Tag Archives | Apple

It’s Official: Apple’s iPhone Event is Next Tuesday

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 27, 2011 at 8:20 am

Sooner or later, Apple rumors narrow in on the truth. Apple is indeed holding its iPhone event next Tuesday, October 4th. It is indeed doing so at its Town Hall auditorium on its own campus rather than in San Francisco. (That’s understandable: Oracle’s Open World conference will be pretty much commandeering the entire city that day.)

Apple isn’t bring too coy this time around: Invites for the event say “Let’s talk iPhone.” One big question is whether that’s iPhone singular or iPhones plural. We’ll know soon enough.

I won’t be there in person this time, but I have a good excuse: I’ll be on a long-planned journey to Tokyo to cover CEATEC, the big consumer-electronics conference. But I’ll be watching from afar–and I suspect I’ll be back in the States before the phone (phones?) hits store shelves. More thoughts to come…

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Assistant: The Best Reason to Buy an iPhone 5?

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 26, 2011 at 10:19 am

Back in April of last year, Apple bought a very young, very neat startup named Siri. 9to5 Mac’s Mark Gurman says that Siri’s voice-controlled semantic search features are going to be built right into the iPhone 5:

Assistant taps into many aspects of the iPhone, according to people familiar with the feature and SDK findings. For example, one can say make appointment with Mark Gurman for 7:30 PM and Assistant will create the appointment in the user’s calendar. On noting events, Assistant also allows users to set reminders for the iOS 5 Reminders application. For example, a user could say “remind me to buy milk when I arrive at the market.” Another example would be integration with the iOS Maps application. A user could ask: “how do I get to Staples Center?” and Assistant will use the user’s current location via GPS and provide directions.

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Apple, Don’t Build a Social Network. Work With the Social Networks I Already Use

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 26, 2011 at 9:52 am

Over at Cult of Mac, Mike Elgan is warning Apple that Facebook is a threat to its dominance of digital entertainment:

Facebook will enable the discovery, sharing, buying and renting of movies and TV shows via Netflix, Hulu, Blockbuster, IMDB, Dailymotion and Flixter.

And just as the iPad is gaining traction as the electronic newspaper of choice, Facebook announces partnerships with the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Slate, the Associated Press, Reuters, Yahoo News and others to make Facebook the default online newspaper site.

Facebook is now more directly threatening to Apple’s business model than Microsoft, Google and Sony combined.

Mike is right that if Facebook’s new media-consumption and -sharing features could start to steal customers away from Apple. And he has a solution in mind: Apple needs to build its own social network. Something way better than Ping, which doesn’t seem to have changed iTunes that much, let alone the world.

If Apple were to come up with a cool social network, it would be…cool! But I fret that it’s not in the company’s nature to wade too deeply into the messy, unruly pool of user-generated content. Apple likes things perfect, not social. And an Apple that was great at social networking might not be so hot at all the things Apple is already so good at.

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The American Customer Satisfaction Index: Apple Aces It, Again

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 20, 2011 at 1:35 am

The American Customer Satisfaction Index rates various industries and companies for–you can probably figure this out on your own–customer satisfaction, based on a poll of 70,000 consumers. It’s released its latest numbers for the PC industry, and there are no surprises: Apple has a clear lead on everybody else that the survey has enough data about to rate.

Here are the ratings for 2011, on a scale of 100. (Unfortunately, there are some major players that it doesn’t have specific data for, such as Lenovo, Sony, and Toshiba–they’re part of “All Others.”)

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Apple “iPad 3” Prototype May Be Circulating, But Don’t Look For It This Year

Posted by Matt Peckham on September 16, 2011 at 11:01 am

It sounds like prototypes (yes, plural) of Apple’s iPad 3 may be floating around the “supply chain” already, but don’t look for the next-gen tablet this year, because…why, right? If you were sitting on 68.3% of the tablet market (according to the latest 2Q 2011 IDC report) and your nearest competitor (that would be Google’s Android) fell from 34% to 26.8% market share during the same period, where’s the fire?

That’s J.P. morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz’s reasoning, anyway. He’s just told Apple Insider that—not really a surprise here—his “conversations with industry insiders” indicate Apple’s third-generation iPad won’t arrive until sometime, 2012.

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Did Case-Mate Just Reveal The iPhone 5 Design?

Posted by Ed Oswald on September 16, 2011 at 9:51 am

What’s a day without an iPhone 5 rumor? What your looking at here is one of the images of apparent iPhone 5 cases that was posted to accessory maker Case-Mate’s site briefly on Thursday before being pulled.

The company says its “inside resources” claim Apple would indeed be launching two phones in early October, the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5. I don’t know why Case-Mate is jumping into the rumors game, as that’s our job, but I do digress…

BGR reports though that the page we’ve linked to here is different from a page they saw, which included a gallery of case images that has since disappeared. Either way, the now ever-more rumored tapered design akin to the iPad 2 seems to what Case-Mate is basing their case designs on, and it does appear noticeably wider.

Now this just could be Case-Mate reacting to the increasingly more frequent rumors of a wider and thinner iPhone 5, or they actually could have inside information. Personally, I’m hoping that either way, they’re right.

I’m no fan of the iPhone 4 design, and I remember in the days after that infamous Gizmodo leak saying “I hope this isn’t it.” But alas it was, despite my (and some others’) belief that this was way too utilitarian in design to come out of Apple. Thus, I’m happy to see Apple return to a sleeker design with the iPhone 5.

Either way Apple, could you hurry up? This iPhone 3GS is getting long in the tooth, and I’m getting impatient. If I have to wait any longer I may have to go to the dark side (Android, that is)! Perish the thought.

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Waiting for Thunderbolt

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 12, 2011 at 9:54 am

Over at Cnet, I wrote about a technology that I’m excited about, although it’s unclear whether any big players other than Intel and Apple are as enthusiastic as I am:  Thunderbolt.

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Lights, Cameras, Jared!

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 26, 2011 at 4:17 pm

Say, look who’s on Techheads.tv, discussing Steve Jobs’ resignation and other topics: our own Jared Newman, talking with Pete Pachal of PCMag.com.

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