OS X 10.8.2. Now those are some impressive results. Results I’m now off to test for myself.

Source: Mac Observer

The always sketechy Digitimes has a new report out, and as usual, douse your taste buds with brine, because they say that a Retina Display iMac was supposed to debut this month, but has been delayed because of production problems. They also say the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro wil be out by October.

According to Enderle Group analyst Rob Enderle, Apple might walk out a celebrity during the iPhone 5 event on September 12.

Why? First of all, because Enderle thinks that so many details about the iPhone 5 have already leaked out that no one’s going to bother watching the event.

Following this morning’s enigmatic shots of the inside of the lobby, news shots of what is happening outside the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts ahead of September 12th’s iPhone 5 event have emerged, showing the first stages of what will become the public-facing banners of what will undoubtedly prove to be Apple’s biggest event yet.

The banners are going up right now, but we’ve got our own photographer heading down, hopefully to capture more. In the past, the banners that hang outside of the Yerba Buena Center Of The Arts have tended to make some reference to an unannounced new product or service, so hopefully, we’ll soon have an inkling of what Apple’s set to announce.

More images at MacStories below.

Source: MacStories

Most Bluetooth headphones are ugly. Most Bluetooth headphones are junk. Most Bluetooth headphones make you long for a cord. They are distorted, bass heavy, low-quality piece of junk.

For the most part, not so Harman / Kardon’s over-the-ear Bluetooth headphones. These are Bluetooth headphones worthy in both sound quality and design of the iconic company that not only helped create Hi-Fi, but is, in many non-trivial ways, the Apple of sound.

There’s a fantastic episode of Pendleton Ward’s postapocalyptic candy land show Adventure Time in which Fin the last human and Jake, his magical dog companion, play a game called Card Wars which is like a futuristic version of Magic: The Gathering matched with the Holochess game in Star Wars.

I’ve always wished Magic was played like that — by placing real cards down on a sort of holographic desktop to see the creatures come alive and do battle right before my eyes — but it never occurred to me that my iPad could already do something like that. But here comes Nuko Cards to prove me wrong.

Ouch. Not that it’s much of a surprise, but a little over twelve hours after The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was going to create its own Pandora rival, prices of Pandora shares have tanked by over 18%.

It seems like the market is taking this as a very real threat, and no wonder: Apple has more to gain by entering the streaming music service space than you might think.

Over the course of the last few months, we’ve heard a lot of rumors that Apple intends on releasing an updated version of the third-generation iPad later in this year to improve the device in a number of ways: namely, to fit it with better efficiency Sharp IGZO panels and give it a new, smaller 9-pin Dock Connector.

Now a new report from research firm DisplaySearch claims that a new iPad is indeed scheduled to arrive alongside the iPad mini, which will be lighter and cooler. We’re starting to think this makes sense.

The big story of yesterday evening was a somewhat cryptic report by The Wall Street Journal that Apple wants to build its own streaming music service, a la Pandora. Once you step back from the “hey, wouldn’t that be cool”-edness of it all, it’s a weird report. But it may not be totally bonkers. In fact, it probably makes a lot of sense.

If you’re looking for a blazing fast ultraportable laptop, the MacBook Air is the best value for the money… and that value just got a little bit better, as Apple has finally started adding refurbished models of the 2012 MacBook Air to the online Apple Store, offering savings of up to 16%.

At today’s Amazon event, Jeff Bezos dropped some whoppers on the industry: not only an upgraded Kindle Fire, but the Kindle Fire HD, a mother of a tablet that has a Retina-caliber display, serious horsepower, and a super low price starting at just $199 for the 7-inch model, $299 for the 8.9-inch model and $499 for a 32GB 8.9-inch model with LTE. Without a doubt, it’s clear Amazon is gunning for the iPad and the upcoming iPad mini, but how do the new Kindle Fires really stack up?

Below, you’ll find a chart comparing the third-gen iPad, rumored iPad mini, Kindle Fires and (just for comparison’s sake) the Galaxy Nexus 7, spec-by-spec. Please be aware that this chart is still in flux, and is based in the case of the iPad mini on rumors, and in the case of the new Kindle Fires on incomplete information which we have supplemented with reasonable speculation. We will be updating the chart as we get new information about the exact specs of Amazon’s new Kindle Fires, but for right now, we think this is a good resource in how all of these tablets compare against one another.

With the Galaxy Nexus 7 eating their lunch and the iPad mini expected to debut in October and put the squeeze on the first-generation model, Amazon has just announced the new Kindle Fire.

Featuring an all-new, more iPad-ish form factor, the new 7-inch Kindle Fire boasts a faster processor, 2GB of RAM, up to 40% faster performance and longer battery life. Otherwise, though, Amazon is being mum about the specs.

Boy, is this tablet cheap though. It costs $159 with preorders starting today, and orders shipping on September 14th.

Image: The Verge

Have you ever broken your iPhone 4 or 4S’s glass? Felt that it was Steve Jobs’s fault for sucking you into his reality distortion field and convincing you that the iPhone 4’s glass was thirty times harder than plastic? Angry enough to want to try to sue?

Tough. A San Jose federal judge has just thrown out a class action lawsuit over the strength of the glass in the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S.

Sonny Dickson got his hands on some pictures in which the “mysterious” chip shielding in the front assembly of the iPhone 5 was peeled back.

So what was underneath? The rumored, then discredited, NFC chip? A fingerprint sensor to go along with Apple’s recent, hasty acquisition of Authentec?

Nope, it’s definitely not either of those, but no one still knows for sure. The chances are, though, it’s nothing very exotic, but a required silion to make the new iPhone’s In-Cell touchscreen work.

Source: Sonny Dickson

Apple’s been working to make the Apple TV “more than a hobby” for a long, long time now, but it looks like it won’t happen this year, with a new report saying that a new Apple TV — whether a full HDTV or a new set-top box with content deals from the cable system — definitely won’t happen this year.

Adobe Photoshop Touch is probably the most delightfully usable and capable touchscreen photo editing software out there right now, but when it was originally released, it had a few big problems: it only supported images at an extremely limited resolution, it didn’t know how to look in iOS’s Photo Stream for pictures and, worst of all, it didn’t have Retina support on the third-generation iPad.

Rad news for Photoshop Touch fans, then. Version 1.3 fixes all of those complaints: it now slurps images out of Photostream, has full Retina support and can handle images up to 12 megapixels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kaVzt-_zajE

This is a heck of a video, in that it shows an iPhone 5 booting up next to an iPhone 4S. Even better, it seems real.

According to MIC Gadget, the iPhone 5 was “accidentally” discovered in Foxconn’s Jincheng factory, which basically means it was smuggled out and is stolen property. Whatever the provenance, though, it seems to be legit: the official first sighting of a working iPhone 5 in the wild.

What else do we know? Not much: the iPhone 5 boots up much more quickly than the iPhone 4S, but otherwise, it’s not capable of being activated at this point, so the iPhone 5 stalls at the activation screen.

More pictures of the new iPhone below:

When Apple switches over to a smaller 9-pin Dock Connecter for the iPhone 5 and iPad mini, all your existing cables, chargers and accessories won’t work without an adapter. According to a new report, you won’t just be able to pick up that adapter anywhere: only Apple will sell them, in packs of one or three.

The iPhone 5 is coming, which means iPhone 5 cases are coming, and unlike third-party accessory makers that need access to the specs of Apple’s still-secret rejiggered Dock Connector, case makers have had accurate access to the next iPhone’s dimensions and port layout for months.

No surprise, then, that the first third-party iPhone 5 cases and screen protectors are starting to show up in AT&T’s system. Unless you love Snoopy, though, the iLuv wallet case previewed above is probably the best of them.

Source: Boy Genius Report