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  • Ed
    Apple's annual Black Friday discounts have started in the Apple Store Australia. Expect US and other Apple Stores to follow suit over the next few hours.
    Disc
    Apple's annual Black Friday discounts have started in the Apple Store Australia. Expect US and other Apple Stores to follow suit over the next few hours.

    Discounts seem to mostly be at the 8% mark and are for one day only. Apple Authorized Resellers have also started their only Black Friday sales too, including MacMall, MacConnection, Best Buy and Walmart.

    If you've been holding off pulling the trigger on a new Mac for a while, this may be a good time to grab yourself a discount!
  • Ed
    Whilst Apple may still be the minority desktop computing platform, since the launch of its iPad this year it has dominated the tablet market and taken no prisoners.
     

    A major survey conducted by consumer shopping site VoucherCodes.co.uk has revealed some interesting insights into what we look for in a tablet device - a few highlights include:


    Dell and RIM have the largest amount of public trust in their tablet after Apple.
    For just a $160 saving, over a third of the market would move away from Apple.
    Every age demographic indicated they wanted the device most for instant access to the web, suggesting clever tie ups with networks could win the battle outright.
    Older demographics indicated the highest interest in purchasing a Tablet Device.
    Women value Price whereas men value Breadth and Quality of Features as the factors most likely to influence their purchase of a tablet device. 


    Head on over to their site to see the full article and brilliant infographic.
  • Ed
    Apple's next major update to its mobile operating system platform, iOS 4.2, has been seeded to developers. The OS which was shown off at an iPod event by Steve Jobs in September has key new features including AirPrint and AirPlay, as well as bringing iPhone features to the iPad such as multitasking, unified mail inbox, threaded messages, and the ability to open attachments in third party apps. Other rumoured enhancements include the abbilility to launch a FaceTime chat from an SMS message, support for Google's revised YouTube voting, and new CoreMIDI music APIs for music apps to taken advantage of.
     
    Apple is now accepting app submissions that are 4.2 compatible so a release for the new iOS is expected to be imminent.
  • Ed
    Steve Jobs unveiled at the tail end of the "Back to the Mac" keynote an all-new line-up of MacBook Airs, featuring a familiar 13" model, and a new smaller borderline-netbook 11" model - the smallest Apple notebook ever produced.
     
    The new MacBook Air models feature an even slimmer, lighter design, measuring just 0.68 inches (17mm) at its thickest point, and an incredible 0.11 inches (3mm) at its thinnest point. The 13" model weighs in at 2.9 pounds (1.32kg) and the 11" at just 2.3 pounds (1.06kg).
     
    One of the major new features of the new MacBook Airs which Apple is hinting at doing across its entire MacBook range is the SSD implementation - gone is the standard 1.8" hard drive bay, and in place is an SSD solution that connects directly to the motherboard, saving valuable space. In fact, most of the space in the new MacBook Air is occupied by the battery components, which deliver 7 hours of "wireless productivity" (a new battery benchmark phrase coined by Apple to give realistic battery times) on the 13" model, and 5 hours of "wireless productivity" on the 11" model, and an impressive 30 days of standby time.
     
    New to the MacBook Air is the nVidia GeForce 320M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM which is shared with the main system memory. RAM is now standard at 2GB, with an optional upgrade to 4GB. Frontside bus remains at 1066MHz for the 13", and the new 11" model has an 800MHz bus.
     
    Ports remain largely the same with a minimalistic approach, albeit with 2 USB ports now as opposed to the previous solitary port. The headphone jack also supports the microphone on the Apple iPhone earphones, which may be handy for those of you that use Skype, iChat, etc.
     
    The 13" screen is still LED but now sports a higher resolution of 1440x900, and the smaller 11" packs a still impressive resolution of 1366x768 which is a 16:9 aspect ratio, inline with the new 27" cinema display and current range of iMacs.
     
    Sadly, the reduced size does mean that the backlit keyboard has been omitted from the new MacBook Air.
     
    Pricing starts at just $999 for the base 11" MacBook Air which certainly makes it a more affordable option than its predecessor, and are available to order from the Apple Store now.
  • Ed
    A new improved MacBook Air is predicted to be announced by Apple tomorrow, and rumors are heating up across the 'net in anticipation of Apple's "Back to the Mac" event which is widely expected to preview the next generation operating-system, Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion".
     
    Pictured in this post is reportedly the innards of a prototype of the forthcoming MacBook Air.
     
    So far, the rumor-mill is predicting that the MacBook Air will now come in two sizes: an existing 13" model, and a new 11.6" variant which may be the closest Apple comes to releasing a netbook, despite the fact that users have been happily running Mac OS X on their netbooks for quite some time!
     
    Allegedly, the standard 1.8" storage bay which houses either an HDD or SSD will be replaced with an SSD card-based storage solution.
     
    Pricing is also rumored to be addressed, with a more aggressive price-point, which has often been a major criticism of the relatively expensive existing models.
     
    The new MacBook Air is also now reported to be even slimmer than the previous model, and no longer sports a port flap.
  • TH3L4UGH1NGM4N

    Tablet War

    By TH3L4UGH1NGM4N, in OSx86,

    The fight is making it's way to the Techway Fight Club floor where these two contenders will take on each other. The infamous iPad will find it's competitor the Blqckberry PlayBook. Playbook you might say may sound quite silly for a tablet but Research In Motion (RIM) is playing no folly with this new gig as it projected to have high sales from the company.
     
    Here is a breif brake down of the specs of each contender respectively.
     
    Weing in at approximately 0.9 lbs (400g for our metric readers) from the depths of the motional movements of research we have the
     
    Blackberry PlayBook
     

     
    Courtesy of Engadget
     
    With the spec sheet shown below...


    7? LCD, 1024 x 600, WSVGA, capacitive touch screen with full multi-touch and gesture support
    1 GHz dual-core processor
    1GB RAM
    BlackBerry Tablet OS with support for symmetric multiprocessing
    Dual HD cameras (3 MP front facing, 5 MP rear facing), supports 1080p HD video recording
    Video playback: 1080p HD Video, H.264, MPEG, DivX, WMV
    Audio playback: MP3, AAC, WMA
    HDMI video output
    Wi-Fi – 802.11 a/b/g/n
    Bluetooth? 2.1 + EDR
    Connectors: microHDMI, microUSB, charging contacts
    Open, flexible application platform with support for WebKit/HTML-5, Adobe
    Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, Adobe Reader, POSIX, OpenGL, Java
    Measures 5.1?x7.6?x0.4? (130mm x 193mm x 10mm)
    Additional features and specifications of the BlackBerry PlayBook will be shared on or before the date this product is launched in retail outlets.These should prove to be some very strong points to take on the tablet King sir iPad the first.
     
    Incase for any non logical reason you have forgotten the specs for Sir iPad, here's the run down once more to job those brain cells of yours
     
    Apple iPad
     

     
    Courtesy of Apple


    Display

    9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology
    1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch (ppi)
    Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating
    Support for display of multiple languages and characters simultaneously
    Capacity


    16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash drive
    Processor


    1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip
    Audio Playback


    Audio formats supported: HE-AAC (V1), AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Store), MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3, and 4), Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV
    Wi-Fi
    Digital compass
    Assisted GPS (Wi-Fi + 3G model)
    Cellular (Wi-Fi + 3G model)Now it is up to the comsumers with that given information and their interest in gadgets to see which tablet will win them over. RIM's ironically named "PlayBook", seems to digress a bit from RIM's business minded moto. Nonetheless, ultimately it will be the end user experience that will determine how the newbie tablet will fair with the current King of All the iPad.
     
    The PlayBook will have to produce some serious sales to begin playing catchup with the iPad if RIM hopes for it to become a successful tablet because other manufactures are bound to jump on to the tablet bandwaggon war in a few months from now. How will the PlayBook play its cards in this bloodbath round? The quarterly earnings will soon tell.
     
    InsanelyMac thoughts?
    Let's get ready to ruuumbleeee!
     
    Sources: Apple iPad Spec Sheet, Engadget
  • Ed
    No sooner than Apple makes the firmware restore for Apple TV's iOS 4.1 available, developers have already managed to jailbreak it.
     
    Using the in-development iOS 4.1 exploit, SHAtter, hackers have been able to unlock the new iOS before the new Apple TVs have even been delivered to their buyers.
     
    The iPhone Dev-Team have reported on their blog that, "Even though the new AppleTV isn’t yet in people’s homes, the firmware is available on Apple’s normal public distribution servers and SHAtter has been used to decrypt its keys!"
  • Ed
    No sooner than Apple makes the firmware restore for Apple TV's iOS 4.1 available, developers have already managed to jailbreak it.
     
    Using the in-development iOS 4.1 exploit, SHAtter, hackers have been to unlock the new iOS before Apple TV's have even been delivered to their buyers.
     
    The iPhone Dev-Team have reported on their blog that, "Even though the new AppleTV isn’t yet in people’s homes, the firmware is available on Apple’s normal public distribution servers and SHAtter has been used to decrypt its keys!"
  • Ed

    Cydia acquires Rock Your Phone

    By Ed, in OSx86,

    The two largest jailbreak app stores have officially announced they are to merge, with Cydia confirming that they have acquired Rock Your Phone and are currently working on porting all Rock apps to its own Cydia app store.
     
    The move appears to have come as a result of the Rock founder's decision to move back into app development instead of competing with Jay Freeman's continued development of the jailbroken app store platform.
     
    Rock reports some interesting stats on its website, including a reported $3.3M in revenue during its 18 months of independent trading, and a team of nine staff.
     
    Freeman of Cydia states within his FAQ around the acquisition of Rock that improvements are coming to Cydia in order to match Rock's featureset, such as ratings and backups. Users familiar with Rock will miss its speed, but Freeman states that this speed was as a result of "a few incorrect/dangerous shortcuts" and indicates that an inevitable update would have reduced Rock's speed to that of Cydia.
     
    Either way, this sounds like it may be good news for the jailbreak community and the future of Cydia.
  • Ed

    Re-designed Apple TV announced

    By Ed, in OSx86,

    Apple today announced an all-new Apple TV to replace the previous hard drive-based models, with a cloud-centric approach to consuming video and music.
     
    No more sync'ing: the new Apple TV now streams all content from either a Mac or PC with an iTunes library, an iOS device such as an iPad or iPhone (running the yet-to-be-released iOS 4.2), or from the Internet via YouTube or (if in the US or Canada) Netflix.
     
    The Apple TV also has other neat touches such as the ability to be controlled from an iOS device via Apple's Remote app. The unit itself has shed some weight, clocking it just a quarter the size of the outgoing Apple TV model, and featuring a built-in power supply, and just the bare minimum output ports: HDMI, optical digital audio out, and 10/100BASE-T Ethernet. It does of course also feature 802.11n Wi-Fi for wireless streaming, and also the current aluminium Apple Remote, all for just $99.
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