Today’s the day, folks! In just a few hours, Apple will kick off WWDC 2013 with a first look at its next-generation iOS 7 operating system. We’re expecting big changes with this update, and according to sources for The Wall Street Journal, those will include a brand new look, new ways to share your photos and videos, and a new music streaming service.
You can also expect to see a glimpse of OS X 10.9 and new notebooks at the event.
Apple’s Worldwide Developers conference is right around the corner, dear brethren, and on this episode of The CultCast, we’ll ponder the new hardware rumors surrounding the big event, like whispers of new MacBooks with dramatically extended battery life and even more power; Airs with retina displays, and why that’s now very possible; updates to the long-neglected Mac Pro; Intel’s powerful yet power-sipping Haswell chips; and soooo much more!
Join us and Gizmodo Chief New York Wired Editor Joe Brown for an extra long CultCast all about our WWDC expectations, hopes and dreams. Stream or download new and past episodes on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing now on iTunes, or hit play below and let the good times roll.
Show notes up next. Namaste.
How much interest is there in Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference?
Enough to stage an alternative free five-day conference with over 40 speakers and hands-on labs that WWDC attendees may want to check out for all the topics Apple isn’t likely to cover. For the second year running, AltWWDC will be hosting the have-nots (as in have no WWDC tickets) for a gathering cloned from the official conference.
Just a few blocks from Moscone Center at the San Francisco State downtown campus, devs from around the world will be hanging out and helping each other out. There will be a volunteer lab to tackle things like crash debugging as well as talks on game development and “marketing you won’t hate.”
Around 1,500 people have signed up, meaning, yeah, even free/freewheeling AltWWDC is technically “sold out.” No worries: if you don’t have a ticket, as long as there’s room to plant your laptop, you’re in.
Cult of Mac talked to Rob Elkin, a London-based software engineer and one of the four founders of AltWWDC about what constitutes an “alt” keynote breakfast, talks Apple doesn’t want you to hear and sponsors.
We’ve been hearing reports for weeks now that Apple has been slowly signing deals with the three major music publishers to launch their new streaming music service, iRadio. There was just one conspicuous holdout. Sony. But now, the deal has been inked.
Every year thousands of Apple developers flock to San Francisco to attend Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference to be educated in all things Apple. Over the past decade the conference has undergone some big changes as Apple has introduced products like the iPhone, Mac Pro, Intel Processors, Mac OS X operating systems, and much more.
An event that used to be lightly attended has now become the most popular developers conference in the world and sold out within 2 hours this years
Here’s a look at the many banners that have decorated the halls of WWDC over the past 11 years:
WWDC 2013 is ready to kickoff in San Francisco next week, and in preparation for the event, Apple has already started decorating Moscone West with WWDC 2013 banners.
The banner art shows the same graphics that Apple used on the official WWDC 2013 logo. the graphics appear to be a bunch of flat app icons, which support the rumors that iOS 7 will ditch its skeumorphic roots for a more minimalist and modern look. One of the tag lines for the banners reads, ‘Where a whole new world is developing.’
Here are some more pictures of Apple’s WWDC 2013 decorations:
At this point, the magic 8-ball is turning up “Yes” to the question whether or not Apple will announce their new streaming music service, iRadio, at next week’s WWDC keynote at a rate of almost 100%. A new report not only confirms the magic 8-ball’s whisperings, it says Apple is restructuring the iAds team to help support the new product. But don’t expect iRadio to launch at WWDC: you’ll have to wait until iOS 7 lands in September.
Apple has released a new WWDC 2013 companion app for iOS, which is designed to give developers the opportunity to follow the event each day. Designed for both attendees and those who cannot make it, the app offers a WWDC schedule, the latest news, daily session videos for registered developers, and more.
Apple hasn’t updated the Mac Pro in forever. It’s been 1,039 days since the Mac Pro received a respectable upgrade. Tim Cook promised us something really great for the Mac Pro will be coming in 2013. It’s possible we might even see it at WWDC.
In the build up towards WWDC and Apple’s first keynote of the year, Mac Pro supplies have started drying up at retail stores. Diminishing stock can be a decent sign that a refresh is imminent for some Apple products, so MacTrast checked in with a dozen major Apple resellers and found that the entry level Mac Pro is getting harder to find.
Here are some the companies that are out of stock:
We already have a pretty good idea of what the fifth-generation iPad will look like, thanks to the many rumors and leaked parts that we’ve seen in recent months. And the latest, a purported front panel with a new design, reinforces those expectations.
While speaking today at the All Things D conference, Nuance CEO Paul Ricci confirmed that Nuance does indeed help power the voice recognition service for Siri.
Since Siri’s launch in 2011, many people assumed that Apple had formed a partnership with Nuance, but neither company has officially confirmed the relationship.
During the his interview, Ricci was asked whether it’s his company’s fault if the iPhone doesn’t understand a user’s voice. Ricci confirmed that Nuance does power the voice part of Siri, but the company is not involved in speech-recognition efforts with Google.
WWDC tickets sold out unbelievably quickly this year. We knew it was highly unlikely they’d be available for as long as the two hours it took them to sell out last year, but we also weren’t expecting them all to disappear in under two minutes.
But did Apple really sell out of WWDC tickets that fast?
The Cupertino company has since been calling developers to offer them a place at its event this June, and that’s led some to question whether all tickets were really sold or whether Apple’s too embarrassed to admit that its servers couldn’t cope with the demand they received when tickets went on sale.
Apple always kicks WWDC off with a big keynote on Monday morning and this year will be no different. AllThingsD reports that Apple has officially stated that the keynote for WWDC is scheduled for Monday, June 10th.
No word on who the speakers for the keynote will be, but you can expect to see at least Tim Cook and Phil Schiller. Who knows, maybe Jony Ive will make an appearance to show off his changes to iOS 7, now that he’s the director of Human Interface. We’ll have to wait and see.
Source: AllThingsD
Every year Apple holds its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California. It’s the only time out of the year that third-party App Store developers can meet with Apple engineers face-to-face. For the indie dev making apps out of his home office, WWDC is Mecca. Besides the knowledge that can be gained, the conference holds tremendous networking value for many who make their livings from selling apps on the iPhone and Mac.
WWDC 2013 sold out in under two minutes this year, and about 5,000 developers will be descending upon the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the week-long conference in June. Some new information shows how WWDC attracts quite the international audience.
Jefferies & Co.’s Peter Misek is our favorite know-nothing analyst, having been proven hysterically, horribly wrong on about every major Apple prediction he’s ever made. He’s probably safe on this prediction, though: even Misek doesn’t think Apple’s going to surprise us with a new iPhone in June. But he’s still kind of an idiot, since it directly contradicts his own prophecies back in December.
Over the last few months developers and websites haven’t seen much iOS 7 beta traffic coming out of Apple’s set of IP addresses in Cupertino. However, over the last few days traffic from devices running iOS 7 has increased for a number of websites and apps.
Onswipe has reported that it has seen a big spike in traffic on its partner sites that run its HTML5 optimized mobile websites. Cult of Mac has seen the number of visits from iOS 7 users increase in our traffic logs, starting around April 29th as well.
The iPad mini is the best iPad Apple has ever released, except for one damn thing: the screen. Even if you love your iPad mini, everyone agrees that the inferiority of the screen compared to other tablets like the Nexus 7 — let alone the 9.7-inch iPad — is the only thing that is holding it back. The iPad mini needs a Retina display.
Sadly, hopes of getting a Retina iPad mini this year have recently been dashed by reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who poured water on the rumor of a Retina iPad mini launch by saying that that the Retina Display needed for a higher-res iPad mini won’t even start manufacturing until later this year, ruling out an October launch.
So what’s Apple’s plan? According to a new report, pretty much what you’d expect: they’ll release a spec-bumped iPad mini in the second half of this year, possibly at WWDC, then follow it up with an iPad mini with Retina Display in Q1 of 2014.
Six months after taking responsibility of software design, Jony Ive is hard at work overhauling Apple’s upcoming iOS 7 operating system. And according to sources for Bloomberg, the changes he is making are so significant that they run the risk of delaying the update’s release.
Apple’s not expected to show much at WWDC that isn’t software. Tim Cook himself pretty much precluded seeing any major updates to Apple’s hardware line until fall. That doesn’t mean, however, that Apple won’t bump the specs of some existing Mac models, and it’s now expected by one of Apple’s more reliable activists that Cupertino will do just that, unveiling upgraded MacBooks across the line at the beginning of June.
Japanese telecom provider KDDI’s mobile branch is planning to kick off its iPhone 5S pre-orders on June 20 ahead of a launch in July, according to an internal document that has been making its way around the web. The carrier expects the device to offer a 13-megapixel camera as well as Apple’s latest iOS 7 operating system.
With all the brouhaha over the 2-minute sell-out of Apple’s upcoming World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) this June, it’s not too surprising that the Cupertino-based technology company has taken a few steps to support those developers who weren’t able to get a ticket to the popular event.
Apple has already decided to offer video of the WWDC sessions, and has contacted some developers who were unable to get a ticket due to the online ordering system overload.
Today, however, in a post on its News and Announcements for Developers page, Apple has announced that there will be a traveling tour, dubbed Tech Talks, making its way to various cities around the country, perhaps like the ones held in 2011 for the launch of iOS 5.
This time around on CultCast: why we need $150,000 $230,000 $500,000 for coffee with Tim Cook; Mr. Cook talks iPhone with a 5-inch screen; and with mobile products like the iPad taking over, could Apple eventually stop selling Macs? Plus, we’re finally getting a new Xbox console; the next iOS and OS X at WWDC; and the current Apple hardware drought needs to end!
All that and more on this week’s CultCast. Stream or download new and past episodes on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing now on iTunes, or hit play below and let the good times roll.
Show notes up next.
Didn’t get a ticket to WWDC this year? Don’t worry, you’re certainly not the only one. But if you were looking forward to a week out of the office, then there is another event you can attend instead.
It’s called AltWWDC, and it’s a free, open alternative to Apple’s prestigious conference that encourages Mac and iOS developers to meet up and mingle and discuss the latest software from Cupertino. You won’t get your hands on OS X 10.9 or iOS 7, but you will get free lunch for a week.
This morning, tickets went on sale for Apple’s 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference at $1,500 a piece. In a matter of two minutes the conference was sold out, and many developers were left staring at their computer screens with mouths agape.
But it looks like Apple didn’t sell all of the tickets just yet. Apple is reserving tickets and offering them to developers who were able to place their orders online.
Your heart races as you stare at your Mac’s screen, breathlessly anticipating the browser window loading another time. “If I just hit refresh again, maybe it will work,” you tell yourself. And it doesn’t. You check Twitter to see that your nerdy, developer friends can’t order tickets either.
WWDC 2013 sold out in two minutes. That’s crazy, but it’s true. You missed out.
Perhaps the above image is a more appropriate logo for this year’s WWDC, considering how many saddened devs won’t be able to attend. Apple gives third-party devs its full attention only one time of the year, and that has historically been WWDC. My colleague, John Brownlee, has already explained the reason tickets sold out so quickly. And Apple simply can’t open the conference up to more devs. Better luck next year.
Source: Louie Mantia
