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Apple Introduces 6th Generation iPad at Education Event in Chicago

My first introduction to a computer was an Apple II in my first grade classroom in the late 1980s. Throughout my school career be it grade school, Junior High, High School, or College, the computers I saw were overwhelmingly Apple, Education has always been an important market for Apple. They made this abundantly clear when they announced their latest offerings, centered around a new iPad, not at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park or a large venue in San Jose or San Francisco, but at a High School auditorium over 2,000 miles away in Chicago.

Like its preceding 5th Generation iPad, the newest 6th Generation iPad is based upon the casing of the original iPad Air. If you were looking for something to rival the iPad Pro or a $200 iPad, you honestly might have had less than realistic expectations. In terms of specs, the new iPad is a really good year over year upgrade. Replacing the A9 is the A10 Fusion from the iPhone 7. On the iPhone side, this generational jump brought one of the largest speed increases in iOS history. When Apple said this architecture was desktop grade, they weren’t kidding. The extra power has a lot of advantages in multi-tasking and AR.

The other big change is when it comes to the touch layer. That means its now sensitive enough to support the Apple Pencil like its iPad Pro brethren. For a company that publicly shunned the stylus many years ago, they are a company that seems like they’re going all in. In fact, Apple is now even allowing other companies to build their own version of the Pencil like the Logitech Crayon. While Logitech says its education focused and it doesn’t have pressure sensitivity like the Pencil, the $50 price could make enough consumer demand for Logitech to change its mind. In short, its essentially an Apple Pencil at half the price for non-artists.

Apple’s software has been updated for the new power and pencil support. iWork finally gets support including a new Smart annotation mode where the annotation is tied to the text, not the place. You make edits, the annotations move. Pages gets a new book creation mode in-box collaboration, and a presenter mode that acts as a poor man’s teleprompter. iBooks Author finally makes its way from the Mac to the iPad.

For the rest of the specs, you’re not going to see a whole lot of battery life. Same colors, same case, same cameras, same battery life. However, what the 5th generation had wasn’t too shabby at the price point.

And speaking of the price point, the newest iPad comes in at the same basic price points as what it replaces starting at $329 for consumers and $299 for education. You just get a better tablet for your money.

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Apple Introduces Apple TV 4K and iTunes UHD Content

If you were looking for Apple to announce a competitor to the Fire TV or higher end Rokus, they not what was announced. In both feature set and price, the Apple TV 4K is such closer to the Nvidia Shield. Its powered by the A10X Fusion chip from the latest version of the iPad Pro. This gives it the power not only to power your TV with a 4K signal, but to offer truly console quality performance as well. With a HDMI 2.0a port, that signal is not only the full 60 frames per second, but offers both HDR10 and dolby vision as well. As far how it looks and works, if you’re familiar with the Apple TV 4, you’re familiar with the 4K. Its just better.

iTunes 4K HDR

As reported by multiple sources the past few months, Apple did indeed work out a deal to offer 4K content through iTunes at the same price as current HD content. Atypically for deals with the movie industry, this deal actually gets better. Any content you previously purchased in HD that’s available in 4K will be upgraded free of charge. All in all, this part of the media transition to 4K went about as well as good be imagined for the consumer.

The TV App Upgraded

One of the best upgrades to tvOS (and iOS) has been the TV app. This puts all your content, save a few holdouts, in an easily accessible place. In the past it has all been on-demand content like your iTunes library and content from available apps. This expands in two key features with tvOS 4: Live Sports and News. You can truly see where Apple is going with this as a single place for all live and on-demand content no matter where you get it.

Pricing

As I alluded to, the price is high. Its slotted above the the Apple TV 4 which receives no price cut whatsoever. Under the new pricing, you get an Apple TV 4 32GB for $149, a 32GB Apple TV 4K for $179, and a 64GB 4K for $199. If you were hoping for a true replacement for the Apple TV 3, it appears that device will never come. Users looking to replace those devices will either have to pay a substantially higher price for a 4/4K or move to a competing device.

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Apple Introduces Apple Watch Series 3

With the third generation of Apple Watch, the Series 3, the Apple Watch has finally fully come of age. Its faster, its finally got an barometric altimeter to measure altitude, and Siri can finally talk back, giving you the same experience as on other devices. But there was one more thing it needed to be a fully independent device: cellular connectivity. Yeah, its got versions with that too.

In terms of style, its undeniably an Apple Watch and almost the exact size as the Series 2 it replaces. If you wanted a radical overhaul, this isn’t your Apple Watch. If you’re upgrading from a previous Apple Watch, your collection of bands will still work. Given the huge third party accessory market out there, this isn’t a bad thing. Plus, the technology isn’t there yet for radical changes.

Powering the new Apple Watch is the S3 system on chip. Like the S2, this is a dual-core design. Its beefy up to 70% more powerful than the original. This not only makes it more responsive, it allows the extra functionality like the Siri-voice. The S3 isn’t the only new Apple chip inside, its also got a W2 wireless chip. The new chip is both faster and more efficient than the combo wi-fi and bluetooth chip in previous Apple Watches.

But that isn’t the radio you’re interested in, is it? You want the model with the Red button on the digital crown, the cellular model. Its here and its actually pretty ingenious. First off, the the cellular antennas are built into the screen. It makes sense from a practical sense as its a big glass part, but tis difficult to pull off from a technology standpoint. Second, the Apple watch manages its own wireless usage and picks what is most energy efficient. If its connected to your iPhone, its using bluetooth, if its by itself in the house its using Wi-Fi, if you’re out on the run it then switches to cellular. It makes the most of the limited battery capacity of the device t give a constant experience whether connected or not. The S3 offers up LTE and UMTS radios; No EV-DO for CDMA providers. There doesn’t appear to be a GSM voice radio, so I would assume all the calls are IP based.

watchOS Improvements

watchOS is receiving a couple enhancements as well. First, the heart rate sensor app is getting a lot more data and a new notification for times when your heart rate shoots up when inactive. There’s also some new workout modes and GymKit syncing with exercise equipment. The Apple Watch also gets full access to Apple Music.

Pricing:

The Series 3 GPS models start at $329 for the 38mm aluminum models. This actually represents a $40 price cut compared to the Series 2. It’ll come in Silver, Grey, and Gold. As with the phones, the Rose Gold has been put to pasture. You get your options for the sport band and a new sport loop which has replaced the woven nylon as the alternative band. The Cellular models will start at $399 for the 38mm models and $429 for cellular. There’s also Stainless Steel and Ceramic versions, but these are only offered in Cellular. The Nike and Hermès editions return. Last year’s budget Series one is back and has been given a price cut to $249.

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Deconstruct WWDC Post Mortem Special Announcement (Update: Rescheduled 06/28)

This Wednesday at 4pm EDT, join Ben and whatever panel he can get together to talk about the developments that took place after Apple’s WWDC 2017 developers conference. Link to the hangout will be private. DM Ben (@BenRoethig) on Twitter if you would like to join.

You can access the show notes here.

Update:
Due to unforeseen internet connection issues, tomorrow’s special episode is postponed.

Update:
The Hangout is Rescheduled for net Wednesday June 28th at 4EDT.

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Nvidia to Launch Beta Mac Drivers for 10 Series GPUs

Nvidia made a surprise announcement this week. No, its not that TITAN Xp graphics card. Yes, it will definitely appeal to serious gamers with near unlimited budgets, but let’s be honest, Nvidia one-ups itself on a fairly regular basis. The real shocker is the other announcement that came with it: Nividia would be releasing beta Mac drivers for its GeForce 10-series chips based around its Pascal architecture.

Nvidia has released its own Mac drivers in the past. The MacBook Pro I’m currently using is using the Nvidia driver rather than Apple’s own. The interesting part is that the newest official Apple machines capable of using these cards are the 5,1 model Mac Pros released in the middle of 2010 and updated in 2012. These machines are nearing the end of their lifespan, have outdated I/O and honestly, the owners are not likely to upgrade them with modern video cards. These cards are not meant for the Mac Pro.

Where does this leave us? With two very grey markets. The first is Hackintoshes. While not a huge market, Apple’s lack of a up to date tower has left some niches of Mac users to take matters into their own hands and install MacOS onto DIY computer hardware. Since Intel’s desktop and mobile platforms usually share an architecture, and thusly drivers, its possible to make some fairly update to date and power homemade Mac clones. There are plenty of resources on the web, so I’m not going to tell you how. The one catch has been the graphics cards. Since Nvidia has fallen out of favor with Apple as of late, there have been no shipping Macs or graphics card beyond the 900 series. The Pascal drivers allow those Hackintoshes the latest and greatest 10-series cards in Nvidia’s stables.

Hackintoshes aren’t the only Macs the could benefit from the 10-series. With the advent of Thunderbolt 3, external GPU solutions for laptops are finally accessible. Not only that, but since the bus is bidirectional, TB3 can allow the eGPU to use your laptop’s own screen. There’s two catches. 1) The external enclosures tend to cost almost as much as the graphics cards themselves. This isn’t an option for the faint of budget at the moment. 2) Apple does not support external graphics options officially or otherwise. While there are options to enable external graphics support through terminal commands, if you fry your new $2500 MacBook Pro, you’re on your own.

All the grey areas aside, Nividia making these cards available to Mac users willing to live on the wild side is an exiting development. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes

Source: Nvidia

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Editorial: Apple Changes Course on Mac Pro After Missing With Current Generation

By 2012, Apple’s Mac Pro was getting long in the tooth. It was gigantic and made of old tech. The limitations of the big, old cheese grater case it inherited by the Power Mac G5 were apparent and it kept getting more expensive. Apple did something very odd, they pre-announced they were working on a replacement and in late 2013, they announced the new from the ground up Mac Pro.

The new Mac Pro was a marvel of design. It featured a cylindrical design built around a massive heat radiation system. It was the smallest professional workstation ever built. It… well, was massively over engineered in a way that nobody asked for. It featured one CPU slot instead of two, requiring more expensive CPUs. There were only 4 DIMM slots for Ram. Instead of the multiple 3.5” bays, there was a single proprietary SSD similar to the then year old Retina MacBook Pros. It had two video cards and neither were upgradable.

Apple bet the farm on Thunderbolt 2 expandability and that professional users were be wowed by the technology of the new machine. They were wrong on both accounts. While the new Mac Pro was and is one of the most visually stunning desktops ever made and an absolute marvel of engineering, it never understood its audience and expected a glut of third party expansion options that never came. As a result, combined with to rocky transition to Final Cut X, many of the video pros to look at other options in the Windows world and even Hackintosh routes. Other than a surprise update this week, the new and improved Mac Pro never got a second chance and was basically the redheaded stepchild of Apple’s lineup.

Apple, thankfully, seemingly understands that it went down the wrong path, admitting to Daring Fireball and other invited media outlets that the second generation Mac Pro is not the machine they need. In addition to its expansion woes, it turns out the Mac Pro was basically built thermally for the hardware that it came with. Apple has had issues with newer, hotter processors and graphics chips that have made any further upgrades nearly impossible. So, the corresponding upgrade is its swan song. However, its not the end of the road for the Mac Pro name. Like with this one, Apple has essentially pre-announced that a third generation Mac Pro is being developed.

So, what will this new Mac Pro be? The short answer is we don’t. Phil Schiller used the term “modular”, but that can mean a few different things. Conservatively, it could be another tower like the previous iterations of the Mac Pro and Power Mac line. It would give professionals the expandability they were looking for and I wouldn’t blame them for going to a known quantity. However, that doesn’t quite seem like Apple. When they say modular, I am disposed to take them at their word and am intrigued to see what form that takes, especially when paired with Thunderbolt 3 technology for external storage, PCI-E expansion, or even graphics cards.

Apple isn’t only resting its pro ambitions on the Mac Pro. They also gave word of a new generation iMac that would further encroach on the pro space. While the all in one will not fit all the former Mac Pro users, Apple is correct that some could and have already gone that route. Updating with the latest CPUs and I/O will make what is an already capable lineup even more so. And for those wondering, yes Apple still has plans for the Mac Mini as well.

This little Apple Q&A is that the demise of Apple’s desktop options are greatly exaggerated. I can’t tell you if the next generation of solutions will match the questions, but we know Apple is at least trying. For a company whose aim is to change the world, not drift with it, mistakes can and will be made. It’s moving forward after those mistakes and learning form them that counts.

Source: Daring Fireball

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Apple Introduces Red iPhone, New iPad, and Clip Video App

Apple Introduces Red iPhone, New iPad, and Clip Video App

There has been a rumor going round the last few days that Apple would do a soft update of some products today. That rumor turned out true, though not entirely in the same scope rumored. Instead of a massively updated iPad Pro line, Apple went a bit more mainstream with a new color to the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, a new low end iPad, and a new social media app called clips. Let’s take a look.

(PRODUCT) RED iPhone 7 & 7 Plus

Apple has had a long relationship supporting the retail initiative to support HIV/ AIDS research and care. That relationship has involved iPods, cases, headphones, and accessories is now going to the iPhone in the form of special edition (PRODUCT) RED iPhone 7s and 7 Pluses. The special edition (PRODUCT) RED version represents the 6th color choice available for the iPhone 7 series joining Silver, Gold, Rose Gold, Matte Black, and Jet Back.

The new phones will be available both online and in stores starting on March 24th starting at $749 for the 4.7” iPhone and $869 for the 5.5” iPhone 7 Plus in 128 and 256GB variants. There will not be an entry level 32GB version in (PRODUCT) RED.

Also getting a bit of love is Apple’s smallest and most affordable iPhone, the iPhone SE. While its not getting a replacement, the SE has had its storage doubled from 16 to 32GB in the entry level and from 64gb to 128gb in the next step up. Prices stay the same starting at $399 starting on March 24.

iPad

While we were expecting iPad Pro updates, Apple went in the other direction and made the 9.7” model more affordable. The new model is simply called iPad. It feature the A9 SoC from the iPhone 6 Plus and is a replacement in the lineup for the A8X powered iPad Air 2. The new iPad is lightly thicker featuring the 7.5mm thickness of the original iPad Air rather than the 6.1mm of the iPad Air 2 and 9.7” iPad Pro. That doesn’t mean the new iPad in losing any features as it still has Touch ID, 8MM rear and 1.2mp front cameras, and stereo speakers.

The iPad will ship on February 24th in Space Gray, Silver, and Gold. It will come in 32 and 128GB versions. Pricing may be the new iPad’s killer feature starting at $329, $70 less than the Air 2, for Wi-Fi and $459 for cellular. The 128GB models add $100 to both of those prices.

Clips

The Most surprising announcement was an app called Clips. Clips is Apple’s take on the multi-clip videos that have become popular on Snapchat and Instagram, only platform agnostic. What makes Clips unique is that the app can add captions and titles in realtime using only their voice. Clips of courses also features the filters and animations that have made these videos popular.

Clips will be a free download from the iOS Apple Store in April and be compatible with iPhones, iPods, and iPads using the 64-bit A7 SoC and later.

Apple allows you to share clips privately with your friends messages or post the finished product to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or Vimeo.

Source: Apple 1, 2, 3

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Apple Refreshes Retina MacBook

Last year, Apple announced the 12″ Retina MacBook ultraportable. Today, the machine got its first update. There’s a lot of things you’d expect and others that are a little surprising. Let’s take a look at what the 2016 model brings.

The 12″ is based around a 2304 x 1440 Retina display. This doesn’t change neither does the casing itself the difference is what’s inside. The Broadwell Core-M has been traded out for its updated Skylake Core M3 counterparts. The new CPUs share the same clock speed, but are a bit more powerful. According to Apple, the new Intel Integrated HD 515 graphics are a not insignificant 25% more powerful than the HD 5300 of last year. The chips are also more efficient offering an additional hour of run time now between 10 and 11 hours. The flash storage has been upgraded to a faster PCI-E standard and system memory is now 1866mhz.

For I/O, you still have two options: a 3.5mm headphones jack and a one-size fits all USB 3.1 Type-C jack. Many, including myself expected this port to be upgraded to Thunderbolt 3 with Skylake. That will presumably happen with updated MacBook Pros later this year. However, given the tasks this Core M-powered machine is expected to perform, one could argue that Type-C was good enough.

Pricing and configurations for the 2016 MacBook are the same as the 2015 models starting at $1299 for the base model. You can still order your MacBook in silver, space gray, and gold with fan favorite Rose Gold adding the fray for 2016. The MacBook’s predecessor, the MacBook Air also received a minor refresh with all 13″ models now coming standard with 8GB of memory.

Source: Apple

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iPhone SE: It’s Not About Us, Its About Everyone Not Us

If you’re reading this, chances are that the iPhone SE is not for you. We’re the geeks, the power users that always want the latest and greatest. What we aren’t is the majority, no matter what we think we are, we’re a very vocal minority in Apple’s sales. You’ll hear about how boring the SE is and how Apple should have done more. On the contrary, Apple made the device they needed to. I’ll tell you why.

When moving to larger screens, Apple moved with all deliberate speed. The 5 & 5S were more about moving the iPhone to the industry standard 16:9 than actually making the iPhone screen larger. It was just longer, but that set the table for what was to come. The iPhone 5 also introduced a new metal unibody construction that was thinner and higher quality than previous iPhones. It also introduced the lightning port. The next year the 5S added 64-bit ARM A8 processing and Touch ID, another important stepping stone, and honestly the feature I appreciate most. Being able to use my thumb print instead of my passwords has made the mobile experience much more enjoyable and convenient.

The next generation iPhone 6 and 6 Plus finally ushered in the medium and large screens I had been waiting for since I laid my eyes and hands on the Samsung Note II. Having larger screens was a godsend for me. I could use it. We also saw NFC and mobile payments make their debut on iOS leading to Apple Pay. The 6S generation brought a 4k rear camera and ability to use the screen as a selfie flash.

Apple found something out along the way. While many people were happy about the color choices and features of the new phones, sone size never fit all. Despite the new phones, 30 million people continued to buy the smaller 4” iPhones. Why? Because it fit them and their uses as much as my 5.5” 6 Plus fits me. The iPhone 5S was definitely a great phone, but it was behind of the features. Apple decided it was time for an upgrade. With the iPhone SE, Apple combined the best of the iPhone 5S with the best of the 6S.

While the iPhone SE may be Apple’s least expensive phone at $399, it is not in any way, shape, or form a low end phone. In fact, its one of the most advanced devices on the market. The A9 CPU is lifted straight from the 6S as is the 12mp rear camera and secure element for Apple Pay. The front camera, screen, and Touch ID sensor are the same as on the 5S. That said, decidedly unlike the 5S it has the Retina flash feature. If you’re looking for 3D touch, its not here. But considering the price and reusing the 5/5C/5S screen, I wouldn’t have expected it.

The most surprisingly controversial design element is reusing the 5S casing for the S$, though now with the same 4 colors as the 6S. The opposition to this perplexes me. Its a smart move for the consumer. The 5/5S have a mature and complete accessories market. Other than the design crowd, who would changing an already excellent design benefit?

The big question is who is this for? Let me tell you. First, its for the person who just wants to have an iPhone. This is your mom, dad, aunt, grandparent, etc and just want an easy to use smartphone experience. The other man crowd is people who even the 4.7” iPhone 6/6S to comfortably use. Lastly, its for the Apple Pay user. Apple wants mobile payments in everyone’s hands. Whoever you are, the iPhone SE gives you the high end features of the latest iPhones in a 4” form factor. You get the full iPhone experience at any size without compromise.

With the iPhone SE, the iPhone lineup is complete. If the SE doesn’t float your boat, you have two other options. Small, medium, and large everyone now has an option.