Apple Announces iPad Air 2, iPad mini 3, OS X Yosemite and More
Many outlets are reporting on Apple's iPad event today. Highlights include:
- Apple pay will launch Monday.
- WatchKit -- a way for developers to make apps for the Apple Watch will launch next month.
- iOS 8.1
- Messages, iTunes, and iWork updated and many more new features in OS X Yosemite.
- You can send and receive calls on your Mac if you have an iPhone with iOS 8 that's signed into the same FaceTime account.
- iPad Air 2: New camera, 10 hour battery life, 12x faster than the original iPad.
- iPad mini 3.
- iMac with Retina display.
- And a Mac mini update: Faster processors, Intel Iris graphics, and two Thunderbolt 2 ports.
I've been thinking about giving the OSX another try... I've been messing around with it at work.
The mini wouldn't be a bad way to go... it's not that expensive and I can still use my 27" monitor.
The iMac Retina... no. Besides not wanting to spend that much now, I'd hold off on a first generation rig like that.
Just because you don't understand what it's good for, doesn't mean it is important to others.
Considering that my Black MacBook (2006) lasted eight years, it was a good investment.
For those of you who are a fan of customizing the colors of message bubbles in Messages.app and don't like that Apple removed this ability as part of the iOSification of Yosemite, there's an app for that: https://github.com/kethinov/Bu...
I made this during the developer previews because I don't like the default puke green for most of my IM conversations. Hope this helps some people. Source code also available.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Yosemite Sam was the hootinst, tootinist, shootinist bobtail wildcat in the west!
About time desktops caught up with better screen resolutions after the whole 1080p marketing hype ruined everything.
I just hope it doesn't have the stupid ghosting problem.
This has been my experience, too. They make good quality hardware, and you will save in the long run, even if they make an insane profit from you in the short term. I'm sure someone on here can point out similar quality PC hardware, but I find other manufacturers to be very uneven. For instance, I got my mother-in-law a high-end HP in 2004 and she is still using it. But some HP machines are absolute garbage.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Considering that my Black MacBook (2006) lasted eight years, it was a good investment.
My XPS from 2006 is still with me, but the equivalent Macbook would have been far more expensive. What is your point?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Except that it doesn't
I spent $1,200 on my Black MacBook and got eight years of use ($150 per year). Prior to that, I spent $1,200 on a Dell laptop that gave me three years of use ($400 per year). Do the math.
Your two data points have me convinced.
XPS is/was a high end Dell laptop specification and branding touted as being the ultimate in desktop replacements (also marketed with the Alienware badge). The series started in the Dimension line of desktop machines when the Pentium first hit the market (source: have owned a Dimension XPS P60 desktop (since scrapped) and an Inspiron XPS 8200 laptop (which I still use because it's got 2GB RAM and a 1600x1200 screen)). The trademark for the laptop line is a lit "XPS" logo running down the left and right sides of the lid in red or blue, on rare occasions in green (mine has the standard lid because I managed to break the XPS badge). On the show Stargate Atlantis, XPS laptops were rebadged with the fictional logo depicting them as "SGI" laptops (SGI have NEVER made a laptop) but for anyone who's ever owned an XPS, Inspiron or Latitude the chassis were pretty recognisable. The biggest selling point for me with the Latitude/Inspiron PPx chassis wasn't the XPS badge on the high end machines but the fact that they're pretty much completely modular. You can switch batteries, optical drives, hard drive caddies, internal cards, graphics processors etc, among almost the entire line from the lowliest PII/233 up to the P4/2.0 - knowing this because I've been doing it since 2002.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Still no new macbook pro...
Thats it, I'm out. I'll just get a Nexus 9 and a keyboard and move to the cloud.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
On two different occasions I sold 5 year old MacBook on Craigslist for $500. I don't know what the expectation would be for an hp or whatever, but I was satisfied with this.
your understanding is incorrect. Apple has explicitly stated that the transaction is 100% between The Merchant, Your Bank, and you. Apple does not receive a copy of the transaction, they don't know who you've shopped with, and that they don't know that any specific transaction has happened.
The only thing Apple does is act as the facilitator to getting the device-specific account number in to the phone. So Apple could know which credit cards you have setup in your device and that's about it.
Are you sure about that? The current generation of iMacs can act as a standard monitor when connected to another machine. Up until a few weeks ago, I was using one that had a failed hard drive in it as a monitor for a desktop PC via a simple mini Displayport to Displayport cable connected to the PC's graphics card.
There is a good possibility that the new iMacs can also be used as a monitor as well.
Yosemite Sam was an angry Hessian.
I'm not entirely convinced that Touch ID is worth the extra $100. Hopefully the IHS teardown will indicate if there is anything else of value between the two.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
How doesn't it? My understanding is that instead of paying by your credit card, your Apple Account gets hit for the charge and Apple pays the vendor and then Apple charges your linked credit card, just like for existing in-app purchases. Since it's your Apple Account doing the purchasing, Apple is in the loop and sees every transaction that you make.
Except that's not how it works. There's a special chip in the new iPhone that talks to an NFC payment terminal and presents itself as a virtual credit card. The terminal sends that information for example to Visa. Visa works together with Apple and figures out that this virtual credit card actually matches your real debit or credit card, and everything is done as if you had used your normal credit or debit card. The chip is locked away from the OS, even Apple couldn't read what's inside it.
The advantages are a minor bit of convenience (you pay by putting a finger on the fingerprint reader on the iPhone), but a big advantage in security because nobody knows your credit card number and therefore cannot lose it to hackers, and crooked employees cannot read it either.
Is Apple so embarrassed by their lack of meaningful CPU performance improvements that they feel the need to compare the latest iPad to a 5 year old obsolete brick to impress me? I think that they think I'm stupid.
Lack of meaningful improvements? 40% faster than the iPad Air. Which was a lot faster than the iPad 4. And trying out how fast I could make that run, i got 7 GFlops out of an iPad 4 with plain C code.
If you think that Apple showing the best possible numbers is a sign of "embarrassment" then you absolutely need your head examined.
> There is a good possibility that the new iMacs can also be used as a monitor as well.
Likely not. The old Mac had a totally typical display. But now it's 5k, and...
Thunderbolt at 10 Gbit/s wasn't fast enough to drive 4K, which needs about 16 Gbit/s. Thunderbolt 2 at 20 Gbit/s can drive 4K, but not 5120Ã--2880, which needs 28 Gbit/s.1 The only promising standard on the horizon is DisplayPort 1.3 at 32 Gbit/s, but that spec is being finalized later in 2014, which means we're probably still years away from anything supporting it.
Marco Arment, January 2014
Wikipedia now says "DisplayPort version 1.3 was released on September 15, 2014." So yeah, no way is this iMac is supporting input based on a month-old spec.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Between going to hourly contracting and having kids, I value my time more than ever. That afternoon is worth several hundred dollars IMHO. I was very different as a young man.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.