This iPhone 6 Concept with 4.7″ Display Looks Amazing, but you know what, it’s just a concept video of some 3D modeled thoughts of a designer… you don’t need to put specs on it, like the chip (A8, just a guess) and it’s speed (1.2Ghz, again, just a guess). Give us the renders, but don’t add a bunch of specs for your rainbow-farting-unicorn render.
Macgasm lists The Only 5 Things You Can Count On At Apple’s Event Tomorrow. The only thing I question is number 3, “Goddam Game Demos”, as those have been a bit lighter later. The rest are a lock though :)
Excellent dissection of the “iPhone 5S will have a fingerprint reader” rumors in Fingerprints by Craig Hockenberry.
And anytime you want to access this data, you’re logging into iCloud. Wouldn’t it be great if you could skip the part where you have to type in your Apple ID?
This is a similar conclusion I came to a couple of days ago. I’ve been on the “this doesn’t make sense for apple to do” train since the rumors started. Adding this sort of gratuitous “extra tech” onto a smartphone felt more like Samsung and their plethora of extras on the Galaxy S4 and not the (in general) tight integration that Apple is known for.
But then I thought about all the times that I still need to enter my password or login on the iPhone. Websites, purchases, buying apps, logging into Google’s search app, unlocking the phone. What if that could be just replaced with “put your thumb on the home button?
Apple has:
Putting it all together, and making the iPhone your mythical “digital wallet” really does now seem like it’s one of those “of course” ideas. Thinking of it this way instead of a simple concept of “your thumb unlocks your phone” really turned me around.
Craig goes into the reasoning in far better a way than I, so I recommend you read his article as well.
Of course, there are also rumors that on launch the fingerprint reader will just be for unlocking the phone, so maybe Craig and myself will be sorely disappointed :)
Interactive Apple iPhone 5S & iOS 7 Concept. Super impressive, especially considering it’s done completely in JavaScript and CSS (no images!)
The rumor mill keeps on heating up about the possibilities (or depending on who you read, certainty) that Apple will release a 7” iPad (or iPad Junior as @danbenjamin wants it to be called), and I wanted to throw a couple of quick links out to people interested in this.
First of all, John Gruber weighed in at Daring Fireball, working through what is it, why Apple would or wouldn’t do it, the fact that Steve Jobs famously said that Apple would never make a 7” tablet, cost factors, etc. A well thought out piece.
If you want a comparison of what it would look like (hint, it’s not a 7” tablet) you can check out Trojankitten’s mockup comparision of tablet sizes. Fairly illuminating as to how when people talk about the ‘7 inch iPad’ you shouldn’t picture an Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 with an Apple logo slapped on.
The rumours that Apple is going to create their own 3D Maps App For iOS 6 have been flying hot and heavy lately, and the mock-ups that people have been posting (ignore the titles that make it look like these are anything other than mock-ups based on speculation based on the fact that Apple acquired a mapping company in 2011) have looked pretty good.
I pose some questions only assuming that these rumours and mock-ups are vaguely close to reality:
Guess we’ll see in June….
Post title pretty much says it all. As usual Gruber has all sorts of good thoughts on the matter, but still isn’t convinced.
If Apple introduced something like this in iOS 6, they could encourage iOS developers to adopt the recommended APIs to be responsive to changes in available vertical screen space. For now, they could pitch this in the context of shrinking screen space in response to on-screen notification banners, but, come October, apps that do the right thing would automatically be responsive to, say, a new device with 176 more pixels.
Recommended reading as well is this post linked from within the article.
More and more rumors have been swirling about the next version of the iPhone, and iMore has done the math on The 4 inch iPhone in terms of what you’d get and how Apple (might) do it.
As Gruber says, the 10 Reasons Why iPhone 5 Doesn't Stand a Chance Against Motorola Droid Bionic article is link-bait, for a multitude of reasons. Yes, obviously the iPhone is horribly unpopular because of it's lack of flash, HDMI, and expansion card slots. Those things have drastically reduced it's popularity.
Oh, wait, it's not :P
Lets also not ignore the fact that the iPhone 5 is only rumored at this point and no one outside of apple knows what it'll actually be or have.
Like Gruber said, link-bait.
The latest leak (maybe?) is a 64 GB White iPhone running iOS 5 with Expose-like Multitasking. Looks good, and a more "3GS" like evolution than a "iPhone 4" whole-new system. Bump in RAM and new OS features basically. Not bad. We'll see what really is happening in a couple of months though, but until then, let the leaks and rumors begin!
Ars runs down What we know about Mac OS X Lion with the latest bits of information from the developer preview that was posted yesterday.
9 to 5 Mac has a roundup of rumors for The Music Event 2010. Short story: iPod Touches, new touch screen Nanos, maybe iTV, and a few others.
After seeing the news that a iPod touch with 2 megapixel camera was leaked in Vietnam I really wonder if whatever business Apple does in that area will be gone in 6 months.
Another one turned up in Vietnam nad toutes A4 Processor, 256MB RAM, N90 PRO2 with some Translated Impressions.
Confused by the whole "gizmodo iphone ethics, journalism police-raid" thing? Run through The Gizmodo iPhone saga flowchart and pretty much everything will be explained (or at least, flowcharted out).
I know it's late, but this video from MossPuppet.com of Steve Jobs responding to Gizmodo on the subject of the iPhone 4G was pretty awesome.
Daring Fireball has some great analysis of Gizmodo and the Prototype iPhone including some revelations such as the quote below:
According to several sources (of mine) familiar with the project, "N90" is Apple's codename for the fourth-generation GSM iPhone, slated for release this June or July. "DVT" stands for "design verification test", an Apple production milestone. The DVT milestone is very late in the game; based on this, I now believe that this unit very closely, if not exactly, resembles what Apple plans to release.
Very interesting... some people seem to really like the new design, some aren't too keen. I'm warming up to it, but people have a point in that the screws are very un-apple-like, and the design looks a lot like the borning "normal" HTC smartphones. Guess we'll see in the June/July timeframe...
The awesome Andy I has got a nice weigh in and round up all about The (Increasingly Plausible) Miraculous Engadget (and Gizmodo) iPhone 4G.
Okey-doke. Given that they didn't say "It has the same guts as an iPhone 3GS," we have to conclude that this is indeed a rogue Apple iPhone prototype.Interesting. On a number of levels.
I was on the "it's a lame knockoff" bandwagon when this first came out, but the evidence seems to be mounting for this being a real thing (either that or greatly crafted PR from Apple).
Apple Insider has some evidence for new MacBook Pros ahead. Tuesday? Thursday? Next week? Either way, not the time to be plunking down $3k for a sexy new laptop from Apple, at least for the next bit. Only a rumor, brought to you by a site that looks at other rumor sites who hear things from people who have a friend who works at a place where they saw some new SKUs. Maybe.
Finally! Sounds like we'll get a peek as to if we should upgrade our iPhones now or wait. The iPhone OS 4.0 Preview Event Scheduled for This Thursday will hopefully give us the details.
Just to round out the last day of (rumored) Apple Tablet posts, both here and everywhere, here's the complete history of Apple Tablet rumors from Engadget, all the way back to 2002.
Doonesbury's take is here.
Macenstein has the Mosspuppet's thoughts on the tablet. Amusing as always.
"You're so sexy iSlate"....
Funnily enough I watched Totally Rad Show this morning and they were wondering what the announcement would be, but saying that by the time the show was out everyone would know. Ah if only that were true. Only 24 hours and 10 minutes left till we find out though.
John Gruber links to David Weisse's Prediction Score Card for Wednesday's Event.
With the announcement of Apple's new creation almost exactly 7 days from now (at this time, 9:15am PST, I figure we'll have gone through the pretense and sales numbers and The Steve will have just unveiled something to his adoring fans), the Apple Blog has got a nice round up of the Vaporware Tablets that are around today (well, by "around" I of course, mean "are vaporware").
Thanks to Peejay for pointing me to the Engadget story where it's finally official.... IApple holding January 27th event to show off its 'latest creation'. So now the blogosphere will explode with more speculation, instead of exploding if Apple didn't have an announcement.
Of course the "Latest Creation" part indicates that this is probably not an iPhone OS 4.0 announcement or a new iTunes (though both of those I'd appreciate as well).
Best comment for the Engadget story IMHO is by DirtyVegas:
1) Expensive or not, it will look super cool and sell like hotcakes
2) We can stop with dumb tablet rumors and look forward to 2nd gen tablet rumors.
Update: The nuts over at TUAW have already started Zaprudering the Invite.
Gizmodo has a good list of all the bits and pieces of the (rumored)Apple Tablet Rumors. I presume there'll be another couple of revisions to this as the (rumored) announcement date gets (rumored) closer.
Aryk pointed me the Gizmodo post (referencing the Valleywag article) that could get you Up to $100,000 for Evidence of Apple Tablet. I'm assuming this doesn't mean that you should fire up Photoshop or your favorite video/VFX tools. The amounts of money that they're boasting about though either means that a) it's going to be such a boon to the site that they can afford to give out $100k or b) they're so confident that no one has access to it (or it doesn't exist) that it's a safe bet.
Nice visual to help you sort out all the rumored Apple Tablet rumors. Full image here.
Yup, tomorrow is 9/9/09, and John Gruber has some info / speculation in the It's Only Rock and Roll Event Prelude. He's got the sure bets, the long shots, and the who-the-hell-knows bets. Looking forward to tomorrow though!
TUAW has a great wrapup of Friday fakes, the best of the fake tablet photoshops from around the net. I know that Apple folks love their gear, but I'm not sure how that translates into making fake images (unless it means they get lots of attention from the fanboys). Nonsense, but fun to look at some peoples ideas.
The first image also has some interesting application possibilities of an actual iTablet (instead of it being a ridiculous thing to have where it's a super-expensive netbook with half the functionality). Of course, knowing Apple, if they do do something like this, it'll be something that comes out of left field and will blow everyone away and not glom onto what is (IMHO) a dead market that is only really useful for a very narrow market.
Not really official, found via @navigon_ on twitter, but the navigon photostream over on flickr has some interesting looking updates for version 1.2. From the looks of it you'll get proper iPod control from within the app (yay!) with a very cool 'peel away' interface for it, location sharing (great for stalkers), text to speech for street names (yay), automatic night mode (yay), and lane information in a small display.
Gotta say that these are some pretty nice things, and while they should have been in there from the start, they weren't absolutely critical, and make a nice point release update. Course, I'll have to nuke a bunch of music from my iPhone, then update, and then re-load it as I keep it pretty chock full....
No ETA on the update though. Also they only said these updates were on the European version, but I'd assume the changes will be the same across all versions. There are some more stuff on the navigon site about this too.
Update: A little birdie told me that the 1.2 update for North America and friends are already submitted to the app store.
Gizmodo has some proported insider information on the Apple Tablet from someone at Apple. They say:
"The device, which I've held mock ups of, is going to have a 10 inch screen, and when I saw it looked just like a giant iPhone, with a black back-- although that design could change at any time" they said, "with the same black resin back, and the familiar home button." That's obvious.
Who knows, might see this this holiday season (if it exists of course).
TomTom has called a Media Event for September 22nd for some journalists (apparently yours truly wasn't on the invite list). They aren't sure if this is for the iPhone app and holster (which had UK pricing of £113 leaked a few days ago or something else), but the message is about how "TomTom will reveal the future of navigation to you".
Also, this is from a .nl site via google translate, blogged by a rumors site, picked up from an iphone subsite of the "topnewsdigest" site, and then by me, so take it as worth the paper it's written on :)
MacRumors has some details of the recently rumored iTunes 9's Social Media Integration features. I'm not sure if I want more cruft in my iTunes though. Version 8's big new feature, Genius, seemed more about selling you new music than anything, but I do enjoy being able to create a playlist of similar music when I'm listening to something I'm really in the mood for with one click. I'm thinking that while it seems like a small thing, it'll start being a given for future media player systems.
I'm looking forward to see what apple pulls out. I'm wondering if version 9 will also tie into new hardware somehow.
The ever-vigilant Macenstein blog nicely lists out what we know so far about the oft-rumored Apple tablet system. Great conclusion with:
Excited? Us too. Seeing the specs laid out like this really cuts through all the rumors and really solidifies the iTablet in the mind... I can almost feel it in my hand! (By the way, it weighs between 8 ounces and 13 lbs).
