Tag Archives | Apple

Is Apple Considering Adding Mini Projectors to iOS Devices? Could Be Cool!

Posted by Ed Oswald on August 11, 2011 at 11:01 am

Patently Apple is one of my favorite sites to watch for news on Cupertino’s latest and greatest, and its latest post is no obsession. The site has dug up patents that indicate the company has worked on the idea of  integrating pico projectors into iOS devices, as well as developing some type of projector accessory for Mac devices.

What’s a pico projector? The devices have become popular as a low-cost way to project an image anywhere.  I’m seeing more and more of them at tech shows lately, although typically as a standalone device and not integrated like we’re seeing here.

There’s definitely a cool factor: as well as offering the projection capabilities you’d expect, Apple’s patent involves making the projected images gesture enabled. Say you have two iOS projecting devices side by side, for example. You could transfer the projected content from one device to the next by swiping. Pretty cool, eh?

Continue Reading →

4 comments

Apple’s iCloud Pricing vs. the Competition

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 2, 2011 at 9:24 am

Apple has announced pricing for its upcoming iCloud service. In typical Apple fashion, the company kept things simple. 5GB of online storage is free; 10GB is $20 a year; 20GB is $40 a year; 50GB is $100 a year. (Most other cloud-storage companies price by the month rather than the year, which makes it tougher to judge what you’re really going to shell out–if you find one of these services useful, you’re going to use it indefinitely, not one month at a time.)

So is Apple’s pricing a deal? Comparing prices for these services is tough. Different ones offer different capacity points. Some have lots of features (SugarSync and Box.net, for instance) and some are far more bare-bones (Amazon Cloud Drive and Microsoft Cloud Drive). Some have their own twists (YouSendIt, for instance, has a built-in digital-signature feature) and some (Amazon Cloud Drive and iCloud) don’t include purchased music in the capacity limits. And anyhow, iCloud isn’t an exact counterpart to any existing service. It’s going to be way more Apple-centric–betcha there won’t be Android clients–and is less about syncing and more about leaving your files in the cloud, period.

Continue Reading →

15 comments

Iomega’s New Hard Drive is for iPad-Owning Mac Users

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 2, 2011 at 6:00 am

How can hard-drive companies jump on the iPad bandwagon? Seagate and Hitachi have created wireless drives designed to work with Apple’s tablet. Iomega is taking another approach. Its Mac Companion Hard Drive is a standard USB hard disk–and a desktop model at that–designed to charge an iPad.

As seen above, the Companion features an Apple-esque design and is sized to fit on the stand of an iMac or Apple monitor. It can connect to a Mac via FireWire 400/800 or USB 2.0, and has both a two-port USB 2.0 hub and the high-powered charging port required by the iPad.  (The USB 2.0 is a tipoff that Iomega really intends this drive for Mac users–otherwise, the company has been aggressively moving to USB 3.0, a technology which no Mac yet supports.)

The Companion is available in 1TB ($195) and 2TB ($295) versions, carries a three-year warranty, and will be available only at the Apple Store at first.

7 comments

For Adobe, Edge Represents Opportunity, Not Surrender

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 1, 2011 at 4:08 pm

“Adobe Quietly Surrenders to Steve Jobs, Builds Flash Alternative.” That’s the headline on Adam Clark Estes’s article over at the Atlantic on Edge, Adobe’s new HTML5 authoring tool. It captures the tone of a lot of coverage I’ve seen. Edge supposedly represents a capitulation on Adobe’s part. And it’s supposedly a product that Adobe might never have come up with if Steve Jobs hadn’t kept Flash off of the iPhone and iPad and been bluntly public about his reasoning.

Well, maybe. It’s true that the inability of Flash to run natively on iOS gives Adobe a powerful incentive to get on the HTML5 bandwagon. I tend to think, however, that this take gives Apple too much credit, and Adobe too little. Edge isn’t about Adobe bowing to Steve Jobs; it’s about it acknowledging reality. And Adobe shouldn’t be building this product in a grudging, grumbly fashion. If Edge is a great HTML5 tool, there’s no reason why it can’t be an enormously popular and profitable component of the company’s portfolio. It would be nuts for Adobe not to do it.

Continue Reading →

6 comments

All Things D: It’s Going to Be an iPhone October

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 1, 2011 at 12:10 pm

Curious about when the next iPhone will come out? You can pretty much pick your month and find someone who says it’ll come out then–there’s probably somebody somewhere confidently reporting that a reliable source is saying the phone will come out in March, 2037. But All Things D’s John Paczkowski isn’t a guy who trades in rumors that are flimsy or just plain flim-flams. So when he says that the iPhone 5 will come out in October, I pay attention, at least.

No comments

A Brief History of Apple Not Buying Things

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 29, 2011 at 2:20 am

And so it begins again. BGR has an exclusive scoop from an “unproven” (ooh!) source: Apple is in talks to buy Barnes & Noble, the country’s last remaining national bookseller. As BGR points out, the acquisition would get Apple B&N’s digital books and other publications (which it might conceivably want) and Nook hardware (which it surely doesn’t), along with hundreds of retail outlets which it could either shutter or convert into Apple Stores. (Enormous Apple Stores! Usually located conveniently close to existing Apple Stores!)

Here’s a bit of deep insight from another BGR source (the story doesn’t say if it’s a proven or unproven one):

It also almost makes too much sense for Apple to do this, said another source of ours, mentioning that Apple doesn’t make moves that appear logical to most outside observers at the time.

Well said. For years, Apple has confounded the rest of us by not buying things that it should clearly be buying. Not purchasing other well-known companies is so core to Apple’s strategy that it must have a whole department devoted to non-mergers and un-acquisitions.

Continue Reading →

165 comments

Kobo to Apple: We’re Building Our Own HTML5 E-Bookstore

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 26, 2011 at 3:15 pm

Apple’s new App Store policies–the ones I worried about when they were announced months ago–have kicked in. From now on, app makers who sell content such as books and music have two ways of making it available. They can use Apple’s In-App Purchase system to sell content within the app (giving Apple a 30 percent commission). Or they can sell it directly to consumers through their own venues, such as Web-based stores–but can include no mentions or links relating to that fact in the iOS app itself.

Many third-party developers are choosing one route or the other without any public fuss. Canadian e-book purveyor Kobo is being a tad more prickly. It’s updated its iOS app with a new version that meets the new rules–it lets you read books you’ve purchased, but provides no way to buy them or register for a Kobo account, nor any explanation of how to do so. But it’s also announcing plans to build an HTML5 e-reading app which will work in the iOS browser–and which it’ll control itself, with no requirement that it follow Apple’s rules. And the company’s chief iOS architect is detailing the Byzantine approval process which the Kobo app had to go through before Apple would finally approve it. (The essentially similar Borders app wasn’t forced to jump through as many hoops, a reminder of the biggest problem with App Store rules: they’re sometimes applied in an inconsistent, apparently arbitrary fashion.)

Continue Reading →

13 comments