The iPad mini is amazingly thin and light but not at all undersized. That’s the first impressions of reporters at Apple’s press event.
Reporters got their their first look at the iPad mini this morning, and the results are trickling in. Most emphasize how light and thin it is, and the quality of the build. And while it’s smaller than a regular iPad, it’s by no means tiny.
Here’s a sample of reporters’ first impressions:
Pictures of a new and improved front-facing camera have emerged, but whether it’s for the iPad 3 or a future model is unclear.
BGR has posted photos purporting to be a new display assembly for the iPad. It features a bigger opening for the front-facing camera, suggesting a HD camera is coming.
Apple’s Maps app is a bomb. A stinker. A sign of the company’s impending doom at the hands of Tim Cook, the CEO who replaced the irreplaceable Steve Jobs.
Landmarks are in the wrong place. Roads are missing. The 3D Flyover view looks like a collapsed sponge cake. There are no directions for buses, bikes or pedestrians. Entire cities are marked as hospitals, the Golden Gate Bridge is in the wrong place, and even Apple’s own retail stores can’t be found. It’s such an embarrasment, Tim Cook apologized for its suckiness.
But if you live in San Francisco, the Maps app rocks. I’ve been using Maps for weeks and I’ve fallen in love with it. I use it even if I’m *not* using it, just to watch the gorgeous 3D display unfold as I’m driving around.
Apple’s Maps app is by far the best maps sofware around. Tim Cook is a wussy. You’d love Maps too — if you lived in a geography where it works.
The first thing you notice about the 2012 fifth-generation iPod touch is how beautifully it’s made. Crazy thin, ridiculously light, yet sturdy as a slab of slate.
The fit and finish are extraordinary. There are no seams, screws, gaps, cracks or openings. It’s literally seamless. The buttons look like they’re part of the iPod’s case, not nubbins that poke through. Who makes stuff this good? Oh yeah, Apple.
Other reviews have complained about the price (it starts at $300) and some reviewers seem unimpressed by the touch. Who is it for, they wonder? Especially if you already have an iPhone.
Well, it’s for the kids. It’s a kids’ computer. Their first computer, if you like. It’s a relatively cheap, highly portable, extremely capable little handheld computer for children. It plays games, music and movies; surfs the net; communicates via text and Facebook; and hosts a bazillion apps for entertainment or homework. It also displays e-books, though let’s be honest: reading is the last thing it’ll be used for.
But $300 is a lot of money to spend on a kid. Is it worth it?
This is a guest post by Ken Segall, a Silicon Valley advertising executive who worked closely with Steve Jobs. Among other things, Segall put that little “i” in front of the iMac and helped develop Apple’s famous Think Different ad campaign. Segall is author of Insanely Simple, a very readable insightful account of what makes Apple tick.
Last time Apple went heavy on advertising in a sporting event, it didn’t exactly end well.
But let us not speak of the Genius anymore. All traces of that campaign have been hidden from our sight.
Now the baseball playoffs are here. And once again, Apple has made a very expensive media buy. This time, it’s blanketing the games with the new iPhone 5 ads.
But look. Someone else has moved into the neighborhood. Samsung showed up for the playoffs with equal force, in the form of its Galaxy S III ads. You know — the ones that make fun of the lost souls who line up to buy an iPhone, when they could just as easily have a much cooler Samsung phone.
If you’re reading this website on a new iPad or MacBook Pro with a Retina display, you may have noticed how crisp the logo is. Go on; take a good look. Zoom in with your fingers. Also check out the navigation bar, and the graphics for Reviews, Tips and How-Tos. See how clear and crisp they are?
That’s because we’ve upgraded the site to Retina — Apple’s marketing term for screens that are so dense with pixels, they’re practically invisible.
We think it looks really sharp. And next week, we’ll be giving the mobile site a complete overhaul to make it pretty for the iPhone 5.
Here’s what the site looks like on Retina and non-Retina devices.
Hit the jump for some of the geeky details:
Following reports that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is planning to move to Australia — a county which, as everybody knows, is located on the underbelly of the Earth and consequently has had its gravity reversed, resulting in a native race which walks around upside down — we’ve discovered that he’s already fitting in by using a topsy turvy icon and name text in his emails.
While you’re waiting for new docks for the iPhone 5 to come on the market, why not make your own? NYC filmmaker Casey Neistat (of iPod “dirty secret” battery fame; remember that?) shows you how. It’s perhaps the ugliest dock ever, but it works!
Don’t miss the video after the jump. Neistat always makes a good movie.
My oh my, is Apple getting a lot of hate from professionals reviewers for the new EarPods. Gizmodo calls them “garbage,” and The Wirecutter’s mixed review says they are no better than $10 earphones. But lots of new iPhone 5 users on Twitter today are saying “ftw.”
I actually like them too. Then again, I liked Apple’s old earbuds as well. They were cheap and cheerful. The price to performance ratio was really good.
The new EarPods sound way, way better than the old ones. In fact, to my ears, the new EarPods have more bass than a pair of $160 Tour earbuds from Beats by Dr. Dre, which are marketed for their extra bass boom. And they cost $130 less to boot.
It’s been a rocking year for Tim Cook, his first as Apple’s CEO. Not only did he not fuck up; Apple shipped a bunch of hit products and became the biggest company ever.
He also defused a big crisis in Apple’s Chinese supply chain and has made Apple a little more open and relaxed (just a teeny bit).
Hit the jump for a great timeline of what Apple’s been up to under Tim Cook’s tenure. (Really, it’s a fascinating timeline and was a ton of work.)
MacKeeper is a strange piece of software. There may be no other app as controversial in the Apple world. The application, which performs various janitorial duties on your hard drive, is loathed by a large segment of the Mac community. Check out any blog, site or forum that mentions it, and you’ll find hundreds of furious comments condemning MacKeeper and Zeobit, the company behind it. We discovered this ourselves earlier this month, when we offered a 50%-off deal on MacKeeper. Look at all those furious comments on the post.
The complaints about MacKeeper are all over the shop: It’s a virus. It holds your machine hostage until you pay up. It can’t be completely removed if you decide to delete it. Instead of speeding up your computer, it slows it down. It erases your hard drive, deletes photos, and disappears documents. There are protests about MacKeeper’s annual subscription fees. Zeobit is slammed for seedy marketing tactics. It runs pop-under ads, plants sock-puppet reviews and encourages sleazy affiliate sites, critics say.
But what’s really strange is that MacKeeper has been almost universally praised by professional reviewers. All week I’ve been checking out reviews on the Web and I can’t find a bad one.
We have a source who claims to have seen a prototype Apple high-definition television set in action, indicating that Apple is readying the long-awaited device for market.
According to our source, who has asked to remain strictly anonymous, the Apple HDTV looks like Apple’s current lineup of LED-backlit Cinema Displays but is “much bigger.” It has a built-in iSight camera for making free FaceTime video conference calls. And it has Siri, the iPhone 4S’s voice-activated virtual assistant.
Apple’s iPhone dock looks good, but has a couple of big problems. It doesn’t accommodate cases and it hangs onto your iPhone and won’t let go. The ODOC stand fixes both these issues, and looks great too.
Thanks to Ken Segall’s new book about Apple, Insanely Simple, we have heard about how Steve Jobs was willing to dress up as Willy Wonka, and how he felt about the negative reaction to the infamous hockey puck mouse.
Here are three more great anecdotes about Jobs from the book. They include Jobs asking the President to help with Apple’s Think Different campaign, the untold story of how NeXT got its name, and how Jobs almost integrated advertising into Mac OS.
Here’s an exclusive excerpt from a new book about Steve Jobs and Apple by ex-advertising Mad Man, Ken Segall. The book is called Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success, and it’s on sale tomorrow. In the excerpt, we learn about Steve Jobs’s great reaction to criticism of the infamous hockey puck mouse, how he responded quickly to mistakes, and his attitudes toward the “brand bank.”
Whenever Apple launches a major new product, massive billboards usually go up within days. I know this, because my commute along San Francisco’s 101 freeway passes three giant billboards on the way into the city.
Year after year, I’ve seen the ads go up within days of the new product’s launch. Last year, ads for the iPad 2 were posted almost immediately after the device’s introduction by Steve Jobs.
Thing is, those same iPad 2 billboards are still there. Two weeks after the launch of the iPad 3, the billboards along 101 are still advertising the old iPad 2.
It seems to be the same situation across the country. We’ve been talking about this for days, and no one on the Cult of Mac staff has seen a outdoor ad for the new iPad.
What does it mean?
Camping out for a new Apple product is a time-honored tradition. Outsiders think it’s crazy, and even some insiders do — couldn’t you preorder it this year — but waiting for the product is just part of the reason you do it. It’s really about the camaraderie, the friendship, the adventure.
Craig Fox, organizer of the upcoming JailbreakCon, is roughing it on the streets of London outside Apple’s flagship Regent Street Store. Even if you’ve never considered waiting in line for a new Apple product, his account of the experience might just change your mind.
Here’s his report:
It’s all about software.
Watch the video of this morning’s iPad event, and note how Apple’s execs spend more time talking about the apps that the new iPad can run than the new iPad itself.
The U.S. Air Force has been awarded a $9.36 million to buy up to 18,000 iPads. They will be used for navigation and as digital flight manuals.
It’s one of the military’s largest orders of tablets.
Want an iPad 3?
Tim Cook will be introducing it next week. Take our reader survey and you’ll be entered into a sweepstakes to win one.
We’ve grown a tremendous amount these last three years, from just a few thousand pageviews a month to more than 9 million in February — and that was a short month. We need a favor — some data about you, the readers, to help attract advertisers and sponsorship partners. This is crucial — our bandwidth costs are through the roof!
There’s more. We’d like to learn something about the state of the Apple ecosystem — what devices you are using and how. Do you use your iPad at work? What are you planning to buy this year? We’d also like to learn what you think of the site and what we could do better.
Apple’s App Store just hit 25 billion app downloads. The countdown just clicked over at about 9.45PM PST. Apple has promised a $10,000 gift card to the person who downloaded the 25,000,000,000 billionth app. The winner will be notified shortly and revealed on the countdown’s web page.
The countdown began on February 17th and proceeded at an estimated rate of 49 million app downloads a day. It took the wildly popular App Store just four years to reach the 25 billion download mark. By contrast, it took eight-and-half years for 16 billion songs to be downloaded from the iTunes Store. For more insights into key Apple milestones, check out the latest on apple news today.
Here’s a video of Apple’s 25 billion countdown timer clicking over:
Playwright Mike Daisey has released the transcript of his influential monologue, The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Steve Jobs, under a royalty-free license.
The move will allow Daisey’s hit play about the conditions in Apple’s Chinese factories to be performed anywhere in the world without restriction.Indeed, Daisey claims that more than 500 groups and individuals in 13 countries have contacted him because they want to stage it.
“No one has done this before,” said Daisey in an email to Cult of Mac.com. “Theater doesn’t do a lot of things like this, and certainly not with a transcript that could have been sold — I had offers from two publishers — for real money.”
Daisey said there’s interest from three major theaters in Germany, a mid-size theater in Spain and two in France. There’s an actor who is planning to perform it in Kurdistan, a group in Nova Scotia that is adapting it, and a group in New York planning to turn it into a full-on play.
“There’s a lot,” says Daisey. “It’s going to be interesting.
Blogger Jason Kottke has noticed an interesting pattern: Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who take Steve Jobs’s biography not as a guide to success, but as a warning.
Kottke points to four entrepreneurs who are scaling back on work to focus on their families, lest they turn out like Steve Jobs.
Labor activist Qiang Li says Apple is doing a much better job of monitoring factory conditions than Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia and many others.
“I compared Apple with other cell phone companies, such as Nokia. And the conditions in those factories are worse than the ones of Apple,” he said.
However, Li says that conditions in the supply chain are not the responsibility of the suppliers themselves or the Chinese government. Apple ultimately bears responsibility, and the company should spend some of its record profits in improving conditions.
For longtime Apple fans and new Mac and iOS users alike, this is a fascinating time to be living and working. Apple is becoming a fixture in every kind of workplace. It seems like every week there are stories of businesses investing in iPads or MacBooks, including the recent Forrester report that one in five people now use an Apple device on the job and 50% of companies issued Macs to at least some staff members. Not to mention the Checkpoint study that showed corporations preferring iOS over both Android and BlackBerry.
In other words, Apple, the iPad and iPhone are revolutionizing business, and Cult of Mac is joining that revolution. That’s why I take great pleasure in introducing Ryan Faas, Cult of Mac’s new business reporter. Ryan will be writing for the site full-time, covering the incredible march of Apple technology into the workplace. Ryan is a veteran tech journalist who has written extensively about Apple, business and enterprise IT, and the mobile industry. He’s contributed to Computerworld, InformIT and Peachpit Press.