So, we get that you don’t usually look forward to Mondays on a Friday afternoon, but guess what makes this coming Monday different?
That’s right, an Apple Special Media Event, that’s what. Time to SPRING FORWARD!
Obviously it’s not that exciting. We’d be really excited if they were, like, giving away free Apple Watches at the event. Or even releasing them to be sold for, let’s face it, quite a bit of monies.
BUT
They will be talking a bit more about it. So that’s pretty cool, right? .. right? RIGHT! Well, cool enough. The Apple Watch product release is building in anticipation, and this is one of the ways that Apple amp that anticipation up a notch, those clever guys. And you know what else they do? Release information as rumors right beforehand!
So here’s what we’re looking at rumor-wise: The Apple Watch will take about 2 hours to charge, which will give you all day battery life, with about 5 hours of heavy use in that day.
The Apple Watch will only deliver notifications whilst the watch is sitting pretty on your wrist, and will stop with the notifications when it’s not on your skin or below 10% battery.
Pressing and holding the Digital Crown will summon Siri, which (who?) is apparently working really well on the watch.
If your battery is low but you still really need to know the time, the watch will have a Power Reserve Mode, which can be accessed at any time and will shut down all functionality except for the watch. The time-telling Watch. The clock bit. You know what we mean.
Apparently the Apple Watch will have 8GB of storage available, with other larger options available, such as in the iPhone/iPad.
The keynote begins on Monday at 10 AM P.S.T. and will be live-streamed on the Apple Website and on a designated Apple TV channel. We will be keep you up to date on all the Apple Watch details and everything else that is revealed on Monday!
So the Apple Special media event happened! But! What actually happened?
Tim Cook began the event with a little spiel about how great Apple has been doing this year with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus being the fastest selling iPhones in history, rolled out now in 32 Countries, and rolling out in China today.
He went on to talk about how Apple Pay is cool, with 500 more banks signed up to partner with Apple on the payment system so far, and more retailers coming on board too. Apple pay is launching this Monday October 20th!
The CEO then spoke about how proud they are of the Apple Watch, how it’s super rad and has been on the cover of Vogue China! Watchkit (for the benefit of potential Apple Watch developers) will be available next month. Christmas time is App making time, yo!
Mr Craig Federighi came on stage then to talk about software, with iOS 8 get the first spotlight. He explained that 48% of Apple customers are using the new iOS so far and 94% are using either iOS 8 or iOS 7. They have apparently been listening to customer feedback to improve the user experience. The example he makes for this is that they’re bringing back the camera roll.
iOS 8.1 will be available free on Monday!
Now on to OS X Yosemite. It’s cool. It has cool features. AND it will be available free from the Mac App Store today! Check out our rundown of the features of OS X Yosemite here.
ALSO: New iWork for iOS and Mac is available today, for free.
Tim Cook came back on stage to talk about iPads. They’re cool, there’s 675,000 apps in the app store for them, a 100% customer satisfaction rating for the Retina Mini, they’re the best iPads ever, aaaaand he introduces a thinner iPad Air, now available in Gold. According to Phil Schiller, it’s pretty thin: ‘6.1mm thick, 18% thinner. Thinnest iPad ever. World’s thinnest tablet.’
And: two iPad Air’s on top of one another are still thinner than an original iPad. Technology, you be silly.
It has a sharper image, an A8X chip, 2nd-gen 64-bit architecture, 3 billion transistors, 40% faster CPU, and 2.5x faster GPU.
New anti-reflective coating reduces reflection by 56% and it has a 10 hour battery life. Features include an 8MP iSight camera with 2.4 aperture, 1080p HD video, Apple-designed image signal processor and a M8 coprocessor.
It will be capable of taking panoramas up to 43 megapixels, burst mode photos , Slo-mo video at 720p FPS and Time-lapse photos.
It will come equipped with faster Wi-Fi, 80211ac with MIMO. There’s a new FaceTime camera on the front with larger 2.2 aperture, 81% more light, improved face detection, burst selfies, Single-shot HDR photos and HDR videos.
AND it will come with Touch ID fingerprint scanner and be able to support Apple Pay.
We will now have Pixelmator for iPad Air as well as a new video editing app called Replay.
iPad Air 2 will retail for $499/599/699 for 16GB/64GB/128GB in Wi-Fi versions. Silver, Space Gray, Gold.
Cellular versions will be offered at $629/729/829.
The iPad Mini is getting a mini update too! This third generation comes in Silver, Space Grey & Gold and comes equipped with the Touch ID. Selling for $399/499/599 for 16GB/64GB/128GB Cellular for $529/629/729.
You can pre-order an iPad Air 2 or an iPad Mini 3 tomorrow, and shipping starts next week.
NOW. 30th birthday of the Mac y’all! Macs are cool.
Tim Cook introduced a new iMac with 5K retina display. How many K retina display? 5. 5K.
5120×2880, 67% more pixels than 4K. It’s got a 27″ display, with 14.7 million pixels which makes it the world’s highest resolution display. Retina 5K display.
The new iMac comes equipped with Thunderbolt 2, Fusion Drive, 3.5GHz quad-core i5, upgradable to 4.0GHz quad-core i7. AMD Radeon $9 M290x, upgradable to M295X.
New iMac with Retina 5K starts at $2499. Shipping today!
And finally, the Mac Mini, such a cute little fella, he gets an update too with a 4th-gen Intel Core processor, Intel Iris and HD Graphics, PCIe-based flash storage, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and 2 Thunderbolt 2 ports.
New mini starts at $499. Starts shipping today!
And that’s it folks! Tim Cook signed off with this:
“Designed to be incredible products individually. Also designed to work together seamlessly. Because we create both the hardware and the software, we can deliver something that no one else can do. A simple, intuitive and yes, magical experience for our customers.This is our vision of personal technology. And we are just getting started.”
What do you think? Pretty solid updates, but nothing super exciting? 5k is pretty exciting, and everything seems to be getting more cohesive as a group of products that can work beautifully together. We’ll need to get our hands on some iPad Air 2’s to see just how close they come to stacking up to an original, because 6.1mm thick is not thick and stacking iPads sounds like fun. We’re pretty excited to try out Apple Pay on Monday, and get OS X Yosemite too.
Not sure it was “Apple special Media event’ worthy, but there’s a pretty solid little set of updates for us.
Are we excited for the iPhone 6? Huh? Huh? Duh! Rumors about the upcoming 9th generation iPhone to be released by Apple are running rampant already, and we couldn’t be more excited.
Here’s a rundown of everything we know about the iPhone 6. And what we think we know. And what we think other people might be potentially correct on what they think. And some things that probably aren’t true but some people think they are. Etc. All photos in this article are not real and are representations of what people believe the iPhone will be, or photos or purported prototypes.
Most people agree that one if not two new iPhones will be released this year, and following Apple’s recent naming system one of them more than likely will be called the iPhone 6. The main hardware difference that most people are solid on is that the new iPhone(s) will be thinner and slimmer, just like your New years resolutions!
Tim Cook has revealed that 2014 is a big year for Apple product releases, and people are optimistically expecting the release of the iWatch, possibly the iTV, and the next iPhone update(s!). These possible new product releases alongside other factors such as the possibility of dual iPhone releases will obviously affect when and exactly how fancily updated the new iPhone(s) will be.
Some people are speculating that the iPhone 6 will be, in fact, the iWatch and the current mobile iPhone will only get a new iOS update.
The more trusted and reliable thought is that the iPhone 6 will be its own separate hardware update, and because of the rumored new product releases set most likely for the Fall, it will be released early this year; think sometime in the 2nd quarter, June, or early Summer. This is certainly a possibility – Apple released the first four generations of iPhone in June, before moving to an September/October launch schedule.
The other line of thought is that the iPhone 6 will follow the more recent iPhone release schedule and released in the Fall, leaving the Apple team plenty of time to make sure everything is perfect.
A lot of analysts believe that Apple will continue with their new 2 phone release model, this time featuring 2 differing size options. The sizing rumors range from 4.5 inches waaaay up to 5.7 inches. There is additional speculation that Apple will minimize or completely eradicate the bezels (the part bordering the screen) on the iPhone 6.
Arguments against the bigger screen sizes are backed up by Apple’s hard stance on one handed mobile use and their reluctance to provide a bigger screen at a loss to function just to compete with other smartphone companies. Tim Cook said this in April of last year:
“My view continues to be that the iPhone 5 has the absolute best display in the industry. We always strive to create the very best display for our customers. Our competitors have made some significant trade-offs in many of these areas in order to ship a larger display, we would not shop a larger-display iPhone while these trade-offs exist.”
Two new hardware components that are rumored to be allowing the iPhone to be thinner, lighter and more durable are Sapphire Glass and Liquidmetal.
Apple has exclusive rights to Liquidmetal, but have done for quite a long time. However, in November, five new Apple patents relating to Liquidmetal were published. Liquidmetal is a very strong and very durable material, which, if used, could make the iPhone 6 stronger and thinner as less material would be needed in comparison to Aluminum. According to some reports, the iPhone 6 could be just 6mm thick compared with the iPhone 5s’s 7.6mm. Below is a purported prototype from Sonnydickson.com
Sapphire glass is the material currently used on the iPhone 5S’s Touch ID Home Button the cover of the iPhone’s rear-facing camera. It’s more than twice as durable than Corning’s Gorilla Glass, and is “extremley scratch resistant. Apple has apparently spent $578 million to enter into a multi-year agreement with manufacturers GT Advanced Technologies to provide sapphire materials from a huge new Apple facility in Arizona.
The iPhone 5s incorporates a 64-bit A7 28-nanometer chip manufactured by Samsung. Apple’s iPhone 6 will reportedly incorporate a 20-nanometer A8 chip from TSMC, which will be both smaller and more energy efficient.
Samsung will continue to be involved in the production, alleviating some of TSMC’s manufacturing workload. The A7 chip marked a 31 percent improvement over the A6 in the iPhone 5, and it is likely that the leap to a 20-nm A8 chip will offer similar increases in performance.
Apple’s next-generation iPhone should, and may support the 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard that first began appearing in Apple products in 2013. 802.11ac, or “Gigabit” Wi-Fi offers speeds up to three times as fast as existing 802.11n wireless networks, reaching speeds over 1 Gigabit per second. It’s though that Apple have been waiting for external technology to catch up before they update their iDevices with the Wi-Fi Technology.
Wireless Charging is something that has been tossed around in the great big salad bowl of rumors, but we don’t think it’s coming- yet. Curved Glass is also a feature many are looking forward to- and would be be beautiful on the iPhone 6, but we wouldn’t be betting the house on it.
According to a reports from The China Post, Apple will not be upgrading the resolution of the rear camera for the iPhone 6 later this year. Citing analysts from Nomura Securities, they indicate that while the iPhone 6 will have some camera improvements like enhanced optical image stabilization, it will continue to use an 8-megapixel sensor rather than a higher-resolution sensor in the 12-16 megapixel range.
Some people think that the Touch ID introduced on the iPhone 5S last year will be removed from future iPhone updates – we think this is pretty categorically not going to happen. What we think will happen is that Apple will, this year, introduce new payment methods using the touch ID.
Apple recently purchased PrimeSense, a firm specializing in the development of three-dimensional sensors for home appliances and mobile devices. This technology is similar to the gesture-detecting sensors of the Xbox’s Kinect controller. This purchase could certainly hint at a move to include gesture control on the next generation of Apple devices, although unlike Samsung, they would want to have it perfected before they release anything with gesture control.
The iPhone 6(s) will run on iOS 8. Yay!
So that’s it – so far. Everyday there are new rumors and people certain they know exactly what the iPhone 6 will be like. In actual fact, there’s very, very few people in the world who knows exactly what it will be like. This guy is one of them.
So if you see him, can you guys ask him for us? Thanks.
Apple, Cool Features, New Releases, Uncategorized | iPhone-Antidote | 
March 6, 2015 2:08 pm | 
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