When I first spotted those leaked images of what was claimed to be the next-generation iPhone’s rear panel, I wasn’t keen on the two-tone aluminum look, and I found myself wondering what Jony Ive was up to inside Apple’s design labs. But now that I’ve seen a few mockups of that design, I’ve changed my mind.
In fact, the latest mockups, created by Martin Hajek, look absolutely incredible.
Earlier this week, Microsoft revealed their new “iPad killer,” a sleek and sexy tablet they’re calling the Surface. The guys over at Gizmodo think it looks even better than the iPad and the MacBook Air. We don’t. Who’s right? What better way to find out than to grab Gizmodo’s Editor-in-Chief, Joe Brown, and let the fists fly on an all new CultCast.
Can Joe convince us that Microsoft is the coolest company in tech right now? Or will the CultCast crew enlighten the Gizmodo chief? Find out on a titillating new episode — and don’t miss the reveal of our favorite new gadgets!
Hit the subscribe button right now and read on for the show notes.
With the incredible success of the App Store, sometimes it’s easy to forgot that there are still many, many countries the world over that don’t have access to it yet. That number has been reduced today, however, as Apple brings its mobile marketplace to another 32 countries, bringing the total number of countries with access to the App Store to 155.
In case you haven’t been counting down the days to Verizageddon, it’s almost upon us. Tomorrow, Verizon will be lighting up and expanding its 4G LTE network in a ridiculous number of markets. Verizon undeniably has the largest 4G LTE coverage in the U.S. and it’ll be years before its competitors catch up.
The new 2012 15-Inch Retina MacBook Pro marks an evolution of the Mac: it’s the first of presumably the entire Mac line-up to get a Retina display, just like the iPhone and iPad.
Unlike the iPhone or iPad, however, the new Retina MacBook Pro is not aimed at the mass market. This is a professional machine, through and through, and has a price to match, starting at $2,199.
The beauty of the Retina MacBook Pro’s display can’t be overestimated: it’s like living print. Likewise, the Retina MacBook Pro is the most powerful all-in-one professional notebook you can buy off the shelf: it makes every Apple notebook before it look archaic.
It’s a Mac that has been designed by Apple for the first time as they would have it: completely without compromises, using cutting-edge technology that it will take at least a year for the competition to catch-up with.
But is it the Mac for you?
Without a doubt, Tweetbot is the best Twitter client for the iPhone and iPad, putting to shame Twitter’s official app offering. Many have hoped that Tweetbot developer Tapbot would soon bring the experience to the Mac, and it looks like those hopes are about to come true, as Tweetbot for Mac is already within testing at Tapbot HQ.
InboundWriter is one of those stunning, trick applications you’re surprised even exists. It’s a web-based text editor that allows you to see — via a big speedometer-like gauge — how well you’ve tuned your document to be search-engine friendly (otherwise known as search-engine optimization, or SEO), and then gives you the tools to tweak your document’s SEO to perfection. And yes, it’s free — so long as you don’t go over eight documents per month.
But since its launch early this year in May of last year, InboundWriter has been running on Flash, making it annoyingly unavailable on the iPad. But that’s about to change; it’s been re-worked from the ground up to run on HTML5, and has even had its aspect ratio optimized for the iPad.
Apple confirmed at its Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month that its next major update to Mac OS X, dubbed Mountain Lion, would be released to the public sometime during July. The Cupertino company is yet to make that release date more specific, but according to one report, we can expect Mountain Lion to pop up in the Mac App Store on July 19.
If, like me, you’re patiently awaiting the delivery of your new MacBook Pro and you’re wondering how well it’s going to play some of your games, check out its performance while running Skyrim at a resolution of 1920 x 1200 on “ultra settings,” with 8x anti-aliasing, and 8x anisotropic filtering.
I think you’ll agree it looks absolutely incredible.
If you decided not to purchase a new MacBook Pro with Retina display simply because almost nothing inside it can be repaired or upgraded at home, then you’ll be pleased to know that the other new MacBook Pro (the one without a Retina display) is just as repairable as its predecessor, earning a 7/10 repair score from iFixit.
Here’s how it compares to the next-generation model on the inside.
The New York Post introduced a paywall last year that meant iPad users accessing its website with mobile Safari would be redirected to its official iPad app, and would then have to pay a monthly subscription fee to access its content. However, it has now performed a complete u-turn and scrapped that paywall completely.
Maybe you were exploring the nether reaches of a Venezuelan jungle yesterday and missed the news that Microsoft announced that they’re making a cool looking tablet called the Microsoft Surface for Windows RT.
Despite some huge holes in the announcement, some people like Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz have gone on to claim that Microsoft’s Surface just made the iPad and MacBook Air obsolete.
We’re actually kind of excited about the Surface and think it looks like an intriguing product, but saying that it’s better than the iPad and MacBook Air at this point is absolutely absurd.
I’ve lost count of how many “iPhone 5” images we’ve seen in the last few weeks, but until Apple unveils the device itself, it’s hard to be sure any of them are genuine. But one manufacturer is taking a huge gamble on them. He’s so convinced by these images that he’s already producing and selling cases for the sixth-generation iPhone. And if he’s wrong, he’ll replace every single one for free.
Apple’s new Maps app that’s coming to iOS 6 looks really incredible. Its detailed 3D maps blow the traditional satellite view right out of the water, and allow you to view high resolution images of cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Las Vegas, and more. But what happens when those detailed images get into the wrong hands.
Well, U.S. Senator for New York, Charles E. Schumer, is worried the detailed images could be used to aid criminals and terrorists, and he has privacy concerns over the military-grade spy planes Apple uses to capture these images.
Apple mentioned during its unveiling of the MacBook Pro last week that it has made some substantial changes to the construction of the notebook’s display to help make it super thin. Unlike existing MacBooks, the new Pro does away with a cover glass and case to measure just 1.5mm thin, essentially making the entire display just an LCD panel.
It’s not uncommon for Apple to hide little treats within the icons of its Mac apps, but it’s always nice when we stumble across a new one. The latest comes with the new Notes application that will launch in OS X Mountain Lion next month, and it contains a famous quote used in Apple’s Think Different ad campaign.
In a post-9/11 environment, the TSA is suspicious of everything. Shoes. Bottles of water. What you look like underneath your clothes. Everything
So when Game Collage developer Juraj Hlaváč flew back from last week’s WWDC and was discovered with a mysterious black box in his backpack that resisted all attempts to be scanned by the airport’s security equipment, and mysteriously glowed to boot, the TSA quickly became suspicious.
Luckily, before it became cavity search suspicious, Hlaváč revealed the true nature of the black box in his bag: an Apple Design Award for his app, Bobo Explores Light.
The new Retina MacBook Displays may have an incredible resolution of 2880 x 1800 pixels, but OS X doesn’t treat it as such. Instead, it treats the display as a 1440 x 900 HiDPI display in its default configuration, meaning that while text, video and images may look crisper, you don’t actually get 2880 x 1800 pixels worth of desktop space.
In the Displays panel in Systems Preferences, you can tell your Retina MacBook Pro to give you more desktop space, up to the equivalent of 1920 x 1200, but that’s as far as it goes. What if you want a 2880 x 1800 desktop, though, with each pixel mapped one to one? There’s an app for that.
Unless you only discovered the Internet this week, you’ve probably already heard a lot about the Pebble, which has become one of the most successful Kickstarter projects of all time, raising over $10 million. This clever wristwatch connects to your smartphone over Bluetooth and then allows you to control your music, get the weather, view incoming calls, read Facebook and Twitter messages, see text messages, and lots, lots more. In fact, the possibilities are endless.
However, for those with an iPhone, there were some restrictions, like it was impossible to send SMS data over Bluetooth. These were, as you’d expect, the result of Apple’s limitations. But thankfully, in iOS 6, this is fixed.
One of this smaller things that has always frustrated me about the iOS keyboard is that I have to capitalize letters manually before and after quotation marks, and after emoji. It’s not that it’s difficult to do, it’s just that the keyboard built into iOS is already capable of some clever things, so why can’t it do this?
Well, in iOS 6, it can.
Apple’s developer release of iOS 6 created an instant mystery: Podcasts are missing from the iTunes app! Who dunnit?
At least, that’s the false meme that emerged. In fact, references to “Podcasts” are in there. Things have been re-arranged, and podcasts deemphasized. Something is going on.
The rumor and/or speculation is that Apple will spin podcasts out into a separate app (but keep it in the desktop version of iTunes). This prediction is supported both by funny business in the app, and also inside information from unnamed sources “close to the company.”
The prediction that Podcasts will get their own app sounds reasonable. But the interesting part is: Why?
Why would Apple put music, movies and TV shows all together in one app, but create an entirely separate app for podcasts?
Sounds dumb, right?
Actually, if Apple is doing what I think they’re doing, it’s a stroke of genius.
This single change could align Apple’s organization of services on iOS with multiple strategic objectives at once. Here’s what I think Apple intends to accomplish.
New Macs! Mountain Lion! iOS 6! The second part of our WWDC special edition CultCast is now on iTunes, and in this brand new episode, no fruity pebble is left unturned.
Join us as we discuss the pros and cons of Apple’s new Macbook Pro with Retina display, the mysteriously missing iMac and Mac Pro updates, and the best and worst new features of Mountain Lion and iOS 6. Yes sir, we cover it all on this special WWDC edition MEGASODE of the CultCast.
Subscribe now on iTunes, and find out why 2012 is going to be a great year to be an Apple fan.
Full show notes ahead!
Canadian lawyer Perminder Tung is suing Apple over a Time Capsule failure that cause him to lose laptop backups that included precious photographs of his child’s birth. Tung wants $25,000 in compensation for the broken device and the lost memories after Apple told him the data on his Time Capsule could not be saved.
Apple’s new MacBook Pro follows the fine tradition of the iPhone 4 and third-gen iPad in that it has a super high-resolution Retina display: a 2880 x 1800 panel with an amazing 220 pixels packed in per inch.
It’s an incredible display. In fact, it’s such an incredible display that it actually has about one million, seven hundred thousand pixels more than it needs to satisfy Apple’s definition of Retina, leading some to claim that those pixels are all going to waste.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Apple’s new MacBook Pros have absolutely great displays, but they need every single pixel they have, because the truth of the matter is that Apple’s got a long way to go before it catches its display tech up to the incredible power of human vision. And that’s a good thing, because it means we’ve got a lot to look forward to.
As we detailed in another post earlier this week, Apple’s new iOS 6 beta features a nifty new status bar that changes color to match the app you’re currently running. We provided a number of screenshots that showed the status bar in three different shades of blue, and in silver — colors the status bar never displayed in iOS 5.
So how does the status bar determine which color to use? Well, it’s actually pretty simple.