As always, read the whole thing, but this bit jumped out at me:
From a design perspective then the end product is clearly a Mac laptop, but it’s a Mac laptop that’s more tablet-like than any before it. From the small size, to the low weight, the choice of a Core M processor, the passive, fanless cooling system, and of course the choice of metallic colors, the MacBook pushes against the line that separates Apple’s laptops from their tablets.
A couple of thoughts:
Apple, on GitHub:
You can get started with ResearchKit by visiting GitHub, now available to all developers for free under the ResearchKit BSD license. Be sure to check out the Overview tab for great links to documentation and sample code to help you start building your research app today. You can even share your favorite modules with the global research community by creating an issue or claiming an existing one from our issue list and send us a pull request.
Apple:
The opportunity to buy tickets to WWDC 2015 will be offered by random selection. Register by Friday, April 17, 10:00 a.m. PDT for your chance to attend. We will let you know your status by Monday, April 20, 5:00 p.m. PDT.
If you’ll excuse me, I gotta go sort out a hotel room.
The fact that the MacBook can charge and be charged via its single port sounds like it could be a nightmare.
After skipping hours of sleep last night to buy an Apple Watch, I wrapped up my day at my local Apple Store with an appointment to try on some Watches. My thoughts are below:
Saddle Creek is an old store. It’s 40 feet across, all on one story. As with most stores like this, the most important products live at the front — RIP, POS bar — with the Genius Bar at the rear of the Store, facing out.
Katie Floyd:
The concern is that because Retina MacBook Pro is so thin and the tolerances are so tight, anything between the body and the top of the computer could cause it to rub against the screen. Apple warns this could cause damage to the display and presumably they’re talking about the recent reports of the anti-reflective coating coming off the display.
My 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display had the issue Katie links to, and Apple replaced the display clamshell assembly under warranty. I don’t use anything to cover my keyboard or palm rest, but Apple’s kbase article about tight tolerances rings true to me.
I’m tired this morning for the same reason many of you are: I pre-ordered an Apple Watch in the middle of the night.
The very fact that I — an some untold number of others — woke up (or stayed up) to do so isn’t as surprising as it once was. I’ve ordered a handful of iPhones this way over the last few years.
As in the past, the Apple Store app was the way to go. Even with having to bounce out to 1Password to get my credit card’s security code, I had ordered my 42 MM Apple Watch with black sport band on my iPad before the online store came back up from maintenance.
Wired’s David Pierce, describing a conversation with Apple’s human-interface boss Alan Dye:
He flips a few pages further into the making-of book, onto the first of several full-page spreads with gorgeous photos of jellyfish. There’s no obvious reason to have a jellyfish watch face. Dye just loves the way they look. “We thought that there was something beautiful about jellyfish, in this sort of space-y, alien, abstract sort of way,” he says. But they didn’t just visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium with an underwater camera. They built a tank in their studio, and shot a variety of species at 300 frames-per-second on incredibly high-end slow-motion Phantom cameras. Then they shrunk the resulting 4096 x 2304 images to fit the Watch’s screen, which is less than a tenth the size. Now, “when you look at the Motion face of the jellyfish, no reasonable person can see that level of detail,” Dye says. “And yet to us it’s really important to get those details right.”
Today’s a big day for OS X users, with the release of Photos.app, the replacement for iPhoto and Aperture.
I’ve been using Photos for a while now and have had mixed luck with the iCloud components, but more on that soon.
Mitchel Broussard at MacRumors is reporting these prices for Apple’s forthcoming 12-inch Retina MacBook:
To compare, here’s where the MacBook Airs sit:
Of course, the 13-inch Air can be maxed out with a 2.2 GHz i7 processor, 8 GB RAM and 512 GB of storage for $1749.
My Relay FM co-founder Myke Hurley bought a 6 Plus back in the fall, and ever since, has praised the device for its superior screen, camera and battery life. It replaced his iPad mini and iPhone 5S both in one fell swoop. He’s been badgering me and many others for months about the superiority of the iPhone 6 Plus. I was excited to see if he was off his rocker or not.