Apple’s Tim Cook calls Microsoft’s Surface Book ‘deluded’
On top of announcing an expansion in Ireland, Apple CEO Tim Cook also took some time to weigh in on Microsoft’s newest hybrid laptop, the Surface Book. “It’s a product that tries too hard to do too much,” he said, according to the Irish Independent. “It’s trying to be a tablet and a notebook and it really succeeds at being neither. It’s sort of deluded.” Ouch. We actually found the Surface Book to be a pretty darn good hybrid laptop in our review. Cook’s comments are particularly rich on the heels of the iPad Pro’s launch this week, a large tablet with keyboard and stylus accessories that looks like it was inspired by Microsoft’s Surface hybrid tablet. Of course, the big difference is that the iPad Pro is running iOS, not OS X. Cook seems to be taking more issue with Microsoft’s attempt to unify desktop and mobile interfaces in a single platform.
Via: Business Insider
Source: Irish Independent
Mophie Unveils Next-Generation Powerstation External Battery Lineup
Mophie today announced the debut of a new lineup of Powerstation external batteries, which can be used to charge a range of different electronic devices, including Apple’s iPhone and iPad. The new Powerstation battery packs are Mophie’s thinnest and lightest yet, with an aluminum finish designed to mesh well with iOS devices and 15W fast charging capabilities.
Mophie’s new Powerstation products follow in the footsteps of its previous Powerstation line, with Mophie offering several different battery capacities at varying prices and sizes. Available sizes include 1X (2,000 mAh), 2X (4,000 mAh), 3X (6,000 mAh), 5X (10,000 mAh), and 8X, with the 8X size offering a capacity of 15,000 mAh, which Mophie says is equivalent to an additional 54 hours of talk time, 59 hours of web browsing, 59 hours of video playback, and 272 hours of audio time.
The smallest Powerstation, the 1X, measures in at 6.9mm thick and 95.5mm (3.76 inches) long, while the largest 8X Powerstation is 12.1mm thick and 183.9mm (7.24 inches) long, with other sizes fitting in between the two extremes.
The higher-end 5X and 8X models include support for a Mophie Power app that lets users see the remaining battery life in the Powerstation and how long it will take to charge a device to full. The app is also able to send custom notifications when batteries are low or fully charged.
All models except for the 1X version also support pass-through charging, which will charge an iOS device before charging the Powerstation. On the 3X, 5X, and 8X models, there are also two ports for charging multiple devices at one time.
Mophie’s new Powerstation lineup is available for purchase from the Mophie website, Apple.com, and Apple retail stores. Pricing starts at $39.95 for the Powerstation 1X and goes up to $149.95 for the Powerstation 8X.
Discuss this article in our forums
Apple to Create 1,000 New Jobs in Ireland Amid Tax Probe
Apple plans to hire an additional 1,000 employees at its Cork offices in Ireland, a country where the iPhone maker shelters multi-billion-dollar profits from corporate taxes in the United States, according to Reuters.
Apple’s offices in Cork, Ireland
Ireland’s main foreign investment agency, the IDA, said Apple was to add 1,000 jobs to its office in Cork by mid-2017 from 5,000 at present. It said the company had also added 1,000 jobs in the past year.
In September 2014, the European Commission accused Apple of receiving illegal state aid from Ireland in return for maintaining jobs. A decision in the investigation is due after Christmas, according to Ireland’s finance minister Michael Noonan.
Apple has paid a corporate tax rate of about 2.5% in Ireland on $109 billion in profits over the past five years, far less than an average 12.5% paid by many other companies in the country. The U.S. has an average corporate tax rate of about 15% to 39%.
Discuss this article in our forums
Jony Ive on Apple Pencil: A ‘Natural’ and ‘Familiar’ Extension of Traditional Drawing Tools
Alongside today’s launch of the iPad Pro and its Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard accessories, Apple design chief Jony Ive shared his thoughts on the new stylus accessory with The Telegraph.
Addressing the device’s strong resemblance to an actual pencil, Ive stresses that a familiar and natural feel is key to the user experience.
“We hoped if you are used to spending a lot of time using paintbrushes, pencils and pens, this will feel like a more natural extension of that experience – that it will feel familiar,” he says, carefully. “To achieve that degree of very simple, natural behaviour, was a significant technological challenge.”
Ive notes how that natural feel increases with usage to the point where the user forgets they are using a piece of technology and is able to simply focus on the task at hand. As an example, he points to his design team, which has experimented with tools other than traditional sketchbooks over the years but is finally finding the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil a natural combination.
“Many of us in the design team have worked together for 20 plus years. We’ve always drawn in our sketchbooks, and for the first time – despite flirting with some alternatives a couple of years ago – I’m seeing people starting to use the iPad and Apple Pencil. Our personal experience has been that there are definitely affordances and opportunities now that you have a much more natural and intuitive environment to make marks, there are clearly things you can do sketching and writing on the iPad which you could never dream of doing in the analogue world.”
The Apple Pencil is a $99 accessory sold alongside the iPad Pro, although early customers may need to wait a bit to get their hands on one. While the iPad Pro is in some cases available for in-store pickup as early as today, the earliest Apple Pencil orders are taking a few days longer to start shipping out and shipping estimates for new orders have quickly slipped to 3-4 weeks.
Discuss this article in our forums
F.lux for iPhone and iPad Launches in Beta Outside of App Store
F.lux, popular Mac software that adjusts the color of your computer’s display to adapt to the time of day, has been released for iPhone and iPad in beta outside of the App Store. The app can be downloaded and side-loaded on iOS 9 devices using Xcode 7 on a Mac running OS X 10.10 Yosemite or later.
F.lux will adjust your iPhone or iPad display to appear like sunlight during the day, and warm during nighttime hours to avoid looking at a bright screen. The app has settings to adjust the brightness level during the day and night, and you can also configure a time that you normally wake up each day.
Apple does not allow developers to access the Private APIs that f.lux requires to work on iOS, so the app is unlikely to appear on the App Store unless that policy changes. Since the app is side-loaded, there are no automatic updates, so the beta performs a daily update check and will display a message if a new version is available.
How to Sideload F.lux on iPhone and iPad
F.lux has provided step-by-step instructions on how to sideload the app on iPhone or iPad.
- Download and install Xcode 7 from the Mac App Store
- Download F.lux for iOS, unzip and open the “iflux.xcodeproj” project in Xcode
- Open Xcode > Preferences > Accounts and enter your iCloud or developer credentials
- Under Targets > iflux > General > Identity, give the Bundle Identifier a unique name
- Under the same Identity > Team menu, select your iCloud account or Developer profile
Next, connect your iPhone or iPad to a Mac using a Lightning cable and follow these steps:
- From the Xcode Product menu, choose Destination and select your iOS device
- Push Cmd-R when you’re ready to have f.lux
- When you first run, you’ll be prompted to open Settings > General > Profile on your device, and trust your developer account
- Run again, and allow location and notifications — the app needs to be able to constantly communicate to run well
F.lux for iOS was developed by Michael Herf and is free for iPhone and iPad. The app was released for jailbroken iOS devices in late 2011.
Discuss this article in our forums
iPad Pro Review Roundup: Powerful Creative Canvas, but Not Quite a PC Replacement
Apple released the iPad Pro online and in stores earlier today, and the embargo has now lifted for hands-on reviews of the new 12.9-inch tablet.
The consensus opinion is that the iPad Pro is an excellent device for content creation, with powerful hardware for intensive apps and multitasking, but not quite a PC replacement due to its iOS limitations. The tablet’s experience will be better realized once more developers update their apps to take advantage of the larger canvas.
From left to right: iPad mini 2, iPad Air 2, iPad Pro (Image: WSJ)
iPad Pro reviews praised its large display, which at 2,732×2,048 pixels has a higher resolution than the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, and most early adopters claim the tablet meets or exceeds its advertised 10-hour battery life. The new Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard also received positive reviews.
Ars Technica – Andrew Cunningham
It’s best to think of the iPad Pro as a starting point, especially for iOS 9. These multitasking features are still brand-new, and there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick in future iOS 9 revisions and into iOS 10. My biggest gripes with the iPad Pro are with the software rather than the hardware, and that means that most of them can be fixed given enough time and enough feature requests. It took Microsoft three tries to really nail down the Surface Pro concept, and given a couple of iOS updates the iPad Pro has room to grow into a more versatile laptop replacement without necessarily giving up the things that people like about iOS.
For the rest of us, there’s still the Mac.
CNET – Scott Stein
I want the iPad to eat the Mac, the way the iPhone ate the iPod. This iPad has already crept up to become as large as a Mac. But iOS needs to fully change with it. I need to connect to my old files and Web tools better, because that’s what I need as a pro. I want it to become as flexible as a computer should be. The iPad needs to bridge the gap.
The iPad Pro feels like the top half of a new futuristic superpowered laptop. I want the bottom half, too.
MacStories – Federico Viticci
The iPad Pro is positioned as a more productive take on the iPad for those who need to get work done on it. My recommendation couldn’t be more straightforward: if iOS is your main computing platform, or if you plan to turn an iPad into your primary computer, you’ll want an iPad Pro. Its powerful hardware, multitasking interface, and extensible nature are superior to every other iPad. I don’t see myself using a Mac as my primary computer ever again.
Mashable – Lance Ulanoff
It certainly has some impressive benchmark numbers. Its Geekbench single-core (3,218) and multi-core (5,455) numbers blew away virtually everything else (in the mobile space), including the A9 chip in the iPhone 6S/6S Plus. It even outperforms the new MacBook’s Intel Core M processor (2,367 and 4,489 for single-core and multi-core, respectively). What’s more, the iPad Pro’s single-core score rivaled desktop performance on the Microsoft Surface Book (beating the sixth-gen Intel Core i5 and coming close to a sixth-gen Intel Core i7). The multi-core scores lagged behind both systems, but not by the margin you might expect.
TechCrunch – Matthew Panzarino
…iPad Pro absolutely, 100% could be the central computing device for a home. […] But there is a certain (sorry) norm-core computing demographic that could very well end up with an iPad Pro as the ’enhanced’ component to their smartphone, which is their real computer. Somewhere on the same level as other use-case-based devices like wearables and an interconnected home.
The Verge – Lauren Goode
But even this split-screen mode isn’t enough for lots of the “laptop” things I need to do on a daily basis. This is still a mobile OS we’re talking about. It’s nice that it’s at least familiar feeling, unlike the foreign hybrid OS that Microsoft introduced with the first Surfaces. But I can’t manipulate more than two app windows at a time on the iPad Pro. I can’t control things with a trackpad. I can’t run Final Cut Pro on the iPad Pro. Entering data into cells in the Google Sheets app on the iPad Pro is still onerous. There’s no way to hand over the iPad to someone else and let them quickly log in as a “guest” user.
The Verge – Walt Mossberg
You can get a lot more done with iPad apps than with the paltry selection of tablet / touch-first apps available for the Surface. But, because Apple hasn’t made a great keyboard, the iPad Pro isn’t a complete replacement for a great laptop like the MacBook Air — even for a tablet guy like me.
The iPad Pro will no doubt make a lot of Apple users happy, especially if they use it for graphics. But I won’t be buying one, and I don’t recommend that average users do so either.
The Wall Street Journal – Joanna Stern
The Pro may seem wedged between iPads and MacBooks, but it will be your main computer in the future. As our phablets push smaller tablets into retirement, the big tablet and its accessories will do the same for our traditional computers. For now, however, it may be easiest to step back and see the Pro as a… really good, really big iPad.
More Reviews: Bloomberg, Daring Fireball, Fast Company, TechRadar, The Telegraph, Wired
Tags: reviews, Apple Pencil, Smart Keyboard
Buyer’s Guide: iPad Pro (Buy Now)
Discuss this article in our forums
Logitech’s iPad Pro keyboard case is relatively affordable
Apple’s iPad Pro is pricey even before you add in the $169 official keyboard case, but Logitech may have a way to make the whole package a little more palatable. It’s now shipping its promised Create Keyboard Case for the gigantic tablet, and the add-on will sell for a slightly more frugal $150. It only works at two angles, but you’ll get perks like backlit keys, automatic pairing (thanks to the Smart Connector) and a raft of iOS shortcuts. And if you don’t want to turn your iPad into a makeshift laptop, there’s an $80 Create Protective case that ditches the keyboard in return for a more flexible stand. Either shell is available in black, blue or red, so you’re not stuck with somber colors on your giant slate. Slideshow-340125
Source: Logitech
iPad Pro Now Available for Purchase From Apple Online Store
Apple is now accepting orders for the iPad Pro, both through its online storefront and through the Apple Store app. The first iPad Pro online orders will arrive on Friday, November 13 when one-day shipping is selected, and Apple’s site is also listing the tablet as available for purchase in many retail stores beginning today.
The Apple Pencil and the Smart Keyboard will not be arriving until late next week and are not available for in-store pickup at the current time.
Logitech’s CREATE Backlit Keyboard Case for the iPad Pro is available in stores beginning today, however, for $149.95. Apple is advertising the keyboard right alongside the Apple Pencil and its own Smart Keyboard. Logitech’s keyboard was designed with input from Apple and it is the first third-party product to use the device’s Smart Connector port.
The iPad Pro is Apple’s new flagship tablet, measuring in at 12.9 inches diagonally. It includes a Retina display, a four speaker audio system, 4GB RAM, and a set of dedicated accessories, the Apple Pencil and the Smart Keyboard.
Apple’s iPad Pro is priced at $799 for the entry-level 32GB Wi-Fi only model, $949 for the 128GB Wi-Fi only model, and $1,079 for the 128GB Wi-Fi + Cellular model. The iPad Pro is available for purchase in Gold, Silver, and Space Gray.
The Apple Pencil and the Smart Keyboard are being sold alongside the iPad Pro. The Apple Pencil is priced at $99, while the Smart Keyboard is priced at $169.
The iPad Pro is available in a long list of countries at launch, including Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cayman Islands, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greenland, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, UAE, U.S., U.K., Uruguay, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Discuss this article in our forums
Apple Music’s first beta launches on the Play Store
We’ve known it was coming, but Apple Music is finally available on the Google Play Store. There’s a catch, though; as of right now, the app is still in beta. There are some missing features that will be added in down the line, but right now you’ll at least have access to your Apple music library, if you have one.
Even though Apple makes the app, you can tell they at least tried to put Google’s Material Design guidelines front and center. You can tell Apple made it, but it feels right at home with other Android applications, which is a great thing. You’ll find that a few features are absent, though, including music videos and the ability to sign up for an Apple Music family plan in the app, but neither of those are absolute dealbreakers, especially since the app looks really great.
With that being said, the app is still in beta, and you might run into issues. I couldn’t ever get my personal music library to load on an LG V10, but it worked on a Galaxy S6, and there was some general sluggishness when moving in and out of the settings and different sections of the app. Playback worked well enough in the curated music section, so if you can at least get your music to appear you’ll be able to listen to anything you want. Searching for music in Apple’s catalog was perfectly fine in my testing.
Anybody planning on jumping ship from Google Play Music or Spotify for Apple Music now that there’s an Android app?
source: TechCrunch
Come comment on this article: Apple Music’s first beta launches on the Play Store
Malicious App ‘InstaAgent’ Sends Instagram Passwords to Unknown Server, Posts Spam in Users’ Feeds
InstaAgent, an app that connects to Instagram and promises to track the people that have visited a user’s Instagram account, appears to be storing the usernames and passwords of Instagram users, sending them to a suspicious remote server.
An app developer from Peppersoft downloaded InstaAgent — full name “Who Viewed Your Profile – InstaAgent” — and discovered that it reading Instagram account usernames and passwords, sending them via clear text to a remote server – instagram.zunamedia.com.
InstaAgent is also using the credentials to log into accounts and post unauthorized images. Instagram does not permit third-party apps to upload photos to user accounts.
While InstaAgent isn’t particularly popular in the United States, it is currently the number one free app in both the United Kingdom and Canada, with thousands of downloads that puts a huge number of Instagram users at risk of having their information stolen. In the Google Play store, the app had between 100k and 500k users, and the install numbers could be similar for iOS.
Google has removed the InstaAgent Android app from the Google Play store, but InstaAgent is still available in the iOS App Store for the time being. Anyone who has downloaded InstaAgent should delete the app immediately and change their Instagram password.
I would say "Who Viewed Your Profile – InstaAgent" is the first malware in the iOS Appstore that is downloaded half a million times.
— David L-R (@PeppersoftDev) November 10, 2015
http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsPasswords for other sites and accounts that were the same as the Instagram password should also be changed as a precaution. We also highly recommend a password management app like 1Password, which can generate unique complex passwords for each and every site or service. Instagram also advises against installing third-party apps that don’t follow its Community Guidelines.
There are dozens if not hundreds of third-party apps that promise to provide Instagram users with followers and other perks, and these kind of apps should be avoided. According to Instagram, these apps are “likely an attempt to use your account in an inappropriate way” as InstaAgent does.
Discuss this article in our forums
AIVAnet 