As is their wont, gadget vivisectors iFixIt have gotten their hands on Apple’s new Retina MacBook Pros in both 13-inch and 15-inch incarnations. As usual, these aren’t the machines you want if repairability is concerned, but there’s additional bad news this time around: the battery in both the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro has actually shrunk.
Apple unveiled a couple of incredible new iPads on Tuesday, including the new iPad mini with Retina Display and the svelte, one-pound iPad Air. They even kept the low-res iPad mini for sale as an entry-level iPad at $299.
What, then, is Apple doing selling the iPad 2 still? At $399, it’s as expensive as a more powerful Retina iPad mini. It’s also less powerful than the $299 iPad mini Apple is selling at the price-tier below it. So why does Apple even bother selling them? It’s as simple as the fact that people keep buying the iPad 2.
iPad Air. Retina iPad Mini. New Macbook Pros. The new Mac Pro. Mavericks goes free. So does the new iLife and iWork. There’s a TON to talk about on our Special Edition CultCast! Join us, and special guest (and MacCast host) Adam Christianson, as we discuss our first impressions of the huge pile of hardware and software Apple unveiled at the jam-packed event.
Have a few laughs and get caught up on each week’s best Apple stories. Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let baseline roll!
Apple’s rollout of the iPhone 5s and 5c continues. After launching on September 20 with limited supplies in 11 countries, Cupertino is now expanding availability to 11 new countries.
Last month, Qualcomm representative Anand Chandrasekher called Apple’s new 64-bit A7 chip a “gimmick.” It was a hugely stupid thing to say, leading to Qualcomm actually correcting Chandrasekher’s remarks. But it also might have killed Chandrasekher’s career, at least in part, as the former chief marketing officer seems to have been sent into exile within the company.
If you read Ulysses III 1.1’s release notes, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Soulmen (Ulysses’ developers) have just aded a few features that should really have been in v1.1. But take it for a spin and you’ll see that the the app has been polished in so many places that it feels both completely familiar and full of new tweaks.
With just hours left before the weekend, the Bungajungle is unlikely to be beaten for the week’s best-named gadget. It’s also a pretty fantastic-looking iPad stand, with enough flexibility (pun most definitely intended) to double up as a stand for your MacBook.
If you thought there wasn’t much Junecloud could so to improve its already-great deliveries-tracking app Delivery Status Touch, then you’re about to be amazed. In fact, so long is the list of changes in the newly-launched v5 that I have pasted them below for your goggle-eyed viewing pleasure.
In short, it now looks great on iOS 7, can sync via iCloud if you prefer, integrates with 1Password and is way way quicker.
There’s another new e-mail app available now for OS X, and it takes a different approach to your usual e-mail clients. It’s called Unibox, and it focusses on people, not messages.
I’m forever intrigued with Booq — a bag-maker headquartered just a stone’s throw from design-crazy Pasadena — and its maverick creations. The company’s latest is the Boa Shift backpack; while it doesn’t much that’s new, it seems to gather all their signature design elements into a single bag.
We know that the new Mac Pro — and as we learned earlier this week, the new MacBook Pros — sport new Thunderbolt 2 ports, which double the speed of the initial version to a maximum throughput of 20GB/second.
All that speed is academic without peripherals designed specifically for Thunderbolt 2. So today, Promise Technology is the first company to announce Thunderbolt 2 stuff — namely, their Pegasus2 RAID storage boxes and SANLink2 Fibre Channel-to-Thunderbolt 2 SAN device bridge.
Tapbots has released its highly-anticipated iOS 7 redesign of Tweetbot, a popular third-party Twitter client. Version 3.0 is a radical departure from the iOS 6 app, and it’s available now in the App Store for iPhone.
Venerable pop artist David Hockney brought his art from the screen of the iPad to towering heights in San Francisco.
If you’re used to seeing his quick iPhone sketches on a screen, the 12-foot-high views to Yosemite are an eyeful. You can catch them at San Francisco’s de Young Musuem in the aptly titled “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibitiion” until January 2014.
We’ll have more on Hockney’s stunning work and the exhibit in the November 2 edition of Cult of Mac Magazine, dedicated to mobile art.
We didn’t get a glimpse of the new Apple TV at this week’s event, or even a major UI update, but Apple did release a small update for Apple TV this afternoon bumping it up to version 6.0.1.
Apple still hasn’t said what kind of new goodies version 6.0.1 Build 11B511d contains, but we’ll let you know if we discover anything worth noting in the meantime.Users can download the update to your Apple TV by going to Settings >> General >> Software Update
Here are the direct download links:
It has only been out for two days, but OS X Mavericks already accounts for 5.5% of OS X’s total web traffic in North America, according to tracking firm Chitika. For comparison, Mountain Lion adoption was only at 1.6% two days after its release next year. It took four days for Mountain Lion to reach Mavericks’ current adoption rate, so we’re looking at double the amount of people upgrading within the first week.
Mavericks’ success is probably tied to the fact that Apple has made it available for completely free. We should have more exact Mavericks numbers from Apple after its upcoming earnings call.
Source: Chitika
Tesla Motors announced this afternoon that it has managed to snatch up Doug Field who has been serving as Apple’s Vice President of Mac Hardware Engineering for the past five years. Field is joining the Tesla as its new Vice President of Vehicle Programs and will be responsible for developing new electric vehicles for the company.
Before joining Apple in 2008 to help make the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and iMac, Field worked at Segway for nine years, but he actually started off his engineering career at Ford Motor Company. Elon Musk released the following statement regarding the company’s newest addition:
Today Twitter’s Vine app was updated with a few new features, most notably the ability to save multiple video drafts at once and editing tools.
Draft support, which Vine is calling “Sessions,” allows you to save up to 10 clips at once in the app. “Time Travel” means you can “remove, reorganize or replace” any clip before sharing. Tapping the green bar in the camera view enters Time Travel mode, and there’s also a new edit button while you’re reviewing a video.
Innovative iOS game, Badland, just updated with a new Halloween theme, four new multiplayer characters, and a new level. In addition, the update drops the price to $0.99, giving us all a chance to discover the scary action for 75 percent off the regular price.
This is the first time the developer has dropped the price so far, so be sure to check it out if you have a buck to spare; it’s worth it.
Last night Carl Icahn took to Twitter to talk about one of his favorite subjects, Apple. The billionaire investor tweeted that he had just sent a letter to Tim Cook and would be publishing the letter on his new website tomorrow.
True to his word, Icahn published the full letter this morning urging Tim Cook and the Apple Board to immediately tender an offer for $150 billion AAPL shares at their current price, rather than wait, as other investors have suggested. Icahn also stated that he will continue to invest in Apple and has already increased his stake in Apple from 4 million shares to 4.7 million.
Here’s the full letter:
Instagram already gave us the heads up that it’s introducing ads in the coming months, and now the Facebook-owned app is giving us a preview of what “Sponsored” posts will look like.
You’ll start seeing the above image in your feed in the “coming week.” It’s a “one-time ad from the Instagram team that’s meant to give you a sense for the look and feel of the ads you will see.” Tapping the Sponsored label will teach you how ads will work.
There you are, listening to your favorite song, when you just want to get to the good part. So you look at the Music app that’s playing that favorite song, and you wonder, “How on earth am I going to scrub through the song to move to where I want to?”
In iOS 7, the visual upgrade gives us a red line in the track being played. You can definitely tap, hold and drag that red line along the track for some high-speed scrubbing, but what if you want to move along the track more slowly, or have a more fine-grained approach?
Here’s how to do just that.
R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App – News – $0.99
Halloween is just a week away, and here’s a weird little app to keep you informed while you’re eating tiny versions of regular candy and watching horror movies of varying quality.
R.I.P. V.I.P.: The Death Alert App is as basic as its title is punctuated: It’s a news feed that updates every time a person of note passes away. So if you want to be the first among your friends to say, “Oh, no, that guy died?,” it has you covered. It’ll even send you notifications, and you can instantly share any of the eulogies of Sausage Kings or 1960s character actors on social media and in text messages, if that’s your thing.
It all sounds pretty tacky, but it’s actually a pretty good resource for learning about interesting people that you can never, ever meet now. For example, did you know that recently deceased Filmation co-founder Lou Scheimer, who produced Star Trek: The Animated Series and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, also provided the voice for Tracy the Gorilla in the unfortunate knock-off Ghostbusters cartoon?
Well, you do now.
Airmail, the wonderful third-party email client for Mac, which we’ve written about a number of times here on Cult of Mac, has today been updated with a whole host of new features and improvements for OS X Mavericks. In addition to quick reply from notifications, the release also adds new icons for the Notification Center, offline editing, local drafts and sent folders, and lots more.
Last night, Apple released four new videos, including ads for the iPad mini with Retina Display and the iPad Air. One of those ads, Pencil, Apple used the width of a pencil as a reference point to just how light and magical the Air actually is.
If you paid close attention to the ad, though, you might have been surprised who voiced it: none less than Heisenberg himself, Bryan Cranston, also known as Walter White on TV’s Breaking Bad.
For those of us who have been running OS X Mavericks since it was announced at WWDC in June, it’s been obvious for a while that OS X Mavericks is a complete miracle when it comes to battery life. Installing Mavericks on any MacBook is enough to eke an hour or so more battery life out of it, but especially when running on MacBooks boasting Intel’s power-sipping Haswell processors, it’s a game-changer.
What kind of battery life increases are you looking at on, say, a 2013 MacBook Air? Up to 30% improvements, according to legendary Apple OS reviewer John Siracusa.