News - page 1223

Microsoft showed off a few neat concepts at yesterday’s Windows 10 conference. But while looking at the stage showed a company secure about its place in the tech world, turning around and facing the audience revealed a very different picture: a room full to bursting with MacBook-wielding journos.

Grasswire co-founder Austen Allred tweeted the above image taken at the event, adding the pithy understatement “A couple MacBooks at the Windows 10 Unveiling…”

If one were needed, it’s yet another reminder for longtime tech followers about just who won the PC war in the long run, despite Microsoft’s dominance during the 1990s. We can’t say we’re brokenhearted about it, either.

There was a time before iPhones, when BlackBerry was the go-to name when it came to high quality smartphones. Those days are now well and truly over, although BlackBerry is still on the lookout for ways to even the playing field.

In a new blogpost over on the official BlackBerry website, CEO John Chen argues for a net neutrality-style “app neutrality,” which would see Apple legally compelled to make its popular iMessage service for BB10 handsets.

“Unfortunately, not all content and applications providers have embraced openness and neutrality,” Chen writes. “Unlike BlackBerry, which allows iPhone users to download and use our BBM service, Apple does not allow BlackBerry or Android users to download Apple’s iMessage messaging service.”

2014 was a landmark year for quality iOS games and, while we’re fully expecting to see more great titles for iPhone and iPad in 2015, it’s also clear that devs are keen to leap on the Apple Watch as soon as possible.

With that in mind, longtime iOS developers NimbleBit have announced that their upcoming word-game Letterpad will absolutely, 100 percent definitely, be coming to Apple Watch — and they’ve even released some mockups showing how it will look on Apple’s eagerly-anticipated wearable debut.

Twitter is introducing a new way of catching you up on tweets you might have missed. A new “While you were away” recap will occasionally be shown at the top of the timeline in the official iOS app.

Twitter says included tweets will be “determined by engagement and other factors,” but hasn’t gone into specifics. The recap will appear more often for those who only check in on their timeline sporadically. If you check Twitter incessantly throughout the day, you probably won’t see the feature that often.

Microsoft just unveiled the future of Windows 10 today in Redmond. Along with some crazy holographic goggles that take on Google Glass and Oculus, company executives revealed the ambitious plan to make the next generation of Windows the first truly universal platform for desktop PCs, laptops, smartphones and more.

The 2.5 hour keynote was packed with new features coming to Windows 10 devices and the Xbox, but eagle-eyed Apple fanboys have already noticed a few ways Microsoft was influenced by some of Apple’s best features.

Here are 5 plays Microsoft stole from Apple’s playbook:

Forget about spreadsheets and Word docs — Microsoft thinks the world is ready for holograms.

“We’re dreaming about holograms,” said Microsoft’s Alex Kipman as he introduced Windows Holographic and HoloLens, the company’s new wearable holographic computer. He showed off the device, which is strapped to the head and includes see-through lenses and an array of built-in sensors designed to bring high-def holograms into the real world.

It looks like much more than a dream.

You’ve got to hand it to Sir Jonathan Ive: Apple’s head of design knows how to scare the competition. Wearables at CES were a huge disappointment, and there was a palpable sense that everyone was just waiting for the Apple Watch to come out.

Even the Swiss watch industry is scared. After initially dismissing the Apple Watch as a design joke, TAG Heuer’s luxury watch guru is singing a new tune.

The Elder Scrolls Online is a massive online role-playing game that lets you join up with your friends to explore the vast realm of Tamriel, the world featured in various high-fantasy games like Oblivion and Skyrim.

Bethesda Softworks has just dropped the subscription model from its award-winning massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, and is bringing the massive virtual world to current-generation consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, as well as updating the PC and Mac versions of the game to The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited.

One year ago we were given some insight into which hard drives last the longest thanks to Backblaze media’s analysis of the tens of thousands of hard drives in their data center. The company uses regular consumer-grade hard drives due to the cheaper costs to power their unlimited storage offerings for customers, and this year they’re back with a new study revealing which 4TB hard drives are too big to fail.

After spinning 41,213 disk drives in its data center, Backblaze crunched the numbers at the end of 2014 to find that if want a hard drive with the lowest failure rate possible, go with an HGST drive.

Apple’s refusal to upgrade the cheapest iPhone to 16GB could be leading to a crisis, and these stats just might prove it.

When the iPhone 6 came out, Apple (un)pleasantly surprised everyone by only upgrading two of the three storage options: While the baseline iPhone 6 stayed at a meager 16GB of storage, the middle and high-end storage options were upgraded to 64GB and 128GB respectively.

Thanks to Apple’s continued success in Japan, and Tim Cook’s big push to expand into China, everyone forgets about one of the most revealing markets the iPhone 6 has scored big in: South Korea. Why is South Korea so revealing? Because it’s none other than the stomping ground of longtime Apple rival, Samsung.

According to a report published Wednesday by Counterpoint Research, Apple is now firmly challenging Samsung in its home ground — with market share in the country rising to 33 percent, from less than 15 percent, based on the success of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Samsung’s market share meanwhile plummeted from 60 percent to 46 percent.

Back in May, we told you about the former Apple employee who was inspired by Apple’s on-campus cafeteria to create his own health-tech product.

Called SITU scale, the smart food scale connects to an iPad and weighs any food you place on it in calories and total nutrients in addition to grams and ounces. Having surpassed its Kickstarter goal by raising a total of almost $60,000, SITU creator and former Apple employee Michael Grothaus has announced that preorders have begun — with a promised delivery date of early March.

“It’s been a crazy ride to get here, but it’s been so worth it,” Grothaus says. “Choosing to Kickstart SITU was the best thing we could have done — and Cult of Mac was a big part of its success. I invented SITU because I wanted to lose weight and designed it with my needs in mind, but through all the open dialog with backers and people who would send us emails, we ended up making the product so much better.”

If you’re a Dropbox user (and you should be!) you might want to take a look at your ‘About this Mac’ info box: the popular cloud syncing app will drop support for OS X Leopard and earlier on May 15th.

Although we’ve heard vague reports about it, all’s been quiet on the Cupertino front about Apple’s plans to relaunch its Beats Music streaming service later this year — possibly as early as February.

Today another piece of the puzzle may have fallen into place, however, with the news that Apple has acquired U.K. startup Semetric, which runs the Musicmetric analytics tool, designed to allow music labels to track sales, BitTorrent, YouTube, Spotify and social-networking data for their artists.

Now that Google has pulled Glass off the market, for the time being at least, we’re left with a handful of questions that can’t be easily answered — even by a face-mounted computer.

Questions like, “What went wrong?” And, “What didn’t go wrong?” And, perhaps most enlightening of all, “How would Apple have gotten Glass right?”

While Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior VP of worldwide marketing, was not a fan of Glass, we’re certain Cupertino could have found success with a head-mounted wearable. Here’s how.

Steve Jobs famously didn’t let his kids use an iPad, because he wanted them to avoid getting sucked into a netherworld of endless screens, without real-world engagement. It’s a feeling even the most tech-loving of parents likely knows — and it’s the inspiration behind a new project from MIT graduate Adam Kumpf.

I wrote about Kumpf’s clothespin iPad piano a few months back, and I’m fascinated by his concept for what he calls an iPad inventor’s kit. Essentially it’s a shoebox of easy-to-find household objects that, when paired with the right app, can help kids invent futuristic iPad gadgets — while also teaching them about the fundamental concepts of mechanical systems, physics, basic electronics, interface design and engineering.

Best of all, you can put it together yourself free of charge, thanks to Instructables.

Apple is already testing iOS 9, but in the meantime iOS 8 adoption continues to grow — although it’s starting to slow down.

According to Apple’s latest stats, 69 percent of active iOS devices are now using the latest version of the company’s mobile OS; up just 1 percent from January 5, when Apple last shared iOS 8 adoption stats. By comparison, 28 percent of users are still working on iOS 7, with a minuscule 3 percent using assorted earlier iterations.

Google’s Material Design makeover isn’t just for those running the latest version of Android; the search giant is also bringing it to its slew of popular iOS apps as well. Chrome is the latest to get the fancy redesign, and it comes with Handoff support and further improvements for iOS 8.

It’s true — Hollywood has fully exported its heroes to the newest media kid on the block, video games. It wasn’t enough for Martin Sheen to play the chain smoking Illusive Man in 2008’s Mass Effect 2 , or Kevin Spacey to turn in a star performance in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

Now John Malkovich, Bill Paxton, Rose McGowan and Jon Bernthal lend their voices and likenesses to the sci-fi-tinged military shooter for the new Exo Zombie mode that comes with the new downloadable content pack “Havok,” available January 27.

Here, they’ve even made a video to show you.

Candide Thovex is having another one of those days in an aptly named new YouTube video, “One of those days 2.”

The professional skier from France has released yet another amazing point of view of his extreme skiing, and in this one, he skis through the actual mountain.

Steve Jobs shunned trips to Washington, D.C., during his tenure as Apple CEO, but Tim Cook has been a frequent visitor to Capitol Hill to personally amp up Apple’s lobbying efforts, which have more than doubled since 2009.

A new report from OpenSecrets today revealed that Apple lobbied the White House, Congress and 13 departments and agencies including the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission in 2014. In 2009, Apple lobbied only Congress and six agencies and only spent $1.5 million compared to the nearly $3 million it spent from January to October 2014.

Karen Koch Rasmussen navigates life just fine without sight. Developing systems to identify the tangibles in life come to her naturally, from how to stock her canned goods to labeling her music collection so she can listen to which ever genre strikes her.

She even has a strategy for when there’s a glitch in her systems, like when a canned item goes in the wrong place. If she grabs tomatoes instead of beans, she may adjust her recipe and roll with the inconvenience.

So when an iPhone app to assist the blind came into her life, thus offering a solution to those occasional challenges, Rasmussen, 26, didn’t quite know how to use a set of eyes that were easily at her disposal.

“I’ve been blind since birth so you learn to get along without seeing,” said Rasmussen, a graduate student in political science in Aarhus, Denmark. “I’m not use to having the opportunity so I would forget there is a solution.”

Apple has provided the official City of Cupertino website with a new photo, showing progress on the new, so-called “Spaceship” campus. And it’s starting to look like a thing of a beauty.

If you’re a developer, listen up: it’s time to make sure your apps can support iOS 8 and Apple’s 64-bit ARM processors. Otherwise, you won’t be able to submit them to the App Store anymore.