News tagged ‘design’

This weekend a memorial service for Steve Jobs was held at Stanford University's Memorial Church. A number of famous personalities attended the service as well as close friends and family members.

Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs, sister Mona Simpson and three of his children spoke at the memorial service held for the Apple co-founder on Sunday, according to two people who attended…

Both people who attended described the service as incredibly moving and a fitting tribute to Mr. Jobs, who was known as a tech visionary, demanding boss and a fanatic for design. One person mentioned that many speakers cracked jokes about Mr. Jobs, who died on Oct. 5 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Jobs' private funeral was held two days after his death and an event for Apple employees will be held this Wednesday and will include temporary closure of Apple’s retail stores.

Last month, we heard rumors that Apple had signed an agreement with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) for production of the next-generation A6 and A7 chips destined for future iOS devices. Samsung manufacture the A4 and A5 chips for Apple, but Apple seems to try to shift to TSMC because of difficult relations and legal battle between Apple and Samsung.

The Korea Times now reports that Apple will indeed primarily be sticking with Samsung for A6 production.

"Apple has been in talks with Samsung over shipment of its A6 quad-core mobile processor (AP) chips to be used in the next iPhone. It appears that Apple clearly has concluded that Samsung remains a critical business partner," an executive from an Apple parts supplier based in Korea said on condition of anonymity.

He said that Samsung has been increasing the output of the Apple-designed A6 chips in its manufacturing plant in Austin, Texas.

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Apple has released new iOS app for mailing post cards right from your iPhone. The Cards app, according to Apple:

The new Cards app from Apple lets you create and mail beautifully crafted cards personalized with your own text and photos — right from your iPhone or iPod touch. Take a quick snapshot and with a few taps and swipes, an elegant letterpress card is on its way to any address in the world. Each card is just $2.99 when sent within the U.S. and $4.99 when sent to or from anywhere else. And that includes postage.

The Cards app is available free of charge from the App Store here.

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UnitediPhoneRepair has posted an iPhone 4S drop test video. Of course, the iPhone 4S shares the same external design as the iPhone 4, and yes, it still breaks when dropped on its glass screen.

As 9to5Mac reports, all current models of MacBook Pro line are constrained and new part numbers for models with 17, 15, and 13 inch screens sizes appeared in Apple’s inventory system. Last month it was reported that Apple planned to increase processor speeds across all current MacBook Pro models.

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As usual, iFixit conducted their standard teardown of Apple's latest gear, this time it was Apple’s next generation iPhone 4S. The device has largely the same design as the iPhone 4, but inside it is different. The new iPhone 4S has a slightly larger battery that improves battery capacity and offers extra hours of talk time, comparing with the iPhone 4.

Other new thing implemented in the iPhone 4S is the A5 chip that improves performance up to seven times, comparing with the iPhone 4. The A5 CPU has a marking of E4E4 with 512MB of RAM.   The teardown also revealed a new Qualcomm MDM6610 baseband chipset that is the slightly modified model of the “worldwide” MDM6600 Qualcomm baseband used in the CDMA iPhone 4 that, as you remember, has both CDMA and GSM modes, but works in only CDMA networks. The iPhone 4S is the true worldwide smartphone, which will allow both GSM and CDMA customers to roam on GSM networks worldwide

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The LA Times provides some new details about "Apple University", an internal project at Apple, designed to provide successful future for the company without Steve Jobs. First information about the project appeared in May, when Steve Jobs hired dean of Yale School of Management Joel Podolny, who  was personally influenced by Steve Jobs and Apple and even described writing his first computer program on an Apple II. Podolny runs an internal group of business professors and Harvard veterans to prepare employees for life at Apple after Jobs.

"Steve was looking to his legacy. The idea was to take what is unique about Apple and create a forum that can impart that DNA to future generations of Apple employees," said a former Apple executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve his relationship with the company. "No other company has a university charged with probing so deeply into the roots of what makes the company so successful."

Jobs reportedly personally oversaw the creation of courses and believed that he was responsible for Apple’s future success. He even identified specific tenets for the company such as accountability, attention to detail, perfectionism, simplicity, and secrecy. Pixar, the Job’s another successful company, is believed to use the same corporate University model.

Apple yesterday announced iPhone 4S  and seems to prepare the name “iPhone 5” for 4G LTE model of the smartphone that may be released next spring. Analyst Will Strauss, president of wireless chip market research firm Forward Concepts, has tried to explain why Apple showed off an iPhone 4S and not the rumored "iPhone 5" on Tuesday.

"They're saving iPhone 5 for the LTE version and that won't be out until next spring. There's no way they could come out with LTE now," he suggested.

Apple may need an LTE baseband chip that, according to Anand Shimpi of AnandTech, will arrive early next year, so first iPhones powered by it likely to arrive in the second quarter of 2012.

"While I don't like participating in the rumor garbage, if I were to guess at the release date of the rumored iPhone 5 I'd say early Q3 2012," he added.

But Apple is not in hurry. The company shows interest in LTE, but not going to implement LTE technology in the next iPhone as soon as possible. Quoting Apple executive Tim Cook, the reason is what that “LTE chipsets force a lot of design compromises with the handset, and some of those we are just not willing to make".

Yesterday during the expected media event Apple announced the new iPhone 4S, an upgrade to the existing iPhone 4 with improved A5 processor, new 8 MP camera with better optics, faster download speed on 3G, Bluetooth 4.0, and more. Media members who attended Apple's iPhone 4S event had the opportunity to spend some time with the new hardware following the presentation, and immediately started posting their first impressions about the iPhone 4S.

Engadget highlights the improved internal specifications of the new iPhone 4S, noting that it is faster than the previous model, with faster navigating between pages and opening the camera application. Engadget was also able to test the new voice assistant, Siri:

The most impressive part was the demo of Siri, the new assistant that lets you do just about anything you can do on your phone — but with your voice. We tried to psych it out with a bunch of random requests... Siri never faltered, never missed a beat… There’s nothing better to say than that. We even sent ourselves a few text messages, which Siri transcribed to a T. Of course, the lady on the other end still sounds eerily robotic, but we’re hoping for smoother responses from the alien within in a future update.

Jim Dalrymple at The Loop covers the differences in antenna design:

The current model has three bands — one on each side on the bottom, and one on the top. The iPhone 4S has four bands — two on the top and two on the bottom. The bands are where Apple houses the antennas for the device. The Wi-Fi, wireless and Bluetooth technologies use these areas. It’s not clear at this point if Apple moved any antennas or what they added the extra band.

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Good news for those who want to buy Apple iPod Nano. The price has dropped from $149 to $129 for a 8GB model and from $179 to $149 for 16GB model. New price nano's are available starting today.

Additionally iPod Nanos will feature a redesigned user interface, 16 new digital clock faces and improved built-in fitness features.

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Well, rumors around iPhone 5 are getting bigger and bigger. This one is really big in terms of dollars. WSJ reports that Sprint, the third largest wireless operator in the US, committed to buy 30.5 million new iPhones for $20 billion.

BGR has heard that Sprint will actually get the much rumored iPhone 5, that is said to be a 4G LTE device. AT&T and Verizon would launch the iPhone 4S and get the iPhone 5 some time in the first quarter of 2012 as an LTE device. Globally, the iPhone 5 might be available as a 4G HSPA+ device.

According to BGR's source the iPhone 4S will feature the A5 processor, an 8MP camera with 1080p video recording, a Multiband 3G Qualcomm chipset, NFC support, and a metal or premium plastic back casing.

The Sprint exclusive iPhone 5 is said to feature a faster CPU, 4-inch screen, 1 GB of RAM, slightly larger design (though thinner), larger battery, 32GB of storage, Assistant, and possibly a new home button which integrates activating assistant.

There's too much rumors lately.

The most part of rumors about the next generation iPhone was focused on its external redesign. But the one thing we almost definitely sure in is that the next iPhone will have the much faster dual-core A5 processor with a much faster graphics processing unit (GPU). The A5 chip is implemented in the iPad 2 that was released in March. Apple claims that the graphics performance of the iPad 2 is up to nine times faster than the graphics performance of the original A4-powered iPad. The recent graphics performance benchmark tests, conducted by Anandtech, (see above) demonstrate how much faster A5's GPU as compared to the A4, suggesting how much faster will be iPhone powered by A5.

9to5Mac reports that Apple has leaked the iPhone 4S alongside a picture of the old design in its latest iTunes Beta:

Inside the latest iTunes beta is a specific mention of the "iPhone 4S." Along with the new iPhone name of "iPhone 4S" comes an image, and it is of a CDMA iPhone 4. Unless Apple still has the CDMA iPhone 4 as a placeholder image until the new iPhone is announced, we're fairly confident that the iPhone 4S will pack the CDMA iPhone design.

It's interesting that iTunes holds just two references to the iPhone 4S (black and white) while the iPhone 4 has four references two for CDMA and two for GSM devices. This once again proves rumors that iPhone 4S will be a dual standard world phone.

According to a survey, conducted by a mobile advertising company InMobi, 41 percent of US customers is going to purchase the next-generation iPhone. 50 percent of them will do it within the first six months after public launch. This time Sprint customers will also have access to the new iPhone, so Apple seems to open new market for its smartphone, taking in account that Sprit has 52 million customers.

If consumers put their money where their mouths are, these numbers could go a long way to bumping up Apple’s overall market share in the UK and the U.S.. According to figures from Kantar Worldpanel, in Q2 Apple had an 18.3 percent share of the UK smartphone market; another research group, comScore, puts it around 20 percent. If people follow through with their purchasing intent, InMobi says this share would go up to 40 percent. In the U.S., the market share would grow to 41 percent.

Nevertheless, despite the InMobi’ estimates, Apple could release slightly revised version of the iPhone 4 – co-called iPhone 4S, reducing number of customers who will purchase such device.