Category: Apple

When I saw someone tweet a link to this article, I thought:

Apple already has a “Chromecast killer.” It’s AirPlay, and it’s been around for years.

Then I clinked the link and noticed the URL:

/apple-tv-air-concept/

The headline it ran with is certainly more inflammatory than the slug is, and I certainly fell for the bait.

Here’s Adario Strange lede:

With rumors surfacing that Apple may be working on a streaming television service with Comcast, it’s only natural that some observers are beginning to wonder what form Apple’s smart TV will take in the future.

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Apple’s newest Your Verse page is really interesting. While the first two essays (ads? articles?) were fairly product-centric, but this one reads more like a whitepaper on the subject. It follows the story of a high school senior named Mike Duffy, and discusses just one app — C3 Logix.

While I was down on the Your Verse campaign at first, if Apple has more of these rolled up its sleeve, I’m looking forward to them.

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NPR’s Elise Hu:

Digital streams of Morning Edition, All Things Considered and hourly newscasts will be available on a new 24-hour streaming NPR station on iTunes Radio.

This is exciting news. There is great content on NPR and other terrestrial stations. Bringing them to mobile devices is a great step.

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There’s a rumor floating around that Apple will be bringing TextEdit and Preview to the iPhone and iPad with iOS 8.

For years on OS X, Preview has been the default applications for opening images and PDFs. Preview has had iCloud support on OS X for a couple of years ago — leading to confusion for some users — and it’s a no-brainer that Preview for iOS would tap into that iCloud container. Saving a PDF or an image in Preview on the Mac would sling it over to iOS over the air, which would be great.

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Federico Viticci at MacStories:

The return of the 16 GB iPad 4 marks the company’s official discontinuation of the iPad 2, first introduced in March 2011 and sold until today as the most affordable iPad in Apple’s line-up. The relaunched iPad 4 is the same device that Apple unveiled in October 2012 — it comes with an A6X processor, FaceTime camera, and LTE support, but it replaces the iPad 2′s 30-pin connector with Lightning, making it consistent with the rest of Apple’s iPad family.

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Josh de Lioncourt, for Macworld:

iOS 7, in general, has been a challenge for low-vision users. Many of the stylistic choices such as transparency and lack of contrast and clearly defined buttons have made iOS difficult for some to see. This is made more challenging because vision is so variable. What works for one low-vision user is unlikely to work for another.

Apple has begun to address this in iOS 7.1 by adding button shapes, more contrast options, and expanding some of the existing options—all found by choosing Settings > General > Accessibility. In general, this is a significant step in the right direction, but there is still much to be done.

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Macworld has reviewed the entry-level, quad-core Mac Pro. Here’s James Galbraith:

It should come as no surprise that the entry-level Mac Pro didn’t perform as well as the high-end $3999 stock Mac Pro, which was 11 percent faster overall. Despite the double-digit performance differences, many of the results were nearly identical between the two stock Mac Pros: iTunes import, file copy, zip, unzip, and PCMark Office tests were all within one percent between the two systems. The 6-core system was much faster at tests that could take advantage of the additional processing cores; HandBrake was 23 percent faster than on the quad-core Mac Pro, Cinebench CPU test was 30 percent faster, and MathematicaMark was 36 percent faster.

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iCloud’s browser tab sync feature is pretty cool, and is more flexible than you would think.

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Rene Ritchie at iMore:

One of the more subtle yet potentially frustrating changes in iOS 7.1 is how the state of the shift key is displayed. Not only isn’t it intuitively obvious which state the shift key is in — lowercase, Upper Case, or CAPS LOCK — but it can be downright counter-intuitive to the point that you find yourself uncertain and guessing wrong more often than not.

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It’s a big one, folks:

CarPlay:

• iOS experience designed for the car
• Simply connect your iPhone to a CarPlay enabled vehicle
• Supports Phone, Music, Maps, Messages, and 3rd-party audio apps
• Control with Siri and the car’s touchscreen, knobs, and buttons

Siri:

• Manually control when Siri listens by holding down the home button while you speak and releasing it when you’re done as an alternative to letting Siri automatically notice when you stop talking
• New, more natural sounding male and female voices for Mandarin Chinese, UK English, Australian English, and Japanese

iTunes Radio:

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John Gruber, linking to this article on Macworld:

What this piece made clear for me is that (a) something similar is going to happen to Mac OS X, almost certainly this year; but (b) there’s no way to look at iOS 7 and predict what a corresponding refresh for Mac OS X will look like. Maybe the only things I’ll predict are lots of white backgrounds, and Helvetica Neue as the system font.

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Jeff Gamet at The Mac Observer:

Apple’s non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro will be discontinued later this year, bringing an end to the non-Retina MacBook Pro line, and built-in optical drives in any Mac model. If the sources sharing the information are correct, that will leave just the MacBook Air without a high resolution Retina Display.

News of the planned product end come via sources speaking with DigiTimes. While DigiTimes doesn’t always have the most reliable of sources, they are correct even if they have the timing wrong. Apple will discontinue the non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro at some point.

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