Before the touchscreen iPhone was revealed at MacWorld in 2007, Apple had a team of engineers working on a click-wheel phone that was kind of like a mashup of an iPod and a phone. It was never released, but the work that went into it is pretty fascinating.
In an interview with TechCrunch, former Apple engineer and Nest co-founder Matt Rogers talks about what it was like to work on the click-wheel iPhone when no one else at the company even knew Apple was developing a phone.
Last week a number of people noticed that the lens flare on their iPhone 5 is really purple. When you have an off-screen light source the iPhone 5’s lens turns the light into a purplish hue, rather than the bright white color the light would be when it’s on-screen. All lenses have lens flare, and sometimes it’s purple, but the iPhone 5’s seemed to be more pronounced that others.
Apple support has officially responded to the purple lens flare issue and said that it’s totally normal, you’re just holding your iPhone wrong.
EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has called for Apple’s warranty adverts to be examined in the European Union’s 27 states. Reding hopes to establish whether or not the Cupertino company fails to mention a buyers’ right to a minimum two-year warranty for all electronics, including Macs and iOS devices.
No need to adjust your volume—that really is the Steve Wozniak you’re hearing on episode 34 of our all-new CultCast!
And what an episode it is! Hear Woz’s thoughts on Apple’s new Maps app; his opinions on Apple’s shiny new iPhone 5; and of course, the hot topic on everyone’s mind: EarPods.
Plus, with the anniversary of Steve Job’s death on the horizon, Woz tells us why a post-Jobs Apple is stronger than ever, but needs us iFans to keep it in check.
Note: Some of you have let us know that episode 34 is not showing up on iTunes yet. We’re not sure what’s taking so long, but if you subscribe to The CultCast on iTunes or with Apple’s Podcasts App, it downloads just fine.
Read on for the show notes!
It can be easy to forget in the crush of the launch of an entirely new product like the iPhone 5, but Apple’s quality control process is one of the most stringent in the world. While we gnash our teeth at pre-scratched units, yellow screens and purplish lens flares, it’s worth keeping everything in perspective: minor aberrations in a pursuit of perfection wrought upon such a collossal scale of mass-production that the mind literally reels to think of it.
Apple doesn’t often lift the curtain, so we haven’t really known what quality control processes it actually uses to get iPhones to our door in as perfect condition as possible. As it turns out, though, the process Apple uses is incredibly thorough and elegant, just what you’d expect.
While the vast majority of us couldn’t be happier with our new iPhone 5s, a number of users who decided to purchase the black & slate model have noticed that its anodized aluminum finish is prone to chipping and scratching. Unfortunately, it’s not an isolated issue affecting a certain batch of black devices, either — it appears to be affecting them all.
Could this be an issue Apple quickly needs to address? No. Apparently not. According to the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, those chips and scratches are “normal.”
With every major release of iOS and a new iPhone, Apple typically offers its official user guide online for free. What’s odd is that Apple doesn’t promote this resource at all, yet it’s still available. Each iOS device purchase comes with a little booklet to help familiarize a new customer with the basics of the device and iOS itself, but the full user guide is much more thorough and extensive.
Apple has an official user guide out for the iPhone 5 and iOS 6. The 365 page guide is available for anyone to view on the web, and Apple has also made it available for free in the iBookstore.
iPhone 5 is selling like hot cakes covered in chocolate sprinkles.
Apple has announced that iPhone 5 sales surpassed a whopping five million units in just three days following the handset’s launch on Friday, September 21. Demand for the device has exceeded Apple’s initial supply, and while the majority of pre-orders have been shipping, many are scheduled to arrive in October.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1Rc4MDmr8o
Apple has released four new TV spots, and three of them tout the brand new iPhone 5. One ad is specifically devoted to EarPods, highlighting the design process Apple went through to create its new earphones.
Unlike the failed Genius ads from the Olympics, these 4 new ads feel much more like classic Apple. Each iPhone 5 spot is 30 seconds and focuses on a particular aspect of the device.
We’ve embedded the other two iPhone 5 ads and the EarPods ad below:
Every review of the iPhone 5 makes great efforts to talk about how light it is. I’ve read those reviews over and over again since Tuesday. Even so, when taking my iPhone 5 out of the box for the first time, I so misjudged the weight that it went flying from my fingers and onto the floor. This is lightness to the point of ephemerability. It’s so hard to believe, and yet it’s testament to the iPhone 5’s construction that such a thin slate of glass and aluminum doesn’t break apart between your fingers like a communion wafer when you touch it, let alone when you — as I did — accidentally fling it across a room. But my iPhone 5 wasn’t even scratched.
This isn’t our review of the iPhone 5. Far from it: we’ll be posting an in-depth review first thing on Monday morning, once we’ve had a chance to put it through its paces in full. These are our first impressions, and let’s say it right off the bat: from the second it comes out of the box, the iPhone 5 seems like such a leap over the iPhone 4S that it’s like picking up your first MacBook Air after lugging around a lunky 2008 MacBook Pro for years. In a couple of years, Apple has improved the design of the iPhone 4/4S so much that the latter now seems absolutely antediluvian.