The iTV, iRadio, and now iWatch. Apple rumors never sleep, and the latest batch of reports reveal that the folks in Cupertino are working on the future of wearable technology, externally dubbed “iWatch.” Little is known about the device, other than it is being designed for the wrist with a curved glass display.
Since iWatch rumors started re-gaining momentum in recent weeks, many have been speculating about how such a device would work.
Remember the Optimus Maximus keyboard from Art Lebedev? No, me either. But if I did I’d probably recall the LED keycaps which had two distinct functions: One, to display a tiny image on top of each key and two, to send the cost of the keyboard through the roof.
Today we bring you the e-ink keyboard, which is the same kind of thing, only way more practical.
Apple hasn’t updated the Mac Pro significantly since 2010, much to the dismay of professional Mac users. That’s why there’s keen interest in the future Mac Pro: Apple has reiterated its committment to the beefy desktop powerhouse, yet it’s the only Mac to not undergo a major redesign in the last couple of years. Eager eyes look to the future of the Mac Pro line to see what’s next.
A new series of concept images by Peter Zigich have been doing the rounds today, and they are getting a lot of buzz. The images describe a Mac Pro that isn’t just significantly smaller and more power efficient than the existing Mac Pro, but that eschews Intel’s server-class CPUs in favor of custom-built A-series chips.
Darrell Etherington over at Techcrunch says that while “obviously a flight of pure fancy, ” Zigich’s concept is “one that takes serious the question of what comes next for the standalone desktop PC in a mobile-first world.”
It does nothing of the sort. Zigich’s concept isn’t just a flight of fancy, it’s nonsense. Here’s why.
We know that Apple’s product roadmap for 2013 will consist of new iPads, iPhones and Macs. That’s nothing new. Apple is always working on new stuff, and if 2012 is anything to go by, we’re about to see an onslaught of new products.
Martin Hajek is a successful designer, and his work has been featured multiple times here on Cult of Mac. His iPad mini and iPhone 5 concepts from last year were spot on, and Hajek has published renderings for the less-expensive ‘iPhone mini’ that Apple reportedly has planned for later in 2013. Some think the seventh-gen iPhone (‘iPhone 5S’) could come in multiple colors, and it will probably look a lot like the 5.
Hajek also has some great renderings of what the iPad 5 may look like should Apple tweak the design to look more like the iPad mini.
I usually avoid posting about concept designs because most of them are so lame. But the iPhone Theater deserves a special mention, somewhat ironically for the very same reason – it’s so lame.
The iOS lockscreen locks in two different ways. One is by keeping strangers from fiddling around with your iPhone or iPad. The second, though, is to developers: they can’t really do much with the lockscreen except pass notifications to it or make use of the lockscreens built-in music playback controls.
What if developers had full access to the lockscreen, though? What if they could do more than just pass a notification on through? It might look something like this concept.
The current Apple TV set-top box just doesn’t cut it. We all want more from Apple, and hopefully we’ll get the perfect TV experience one day. Until then, there’s only the imagination.
Content distribution and management is a convoluted mess right now, especially in the living room. That’s why I’m floored by the beautiful simplicity of this Apple TV concept:
Apple’s iMac line hasn’t been updated since May 3rd, 2011. On average, that makes an update almost a year overdue. So you know a big update is coming, and rumor has it that when it comes, the new iMac will jettison the the optical drive to achieve a vastly thinner, teardrop form factor.
We were curious what that would look like, so we asked our designer Dan Draper to mock-up what a revised iMac with a thinner design would look like while largely retaining the iMac’s iconic portrait. The answer is familiar, and yet entirely new… the best iMac yet.
The new iMac is believed to be announced next week at Apple’s October 23rd event. Check out the full concept after the jump, and let us know what you think in the comments.
Over the past few years we’ve seen hundreds of fake iPhone mockups, some have been bizarre, while others looked so good we wished they were real. What’s been most surprising is that some of the weirdest looking concepts are actually fairly similar to prototypes Apple was working on in their labs.
Thanks to the evidence in the Apple vs Samsung trial, we got to see the different iPhone prototypes Apple was working on, so we’ve gone back and found 7 artists mockups that look a lot like prototypes Apple was working on.
Like a healthy baby in utero with all its fingers and toes showing on the ultrasound, we’ve now got a pretty good picture of what the next iPhone will look like: longer, thinner, a new metallic back, a smaller 19 pin dock connector and, of course, a bigger 4-inch display.
It’s going to be a beautiful phone, but what next? It’s unlikely that Apple will do another major iPhone revision for awhile, which means future iPhones will, for the forseeable future, probably just refine the forthcoming design.
Here’s a beautiful concept of what the iPhone’s design could look like in the next couple of years, courtesy of French designer Nak.
Italian designer Federico Ciccarese is well known throughout the blogosphere for his Apple product concepts. Chances are that you’ve seen his gorgeous iPad Mini and iPhone 5 concept designs in recent months.
Ciccarese has released a futuristic iPhone concept that takes a very different approach to wearable technology. Kinda creepy, right?
If Apple made an iCamera, it would look like this. The Iris, a concept design by Mimi Zou, is so pared down that it doesn’t even have one button. And like Apple’s designs, this minimal approach brings some compromises.
Instaglasses. What a fantastic idea. Sadly only a concept (and surely destined to remain so), these special specs survey the scene before you and apply your choice of Instagram filter to the real world. You’ve heard the expression “seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses”? Well, these are retro-tinted glasses.
The chances of iOS 6 being anything like this video concept by Joost van der Ree are pretty slim: we already know most of what to expect in iOS 6, and across the board, it looks like an app — not feature — focused update.
But who cares? This still looks great. We’re not so sure about the redesign of the Notification Center to pull down under the home screen — this seems counter intuitive — or the need for a “Mission Control” for finding running apps — the existing task switcher is an expert feature unused by most people which works just fine for poiwer users — but we do love the major innovation of this mockup: “Flipcons”, which show all your app updates and notifications as an overlay that pops out of each individual app on the homescreen.
None of this stuff will be in iOS 6, of course. But maybe some of it will come via jailbreak, and if it doesn’t, there’s always iOS 7.
Source: YouTube
Via: Redmond Pie
According to pre-WWDC scuttlebutt, iOS 6 won’t be a huge departure from what we’ve got now, at least when it comes to stand out system features. What we will see, however, is a total revision of Apple’s core apps, most noticeable in Apple’s totally overhauled, Google-free Maps app, along with a sexy new silver UI.
What will it all look like in action, though, on the new, possibly elongated iPhone 5, when it ships in September or October? Over on the Apple Core forums, user gizmosachin created some nice mockups of what all the pieces will look like when glued together.
Apple is expected to unveil iOS 6, the next major iteration of its software platform for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, at WWDC in two weeks. Not much is known about iOS 6, other than the new Maps app and the possibility of a more metallic look. Many have been speculating about what Apple could introduce, and we at Cult of Mac have a few ideas we’d like to see come to fruition.
The iOS jailbreak community has been innovating at a quicker pace than Apple for years. Jailbreakers had multitasking first, tethering first, iTunes WiFi sync first, and so on. There are many jailbreak concepts currently available for iOS 5 that we’d love to see Apple implement in iOS 6. That’s not to say that Apple will adopt all of these concepts, but we expect at least a few to show up in a way that only Apple can make happen.
There’s nothing that really needs changing about Apple’s patented “Slide to Unlock” functionality, but ever since Apple introduced the Smart Cover for the iPad 2, there’s been a conceptual disconnect between how you unlock an iPhone — by sliding — and how you unlock an iPad — by unfolding an origami-like cover off of the display.
It’s not really anything Apple needs to fix, but short of releasing a tiny little iPhone-sized smart cover, I think this “Fold To Unlock” design created by Anton Kudin is just an excellent conceptual bridge between the lockscreen and the smart cover.
Check out the concept in its full, high-res glory below.
Almost every tech publication there is has been claiming that the next iPhone will have a 4-inch screen, culminating with the Wall Street Journal‘s report today basically confirming it, but there’s still a lot of debate over how Apple will make the screen larger without bringing on a lot of extra bulk to the device. Should they make it taller? Wider? What about making room for LTE?
Here are 12 cool iPhone 5 concepts that envision what Apple’s next iPhone might look like. If you want to know what we think, though, check out this opinion piece we wrote for Wired on why we think the 4inch iPhone makes a lot of sense.
Following Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, news and rumors surrounding the photography app have continued to swirl.
What would happen if Instagram sold a standalone camera to take and share pictures? While such a thing will obviously never happen, the idea was interesting enough to inspire “Socialmatic,” a physical camera concept for Instagram.
We have a source who claims to have seen a prototype Apple high-definition television set in action, indicating that Apple is readying the long-awaited device for market.
According to our source, who has asked to remain strictly anonymous, the Apple HDTV looks like Apple’s current lineup of LED-backlit Cinema Displays but is “much bigger.” It has a built-in iSight camera for making free FaceTime video conference calls. And it has Siri, the iPhone 4S’s voice-activated virtual assistant.
Text editing on iOS isn’t bad, but it’s definitely fiddly. Make an error or want to delete some words and unless you’re using a Bluetooth keyboard, you have to take your hands off the keyboard, tap the words you want to select or where you want to insert your cursor, adjust the boxes manually and more. A pain.
YouTube user Daniel Chase Hooper had a better ideas, as illustrated in this video concept below. What if to edit text, your hands never had to leave the keyboard area on the iPad? To move the cursor, you swipe in the keyboard area left, right, up or down. To select a bunch of text at once, you swipe in the keyboard area while holding down shift.
Transferring files from your Mac to your iPhone is supposed to be an easy process thanks to iCloud, but sometimes the lack of a physical connection between your devices can make the process feel daunting. Or that’s what Ishac Bertran thinks, anyway. He’s come up with a neat concept idea that is simple and clever for tranferring photos, webpages, music, etc., to your iPhone or iPad, even if it’s not what users really need anymore. Ishac claims,
Our devices are well connected virtually, through services like DropBox or iCloud. Those offer wireless synchronization for data, but the devices that contain this data still miss a tangible connection. I thought that a representation of a physical connection would facilitate a more intuitive interaction based on traditional mental models from the physical world.
Here’s a video of Bertran’s concept in action:
Deep down in my soul, I want to believe that Apple is going to come out with a holographic iPad and iPhone someday just so I can watch three dimensional Lady Gaga dance parties unfold in Lilliputian fashion. CES totally sold me on the idea, and even if we have to wait 15 years for a holographic iPad, I’m cool with that.
LA-based 3D artist Mike Ko decided to take it up a notch though, and envisioned what it would be like if three dimensional objects could blossom into life from the iPhone’s screen. Objects like, say, a miniature city with whimsical little cars zipping around the streets. Check out Mike’s iPhone 3D video masterpiece below and let us know what you think.
We’ve long been in love with Italian design house Ciccarese Design’s incredible renders of upcoming Apple products, and the images they just sent us of what they envision a 7.85-inch iPad mini would look like in the flesh are no exception. No implausible whimsy here: these could just as well be product shots pushed up on Apple’s site the day after the iPad mini is officially announced by Tim Cook later this summer, and really puts the totally usable size of such a device in perspective. Check out some more after the jump.
When we first saw Nokia’s 808 PureView — a Symbian-powered phone that can putput SLR caliber photographs thanks to some sophisticated, satellite-grade oversampling technology and an absurd 41MP camera sensor — we were totally blown away by the quality of the images it took, but knew it would never come to the iPhone, because the frickin’ camera module took up half the back of the camera body.
But what if it did? What if Nokia’s PureView technology came to the iPhone. Well, you’d get something that looked like this monstrosity… except it would take way better pictures, because this iPhone only has a 1.2MP cam. What?
