John Brownlee - page 95

The City of Cupertino has just released a slew of new plans and technical drawings for Apple’s proposed Spaceship Campus, which is set to finish construction in 2015.

The most interesting part of these plans, though? The plans for a massive new subterranean auditorium for future Apple press announcements. This will be where Apple unveils products like the ninth-generation iPhone, the seventh-generation iPad, the future Apple HDTV and other magical gadgets we haven’t even thought of ye.

Here’s some pictures of the auditorium. It’s like a giant secret lair!

Facebook’s been planning an HTML5 app center to try to tackle Apple’s App Store for quite a while, and now Techcrunch has what they say is the first shot of what it’ll look like in the official Facebook iOS app. In fact, we might all see it as soon as tonight, at an app-themed press event to be held in San Francisco.

Facebook on their part is playing mum, saying: “Since we announced the App Center to developers last month, we’ve been testing it with a small percentage of users. We have no further details to announce at this time.”

For me, all I can say is if App Center requires me to load Facebook’s execrable app, I doubt Apple has anything to fear.

Source: Techcrunch

TwelveSouth is a company as known for their fantastic innovations (for example, the PlugBug) as their curiosities (the BookBook case). The SurfacePad for MacBook doesn’t fall in either category: it’s a strictly utilitarian accessory, a thin leather sticker for the keyboard of your MacBook Air that makes it feel more pleasant to type on by putting an almost imperceptibly thin layer of dyed cow flesh between your palms and the cold unibody aluminum.

Earlier this week, we did the math and declared prepaid carrier Cricket Mobile to be the best iPhone deal around, but today’s announcement that Sprint’s Virgin Mobile will also be offering the iPhone 4S starting on June 24th changes the math substantially, and Cricket’s no longer looking like such a good deal.

Virgin Mobile’s iPhone deal requires you to purchase a completely unsubsidized iPhone from them up front at $649, $150 more expensive than Cricket. But that initial money spent up front can really pay off over time, depending on which plan you sign up for.

How much? You can save over $1000 over the course of two-years on Virgin Mobile compared to AT&T, Verizon or Sprint.

At this point, the consensus of everyone from the smallest Apple blogs to the venerable Wall Street Journal is that Apple will dump Google as its Maps provider in iOS 6 in favor of its own, in-house technology that will bring, among other enhancements, 3D mapping to the mix.

Apple’s move has caught Google not just off-guard, it’s put the search giant into a total panic. Need proof? Look no further than Google’s debacle of an emergency announcement today, in which they unveiled “the next dimension of Google Maps.”

During this announcement, Google coincidentally announced their own 3D Maps solution… coincidentally enough, just five days before Apple’s expected to unveil theirs. Oh, and they showed it working on an iPad instead of an Android tablet… and their app was so hacked together it crashed numerous times during the presentation.

Can anyone say “rushed?”

Despite Apple’s stated efforts to improve worker conditions at their Foxconn factories in China, worker tension is still high, as up to a thousand workers rioted in Chengdu last night for hours over a minor incident.

Dungeons of Dredmor is one of my favorite games on Steam, a funny, impish, brutal yet utterly modern entry in my favorite gaming genre, rogue-likes. It only costs $1.50 right now, which rounding down for inflation is essentially free, so you might as well buy it. It’s a great introduction to that most sadistic genre of games, the rogue-like.

But Dungeons of Dredmor’s low, low price isn’t why we’re posting. Nor is the fact that it just got a free new expansion pack full of great new monsters and skills.

No, the reason we’re posting is because of that expansion pack’s new system requirements, which will elicit either a chuckle or an outraged roar from Apple fans.

The iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S’s Retina Displays are already ludicrously pixel packed at 326 ppi, but even so, that’s only enough pixels to make it so that the human eye can’t resolve them when the phone is held twelve inches away from your face.

Apple can do better, and maybe someday they will, thanks to Japan Display’s new technology which squeeze 651 pixels per inch into an LCD screen. Their latest display has a resolution of 1280 x 800, the same as the existing 13-inch MacBook Pro, but is only 2.3 inches across.

That’s just one ppi from a true pixel doubling, which Apple has done for iOS devices to maintain backwards compatibility amongst apps and UI elements. If Apple picked this technology up, they’d finally have a display that was “retina” in the truest sense of the term… albeit, at four times the impact on the GPU.

Source: Tech-On
Via: Gizmodo

Let’s face it: the iPhone is the Hot Rod of smartphones. If Steve McQueen was still alive, he’d own one; Jay Leno probably has a hanger filled with a hundred of them. Nothing seems more appropriate to me, then, but to see a Hot Rod style exhaust snaking out of an iPhone. The iPhone is the most powerful thing you can drive that fits in your pocket.

That’s just what the iXoost dock does. It’s a speaker dock handbuilt by Xoost in Italy that grafts some gorgeous aluminum exhaust pipes onto your iPhone.

Cricket Mobile’s recent announcement that they will be selling the iPhone 4 and 4S to prepaid customers (while offering enormous savings over traditional plans) seems to have started an avalanche, as now Sprint’s Virgin Mobile prepaid brand is reported to be following their lead.

You might have heard that today’s a pretty special day, astronomically speaking. Venus is in transit between Earth and the Sun today, which is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Today only, right before sunset in the United States, if you look up at the sun, you’ll be able to see the silhouetted Venus passing between us and our life-giving star. And due to the differences between Venus’s solar year and our own orbit around the Sun, you’ll have to wait a hundred years until this event happens again.

In other words, if you’re American, you don’t want to miss this if you have any curiosity about the heavens at all. And luckily, there’s an app that will help you make sure you don’t.

These official Star Wars iPhone cases just announced by PowerA are just super cute. At $40, they’re pretty pricy, but LucasArts licensing ain’t cheap. Each case distills the iconic style of Star Wars‘s core characters — C-3PO, Darth Vader, R2-D2 and Chewbacca — into an attractive, quasi-abstract pattern. I particularly like the fur matting on the Chewbacca one.

Hey, who says a fanboy can’t look smart? These cases should be out later in the year.

Source: PowerA

When former Apple retail boss Ron Johnson took his leave from Cupertino to become the new CEO of JC Penney late last year, there wasn’t as much “WTF-ing” as you might expect. Sure, there was some incredulity as Johnson left the gleaming stores he had founded for JC Penney’s chain of mouldering clothing outlets, but there was also a lot of optimism: if anyone could turn around a business like JC Penney, it would be Johnson.

Johnson may still succeed, but his first moves at rehabilitating JC Penney have been failures. The stock is tanking and JC Penney posted a $163 million loss last quarter alone. Customers, it seems, are not reacting well to the new JC Penney, which eschews sales, circulars, coupons and fine print for plain, honest pricing… the kind of store where all the .99s are dropped from the price tag.

Why? Honest pricing might work for Apple, but in most of the retail word, it appears to be a sucker’s game. Customers, it turns out, only say they want fair pricing. What the really want to do is treat shopping like a game.

It’s really hard to verify this, and it flies in the face of all of the most recent rumors about the latest MacBook Pro line, but a new photo of what is purported to be the new 13-inch MacBook Pro’s specs, and they are underwhelming to say the least.

There is an 2.5GHz Ivy Bridge chip, and there is a USB 3.0 port, but across the board, pretty much everything else is the same: no Retina Displays, same thickness as before, the optical drive’s still there, same RAm, hard drive and SuperDrive specs.

In short, a speed bump, not a major revolution. Is it possible this is the base model of MBP Apple will unveil to keep people who still need an optical drive happy, or have we all got caught up in a maelstrom of wishful thinking?

Source: Weiphone
Thanks: Chesh!

According to the latest report by ABI Research, there is no tablet market… only an iPad market.

Microsoft has officially announced their newest product for the Xbox 360, Xbox Smart Glass, and it will turn your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch into an extension of your favorite console games.

Imagine playing a game of Halo and using your iPhone to show you the mini-map, or your iPad to talk with team mates, and you have the right idea. And while you won’t be able to stream full games from your Xbox 360 to your iPhone or iPad, this still sounds pretty great.

If you’ve had problems jailbreaking your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad with the Absinthe 2.0 untethered jailbreak released a couple weeks back, good news: the indefatigable iPhone Dev Team have updated their popular jailbreak tools with iOS 5.1.1 untether compatibility, including redsn0w (for all factory unlocked devices), PwnageTool (for devices reliant on software unlock), Cinject (for already jailbroken but tethered iOS 5.1.1 devices) and Ultrasn0w 1.2.7.

A new rumor suggests that come next week’s WWDC, Siri is finally making its way to the iPad. Or, at least, it will when iOS 6 is finalized in September later in the year.

Owning an iPhone is a great thing, but the plans sure aren’t. Favoring the carriers more than the consumer, up until now, if you wanted to use an iPhone in the United States, you had to sign yourself up to have your bank account drained for nearly $100 a month for the next twenty-four months.

Last week’s announcement that Cricket Wireless was entering the iPhone game radically changes the carrier landscape in the United States, at least as far as we customers are concerned. The prepaid carrier isn’t some regional oddjob: they service $7 million customers in all fifty states. For $55 a month, you get unlimited voice, unlimited data, unlimited texts… and no contract. The only rub? You have to lay out $500 for the iPhone up front.

It’s worth it. I decided to sit down with my calculator and figure out how much users can save if they get their next iPhone through Cricket instead of one of AT&T, Verizon or Sprint. The answer? A LOT. Here’s the data.

According to pre-WWDC scuttlebutt, iOS 6 won’t be a huge departure from what we’ve got now, at least when it comes to stand out system features. What we will see, however, is a total revision of Apple’s core apps, most noticeable in Apple’s totally overhauled, Google-free Maps app, along with a sexy new silver UI.

What will it all look like in action, though, on the new, possibly elongated iPhone 5, when it ships in September or October? Over on the Apple Core forums, user gizmosachin created some nice mockups of what all the pieces will look like when glued together.

According to the latest data from comScore, Android might have peaked. Meanwhile, iOS is still going strong.

New smartphone users — individuals trading in their own feature phones for their first touchscreen, Android’s core constituency — are at their lowest level since 2010: just 300k new smartphone users a week in the last quarter, compared to 1.5 million in November.

It gets worse for Google. Android added the fewest number of new users than it has since 2009. It’s effectively an all-time low for Android growth, which, as Horace Dediu points out, equals four straight months of decline.

The friendly skies have been cozying up to the iPad for awhile now. First, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration allowed pilots to replace hundreds of pounds of flight manuals and log books for Apple’s tablet, and now a new airline is promising to save fuel, increase profits and make their customers happier by phasing out the in-flight entertainment system in favor of a fleet of iPads.

Last week’s release of the much anticipated Absinthe 2.0 jailbreak didn’t just benefit iPhone and iPad owners: it also gives a new lease on life to the second-gen Apple TV. Now Firecore has released a major update to their aTV Flash software, and the new goes far to supercharge your set-top box with great new functionality the stock firmware doesn’t offer.

A major update to Maps is totally out of the bag, but what else is going to be new in iOS 6? According to a new report, iOS 6 won’t look that much different from iOS 5… until you open up the core apps, which have all been rebuilt from the ground up.

At every public appearance by Tim Cook — say, Wednesday’s on-stage interview at AllThingsD’s annual D10 conference, or at the next WWDC keynote — there is always a certain type of commentator who, with hushed voice, will see the spectre of Steve Jobs looming behind Apple’s new CEO.

It’s no wonder. Steve Jobs was a personality larger than life, so it’s no surprise that the force of that personality can still be felt nine months after his death. Likewise, it’s undeniable that the soft-spoken but forceful Cook is less charismatic than his predecessor. But the idea that Tim Cook is a haunted man, trying to live up to the legacy of Jobs, is absurd. He’s his own man, his own CEO, and Apple today is doing better than it ever was under Jobs’s leadership.

Read more at ReadWriteWeb.