There’s a conspiracy among some Apple watchers: the ‘iOS-ification’ of the Mac.

The past couple versions of OS X, specifically Mountain Lion, have proven that Apple is not afraid to bring features from its mobile operating system to the desktop. Sometimes the borrowing is incredibly blatant, like the Mac version of Reminders, and sometimes the trend is more subtle, like when Apple inverted scrolling in OS X Lion to recreate the “natural” scrolling experience from a touchscreen.

Before the June unveiling of OS X Mavericks, it would not have been farfetched to look at the evolution of OS X and iOS and draw the conclusion that the two were becoming more alike. Now that we’ve seen Mavericks, it’s clear that OS X isn’t getting more iOS-ified like everyone feared. The two platforms are headed in different directions and while they share similarities, Apple does not appear to be on a mission of convergence. Cupertino has decreed that never the twain shall meet.

The Walled Garden

Compare iOS 7 to Mavericks, and the untrained eye could be led to believe that the two operating systems were designed by separate companies. iOS 7 is full of bright, unrestrained colors and abstract interface elements, while Mavericks largely still looks like the OS X we know and love. There are plenty of great improvements in Mavericks, but the general aesthetic of the OS is by no means a radical departure from Mountain Lion. Mavericks remains grounded, while iOS has been set free to soar into a new world of design.

“Mavericks remains grounded, while iOS has been set free to soar into a new world of design.”

To Apple, iOS is the software used by its largest and most profitable customer base: iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners. iOS is designed to appeal to the masses and offer a consistent experience from one device to the next. iOS 7’s aesthetic design may be incredibly different, even jarring, to users of past iOS versions, but the core philosophy behind the platform hasn’t changed in 2013.

Unlike OS X, the file system in iOS is totally invisible. You can send media and certain files in-between certain apps, but there’s nothing like a Finder equivalent—no ability to open a zip file’s contents like you can on the Mac. The innards of what composes iOS are kept hidden so you don’t sweat the small stuff, or more importantly, do something damaging to the smartphone you rely on every day.

Each iOS app is sandboxed, meaning that it is forced to operate within a silo of its own under Apple’s rules. App Store apps have limited ability to talk to each another and they definitely can’t take over all of the OS, like Facebook Home on Android. An analogy that’s commonly used is a walled garden. You can enjoy the experience, just respect the boundaries.

Apple approaches iOS in a fundamentally different way than OS X, and that’s a good thing for the future of the Mac.

“PCs are going to be like trucks.”

“PCs are going to be like trucks,” said Steve Jobs, hitting the nail on the head way back in 2010. Like the car industry has been revolutionized by the automatic transmission, power steering, and hybrids, the world of traditional desktop computers has been upturned by smartphones and tablets. “Trucks” will always be needed, just not as much. The Mac is still a cornerstone for Apple. It will never have the huge install base of iOS, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Since when has Apple only cared about taking as much market share as possible?

The recently unveiled Mavericks continues to bridge the gap between iOS with a couple of additions, like iBooks and Maps. But then there’s also plenty of new features for power users, like enhanced support for multiple displays, Finder Tabs, Timer Coalescing for more efficient CPU management, and App Nap for managing power. Apple has historically been about connecting the familiar with new, groundbreaking technology.

Word on the street is that Apple has given Mavericks less attention in recent months to devote resources to polishing up iOS 7 in time for its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). That may explain why iOS 7 looks so different and Mavericks is more of an incremental upgrade to OS X. Now that Jony Ive is in charge of all software design at Apple, he surely has more tinkering to do with OS X if he wants to unify the company’s design language across platforms. He’s already stripped out most the garnish textures with Mavericks (“No cows were harmed in the making of this virtual interface,” said Apple’s Craig Federighi at WWDC), but there’s a lot of needed change for OS X to truly be ushered into the era of Ive.

“The Mac is still a cornerstone for Apple.”

That doesn’t mean OS X will eventually dissolve into iOS, at least not for decades to come. While explaining the reasoning behind naming OS X 10.9 “Mavericks” on stage at WWDC, Federighi said, “We’re really excited about the future of the Mac, and we want a set of names that will carry us for the next 10 years.” Future versions of OS X will be named after special places to Apple in California. OS X is an inspirational product for the company and it has its own vision.

This is the first time in several years that Apple’s mobile and desktop platforms look so different from one another. Will our concept of “desktop computers” not exist years down the road? Thanks to the rapid pace of innovation in the tablet industry, probably. Will underpinnings of OS X fade into obscurity as the platform is phased out by iOS? Certainly not.

It’s nice to know that iOS and OS X can co-exist in the post-PC era. The future remains bright and full of possibilities.

In a 92-character shot heard around the web, graphic designer, blogger and former design director for The New York Times Khoi Vinh weighed in on Twitter about the new operating system: “If iOS 7 is revenge on Forstall, Forstall’s revenge may be that it’s kind of not that great.”

Now that he’s had a chance to play with it for a few months, Cult of Mac asked Vinh what the best (and worst) parts are of Apple’s new operating system. His first impression that iOS 7 is a mixed bag hasn’t changed – but he’s grown to appreciate the lighter side of the new OS as well as dread switching his mom’s iPhone over.

The good

The new iOS is beautiful

Lighter fonts, clear colors. And no more green felt in the Game Center! The clean lines of the new system are definitely easy on the eyes. Also, it’s the unbeige answer to the ho-hum design everyone else is doing. With a little more polish, Apple might really have something, he says.

“The overall look of it is really beautiful. And the fact that they’re willing to take this chance is commendable…they’ve built some really slick things,” he said.

Vinh finds the new mutlitasking feature irksome, but admits even that has some upsides. “They made zooming much more consistent throughout the operating system and not just on the home screen but throughout the apps too. So when you tap on an app you actually are zooming into the app tile and then you see that in the calendar app, too. When go out to a month, you zoom out to a month rather than just switching to a different view. And I think that stuff is really nice.”

You will find everything

“It’s really not that different, it’s a question of perspective. I think you could argue convincingly that the majority of the changes are cosmetic, that the underlying interaction models are consistent: you still have this concept of the home screen, there are apps that you launch and so forth.”

Your kids will love it

“I’m not concerned at all about three-year-olds understanding this,” he said. “Every time they inherit a device like this or an operating system like this they’re fully prepared to learn from square one and do so very rapidly.”

It opens up a whole new world for developers

The sleek new look of the OS makes everything that came before it look like knee-length bloomers at a Victoria’s Secret fashion show. And that may create an opportunity for indie developers to crash the scene by getting up to speed with the new UI and making the competitors look like last year’s news.

“One interesting thing of what they’ve done is they’ve created this artificial sort of disruption in the continuum of like an app’s lifecycle, and they’ve kind of created an opportunity for new players to come in and quickly gain favor. ”

The Bad

The new “back” button

Vinh feels so strongly about the former back button that he wrote a requiem for it, calling the it the best back button of all time.

“The original back button is just a really marvelous sort of piece of work. It does all those jobs at once and nobody ever has problems with visually understanding what’s there. And the new one sort of introduced this problem where there was no problem before. It was solved before. So I’m sad to see the old one go.”

Expect hell when you get stuck upgrading your favorite baby boomer’s phone

Boomers are a slow-growing but important segment of smartphone owners and they’re not always the quickest to adapt. Those of the rock n’ roll generation will probably skip the needle when they see iOS 7, given how different it looks. Expect squinting at skinny, high-fashion Helvetica Neue fonts and some senior moments over the interaction, too.

“It’s going to be kind of confusing for them. I’m kind of wary of the day I have to upgrade my mother’s iPhone,” Vinh said. “In the long run it might be just fine, but just the very fact that so much is changing, even if Apple can pull off the feat of making the net result neutral, why should someone have to muddle through it to that extent?”

The gestures are not as nicely in synch with the UI, as they were on the old operating system, he says. “There were stylistic changes that don’t necessarily break the feature, but they create like a half second of disorientation.”

The Meh

It’s pretty, but it’s not that much of an improvement on the previous version

“I haven’t seen anything that makes me believe that it’s better…I’m hoping that maybe something gets pulled out of the hat at the last minute. I also feel like we might have our minds changed a bit by new hardware,” he says, recalling that it makes sense to visually overhaul the device when what’s under the hood changes too. “Otherwise, the redesign is often just a failure.”

Then again, he added, “Maybe there’s just so much glare from the gold of the new phone that you can’t even see the UI anymore.”

iOS 7 provides two new features under the hood that will blow the lid off mobile gaming: game controllers and a sprite animation and particle physics engine. While these may not sound super sexy, they have the potential to revolutionize the way we play games on our mobile devices. The first is a recognition that many games really need physical buttons to provide high-end gaming experiences, while the second is a step toward supporting game developers in the way that development engines like Unreal and Unity already do, but built right in to the operating system. Together, these two developments are nothing less than—forgive the pun—complete game changers. Mobile gaming is already a big business for game developers, publishers, and Apple. And while Apple has never put gaming front and center before, that’s going to change with iOS 7. Gaming is already huge; now it’s going to get even bigger.

When it came time to redesign the UI of iOS 7, Apple decided to buck its love of skeumorphic UIs in favor of a new minimalist look that’s flat and parallaxed all over. The big design updates have been a welcomed improvement because iOS was starting to look a little long in the tooth.

Scott Forstall and his love of skeumorphic elements may be long gone, but closely at iOS 7 you’ll see a couple of skeumorphs are still clinging to. Here are some of the real world products that inspired the new iOS 7 icons.

FaceTime

Ever notice how the App Store icon resembles the Anarchy symbol?

Safari

Phone.app

Settings

Camera

Compass

Maps

This article first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

Apple devices are on the most wanted list for thieves who snatch smartphones and tablets out of the hands of distracted commuters in big cities.

This type of theft is so easy and generally without consequence that it’s become known as “Apple picking.” The Cupertino company has been on the forefront of trying to curb these crimes, dating back to the Find My iPhone app in 2010 and the new Touch ID fingerprint sensor for the iPhone 5s.  Apple has also added a new i0S 7 feature called Activation Lock, which many are dubbing the “kill switch.”

“As a consumer, I love the idea of a kill switch for the device that I, as the owner, can invoke, but giving that type of power to my carrier is another thing.”

In doing so, Apple has responded to further pressure from authorities who are inundated with cases involving iPhone and iPad crime. (See our investigation into lost and stolen iPhones on Craigslist for more.) But prosecutors in New York and San Francisco, where about half of all crimes involve smartphones, were initially lukewarm on the feature but say they are now optimistic after seeing it in action.

The industry insiders Cult of Mac sounded out, not so much.

“To really make this work, the ‘kill switch’ would need to be wired to carrier networks, so that as soon as the device’s IMEI shows up on the network, the device is disabled by the carrier,” said Tom Kemp, CEO of Centrify, a company that provides unified identity services across data center, cloud and mobile for businesses. “As a consumer, I love the idea of a kill switch for the device that I, as the owner, can invoke, but giving that type of power to my carrier is another thing.”

As smartphone use grows — nearly half of Americans own one — so has iCrime. According to recent comScore data, Apple owns almost 40 percent of the smartphone market, more than its next closest competitors Samsung and HTC combined, with 23 percent and 8.7 percent, respectively. But part and parcel with Apple’s success and their distinctive design aesthetic is the fact that Apple products are an easy targets for a quick snatch-and-resell.

“How much would mugging decrease if your wallet was worth $0? Essentially, that’s what Apple is doing with its new kill switch feature – making your smartphone worthless, ideally. But, who is it really worthless for in the end?” said David Anderson, director of product for smartphone insurance company ProtectYourBubble. “Smartphone thieves often resell stolen devices on the secondary market…Unknowing consumers will purchase devices from sites like eBay and Amazon to cut costs but (will) end up receiving a ‘killed’ device in the mail.”

Companies that survive on tracing stolen gadgets are also not worried that the kill switch will sound the death knell for their businesses. “Unfortunately for consumers, Apple’s tracking and other anti-theft measures are also fairly easy to disable. People are going to continue to steal iPhones and hackers will find a way around the kill switch. It can be as simple as jailbreaking the phone,” said Ken Westin, founder of GadgetTrak. Most of GadgetTrak’s customers are tracing Apple devices — check out the live map — and use of the service has led to a few spectacular recoveries like this one from Kansas to Mexico.

Which brings up another point: whether Apple should be partnering with authorities rather than potentially enabling users to pursue their stolen iPhones

Maybe Apple should be partnering with authorities rather than enabling their customers to pursue their stolen iPhones.

Absolute Software, which says it has recovered 29,000 devices in 100 countries to date, recently launched a partnership with Samsung and says one with Apple is very possible. They work with police and discourage people from trying to get their gadgets back, rogue style.

“Deactivating a device with Activation Lock so that an unauthorized user is unable to use it or sell it can have a positive impact on deterring theft. However, the value of this capability is limited and could lead to encouragement of owners trying to recover devices from thieves themselves,” said Ward Clapham, vice president of recovery services at Absolute. “Self-recovery can be dangerous – even fatal. The best case scenario is for the user to rely on trained professionals to work with law enforcement to recover the device and pursue any criminal charges that may result.”

iPhone users who keep their smartphones mute in their pockets out of fear may find the new service makes it once again OK to stumble down a crowded sidewalk while checking email.

The iWatch might be a really popular theft target.

“With the kill switch, you will no longer feel unsafe using your iPhone on a city street. The kill switch makes the iPhone a much less desirable target for thieves — they’ll have to go back to nicking gold watches and fancy handbags,” says Dave Howell, founder and CEO of Avatron Software, which makes a number of productivity apps. “With this feature, Apple is responding to rising iPhone theft rates, but the company may also been preparing for the launch of the iWatch. The iWatch might be a really popular theft target. The kill switch is a neat, thoughtful feature but it won’t move the market-share needle.”

Howell, a former Apple software engineering manager whose team includes a number of veteran Mac programmers, says he doesn’t have any inside knowledge about the kill switch but that the service fits into Apple’s general ethos.

“I know Apple’s been working hard for some years to make iPhone as safe as possible…Apple has always garnered a reputation for designing for the benefit of users, even when it hurts sales. Certainly preventing theft will put a dent in replacement iPhone revenues.”

This article first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

Did you buy an iPhone 5s or 5c this morning? Upon booting up your new precious for the first time, you’ll be asked to download over-the-air an update to iOS 7.0.1.

The gold iPhone 5s seems to be a hit. After selling out so fast on Apple’s official website that ship times are now in October for all gold models, and the Chinese literally swarming to get their hands on one, Apple is bumping production of the gold iPhone 5s to compensate.

There’s no getting around the fact that you look like a total dork when taking photos with your iPad, a problem only slightly mitigated by using the iPad Mini. But id you start shooting video with the Padcaster Mini, all bets are off. Even with my finely-tuned DorkDar (like a radar for nerdiness), I have no idea whether the Padcaster Mini will make you look awesome or utterly ridiculous.

4 hours after it became available for preorder on the official Apple site, the iPhone 5s is in short supply.

The biggest demand so far seems to be for the new gold iPhone 5s model, where pre-orders across all three U.S. carriers have already shipped to October. Other models, however, are faring better.

There were so many app updates tumbling out into the new iOS7 app store on Wednesday that we didn’t have time to cover them all, but the update to the iOS Kindle app is definitely worth a look. I do most of my reading on an actual Kindle device, but I love the fact that I can pick up on any device thanks to Whispersync. And now the iOS Kindle experience is way less ugly than before.

The new Google Translate is ready for the iPhone and iPad, and it’s a fantastic update. While other apps are better at giving you context and points of grammar, Google’s app is hard to beat for fast translations of single words or phrases.

And now it adds a third way to input words: handwriting.

Triggertrap Mobile has just released v2 of its camera-controlling software, allowing you to hook it up to any of 300 camera models by wire, and fire the shutter remotely.

Of course, that’s not all it does: Triggertrap can use any and every sensor in your iPhone to trigger the camera, along with timers.

I never make actual phone calls – they’re for people who don’t know how to use the internet. But I used to, and I remember one thing: real telephone handsets are way more comfortable to use than cellphones, especially for long calls.

Which is to say, the POP Desk handset will look great next to your fax machine.

Kids: Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re here to stay (unless they stop being born in some kind of Children of Men nightmare world). And one of the things we love and hate most about kids is that they are drawn to our iDevices like a hooker is drawn to dangerous situations.

Now, these monsters get their own section in the app store, which means that you should probably consider visiting the Restrictions section in your iPhone’s settings and switching off the store.

Update:
After ripping it apart and posting in real time, iFixit finished the teardown of the gold iPhone 5s last night. The team there pulled it to pieces (carefully, gently) to find out just what makes it tick. They were able to see inside the A7 chip, can’t find the M7 chip, and were able to identify the maker of the iSight camera (Sony). All in all, some great stuff from the folks down under.

What they found isn’t too surprising, but it’s a ton of fun to read through the details, below.

Original Post:
The team over at venerable rip-into-gadgets site, iFixit, have gotten their hot little hands on a brand new iPhone 5s, and they’re tearing it down to let us all know what’s inside. If you’re into seeing the guts of Apple’s latest iPhone 5s, check out all the gory goodness below.

Update: It looks like Jimmy is the one who got the first two iPhone 5s, one for himself and one for his mother in Indonesia. What a nice guy! The Herald Sun has a nice article on Jimmy and his bit of fame.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that the iPhone 5s goes on sale tomorrow around the globe. We’ve been watching the lines start to form via the magic of the internet, keeping an eye on Twitter and Instagram, for starters.

As you get in line tonight, and tomorrow morning, feel free to send us your photos of the queues you’re sitting and standing in to us via email or Twitter.

Here’s several form-ups we’ve seen:

As we noted earlier this week, iOS 7 includes some code that will allow third party manufacturers create universal controllers for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch using Apple’s latest mobile operating system. It’s groundbreaking stuff, especially for a traditionally game-averse tech company, but we’re starting to see the first wave of controllers to come out.

By now you’ve probably already seen this story floating around the internet, but in case you haven’t, here’s your assigned Apple reading for the day. Bloomberg Businessweek has an exclusive interview with Apple’s Tim Cook, Jony Ive, and Craig Federighi for its latest issue.

With the launch of two new iPhones, Apple’s top designer Jonathan Ive granted very rare back-to-back interviews with USA Today and Bloomberg Businessweek.

Having read everything he’s ever said in preparation for my book about him (due mid-November), I recognized the usual Jony Ive talking points; the striving for simplicity, the importance of caring, and so on.

But there are a couple of paragraphs in the USA Today that especially gave me a strong sense of Deja vu.

It wouldn’t be a major iOS release without another lockscreen bug. This time, you use Command Center into tricking iOS 7 to give you full access to the Camera Roll and sharing options. The method was uncovered by a veteran lockscreen-bug-finder named Jose Rodriguez, who admits that he likes to “submit my iPhone to cruel methods of torture” in his spare time (which he apparently has a lot of).

iOS 7 came out yesterday and if early adoption numbers are any indication, people love the hell out of it. Well, everyone except one young kid who hates that Jony Ive just changed everything. Check out the video Derek Colling posted to YouTube of his sons reaction to iOS 7.

Colling said he knew his son would be surprised, but a full-on mourning of Forstall’s fine green felts and leather stitchings came as a bit of a surprise. But hey, when you’re a kid and the smallest of changes feels colossal, is it too much to ask that your Angry Birds playing device have the same UI consistency throughout your tenure at pre-school? #firstworldproblems

Via: Twitter

iOS 7 finally lets you put the Newsstand app in a folder. To some that alone is reason enough to celebrate, but there’s also an awesome little bug that lets you hide all of Apple’s other annoying default apps that take up screen real-estate – we’re looking at you Stocks.

For the hack to work, you have to set up one of your iPhone’s pages with a full screen of apps. You’ll also need one folder on that page, and you should place the app(s) that you want to hide in your dock. Once you’re ready, tap and hold on the app you want to disappear, then hit the homebutton twice to bring your app switcher, then go back your homescreen and you’ll notice the app you want to delete is abnormally large. Tap your extra folder on the screen while all the apps are jiggling, and then press your homebutton and viola! the app is gone.

The process sounds a little convoluted, but it’s actually very simple. To make things easier, our friend Dom from AppAdvice made the video tutorial above. Best of all though is that once you magic an app into oblivion you can still access it via the finder search.

Sometimes, mindless dungeon crawling, at least within a video game, is good. I’ve never actually crawled a real dungeon, to be honest.

While I love deep, story-based games, sometimes I just want to roll around pixel-based catacombs, corridors, and rooms, bashing or blasting hordes of baddies as they converge upon my location.

Developer OrangePixel (Gunslugs, Meganoid) has figured out how to perfectly encapsulate the dungeon crawling experience within a pixel-perfect arcade eye-candy shell.

So Apple won’t let you pre-order the iPhone 5s and the very thought of waiting in front of an Apple Store for eight hours send spasms of dread from your eye sockets all the way down the nether regions you don’t even want to think about. Standing in an a line, any line, for hours, sucks.

Yes, it’s a huge time investment, and no one really wants to sit outside an Apple Store for a couple of hours before the break of dawn, but we’re here to help you come prepared and make the most of your iPhone 5s launch line waiting experience. In fact, this could even be a lot of fun. Just follow this guide and you’ll be in and out of the store and cradling your precious golden iPhone  in no time.