Apple | IT newspaper

21.5-inch iMac could get its Retina 4K upgrade in November

September 10th, 2015 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | hardware

Sep
10

At 4K resolution, Apple’s smaller all-in-one would match the 27-inch 5K iMac in pixel density.

One year after dialing up the screen resolution of its 27-inch iMac, Apple will reportedly do the same with its 21.5-inch all-in-one.
Citing unnamed sources, 9to5Mac claims that Apple will announce the 21.5-inch iMac with 4K Retina display by the end of October, alongside the launch of OS X El Capitan. The new high-res iMac would then ship in November.
The exact screen resolution will be 4096-by-2304, 9to5Mac claims. This resolution has previously appeared in the code from Apple’s El Capitan Developer Preview. Currently, the 21.5-inch iMac has a resolution of 1920-by-1080.

With a 21.5-inch display, the 4K iMac’s pixel density would come out to 218.6 pixels per inch, just a tad higher than the 27-inch Retina iMac’s 217.6 ppi display. While 9to5Mac doesn’t mention the Retina branding, it seems likely that Apple will use it once again for its smaller iMac. As with the 27-inch iMac, the 21.5-inch model should have improved color saturation and faster processors to drive all those extra pixels.
There’s no word on pricing, but users should expect to pay a premium for the 4K display. Apple currently charges $1,999 for its basic Retina 5K iMac, though thedebut model had slightly superior tech specs and cost $2,499 at launch. Meanwhile, Apple still sells a non-Retina 27-inch iMac for $1,799. The current 21-inch model ranges in price from $1,099 to $1,499, and could stick around as a lower-priced alternative.
Why this matters: The 21.5-inch iMac is one of just three Apple products that don’t offer a Retina display option, the other being Apple’s 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs. With OS X El Capitan set for this fall, it makes sense for Apple to tie the launch a smaller, presumably more affordable Retina iMac.

Source: www.macworld.com

Apple, Samsung battle to the end over damages payment

September 3rd, 2015 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | software

Sep
03

Apple is demanding that over $548 million in damages be paid.
It may take some time for Apple to see any damages from its patent infringement dispute with Samsung Electronics.
Apple is asking a district court to order Samsung to pay over $548 million in damages, in a long-drawn patent dispute between the two companies that dates back to 2011.
But Samsung has fired back asking the court to declare invalid the claim of an Apple patent also known as the pinch-to-zoom patent, which figured in the lawsuit, or to stay proceedings.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office decided in December that claims of an Apple patent had been found invalid, according to Samsung’s filing. The South Korean company also wants a vacation of damages awarded to Apple in connection with the patent.
The iPhone maker asked the court this week to order the payment after an appeals court denied Samsung a review of the damages and also refused to stay its mandate to the district court to go ahead with a final judgment on the damages.
For Apple, the $548 million in damages is just a part of what was originally awarded by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The court awarded Apple damages of $930 million after a jury found that Samsung infringed Apple’s design and utility patents and diluted its trade dresses, which relate to the overall look and packaging of a product.
On appeal, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit went along with the jury’s verdict on the design patent infringements, the validity of two utility patent claims, and the damages awarded for the design and utility patent infringements appealed by Samsung.
But the appeals court reversed the jury’s findings that the asserted trade dresses are protectable, and vacated the damages relating to trade dress dilution. That order shaved off $382 million in damages but $548 million still remained.
In a request for review by a full-bench of the Federal Circuit, which was denied, Samsung challenged $399 million of the balance, which is an award of its entire profits from products found to infringe Apple’s design patents. Samsung contests the basis for the award of the damages, and has said it will appeal to the Supreme Court.
After failing on Tuesday in its bid to get the Federal Circuit to stay its mandate to the district court, Samsung has now filed a motion in the California court, asking it to enter a judgment of invalidity on claim 8 of U.S. Patent No. 7,844,915, after a final decision by the PTAB that such a claim is invalid. Samsung has asked the court alternately for an order staying all proceedings, including any entry of judgment.
District Court Judge Lucy H. Koh has on Thursday ordered a stay on more filings by either side, without the court’s permission, as the court has not yet received the mandate from the Federal Circuit.
Apple can appeal the PTAB’s invalidity decision in the Federal Circuit. Its petition for rehearing before the PTAB is also pending, according to court records.

Source: www.macworld.com

OS X 10.11 El Capitan: news, release date, and features

August 20th, 2015 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | software

Aug
20

Update: Apple has released a public beta version of OS X El Capitan

It’s been seven months and counting since Apple’s iOS-inspired OS X 10.10 Yosemite leapt onto the Mac. Attention has now turned to the next major release of OS X, which is expected to be named – you guessed it – OS X 10.11 El Capitan.Like iOS 7, Yosemite’s bold colours and flattened icons divided opinion, but the stats paint a positive picture: more than half (58%) of Mac owners were running the latest version of OS X in April, according to data by NetApplications.It’s hard to deny that Yosemite looks fantastic on Apple’s newer computers with Retina displays – such as the iMac with Retina 5K and the new MacBook – but users on older hardware have reported sluggish performance since upgrading.As such, OS X 10.11 will focus on “under-the-hood” performance improvements, rather than new features, as OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard did back in 2009. Snow Leopard famously launched with “0 new features”, instead focusing on improving performance and service support.This includes 1.4 times faster app launching than its predecessor, two times faster app switching and email opening, as well as four times faster PDF previews. While Apple hasn’t quite gone with the stringent strategy of no new features, it has aimed to please developers with a better optimized OS complete with Metal pulled from iOS 8.

OS X 10.11 release date

OS X 10.11 as expected was shown off for the first time at WWDC 2015, which took place on June 8. At the event Apple gave developers the chance to “learn about the future of iOS and OS X”, bringing forth both OS X El Capitan and the next version of iOS, iOS 9. Certain Yosemite features such as Continuity saw tighter integration between OS X and iOS, a path Apple is continuing with OS X 10.11.Apple’s WWDC logos through the ages: what did they tell us?With Apple promising to release OS X 10.11 this fall it wouldn’t be surprising to see El Capitan arriving in October, the month that both OS X 10.09 Mavericksand OS X 10.10 Yosemite were let loose into the wild in 2013 and 2014 respectively.While Apple has yet to announce an official release date as of yet, the Cupertino company released a public beta of its next Mac OS on July 9. The free preview version of El Capitan is available here.

OS X 10.11 price

The last two versions of OS X, Yosemite and OS X 10.9 Mavericks, were both free and this is a trend El Capitan will follow too. It would have been especially hard to see Apple going back to paid annual updates in light of Microsoft’s decision to offer Windows 10 as a free update to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users for one year.

OS X 10.11 name

Releases of OS X were named after big cats prior to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, with the last being OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Apple indicated that future versions would be named after California locations from that point onwards, starting with OS X 10.09 Mavericks.So what’s next? Apple has trademarked a number of names that could be used for OS X 10.11, including: Redwood, Mammoth, California, Big Sur, Pacific, Diablo, Miramar, Rincon, El Cap, Redtail, Condor, Grizzly, Farallon, Tiburon, Monterey, Skyline, Shasta, Sierra, Mojave, Sequola, Ventura and Sonoma. Of course, there can only be one and the Cupertino company decided to go with El Capitan.

Split View

Windows 7 introduced the ability to “snap” windows to the sides of the desktop to easily position apps and other content on the display, something that has been missing from OS X for almost six years. Now El Capitan will finally introduced something Apple is calling Split View, which as the name suggests allows users to easily orient two windows side by side.Sure, there are third-party apps that can do it, but they’re not free or run as smoothly as the native behaviour on Microsoft’s snap-happy OS. Windows 10 has introduced a way to snap four Windows of equal size to each corner of the screen, which would be a boon for anyone using Apple’s larger iMacs or a large monitor.

Spaces Bar

OS X El Capitan also brings a slightly revamped multi-desktop management system called Spaces Bar. Users can launch the new expansive view of their desktops by dragging a window to the top of the screen. For a split-screen view, simply drag one window on top of the other.In a few other tweaks, Mission Control said to be smoother, simpler, faster. Meanwhile, full screen apps including Mail are smarter with multitasking features similar to iOS 8’s enhancements.

Metal

One of the biggest improvements El Capitan will bring with it is Metal, a low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated graphics API. Apple promises this iOS 8 feature coming to its desktop OS will introduce a 50% improvement in performance with up to 40% greater rendering efficiency.The melding of Metal with El Capitan should make Macs a much more capable platform for gaming. Thus far, Epic games has demoed a build of Fortnight built on Metal.Aside from gaming, Adobe also presented Metal has enabled After Effects to render effects with eight times the efficiency. The software maker also announced it is adopting Metal in its OS X apps, which has resulted in a 10x improvement in draw call performance.

Sync Launcher layout to iCloud

Another useful feature from Windows 8.1 is the ability to have Windows automatically download and lay out apps, desktop wallpaper and settings associated with a Microsoft account. This means that you can log into another Windows 8.1 machine and have all of your favourite apps downloaded and laid out as if you’ve sat down at your own computer.OS X forces you to manually download your previously purchased apps from the Mac App store, before inserting them into the correct order the on the dock (if you harbour OCD tendencies). It’s not a problem if you stick to one machine, but slightly cumbersome if you tend to chop and change. Baking such functionality into OS X 10.11 shouldn’t be too difficult thanks to iCloud support.

OS X 10.11 and Siri

The most notable absence from Yosemite was Apple’s voice-activated personal assistant, Siri. With Microsoft introducing Cortana into Windows 10, now would be a good time for the personal assistant to come to Apple’s desktop OS. When you can download and install Windows 10 Technical Preview onto a Mac to get Cortana, but you can’t get Siri on the native OS, that’s a sure sign that Apple needs to play catch up.

Source: www.techradar.com

The real Apple Watch party starts this fall

August 8th, 2015 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | hardware

Aug
08

“The Apple Watch is available on April 24,” Apple CEO Tim Cook declared on stage during Apple’s March media event, officially setting the launch date for Apple’s highly anticipated new product. And yet when you consider all the facts, it’s hard not to conclude that the Apple Watch truly arrives this fall, and its first six months have been merely a prologue.
I wear my Apple Watch every day, and I enjoy it. The fitness features have made me more active, and I enjoy being able seeing notifications from my iPhone and responding quickly when I feel the need. But as with so many new Apple products, the early users are on the shakedown cruise, before all the regular passengers come aboard. This was true with the iPod and the iPhone, and it feels true about the Apple Watch, too.
“Now, our objective for the quarter wasn’t primarily sales,” Cook said during hisconference call with financial analysts last week. If not sales, then what?
First, consider that most entirely new Apple product suffer from shortages, and not just because of pent-up demand. Building a new piece of high technology in large numbers, especially with Apple’s specifications, can be fraught with difficulties. So part of the objective of the first few months of Apple Watch production was to increase manufacturing volume. First came fulfilling demand in the Apple Watch launch countries; then as the initial demand has been met, Apple has added in new countries with their own initial demand and rolled the watch out to Apple’s retail stores. The goal is to reach the holiday season with an ability to accept every Apple Watch order that’s made, and to have enough watches to sell at Apple Stores (and other retail establishments).
Then there’s watchOS itself. The version on the Apple Watch today is so new, it doesn’t really even have a name. It’s an impressive piece of work, but software–unlike hardware–is a constant work in progress. Apple needed the Apple Watch hardware to be rock solid on the launch date, because once that watch hardware is out in the world, it’s never going to get any better. But the software, that’s a continuing story.

Getting to version 2

With the announcement at WWDC 2015 of watchOS 2–finally, a name!–we can see how the Apple Watch will function beginning this fall, and how holiday watch buyers will experience it. The big story is support for standalone watch apps, but there will be plenty of other feature tweaks as well, exactly what you’d expect after six months of continued development of a brand-new product. (Not to mention, watchOS 2 will benefit from what Apple has learned from the first users of the Apple Watch outside Apple. The company tested the product extensively in house, but there’s nothing better than hearing from real customers about what they desire and what disappoints them.)
This fall’s Apple Watch will also benefit from six months more consideration and experimentation from third-party app developers. The first wave of Apple Watch apps were created largely on spec, without much idea of how the Apple Watch would really be used by regular people day to day. The second wave came whendevelopers used their apps on real Apple Watches and realized that their initial approaches weren’t appropriate for the actual product. This fall we’ll see a third wave of apps: Some will take great advantage of the new features of native apps on watchOS 2, some will be improved versions of existing watch apps, and still others will be first releases from app developers who have been watching the mistakes and successes of other developers and waiting for the right moment.
“We’re more excited about how the [Apple Watch] is positioned for the long term,” Cook said in that analyst call. “We’re convinced that the watch is going to be one of the top gifts of the holiday season.”
I’m enjoying my time with the Apple Watch, but it seems clear to me that the real starting gun for this product will be fired this fall with the release of watchOS 2. Its success as a product won’t be measured this summer, but after all the tinsel and ornaments have been taken down and Apple’s reviewing its numbers from the holiday quarter, which is traditionally its best quarter by far.
The Apple Watch: Coming this September.

Source: www.macworld.com

Report: Apple and BMW started talking about an iCar collaboration last year

August 6th, 2015 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | hardware

Aug
06

Tim Cook and company have shown interest in how BMW manufactures its i3 electric car, but want to go at it alone.

The Apple Car is taking another lap on the rumor circuit, with a new report from Reuters that Apple execs visited BMW last year to find out more about how BMW makes the (very cool) i3 electric car.
“Apple executives were impressed with the fact that we abandoned traditional approaches to car making and started afresh. It chimed with the way they do things too,” an unnamed source at BMW told Reuters.
According to the report, Tim Cook visited BMW’s headquarters in 2014 and asked the carmaker’s board members very detailed questions about production of its i3 electric vehicles, which BMW manufactures using lightweight carbon fiber. BMW execs were willing to provide the parts for the Apple Car, according to Reuters.
Talks about a potential collaboration between Apple and BMW, however, ended shortly after that. Sources told Reuters that the reason was because Apple decided to try to build a car on its own. As for BMW, the carmaker started getting worried about revealing its manufacturing secrets and becoming just a mere supplier of car parts for the tech company. BMW denied the claims of a potential collaboration, and Apple declined to comment.
”We need to get away from the idea that it will be either us or them. We cannot offer clients the perfect experience without help from one of these technology companies.”
“We do not collaborate to open our ecosystems but we find ways, because we respect each other,” BMW’s head of research and development Klaus Froehlich told Reuters.
When it came to speculating about Apple’s plans for a future car, the Reuters report referenced Steve Jobs’s infamous a-ha moment after visiting a Xerox research center in 1979 and getting the ideas for the first Macintosh. Could Tim Cook have gathered enough insight from visiting BMW last year to have a fleet of self-driving electric vehicles on the road by 2020 without help from a major carmaker? Doubtful. But this year alone Cupertino has hired a lot of talent from the automotive industry, including Tesla.
Why this matters: With over $200 billion in cash as of its last earnings call, Apple certainly has the resources to take a few risks and enter the auto industry. These deep pockets could be why the Cupertino thinks it can go it alone. As for automakers like BMW, they seem to understand their need to partner with a tech company to develop next-gen vehicles. Building cars from scratch is hard, yes, but so is creating the mapping software that recalibrates in real time.
“We need to get away from the idea that it will be either us or them,” said Peter Schwarzenbauer, BMW’s management board member in charge of digital services. “We cannot offer clients the perfect experience without help from one of these technology companies.”

Source: www.macworld.com

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