Apple’s Phil Schiller just announced a new lineup of MacBook Airs based on Intel’s Haswell processor. The 11-inch Air now has 9 hours of battery life, and the 13-inch now boasts 12 hours! The exterior design hasn’t changed. This is a huge internal specs bump.
The new 11-inch starts at $999 with 128GB of flash storage. The 13-inch starts at $1099 with 128GB of flash storage.
Shipping today from Apple.com!
To work with Apple’s new 802.11ac MacBooks, Apple is releasing totally redesigned AirPort base stations.
Although the new AirPort is tiny, only 4-inches, it packs a lot of functionality, including 3-stream 802.11ac Wi-Fi, simultaneous dual-band, a beamforming antenna array and the option of either a 2TB or 3TB hard drive.
Price and release haven’t yet been announced, but these look like great updates.
Apple just announced that OS X Mavericks is coming out in a developer preview for today. It will be available to everyone else in fall, presumably for the usual price of $19.99. Stay tuned for our hands-on of Maverick’s new features!
Maps isn’t the only iOS app coming to OS X Mavericks. Apple is bringing iBooks, allowing you to read, take notes, and have everything synced up across all of your devices. The standalone iBooks app looks like a nice powerhouse for reading and annotating on the desktop. There’s a neat notes feature which looks tailored for students.
The interface is clean and minimal, just like everything else we’ve seen so far in Mavericks.
It was bound to happen eventually. Whether you like it or not, Apple is bringing its official Maps app to OS X Mavericks.
The new app will let you search for locations and send directions from your Mac to your iPhone via iCloud. There’s full support for everything in Maps on iOS, like 3D flyover data and points of interest with services like Yelp. You can bookmark a place on the Mac and it syncs up with all of your devices instantly. Just don’t get lost.
Apple just showed off how Notification Center is getting supercharged in OS X Mavericks.
Now in Mavericks, if your machine is sleeping, you’ll see all the Notifications that came in while you were away, all on the lock screen.
Mavericks will also update your apps in the background. And if you get an iMessage or an email, you can reply right from the Notification.
There’s also apparently a new kind of Notification, where apps can send Push Notifications to iOS devices.
Notification Center was notoriously underbaked in Mountain Lion: it’s nice seeing Mavericks getting this right.
Image: Engadget
There are even more improvements in OS X Mavericks, and the first of them is iCloud Keychain.
Craig Ferenghi says the new iCloud Keychain will keep track of website logins, credit card numbers, and Wi-Fi passwords, synced across iCloud to all your devices.
iCloud Keychain can also generate unique passwords for you, then automatically store them. And since this is all database stuff, it implies iCloud can now handle Core Data… a big failing in iCloud beforehand.
It’s all encrypted, too. Of course, with data vulnerabilities at an all-time high, whether you want to use iCloud Keychain might depend on how paranoid you were.
While unveiling the new OS X Mavericks at WWDC, Apple talked about the upcoming iteration of Safari.
Apple’s software guy, Craig Federighi, joked about calling the next version of OS X “Sea Lion” today at WWDC. He said the company didn’t want to delay the release due to a “lack of cat names.”
So instead, Apple is taking a new direction. Cat names are no more. Now OS X will be named after aspects of California, the state where Apple is based.
“We went to our backyard” for OS X 10.9, said Federighi. Enter OS X Mavericks.
Craig Ferenghi just announced some features OS X 10.9 Mavericks:
• Finder Tabs. No more having a thousand Finder windows open. Now it’ll work like Safari with one tab for every Finder instance. You can
• Tagging. You can now tag files to make it easier to find files you need. These tags exist almost as smart folders in Finder, and you can easily tag files by either entering the text you want to tag it with, or drag them into your tag folder. Looks like Apple has finally given up on hiding the file system on OS X.
• Multiple Displays. Finally, proper multiple display support! Going full screen on one display won’t blank out your other display. And you can pan Spaces on each display individually. You can easily open apps on whatever display you want, have more than one app fullscreen at once (dragging assets between apps) or keep one display static with pinned apps (like a Dashboard) while you work dynamically on the other one. You will also be able to use your Apple TV as a second display over AirPlay.
Tim Cook points out the obvious: everyone on a Mac upgraded to Mountain Lion within a year, while no one is even bothering with Windows 8. A chart tells a thousand words, huh?
Tim Cook just did something odd: he allowed another company to take the stage right off the bat to explain cool things people can do with iOS devices, artificial intelligence and robotics.
Boris Sofman, founder of ANKI, showed off ANKI Drive, remote control cars that connect to your iPhone via Bluetooth 4.0 and can drive themselves around a course while automatically detecting the other drivers, motions of the track, etc.
Kind of like Google’s self-driving cars, but for children. The reaction from the audience wasn’t that great, and the demo sort of failed, but you can see the possibility: iOS devices acting as the brains for real life robots.
It’s a small, fun demo, but it’s more about the possibilities here. Everything you love about video games imbued in real objects, or artificial intelligences being powered by iPhones.
Today Tim Cook gave an Apple State of the Union update at WWDC 2013. He kicked off with Apple Retail, highlighting the recent opening of Apple’s new store in Berlin. “It’s a fantastic store in a great location,” he said. “Only Apple could do this.”
Cook went on to talk about Apple’s success on the digital storefront: the App Store and iTunes.
Here are some big numbers that were mentioned:
It’s not a big deal, but in a human touch, Tim Cook just acknowledged the difficulties Apple had accomodating all the developers who wanted to go to WWDC 2013 this year.
“We apologize for not being able to have more developers here,” Tim Cook said. “This is the largest venue we can hold WWDC in.”
This is a nice nod to the controversy that erupted after Apple’s WWDC 2013 tickets sold out after just two minutes this year. Of course, the biggest issue isn’t just capacity: Apple’s ticketing system fell over in demand this year. But it’s still nice to hear Tim Cook acknowledge the difficulty so many developers have had getting to WWDC.
Let’s hope they manage better next year. In the meantime, Apple is posting all of its conferences online.
To rousing applause, Tim Cook has just taken the stage at the 2013 Worldwide Developer’s Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Today, Tim Cook is expected to unveil Apple’s new streaming music service, iRadio, along with iOS 7 and OS X 10.9. In addition, we’re expecting new MacBooks, a radically redesigned iOS experience courtesy of Jony Ive, and possibly new Mac Pros.
This year, Apple kicked off the WWDC keynote with something different: a video presentation expressing Apple’s design ethos. It was very pretty, and forecasts some radical changes to iOS and OS X 10.9.
We can’t see what’s coming next. But first, the obligatory numbers.
People camped out all night:
There are two secret banners at WWDC this year, which is supposed to be a celebrate of iOS 7’s departure from the skeuomporphic UI pushed by Scott Forstall. But what if WWDC isn’t about embracing iOS 7 at all. What if the real secret of WWDC is that Scott Forstall is back?
Or maybe it’s just a great prank? Either way, this would be the best WWDC joke ever if it were real.
Source: Steve Streza
WWDC is about to kick off in a little under an hour at the Moscone West in San Francsisco. We’ve seen all the decorum on the outside of the Moscone Center, and the banners in the hallways, but this keynote room is where all the action is going to go down.
Tim Cook and company are set to take the stage in less than an hour. iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 will certainly be introduced, along with some new hardware. Press hasn’t been let in yet, but TNW grabbed this shot of the keynote room before it gets crowded.
Source: Twitter
We’re less than 90 minutes away from Apple’s first keynote of the year. If you’re already salivating with excitement and anticipation about all the goodies that are about to come out then here’s a little iOS 7 wallpaper (based on the WWDC banners on display) that should hold you over until Tim Cook officially unveils the new look of iOS.
Source: Reddit
Apple has already decked out the Moscone center with a ton of banners for WWDC, but like most years, there’s at least one banner that no one has seen yet, hiding in plain sight under a black cloth.
Here’s a shot of this year’s secret banner. What do you guys think it’s for? iRadio? New Mac Pros? We’ll find out as soon as the keynote kicks off in less that two hours.
Update: Matthew Panzarino at TNW spotted another hidden banner above the food line too.
Source: Twitter
With just over two hours to go until Apple kicks off its WWDC 2013 keynote, the Apple online store has gone down. We can’t say we’re hugely surprised, but the move does suggest that we won’t just see software previews today, but also new hardware as well.
We’ve been hearing a ton of leaks and details about Apple’s new iRadio streaming music service lately, enough to get a complete picture of the Pandora-like service, which will not only serve up a streaming music station of music you’ll like based upon your iTunes collection, but allow you to buy any tracks you hear with a single tap. And it’ll all be supported by iAds.
All the music labels are reportedly on board, and so we should hear Tim Cook announce the service in just a few hours. But in case there was any doubt, the Wall Street Journal is now weighing in, confirming that iRadio is a go.
For the past year, Apple’s head of design Jony Ive has reportedly been taking a hatchet to the skeuomorphic design principles of iOS. When iOS 7 is announced later today, it is widely expected that he will show us a much more modern-looking operating system, one emboldened by what is widely called a ‘flat’ design aesthetic.
But let’s keep a little bit of perspective here. Jony Ive isn’t completely overhauling iOS 7 because of some petulant, blind hatred for skeuomorphism. He’s doing so because he’s a pro, and skeuomorphism is solving a problem that iOS no longer has: how to teach people to use devices that, a mere six years ago, seemed impossibly futuristic and sci-fi-like!
YO! Sushi, a chain of Japanese restaurants based all over the globe, has adopted a novel new way of delivering food to its customers: Waiters and waitresses load up flying trays made of lightweight carbon fiber, then guide them to tables using iPads.
Two months ago, Verizon announced that it wouldn’t allow customers to upgrade their iPhones early after twenty months anymore. It was a pretty hostile move: the subsidy you’ve paid for your iPhone has been paid off after twenty months, so Verizon was effectively saying that their new policy was to bleed you dry for an additional four months, no exceptions.
When we wrote about Verizon’s move, we said “And what Verizon tends to do, AT&T can usually be expected to follow. How long until AT&T ends 20 month eligibility for early upgrades too?”
The answer, as it turns out, is a little under two months.