Apple Announces iPad Air 2, iPad mini 3, OS X Yosemite and More 355
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.
Maybe a Mini (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Aside from the Mac Pro, the Mini was the only Mac that you could easily change the hard drive and memory yourself. I just had a quick look at the specs of the new mini and I can't tell if you can still do that.
I'm worried that the mini may go the way of the iMacs and head into being a totally sealed/pre-configured device and have no user changeable parts.
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Aside from the Mac Pro, the Mini was the only Mac that you could easily change the hard drive and memory yourself. I just had a quick look at the specs of the new mini and I can't tell if you can still do that.
Memory, yes. But changing the hard disk was not a task for ordinary mortals. (Been there, done that.)
What concerns me is the lack of any mention of dual-drive configurations. If I can't mirror the boot drive, then it just became much less useful as a small server.
Re:Maybe a Mini (Score:4, Interesting)
6 screws & a paint scraper. Follow the step by step. Isn't very hard.
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Didn't even need the paint scraper if you had a kitchen spatula :-)
I even did the dual deck CD to SSD upgrade with the special tray on my '09 mini.
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The newer unibody models don't need a paint scraper/spatula. The chassis slides out. There is a "special" apple tool for service providers to slide it out, but it can be done by mere mortals. And there is a second hard drive kit available.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/I... [ifixit.com]
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It has Thunderbolt. Attach as many drives as you like.
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What, was it made of chocolate or something?
I've done the fan in my 2007 Macbook a couple of times (what can I say? It gets a lot of field - as in "standing in the middle of a ..." - use). It's not much harder than:
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The mini started out that way, though now the unibody ones have a huge rubber root that can be twisted to remove it and exposing the RAM and innards. RAM swap is easy. hard drive swap requires a bit of work but the /. crowd should have the requisite skill to do it (
About the most "proprietary" part is the PCIe SSD, but it has a SATA port too for regular spinny ha
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I'm worried that the mini may go the way of the iMacs and head into being a totally sealed/pre-configured device and have no user changeable parts.
What? The iMac is anything but sealed.
True, you aren't going to find a dozen choices for a replacement mobo on the shelf at Fry's (anymore than you would for, say a Dell or HP AllInOne); but there are at least some commodity, replaceable parts in an iMac.
And as far as accessibility for repair being a bit tedious, again, I refer to other AIO designs. I would hazard a guess that changing a bad Power Supply in ANY AIO would be a painful experience. But it can be done.
So, "no user changeable parts" is sim
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The mini wouldn't be a bad way to go... it's not that expensive and I can still use my 27" monitor.
Was thinking the same. The good specs and lower price make the new Mini quite attractive desktop.
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I look forward being able to buy a used new mini for running linux :p
Why fear the iMac? (Score:3)
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Because this is their first REALLY BIG Retina display? Apple's first attempt at something unique often has issues, hence the mantra of "avoid any Revision A Apple product."
Recall the various screen issues and defects they had 1-2 years ago with smaller Retina displays? Recall a bunch of issues they had with the 27" iMac (non-Retina) redesigned screen? Things looking blotchy, bad glue jobs, etc. Apple had done retina a bunch before those issues, and 27" Macs a lot too. But a large enough redesign and al
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The iOSification continues! (Score:5, Interesting)
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... [github.com]
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.
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You should make friends with more mac/iOS users so those bubbles start turning from green to blue
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What if I want them to be purple! ;)
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A q: do you change colors to add more info, eg label friends green and frenemies red, or for aesthetic purposes? Either is valid.
iMac looks cool (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Subdivision (Score:2)
I don't know if I'm the only one and to be honest the way I use OS X doesn't make this such a big deal, but at 5K unless they do automatic font scaling. I'm going to need to be able to divide my monitor up in to virtual monitors. That way I can resize zones where if I click the magnify/maximize button it doesn't waste the entire real estate of my monitor. I really enjoy the snap feature in windows 7 enough I use a program called sizeup on OSX to emulate it, but once I start buying 27 and 30" monitors I rea
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All they've done is double the PPI of the existing displays exactly. This is going to be like the transition from the iPhone 3GS to the iPhone 4 - everything will have the same physical dimensions, but applications that support retina displays will look sharper.
I'm sure if you want to use your screen as something that's quadruple the logical size you'll be able to, but this is intended to be a visual quality upgrade, not a real estate upgrade. What you'll get by default will simply be a clearer version
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This is a great idea. I use a similar app to snap a window to the left/right size. A cool feature would e to snap the window to screen quadrants.
No new macbook pro (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Touch ID for $100?? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Touch ID for $100?? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you look at this comparison chart [apple.com] you can see that the iPad Mini 3 is exactly the same as the existing iPad Mini with Retina Display (now called iPad Mini 2) with the exception of two things:
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.
If there was anything else worthwhile, wouldn't apple be boasting about it rather than us having to wait for a teardown?
I am convinced that Touch ID isn't worth $100 to me...
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If you look at this comparison chart [apple.com] you can see that the iPad Mini 3 is exactly the same as the existing iPad Mini with Retina Display (now called iPad Mini 2) with the exception of two things:
Does the Touch ID imply that it also has an NFC chip for ApplePay? (Apparently it does, and the iPad Mini 2 doesn't.) That's an odd thing to leave off the comparison chart.
What's with the performance comparisons? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:What's with the performance comparisons? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Thunderbolt (Score:4, Insightful)
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niche uses like most all video cameras.
Just because you don't understand the actual use, doesn't mean it's not useful to transfer data at 20Gbps.
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I can understand why some would like it but it could definitely be improved upon.
Hey Thunderbolt, the 80's called, they want their daisy-chain back.
Hey PC user, the 90's called, they want their boring large beige boxes back.
Re:Confucius say: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Confucius say: (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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"Doubled" doesn't mean much, when it's one afternoon every three years.
Re:Confucius say: (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Confucius say: (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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What is an XPS?
What is yoir point?
Re:Confucius say: (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:Confucius say: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Confucius say: (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
Yeah and I have had a Toshiba laptop last 5 years at 400. Thats 80 bucks a year. Both of our accounts a merely anecdotal though.
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Did the math, my Dell laptop has outlived any Apple device I own. Plus I can still get replacement batteries and upgrade it with RAM and SSD at will without paying extortionate prices for the privilege of doing so.
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Plus I can still get replacement batteries and upgrade it with RAM and SSD at will without paying extortionate prices for the privilege of doing so.
For my 2006 Black MacBook, I maxed out the RAM to 2GB by using cheaper memory modules from Other World Computing (OWC). I popped in a OWC 120GB SSD for less than a $100 last year. Although Apple still charges $129 for replacement batteries, I can get them for $75 through OWC or $35 on eBay from China.
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That is similar to what is going on with PC laptops. Basically MacBook Air is an ultrabook in PC nomenclature. PC ultrabooks also tend to be less upgradeable and serviceable than bigger laptops. For example compare Lenovo ThinkPad 430 and 430u (u - as in ultrabook). The slim design just forces use of smalled perhaps nonremovable parts. IMO all PC laptops that match MacBook Air size are also as unupgradeble and unserviceable as MacBook Air - it is not a marketing choice by Apple but the size imples it. Also
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and my XPS fell apart (hinges failed and the body start cracking) while I'm still running my 2008 MacBook.
Who cares?
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My XPS had the keys on the keyboard fall off, suspiciously close to the time the warranty ran out.
As always, YMMV.
To each their own... (Score:3)
When the netbook craze began (2008), I bought a 9" Acer Aspire One, for roughly US$400. That was my main laptop (and, during vacations, my main computer. Yes, I work at a university, so six weeks of vacations every year).
One year ago, I decided it was time to renew. I bought its sucessor, the 10" Acer Aspire One. For US$350. And it's my main computer outside of my office. I am really happy with it.
I have just bumped up its memory (2GB6GB). Besides that, I'm more than satisfied with what I got. I have recomm
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i have one too and it still kind of works. not any useful but works
to bad today's mac's are cheaper than comparable windows laptops
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I'm glad it worked for you. But depending on where you're going with that statement, you might be committing the Texas sharpshooter's fallacy [wikipedia.org].
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Re:Confucius say: (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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. This is known as a Return of Investment (ROI).
The current value of my Black MacBook with a busted CPU fan, a 32-bit CPU and unable to run current software is a paperweight in my dead tree inbox.
Re:Yosemite (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yosemite (Score:4, Funny)
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"an ipad 12x faster than the "original ipad"
faster doing ... what?
At least the Google 9 was mildly interesting if for no other reason than its been a few years since the 10 came out. Apple seems to be on a 6 to 12m hamster wheel of speedbump upgrades. Yawn indeed.
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I have to assume you and the original poster didn't watch the keynote.
The main processor is 12x faster than the original iPad (which, I still own and use). Graphics are 140x faster with the new graphics processor.
However, what the original poster DIDN'T say is gain in 2x+ performance over last year's iPad Air and the drop in pricing for comparable versions. The demonstrated photo processing apps were seemless. They also didn't indicate whether the new devices have more RAM or not. 1 GB has worked well.
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However, what the original poster DIDN'T say is gain in 2x+ performance over last year's iPad Air and the drop in pricing for comparable versions.
The original poster (me) didn't say that because it wasn't in the summary. That its twice as fast as the previous ipad air actually WOULD have been reasonably interesting. 12x as fast as the original ipad is meaningless marketing propaganda fluff.
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faster doing ... what?
I have a theory why people buy tablets ... or better to say, why men buy tablets: Porn. I believe they buy them so they can watch porn while sitting on the toilet. That's why tablet sales are so high. The remaining alleged 'purposes' are just excuses. It's just a theory, of course.
Now regarding women who buy tablets, I have no idea why they would do that. Do they buy tablets? If so, that's perhaps because they are sleek and handy and you can watch Sushi advertisements on them. Or whatever.
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would that be a fair comparison, a quad 3.9 with a FSB running well over 1GHz against something with a 400MHZ FSB and only two cores?
(I don't know what the original iPad had in it nor do I know what the new one has, but I suppose you could extend my argument to cover that as well. Is it 12x faster for having twice the core running at three to four times the core speed, or is there some strange benchmark going on here that takes advantage of some extended instruction that the older chip doesn't have? It can
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The point is that its 12x faster than an ipad 1. That's several generations ago, and pretty much obsolete.
When a new Porsche 911 comes out, the interesting question for buyers is how it compares to last years 911, not the original one from 1963.
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Chip and Pin uses physical contact of the card to the payment terminal. The chip is very hard to duplicate so it essentially eliminates card cloning. The PIN provides a second factor to authenticate a trusted customer at the point of sale.
Apple Pay is a variant of NFC (near field communication) much like Google Wallet with PayPass. This is wireless (contactless).
The specifications for hardware (Level 1) and software (Level 2) for both contact and cont
Re: Apple Pay (Score:3, Informative)
Except that it doesn't
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There's the tokenization too. Instead of using your card number, you get a one-time use number for that transaction from your bank to process that transaction.
Re: Apple Pay (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: Apple Pay (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Do you have a cite for this? I'm pretty familiar with how Google Wallet (with and without a hardware Secure Element) works, and I *know* that CC info is presented to the POS in order to make the transaction.
Any of the hundreds of articles about how Apple Pay works. Here's one [macrumors.com] that explains that the device gives the credit card terminal a 16-digit randomized token and a unique one-time-use CCV. Payment processors use the pair to identify the credit account to bill.
In short, your actual credit card numbers never leave your device. Google for "apple pay token" if you'd like to dive into further detail.
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Source for this? I haven't read anything about apple's access to information, and would be very interested if they cut themselves out of the loop by design.
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They absolutely did, and they talked about it specifically when Apple Pay was announced during the iPhone 6 keynote.
The design of the system is that your credit card number is hashed together with the unique device ID of your phone to create a signing key (the card number itself is then never stored anywhere). You then activate apple pay with your bank so they have a way to verify your purchases. When you then use your device to buy something a transaction-specific token is generated from your signing key t
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I suggest you read up on the technology. You could take a look at Swipe as I think it's probably the closest pre-Apple Pay implementation to what Apple Pay is (Swipe, IS an Apple Pay provider, however). Banks are jumping onboard now that the technology appears secure. Apple claims another 500 banks have joined since last month.
Your card details are stored within a secure chip on the iPad. When you make a purchase, the card info hits the CC provider and a token is returned for THAT transaction. That is
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The way I understand it is that this isn't "really" a x.1 version, it's "8.1" because it's the version that adds Apple Pay and support for the new iPads.
Basically iOS 8.0 was released missing features that the couldn't finish in time for launch, and 8.1 will be the originally intended 8.0 with all the features iOS 8 was supposed to have from the get-go.
Which, uh, really doesn't instill much confidence either, now that I think about it.
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Yeah, that's kind of my point. If you're releasing a major version a month or so before you launch new products, you'd hope you have the OS for those products squared away.
This sounds like they pushed out iOS 8, ran into problems and released iOS 8.0.1, and apparently 8.0.2, and then 8.0.3.
And now they're rolling out 8.1.
That is a lot of churn in a relatively short period of time. Which tells me I'm still going to wait a while, because I expect 8.1.1 or 8.2 to appear within a month or so.
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That kind of thing doesn't instill a lot of confidence.
Never mind that iOS 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3 were in testing [macrumors.com] after iOS 8 got released. So many new products, so many updates.
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well the release of ios 8.0.1 was a joke with the bugs, but 8.1 makes sense since the main reason for the release is to include apple pay (if it was just bug fixes would be 8.0.3)
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Also, my understanding is to call from your Mac, your phone must be on the same wifi. Am I wrong?
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Also, my understanding is to call from your Mac, your phone must be on the same wifi. Am I wrong?
Yes, they do need to be on the same wifi. See below.
Sometimes when your iPhone rings, it’s not where you are. Maybe it’s charging in another room. Or it’s buried in your backpack. But your Mac or iPad is sitting right there. Now you can make and receive phone calls on those devices as long as your iPhone running iOS 8 is on the same Wi-Fi network. Incoming calls show the caller’s name, number, and profile picture. Just click or swipe the notification to answer, ignore, or respond with a quick message. And making a phone call from your iPad or Mac is just as easy. Simply tap or click a phone number in Contacts, Calendar, or Safari. It all works with your existing iPhone number, so there’s nothing to set up.
[source] [apple.com]
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I'd expect it to work more like Google Voice, where instead of having a phone line for your cellphone that gets forwarded to your computer, you have a phone line for VoIP that gets forwarded to your cellphone, computer, and whatever else you want.
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In other words, Google Voice requires you to have a separate telephone number, that's not your mobile phone number. Depending on what services they want, people have to contact you on the two separate numbers. (Google Voice has limitation on SMS, international calling etc.)
Depending on which number they use, your ability to accept the call on a computer will either exist or not.
As a result of the complications, Google Voice isn't a big success.
As always Apple goes with a solution that cuts out all the conf
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Also have to give them credit for the bit at the very start where they proudly reiterated their very new widget [android.com] and Intents [android.com] features.
You know, cutting edge stuff that no one's ever seen in a smart phone before.
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And is free on new Macs, you buy.
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What is table transposing?
Same as matrix transposing?
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For many of us, it's not a good investment. But if someone can afford (and wants) to replace his computer every few years, it could make sense.
For my wife's photography business, we considered a Mac, because color calibration is a huge deal. In the end though, we decided that Windows' color management was close enough to OS X's, that we preferred the low cost and at-home-repairability of a Windows box.
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any ecosystem is a lock in
windows apps run on windows
android on android
ios on ios
osx on os x
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Um... "Yes."
The retina display is a "brand" for Apple. The term was supposed to imply that the display's ppi was great enough that your eye couldn't perceive any improvement with better. Of course it was shown pretty soon after that they were wrong BUT the measure is fairly close and they stuck with the name.
My new Dell has a less snappy name for its display "QHD+" but I'm not complaining since it has a noticeably higher PPI than Retina (as well as supposedly better tech for a brighter image at that rez)
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It defaults to twice the DPI but can be set to other resolutions. https://www.apple.com/macbook-... [apple.com]
"Native resolution: 2880 by 1800 pixels (Retina); scaled resolutions: 1920 by 1200, 1680 by 1050, 1280 by 800, and 1024 by 640 pixels"
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I could claim that my old VGA display is "retina" if I don't need to specify the viewing distance, right?
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1) I don't know. It's probably the same panel Dell announced a couple months ago.
2) no. You could probably do some sort of solution, but no hardware connection.
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Apple historically has offered the same displays for sale as separate entities.
My guess would be in the future you'll be free to buy an Apple display
Re:5K display (and computer) for $2500 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:5K display (and computer) for $2500 (Score:4, Informative)
> 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 [marco.org]
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... [wikipedia.org]
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I love the times we live in. This all reads like yesteryear's science-fiction. We're fast approaching a cinema quality display in an iMac - a simple to use piece of off-the-shelf consumer hardware. In an aluminum chassis that would be considered viable only for military grade hardware a mere decade ago. One can bitch all they want about "Apple tax", but if it weren't for Apple, we wouldn't have that hardware. Never mind that nobody else makes a PC in the aluminum iMac-style chassis, AFAIK. Or at least not i
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Beware, I haven't actually tested the power consumption so this is just speculation on my part, but since the processor and GPU in iMac aren't really doing anything I suspect they are running at their idle frequencies. If so, the power consumption of the machine should be fairly low - since many modern CPUs and GPUs have fairly low idle power requ
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All iMacs can act as an external display for another machine. I'm using two of them for that at the moment. A quick keyboard shortcut switches it from displaying it's own video to displaying the external video. It's called Target Display Mode if you want to google it.
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All iMacs can act as an external display for another machine. I'm using two of them for that at the moment. A quick keyboard shortcut switches it from displaying it's own video to displaying the external video. It's called Target Display Mode if you want to google it.
If my memory serves me correct, target display mode only works on thunderbolt models.
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No. This is what I hate about these iMacs. And especially more since this high-res display. You get a good, expensive display, which you could easily keep for 10-15 years, but are forced to throw it away when you want to upgrade the computer, after say 2-8 years. A Mac mini duck-taped on the back of a monitor takes about the same space anyways.
Apple says you can use iMacs as displays. [apple.com] It requires Thunderbolt apparently.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm going to guess that you are comparing the "Mid 2010" Mac mini with the newly released low-end model.
Clock speed aside, the 1.4GHz i5 in the new Mac mini is a 22 nm, fourth-generation Intel Core processor. So if I understand Intel's generations correctly, that's a 4th generation i5 compared to a Core 2 Duo which makes this new Mac mini CPU at least five generations ahead of the Core 2 Duo.
Can anyone with more knowledge compare the clock speeds, cache, etc?