While the iPad mini looks like a terrific little tablet, that’s sure to make millions for Apple, we’ve learned over the past few days that some people are unhappy with its price tag. Thanks to the rumors, the majority of us expected the device to be priced around $249. But as it turns out, it’s $80 more than that.
According to Microsoft’s Windows boss, Steven Sinofsky, that’s a lot to pay for a “recreational tablet” when you can get a new Windows 8 laptop for $279.
To vastly simplify matters, every LCD screen is made up of a bunch of pixels connected to each other with a mesh of tiny little wires. These pixels don’t actually emit light themselves, but simply regulate the color of the light being displayed in that pixel. Behind this mesh is a lamp, and before a pixel can light up on your screen, the light from this lamp needs to shine through this mesh of wires. Because this mesh is so densely packed, though, the lamp needs to shine very, very brightly to get through… and the brighter an LED light shines, the more power it soaks up.
This is why the new iPad needs such a massive battery. The Retina display has over 3 million pixels in in a tiny area, which means the mesh behind the display is even thicker and more densely packed. To compensate, Apple needs to use a very bright light to shine through this extremely dense mesh, which results in worse battery performance over all.
What if there was a way to make the mesh of wires behind every pixel a lot less dense? That’s the idea behind Sharp’s IGZO technology, and the reason why we’ve been excited about it finally coming to Apple products since at least the beginning of the year. Now it looks possible that, with the iPad mini, we could finally get our wish, as Sharp is now announcing that their IGZO tech comes in 7-inch varieties… and they are releasing a tablet to prove it.
Just Mobile is one of my favorite third-party accessory makers for Apple products. They make beautifully minimal stands, chargers, styluses, and other random accessories for iPhone, iPad and Mac. What makes Just Mobile’s stuff great is that most of their products look like they were designed by Apple itself, and that’s no exaggeration—just take a look at their catalog. It’s all great.
A couple of the newest products to be announced by Just Mobile include the AluBase and AluRack MacBook mounts.
According to the latest round of rumors, Apple will unveil the iPad Mini and a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display on October 23rd. Both aren’t radically new products, they’re just smaller versions of the iPad or 15-inch MacBook Pro.
So which one is more lust worthy? I’ve been using a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro for a few months now and it’s beautiful, but too bulky compared to the 11-inch MacBook Air I had been using for the last year. A smaller MacBook Pro with a Retina display would be perfect. As far as the iPad Mini goes, I don’t play a lot of games on my iPad, and a smaller screen would make it more portable and better for reading in bed. I can’t decide which one I should want more though. What do you think?
The iPad mini is getting all the hype this month, but we haven’t heard much about the line of new iMacs that should be coming out some month soon. Apple hasn’t updated the iMac lineup in over 531 days, but according to a new rumor, a redesigned iMac might be unveiled at the iPad mini event on October 23rd.
Quite a few resellers of Apple’s Mac Mini computer are currently out of stock of the diminutive desktop Mac, potentially signaling a potential hardware refresh. Amazon, MacConnection, Mac Mall, and J&R retailers are all reported to not have any more Mac minis of the 2.3 GHz or 2.5GHz persuasion, according to Apple Insider.
German Mac blog, Macerkopf, also noted today that Mini supplies are running out in its country, as well.
Could this be the front wave of a potential new hardware refresh of the Mini, perhaps to the new Ivy Bridge chipset?
The visionary co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, may have been dead for a year today, but the fruits of his incredible imagination, indefatigable quest for perfection and keen design eye are still ripening and shaking from the tree of the company that he created. The recently released iPhone 5 and new Lightning Connectors were approved by him before he died, the upcoming iPad mini was greenlit personally by Steve, and Apple’s upcoming roadmap for the next couple of years will probably be filled with projects that he personally oversaw.
Some of Steve Jobs’s last unrealized products loom larger than others, though. Here are the five incredible products from Steve Jobs that we still haven’t seen.
Steve Jobs has changed the world four times, by my reckoning. One year after his death, is the world different? What is his legacy? Is it the company that he started, journeyed outward from in disgrace, and ultimately returned to in triumph? How about the devices he had an enthusiastic hand in bringing to market? The business of music and film? What is the world now that it would not have been without Steve Jobs?
It’s all of those things, of course. Jobs’ legacy is not something we can distill into a simple slogan or tagline. Steve Jobs worked for a world in which the design, manufacture, and marketing of consumer electronics enhances our lives in a very human way.
Let me explain.
Steve Jobs was passionate about a lot of things: simplicity, challenging the status quo, creating products that people loved, etc. He was a man of many shining strengths and deep personality flaws. As one of the most dynamic titans to ever grace the tech industry, one can only imagine what Jobs would think of Apple in 2012. How would he have handled Mapgate? We’ll never know.
Based on what we do know about the late CEO, there are several things Jobs would have definitely been proud of at Apple in 2012.
Plug in your iPhone or iPad and charge it up, and you’ll notice that while the first 80% or so will go by pretty fast, they actually kind of suck at charging up that last 20%, taking a lot more time to do so than it feels like they should.
There’s a reason for this. Charging batteries up to “full” is a complicated process. There’s no real way to tell if a battery is completely “full” so all you can do is measure the voltage, which (and this is a vast simplification) tells you how much resistance is being met when you try to put more electricity into the battery.
That’s why it takes so long for an iPhone to charge that last 20%. It charges full blast until it measures a certain voltage, then goes into what’s called “trickle mode” to slowly allow small sips of electricity into the battery until it thinks, based upon some software calculations, that the battery is more or less full. But a new algotihm could make the time it takes to charge your iPhone or iPad go by a lot faster.