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11 October 2011
Posted in
Apple
Mark informed us that the Wellington (and Palmy) Mac communities are organising a Wellington Public Memorial Service for Steve Jobs. The service is being held on Thursday October 13th at 1pm at the Wellington Cathedral of St Paul on the Corners of Molesworth & Hill Streets. (There is no parking on the site.) The service will be 35-40 minutes long. We'll remember and celebrate the extraordinary life and contribution of Steve Jobs.
Mark invities the NZMAC community to participate.
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11 October 2011
Posted in
Apple
Boy Genius Report bring news that iPhone 4S pre-orders numbers have reached over one million in the first 24 hours of pre-orders being available, a pretty impressive number all by itself, but all the more impressive when you take into account that the iPhone 4S' predecessor, the iPhone 4, had just 600,000 in a single day. Looks like many pundits will be eating their words about the iPhone 4S being a lacklustre upgrade very shortly.
News this morning says that Sony is looking to produce a movie based on the official Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson (which has also had its release date moved up to October 24th). According to reports, Sony are supposedly in the stages of acquiring the rights to the movie — and The Mac Observer says they already have a producer on board.
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10 October 2011
Posted in
Apple
It's a gross understatement to say that Steve Jobs had an influence on product design at Apple. If fact, Steve Jobs had such an influence on every aspect of product design that to say so could almost be classified as an outright lie. MacRumors reports that Steve Jobs has left four years' worth of products for the future Apple product lineup, products thought of by a man who created the industry-changing Macintosh. Products that you or I couldn't have even possibly imagined.
The iOS 5 gold master has already been released to developers, and the official release is mere days away — and already, one investigator has managed to find references to an AppleTV 3,1 — a model which currently does not exist. 9 to 5 Mac says there's the distinct possibility of an updated AppleTV, but with little external changes — instead, it's extremely likely that any changes will be purely internal.
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07 October 2011
Posted in
Apple
Apple has lost a visionary and a genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.
All over the web, tributes have poured out — notable websites like Wired have put up a whole page of quotes about one of the greatest men of our time, Boing Boing has totally re-designed their website to pay tribute to the man who invented the Mac, and over at Ars Technica John Siracusa tells his personal rememberance. Companies like Panic and Realmac Software have also joined the chorus.
Rest in peace, Steve.
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06 October 2011
Posted in
Apple
It's currently unknown as to why New Zealand isn't in the first or even second release tiers for the iPhone 4S as announced by Apple yesterday, but Chris Rawson at TUAW says there's anecdotal evidence to suggest that previous iPhone launches bungled by one carrier might be to blame. Apparently Apple don't take too kindly to the aforementioned shenanigans when it comes to one of their best selling devices, and the result is a delay in the iPhone 4S release for New Zealanders.
With the launch of the new iPhone also comes a new kind of AppleCare. AppleCare+ is unlike traditional AppleCare in that it also offers accidental damage protection, say, in case you accidentally drop the phone or manage to damage it via some water-based means. There's also a good chance that AppleCare+ was created in a response to the number of accidental iPhone damage seen at various Genius Bars — with two slabs of glass, there's a pretty big chance that glass will shatter.
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05 October 2011
Posted in
Apple
At the "Let's talk iPhone" event that occurred early this morning,
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04 October 2011
Posted in
Apple
If you cast you mind back a little, you'll eventually remember a company called Psystar who were selling non-Mac computers that had OS X running on them. It's been almost two years since the original court proceedings, which originally found Apple not guilty of misusing copyright by having it in the OS X license agreement. Naturally, Psystar appealed — and the court has ruled mostly against Psystar.
There's an upcoming feature in iOS 5 which will allow news-delivery and magazine-type apps to automatically be collected and refresh their contents periodically.
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03 October 2011
Posted in
Apple
Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber speculates on the design of the iPhone 5. He admits that he doesn't know what the iPhone 5 will look like, but what he writes is "just good old fashioned speculation and design thinking". Either way, there's basically two ways the iPhone 5 will appear: either in a design that's very similar (even identical, perhaps) to the iPhone 4, or in a somewhat MacBook Air-inspired "teardrop" design.
Apple has told the education sector that there will be no more boxed copies of Apple software, with very few exceptions. This latest move shows that Apple are really serious about the Mac App Store as a distribution platform for apps, pointing education customers towards the Mac App Store as an alternative (which, when combined with Mac App Store volume purchasing, completes the software package).
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30 September 2011
Posted in
Apple
IFixIt have taken apart the new Apple Thunderbolt Display, and they have found quite a bit of silicon inside. Even for a display that has a more than a few inputs and outputs, there's enough there for IFixIt to glean the information that there's actually a good reason the Thunderbolt display can't pass a video signal to a mini-DisplayPort display — the Thunderbolt connection passes a Thunderbolt connection, not a mini-DisplayPort one.
There's a new piece of Mac malware on the loose, and it attempts to fool people into thinking they're installing a version of Flash player. Flashblack is a new Mac trojan that, once installed, sends back information about the host Mac to a remote server — but seemingly doesn't do anything else.
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29 September 2011
Posted in
Apple
Apple are rumoured to discontinue the iPod shuffle and classic at their October 4 event, but I don't think that's such a great idea. I know the future is iOS, but I also feel that there's a market for both those devices to co-exist within the current iPod line up — the Classic has long been the staunch elder, with more storage space than you could poke a stick at, and the Shuffle, well, who doesn't want a small everyday iPod that's perfect as an exercise companion?
Apple has also been denied a trademark on multi-touch by the US Patent and Trademark Office, this time for the last time. As it turns out, Apple appealed the original denial the first time around, and now the USPTO has seen fit to deny their appeal as well — citing that their trademark does not contain "acquired distinctiveness".