News - page 1438

To ease the minds of millions of Americans worried about their health insurance, Obama held a press conference today and admitted that his administration fumbled the launch of Healthcare.gov. Continuing his speech with optimism, Obama then turned to his favorite tech company – Apple – as an example, saying everybody needs to chillax and that buying health insurance won’t ever be as easy as purchasing a song from iTunes.

The Obama Administration has been under heavy fire the last few months thanks to the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov and has pulled a couple Apple metaphors out of his hat to cope with the mess.

Obama’s not the only one in Washington looking to Apple for inspiration with the Healtcare.gov mess though. The GOP released a series of attack ads that spoof Apple’s famous “Mac vs. PC” campaign. Take a look:

Hot on the heels of the iBooks de-Forstallization for iOS 7, Apple has released iOS 7.0.4 with “bug fixes and improvements.” The update also addresses “an issue that causes FaceTime calls to fail for some users,” according to the release notes. You can download 7.0.4 as a 37.6 MB update.

iOS 6.1.5 has also been released with the same FaceTime fix for the fourth-gen iPod touch, a device that can’t run iOS 7.

Apple released iOS 7.0.3 with iCloud Keychain, improvements for iMessage, and other bug fixes last month.

Source: Apple

Continuing its slow purge of felts, leathers and woodgrains the UI of iOS 7, Apple released an iBooks for iOS update today that finally dismantles the woodgrain shelves championed by former iOS Cheif Scott Forstall, and tosses them in the woodchipper.

The update features the same minimalist UI that Apple has embraced throughout iOS 7 and its other apps, though it doesn’t look like Apple actually added any major new features. Apple also released an update for iTunes U today with an all-new look and feel. Both app updates are available for free in iTunes now.

Source: iTunes

The official Google Music app for iOS, which will allow Google Play Music All Access subscribers to enjoy the music streaming service on iPhone and iPad, is now “imminent,” a reliable source reports.

Once I started iSpying in the crowded, bustling streets of Hong Kong, it was hard to stop. (Also, the IP lawyers must be seriously busy in these parts.)

These are some of my favorite finds of Apple-esque products and signs — minus the pics that didn’t turn out because my travel companions were trying to stop me from lagging behind or getting run over.

We’ll have more reporting from Hong Kong soon; a special thanks goes out to Truman Au for showing me around.

The holiday shopping season will be starting a little earlier this year for Apple, as sources are now claiming that Apple will keep several of its U.S. Apple Stores open on Thanksgiving Day.

What store sells the most iPhones every year? If you named, oh, the 5th Avenue Cube, or the Grand Central location, you’d be wrong, asserts ABC News. Instead, they identify an obscure Apple Store in a shopping mall in Delaware as being the likely contender for selling the most iPhones every year. What wizardry is this?

Those frustrated that Nintendo still stubbornly refuses to release an official Legend of Zelda game for iOS should pluck-up, because the next best thing is here. Heavily inspired by one of the best Zelda games, The Wind Waker, a console-quality Zelda like has just hit the Apple Store called Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas. And this is a game you want to get.

If you want an iPad mini with Retina Display today, there’s only one way to get one: reserve it for in-store pick-up. That’s how I got my 128GB iPad mini with Retina Display on day one of availability while my colleagues Charlie Sorrel and Killian Bell were sitting at home, waiting five to ten days for delivery like a couple of suckers.

If you’d like to make the hunt for an iPad mini in your area easier, a new web-based tracking tool has been released that makes the process less tedious. But act now, because Apple has shown itself to be willing to kill these trackers before, although it’s possible this one will escape unscathed.

I ordered a Retina iPad mini (128GB, LTE, silver if you’re asking) barely 30 minutes after I noticed Killian had posted about it. And yes, I have to wait 5–10 days, but so does everyone else. Even those hippies on the West Coast who sleep in ’til noon every day before making their mango smoothies.

Which is to say that I agree with Ed Dale’s smart take on Apple’s weirdly quiet launch of the Retina mini: that it was designed to keep folks happy.

Jawbone has announced the UP24, a tweaked version of its troubled UP activity-tracking wristband. It’s mostly the same, with a cool futuristic look and $150 price tag. The difference is that it now uses “Bluetooth Smart,” which lets it communicate with your iPhone in real time to send alerts and notifications.

But what’s really interesting is that it now has a rather useful IFTTT channel.

Coffitivity is an app that turns your too-quiet (and frankly pretty creepy) home office into a buzzing coffee shop, only without the jerk who’s hogging the single power outlet all frikkin’ morning after buying one measly coffee. And not even a real coffee. It’s one of those lame-o frappa-latte-chinos or something.

Anyhow, Coffitivity adds a backing track to your office, via a Mac or iOS app.

Everpix’s servers are probably going to hate this, but users will love it. Picturelife (my favorite of the Everpix alternatives I tested, has made an Everpix-to-Picturelife importer. If you received a link to your Everpix archive, you can just plug it in to the importer and walk away.

Best of all, the entire archive won’t count towards your storage quota. And the Picturelife team managed to put this all together in less than 24 hours.

Day One, the beautiful journaling app for Mac and iOS, has just gotten even more beautiful on iOS 7, and added features to boot. I roll my own nerd journal, but if I used a journaling app it’d be Day One. Especially now it has M7 support.

Richard Haberkern’s new GPS Cookie looks like a great little data logger for photographers, and a nice tracker for bikers, hikers and vacationers. It’s a tiny little puck which does nothing but detect GPS satellites and record it’s location periodically, so you can just switch it on an forget it.

Facebook has released a major redesign of its Messenger iPhone app in the App Store. The update is a significant departure from the previous version, and Facebook has designed it with iOS 7 in mind. Profile pictures are circular like they are for contacts in iOS 7, and Facebook is using a brighter color scheme that comes close to mimicking the look of Apple’s Messages app.

Badges now appear over friends’ pictures when they are on Messenger. Facebook has done a good job of stripping pretty much all of its normal branding out of the redesign, so Messenger looks like a typical chat app now.

A key addition is Messenger’s new integration with phone numbers. If someone has their phone number listed on Facebook or in your iPhone’s contacts, you can enter their number in the app to find them on Messenger. You can also message people through the app by using phone numbers in your contacts list.

Source: App Store

Pocket, the service formerly known as Read It Later, announced a new version of its mobile and desktop apps today. Version 5.0 introduces what Pocket is calling “Highlights,” a new method for discovering articles inside the app.

The user interface has also been simplified to make the experience of using the app smoother, and Pocket has added a new side navigation bar and the ability to bulk edit lists of items.

While everyone seems certain that Apple is working on some sort of wearable, exact details on the mysterious ‘iWatch’ remain allusive. Publications like The New York Times have said Apple is working on a watch with a curved glass display, and Tim Cook has hinted that the wrist is “profoundly interesting” for wearables.

The latest rumor on the iWatch is that Apple is developing two sizes: a larger display to market towards men, and a slightly smaller display for women.

By now you should know that it takes an incredibly complex, efficient system to build Apple products overseas, assemble them, and ship them thousands of miles to then show up at your doorstep in the arms of a friendly mailman. Apple’s attention to detail extends outside of its Cupertino HQ to every area its business touches, including the machinery that makes the products overseas.

For 2014, Apple has committed to spending a record $10.5 billion on new manufacturing technology, according to a new report. Apple outspends all of its competitors to get exclusive deals on unique machinery that is needed for its product designs. 

Hartmut Esslinger, Apple’s first celebrity designer, is coming to the Jony Ive book launch party on Thursday!

This is super exciting. Esslinger is giant of the design industry. He was hired by Steve Jobs in the mid-1980s to bring world-class design to Apple. Jobs wanted to make Apple “the Olivetti of Silicon Valley,” a world leader in design. He succeeded amazingly well. Esslinger was responsible for Snow White, a distinctive design language that dominated the entire computer industry for more than a decade, and other industries too.

The crazy folks over at iFixit are at it again with a complete rip apart of Apple’s latest amazing machine, the iPad mini with Retinal Display.

What they found is that the iPad mini with Retina Display is just as amazing, just as powerful, as the other two flagship iOS products, the iPad Air and the iPhone 5s. The mini, as advertised, has the uber-powerful mobile A7 chip as well as the M7 motion coprocessor. It also has a stunningly sharp 2048 X 1536 pixel display that fairly shines with a fairly dense 326 pixels per inch (the iPad Air “only” has 264 pixels per inch).

That’s a lot of pixels–and power–in a small space.

Artpop — Music — Free

Are you a creative, psychic Lady Gaga fan with an interest in intergalactic travel? If not, does any of that at least sound like something you’d like to see? Hey, Artpop.

It’s a slick, shiny app that ties in with Gaga’s latest album, which is also called Artpop. It’s also a social-media platform, a music player, an art creation and sharing app, and a chatroom. You create your “Aura” (read: avatar), and then you can make projects using a combination of preloaded shapes and patterns and your own pictures and share them with all the other little monsters on the app.

Plus, it’ll tell you if Lady Gaga actually looks at your creation, so it’s kind of the ultimate super-fan experience.

Artpop

A lot of fuss has been made about the iPhone’s lack of repairability ever since it debuted in 2007 without *gasp* a removeable battery. Six years of design updates later and the iPhone is still as hard to tinker with as ever, unless of course you work at Apple.

Yesterday, Cult of Mac revealed a few pictures of the new tools Apple created to make iPhone 5s and 5c repairs easier than ever for Geniuses.  Now our tipster is back with a bunch of GIFs of Apple’s fancy new toys in action, straight from Apple’s official iPhone 5s and 5c repair training videos.

Along with detailed animations of the new iPhone 5s and 5c components, the exclusive shots below show the exact methods Apple staff use to repair broken iPhone 5s, thanks to an array of tools created to make the process more efficient, including a new Universal Display Removal Fixture and an iPhone Battery Fixture Apple keeps hidden in the back of Apple Stores.

Want to know how fix your iPhone the Apple way? Study the GIFs below and you’ll be swapping out batteries like a Genius in no time:

Android may have greater market penetration than ever before, but it also has more defectors than ever. According to new data, in fact, more Android users are migrating to the iPhone than ever before.

It’s hard to think of two analysts as different frome one another as Gene Munster and KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. While Munster has foolishly prattled on, predicting an Apple HDTV set every single year for at least five years without it coming true, Ming-Chi Kuo draws upon proven supply-chain sources across the Far East to make predictions about upcoming Apple products with almost unerring accuracy. When Munster opens his mouth, everyone laughs; when Kuo opens his, everyone listens.

So it’s odd to be writing a story in which Ming-Chi Kuo and Gene Munster’s predictions are lining up for a change, but it’s an odd world. In a recent note, Kuo argues that not only will an A7-powered Apple TV will be coming next year, but Apple will enter the living room with a proper HDTV set in 2015.