Apple

Rumors of Apple releasing a cheaper iPhone to compete at the lower end of the smartphone market have been floating around for some time and now Reuters is citing “sources with knowledge of the matter” who say that manufacture of a cheaper 8GB version of the iPhone by Asian suppliers is already underway and is expected to be released around the same time as the upcoming iPhone 5. Read More

With the success that Apple has achieved over the past decade, it's perhaps no surprise that it has outgrown its original "Infinite Loop" campus and is in need of a new flagship headquarters to bring the teams together under one roof. Since Steve Jobs will undoubtedly have been the driving force behind the building's conceptual design and hey, it's Apple, the architecture for the new campus is unlike anything else ever built. Indeed, Apple saw fit to engage London-based über-architect Sir Norman Foster and his team, a company known for its unashamedly modern, hi-tech and unique approaches to large buildings such as the Stanstead and Hong Kong airports, the American Air Museum, the Berlin Reichstag, the Dallas Opera House, The Smithsonian and part of the World Trade Center re-development. The statistics of the proposed building are staggering. Read More

One of the big changes ushered in by Apple with OS X Lion was the form of delivery. Since Lion was initially only available as a digital download, users no longer had a physical disc if they wanted to do a reinstall of the OS. Although Lion does automatically create a recovery partition on your hard drive during installation, this isn’t much help if the reason you want to do a reinstall in the first place is because the hard drive itself has failed. Apple has now provided a simple solution that lets Lion users create their own recovery disk – or rather, recovery USB drive. Read More

In an industry obsessed with polygon counts and frame rates, Nintendo's Wii console and DS handheld were the proverbial knives at a gunfight. They were grossly underpowered compared to the competition, meaning Nintendo could sell them at a profit from day one. Their innovative control methods ensured they still sold like hotcakes. An animated GIF of Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata holding a DS that printed money became the go to picture to run alongside quarterly announcements of Nintendo's gargantuan profits. If a disheveled man emerged from a time-traveling DeLorean with tales of a near-future Nintendo struggling to sell its latest handheld, I'd have been more surprised about the Nintendo thing. So what on earth happened? Read More

Charging an iPhone or iPod when out and about can often leave users taking advantage of any spare power outlet at hand. For those using the standard adapter and cable that came with said devices, this can sometimes mean leaving the units laying on the ground at the mercy of any big booted passersby. Bluelounge's MiniDock charging adapter overcomes this problem by replacing the dangling cable with a dock that connects directly to the standard Apple USB power adapter so that your mobile device sits upright close to the wall, safely out of harm's way. Read More

The iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad are now established favorites for the mobile muso with new synths and sequencers seemingly coming out every week. Until iOS 4 however there was no standardized method for getting MIDI control signals in and out of the units for interfacing with ‘proper’ equipment. Some enterprising developers created methods using the Apple Camera Kit USB connector whilst Line 6 created its own proprietary method and the MIDI Mobilizer dongle to go with it. In the iOS 4 software release Apple ported the CoreMIDI programming interface framework from MacOS and developers finally had a standard method with which they were familiar. Though iOS4 was released a year ago, compatible MIDI interfaces are now only beginning to get to market. Read More

The world has changed greatly for Apple in the past few years. As of their earnings statement released Tuesday, three quarters of all income comes from the iPhone and iPad and the number of users of iOS is already at least four times that of Mac users. After the under-the-hood tweaks and rationalizations of previous operating system update Snow Leopard, the mission for Mac OS X Lion was clear - make the Mac OS comfortable and familiar to the new Apple mobile user audience without putting off established Mac veterans. Can they pull it off? Read More

Just in case the release of OSX Lion and the unveiling of the updated MacBook Air isn't enough to satisfy your Apple cravings today, the company has also taken the wraps off its first Thunderbolt equipped display and revealed a beefed up Mac Mini line-up. Read More

An update to the MacBook Air line-up is among a raft of new releases announced by Apple today. The new 11-inch and 13-inch models get Mac OS X Lion (which has also just landed), the latest Intel Core i5 and Core i7 dual-core processors, Thunderbolt ports and a backlit keyboard. Read More