Apple is now the most valuable brand in the universe

Who’s the most valuable company in the world? Who is?! Apple is! We always get Run DMZ in our head when we read that sentence for some reason. So, naturally, now you guys get to have it in your head…

There! Ok, so last week Apple was named the world’s most valuable brand. In the world. Technically, in the universe. Alf got nothing on you, Mr Cook.

We miss Alf.

Back in 2000, a company called Interbrand began compiling a ‘Best Global Brand’ survey of the top 100 brands worldwide. The company that produces that sweet, sweet, black gold, Coca Cola, has been number one every single year.

Until now. BUM BUM BUUUUUUUM

This year, Coca Cola has fallen to the number 3 position and Apple has taken place at the top of the brand castle, thank you very much.

Apple climbed from the number 2 position in 2012, and all the way from the number 8 position in 2011.

According to Interbrand’s report, Apple’s brand value has increased by 28% from last year, sitting at 98.3 Billion. That’s… a lot of apples.

Google, with 93.3 billion, placed 2nd this year, and 5 of the top ten were tech companies, a trend that should only become more clear in the years to come.

Rumors of a new apple device! What is it?!

Ok Apple so you bought us 2 new iPhones. That’s pretty cool. But that was, like, days ago. It’s getting kind of….borrrrring…

Oh, wait what’s that? Rumors of another new Apple device?  Oh, ok! You got us!

NEW DEVICE RUMORS! It’s a bit of a controversial one, actually. We know, Apple controversial? Never! Well, this one might cop some wrath form within the Apple community as well as outside of it and in those scary tech forums.

It’s a…. really big iPad.

Poor MaxiPad. It’ll kinda be like North West (Kanye’s kid), never even having a chance with the bullies.

Rumors about the larger iPad have actually been going on quietly for the past 6 months, but yesterday Chinese site United Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, and Aussie Sonny Dickson all released leaks and addressed rumors that a bigger iPad is in the works for Apple, and that Quanta Computer are the people who are manufacturing it.

The iPad would supposedly be Space Grey, and the size differs slightly between reports from 12 – 13 inches diagonally, but it would be similar in size to the MacBook Air, leaving some fans ( and critics) to ask, why not just make a touchscreen MacBook Air?

Well, just cos, is why. Also, a much better answer would be that we think that Tim Cook et al like the slimline portability of the iPad, but want to give a little bit extra working space for people, especially in industries such as graphic design, gaming, music etc.

Apple is expected to announce the 5th Gen iPad and a new iPad mini with retina display come October/November, but this bad boy is thought to be announced early next year. There are some who have stated that the larger iPad may not even come to fruition.

What do you guys think, bigger iPad, YAY or NAY?

Images courtesy of  up-ship.com, unitedcats.com, Macrumors & Sonny Dickson.

Tim cook’s first tweet

Apple CEO Tim Cook has joined Twitter! Hooray!  Actually, he joined back in July but waited until the day of the release of the iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S to send out his first Tweet.

And wasn’t it a magnificent one!  “Visited Retail Stores in Palo Alto today. Seeing so many happy customers reminds us of why we do what we do.”

We wonder if there was perhaps a few more gold iPhone 5S available at the Palo Alto store with so many happy customers?

His twitter handle is @tim_cook and you can follow him here https://twitter.com/tim_cook

Image courtesy of Apple

Apple shares over $500! Time to invest?

Because of one man, the shares in Apple have gone up by more than 5%, almost reaching the $500 mark and making over 17 million dollars for Apple. Sweet.

First, it started with a simple tweet from stockbroker turned billionaire hedge fund manager and investor Carl Icahn. It read;

“Had a nice conversation with Tom Cook today. Discussed my opinion that a larger buyback should be done now. We plan to speak again shortly.”

Then came the second tweet;

“We currently have a large position in APPLE. We believe the company to be extremely undervalued. Spoke to Tim Cook today. More to come.”

Less than two hours later, Apple shares had closed up by nearly 5 percent at just under $490.

In the days leading up to the Icahn tweets the shares had already been rising due to the leaked news of the Apple iPhone 5S announcement on September 10th,  as well as the news that the Obama administration had overturned an import ban on some older iPhones and iPads, and that the International Trade Commission had ordered several Samsung smartphones be banned for infringing on Apple patents.

All positive things for Apple, which reflects in their share prices.

Icahn is investing in Apple because he believes it to be undervalued, yes, but also because he thinks that if Apple use some of their massive $150 billion cash stockpile to buyback stock, the value of the stock could skyrocket to around $700.

No news yet if this is something Apple will be doing, but with a slate full of new product releases scheduled for the end of this year through to 2014, the general consensus is that Apple shares will remain positive.

As of today, the stock prices have reached $507.15 after hitting a peak of 513.43 April 19th, the highest the shares have been since September 19th 2012, when it reached the peak of $702.10. Although the price has gone slightly down, the fact that they remain above the $500 mark is a good sign.

So, time to invest?

Images courtesy of Appleinsider.

The iWatch

Good news for those of us waiting for a brand spanking ( ooh) new Apple product!

Yesterday, Apple’s application to trademark the term ‘iWatch’ in Japan was made public.

iWatch is, of course, the rumored name for the first wearable Apple device and the potentially out of this world Smart Watch. The trademark was applied for on June 3rd this year and is actually the second time that Apple has applied to trademark the name, the first being in Russia in February.

Momentum (and the rumor mill) for this product is building rapidly. Yesterday’s reports come after Bloomberg posted in March this year that according to their sources there were 100 engineers working on the planned smart watch, and after Tim Cook said in May that the wearable device market is one just waiting for innovation. And who better to do it than Apple?

Unlike other Smart Watches currently available (see the wonderful Pebble Watch), the much speculated iWatch will most likely be a stand alone device, with biometric potential that could turn the way we use technology on it’s head.
Suckily, experts agree that we probably won’t see the iWatch until the 3rd or 4th quarter of 2014.

C’mon Tim Cook! We want wearable device innovation, and we want it now! Or soon! Please?

Image courtesy of  Forbes.

WWDC lowdown!

Alright guys, so yesterday was THE BIG DAY!

The four day annual world wide developers conference for Apple began yesterday morning, kicking off at the Mascone Centre in San Francisco at 10am.

As per usual, WWDC began with a perfectly orchestrated keynote speech given by Tim Cook, featuring a few other key Apple guys AND more importantly, featuring some new Apple software and hardware announcements and previews.

DOUBLE RAINBOW EXCITING!

For the first time, the keynote was broadcast live from the Apple website and on Apple TV.

The two hour address was, as expected, super stylishly presented, with multiple media presentations, some jokes, and a few fantastic and even surprising new Apple products and updates.

The top things you should know about that were announced today are:

– The new Mac Pro. Stellar, revolutionary and round.

– iOS 7, the biggest change to iOS since the iPhone came out.

– OS  X Mavericks – the new operating system named after a California beach break.

– New Macbook airs with super extended battery life.

– iTunes Radio – the much talked about radio product that actually sounds better than we expected!

Super double rainbow exciting, right!?

We’ll have even more from WWDC coming up this week!!

The New Mac Pro

We got a sneak peak today, with a big drum roll please announcement of the new Mac Pro.  Apple’s line of Mac Pro’s are generally used a lot by graphic designers, software developers, video editors, people who need a lot of power.

The new Mac Pro is innovative in it’s size and cylindrical design, and sounds just basically miraculous and perfect. And we’re not ones to go over the top. Much.

There are some people who say it looks like a giant pill. One of those ones that doesn’t go into your mouth…we disagree. We think it looks svelte and sexy, so there.

The Mac Pro is one of Apple’s products that haven’t had the privilege of being updated in quite a few years. And now it got the privilege, it got it all over the place. The old Desktop Mac looked like this:

This new one is 1/8^th of the size! But it’s also faster, better, stronger and, well, not harder. Just the first three then. The casing can be rotated using a handle at the top and the computer will use motion sensors to light up the input panel so you can see all the ports.

It’s assembled completely in the United states ( Go Patriotism!), we have no idea how much it costs yet ( but probably expensive) and it will be released later this year sometime vague.

So, here’s what’s so impressive about it apart from the new design and size. It’s 2.5 times faster than the previous model, and according to Apple, will provide twice the performance.

According to Apple, the specs are as follows;

The next generation Mac Pro is architected around an ingenious unified thermal core that allows the desktop to efficiently share its entire thermal capacity across all the processors. The result is a pro desktop with breakthrough performance packed into a design that is one-eighth the volume of the current Mac Pro. Next generation Intel Xeon E5 processors with up to 12 core configurations deliver double the floating point performance. With two AMD FirePro workstation-class GPUs, the all-new Mac Pro is up to 2.5 times faster than the current Mac Pro and delivers up to an amazing 7 teraflops of compute power. The new Mac Pro also features PCIe-based flash storage that is up to 10 times faster than conventional desktop hard drives and includes the latest four-channel ECC DDR3 memory running at 1866 MHz to deliver up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth. With all that power, the new Mac Pro lets you seamlessly edit full-resolution 4K video while simultaneously rendering effects in the background.

So, it’s super fast and powerful and stuff. And it looks really cool. We want one. For Christmas. Please. We’ll use it to make the best penguin meets llama animation that anyone has ever seen, promise.

Images courtesy of; Engadget, Inrumor, Gizmodo & Macrumors.

OS X Mavericks

We would have suggested OS Liger ( rawr!), but Apple went ahead without consulting us and decided with this system update to start over with the naming process, leaving the big cat names behind.

Coinciding with their new ‘Designed by Apple in California’ ads, and the announcement that the Mac Pro will be built solely in America, Apple have started a new naming scheme for their operating system based on locations in California.

To start it off, announced yesterday at WWDC, we have OS X Mavericks. Mavericks is a surfing location particularly well known for its dangerous big wave riding in Northern California, just north of the town of Half Moon Bay.

Now, it’s also the new Apple operating system. Is it as cool as beach with big wave breaks? Well, kinda? We may have trapped ourselves in that comparison- it might not be that cool, but it is very cool.

Here’s the double rainbow of coolness for you guys;

New Finder Tabs.

Just like in your Internet browser, you can now have independently controlled tabs in your finder windows. You can merge these finder windows and take the finder full screen.

Tagging.

Filed under ‘I wouldn’t have though of this, but now that you did, it looks really freakin useful’ is tagging.

With Mavericks you will be able to ‘tag’ documents and media – save it, tag it as sports, home, to do, etc. and it catalogues these under their tags in the side bar of the finder.

You can tag documents with multiple tags, create new tags on the go, and the best part? Searching using tags. For instance, searching for ‘iphone stuff’ and ‘the best’ will naturally take you directly to your saved iPhone Antidote Wallpaper.

Multiple Displays

Users will now be able to access the menu bar and dock separately on each screen with multiple display support. You will also be able to load separate and independent applications on each screen, and drag them from screen to screen.

Apple TV is not forgotten here either, as it can now be a fully powered OS X display, with access to menu bar dock and independent applications also.

Extended Battery Life

There is a heap of new processing elements included in Mavericks to extend your battery life and reduce CPU utilization by up to 72%.

We particularly like a new feature called app nap, which figures out what applications and web pages are in use, and which are not. The system will then simply stop giving power to the web pages and applications that you’re not currently looking at.

Compressed memory pretty much does what it says, compressing inactive memory to provide spare memory to running applications when needed.

Timer Coalescing groups low end operations together , creating tiny periods of time when your computer can enter into an idle, low power state, which in turn saves your battery.

Safari

Safari is updated with Mavericks, starting with an all-new homepage with top sites and a sidebar with your bookmarks and access to your reading list. This will also include shared links from people you follow on Linkdin and Twitter.

Safari uses less energy in this update and includes accelerated, smoother scrolling and one click bookmarking.  In your readin list, you will be able to scroll continuously through all of your articles, one after the other.

iCloud keychain

Cross device safe keeping of all your passwords and credit card information starts with iCloud Keychain.

This new feature will store all your passwords, across all your devices, so you don’t have to think about them ever again. Sounds pretty good right? The keychain will even suggest new passwords for you, and then will go ahead and put it in the cloud, encrypted.

With your credit card information, when shopping online, the keychain will offer the last four digits of all the cards you have stored, and you can pick one when paying and be done with it.

Although this sends little tiny shivers of scariness up the security part of our spine, it also sounds super useful and convenient.

Notifications

You can now get all your notifications, from all your devices, on your computer.

What’s also pretty great about this is you will have a number of new options for action within the notification when it appears on your screen.

You can respond directly to most notifications, (by replying to email, declining Skype calls etc.), within the notification banner when it appears.

Once you have actioned a notification, you won’t see it again on any of your other devices, and they will all be updated with your response to the original notification.

When the computer is awoken from sleep, all the alerts you may have gotten when it (and you!) were asleep will be listed.

Calendar

The calendar app has been updated in a really cool way- where now if you have appointments scheduled, the app will give you a ton of information you might need for them.

The calendar will now provide you with weather in the spot where your appointment is scheduled, as well as suggestions for restaurants etc if you require them.

We particularly like that the calendar will work out and tell you the travel time to and from your appointment, and will even add it to the calendar so you cant double book the time when you’re supposed to be on your way!

You will also get notifications of when you need to leave on your phone and/or computer.

Maps

Maps hits the computer with Mavericks! You can now access street maps, 3D flyover data and info cards. You can also push turn-by-turn directions to our iOS device straight from your computer.

iBooks

iBooks will be on your computer by Fall with this system update. Now you can access all the books in the iTunes store as well as your stored books and bookmarks, and read them full screen on your computer screen.

But what is really cool is for the educators and the learners amongst us.

iBooks for Mavericks will come with interactive textbooks, which feature videos and other media embedded within the normal text. You will also have the ability to highlight and make notes, and learn using study cards made from the material.

Sounds pretty awesome huh?

OS X Mavericks will be available to the public in the Fall.

All images courtesy of Apple.