Category Archives: Apple

Apple News Technology TV

Apple TV+ could end Netflix

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The new Apple TV+ video streaming service was launched a month ago with a somewhat mixed reception. Apple had only a few shows at launch, and some people felt short-changed with the lack of content.

If we look at rivals Netflix, they have an extensive collection, which at this time beats Apple TV+ hands down as Apple only released a handful of shows at launch; even though this could change shortly.

As you might be aware, Apple iTunes is one of the most significant collections of video content by far, but this hasn’t seen its way into the new video streaming service. There could be many reasons for this, but the higher cause is probably due to rights and royalties.

Apple could wipe Netflix off the map if they allowed the entirety of the iTunes video collection to be available for paying subscribers. If they keep costs low for the customer, they will migrate from rival stream services as they will have a better choice. Think different, remember that Apple.

If you would like a free seven-day trial, download the Apple TV app from the app store. You can get a free twelve-month subscription if you have bought a new Mac, iPhone, or iPad in 2019, do not hold me to that, but I got one with my iPad 10.2-inch 7th generation. Otherwise, if in doubt, it’s outlined on the apple website.

Apple Microsoft News

Microsoft saves headphone jack

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Image credit: Independent UK


Over the last few years we have seen many phone manufacturers ditching the headphone jack for alternative wireless solutions. They all claim that ditching the headphone jack will give them more space to design thinner handsets. 

Microsoft today have released news about a patent they have been granted for a resizable headphone jack. The new technology will allow any handset to incorporate a headphone jack without taking up vital space. 

There are two aspects to this, have Microsoft found a vital market, or have they lost touch with what consumers want in their handsets? I guess time will tell whether this will make them a fortune or be a big waste of time. 

Even if they have found a gap in the market, we all know that Microsoft will licence this to the hills and this will put a premium cost on top of the handsets sale price. 

Would you pay extra for a headphone jack, or would you adopt new technologies? I think personally, I would just adopt new wireless technologies rather than buying outdated technology. 

Apple News Search Engines

Two Cheeseburger emojis starting a worldwide debate

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Image Credit: mirror.co.uk


What is the world coming to? People are debating the difference between the cheeseburger on Apple and Google devices. 

Users have noticed that Google have placed the cheese at the bottom of the cheeseburger, while Apple have placed it on top of the burger. This must be a modern day issue if people are worried about what a cheeseburger looks like on their devices. 

Google have said they will be discussing the offending emoji to come to a suitable solution. 

Apple News

Safari iPhone Crash — How to fix

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Today Apple users will feel the pain with the latest bug in Safari. When using the top bar, users have been faced with it crashing each time, and Apple have yet to comment on what’s causing it. 

So, until they issue a fix, here is how I stopped the bug. As demonstated in the print screen below, you need to turn off search suggestions, Safari suggestions, and preload top hit. These can be found in settings – Safari. Please bare in mind, this bug is only said to effect iOS users, your Mac or PC version of Safari should be fine. 

This should fix the issue. 

 

Apple News

Checking Signal Strength — iPhone Hack

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Have you ever wondered what your real signal strength is with an iPhone? Here is a simple little hack that will help you. 

1. Type *3001#12345#* and hit call. 

2. Hold down the power button until it appears with the slide to unlock. 

3. Then hold down the home button until the screen flashes back to your home screen. 

The end result will change your signal strength bars to a physical number. Anything close to 80 will mean you have enough strength to make a call, and anything under might result in bad reception. 

To revert back to the old signal bars, just simply reboot the phone. 

I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY MISTAKES MADE BY USERS, YOU DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK! 

Apple News Personal

Apple Chargers — The Ultimate Pain

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If you own, or owned an Apple device you will know how much these devices cost, and how much Apple charge for new charging cables, and I’ve bet you have felt the sting when purchasing replacements—it isn’t cheap for sure!

I’ve personally owned Apple devices for around eight years now and in that time I have probably gone through hundreds of replacement cables, keep in mind that I’ve had every iPhone since its release in 2007, and several iPads and iPods. For every cable I got with a device I would buy another one for it, or in some cases two depending on how paranoid I got about Apples’ flimsy charger design. It soon adds up.

The actual design of these chargers may seem like they are sexy and simple, but in essence, they are flimsy and break easily—maybe this is done on purpose to make money? These replacements from Apple cost £15 a time, which is good, considering they used to be £30 a time between 2007 and 2014. Maybe Apple felt sorry for themselves and decided to drop the price—they make 150% profit on everything they make anyway, it was about time they dropped prices on overpriced products. 

This is a true story, but at times I’ve had to tape up broken cables just to make them last longer, and on some occasions I’ve used electrical tape on new cables to form a thicker protection around the cable. Do the math, make a cable last longer and save £15, or replace it every time it breaks and watch your bank balance slowly disappear, I know what one I would choose! 

Ultimately, you have only a couple of choices, and either way it won’t help you, unless Apple decide to change their charger design to make it last longer, who knows? We might be lucky. 

Apple News

iPad Mini: Media Event

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Here is a transcript of the recent Apple event in order, any remarks posted here are directly copied from hearing the event and is not a personal opinion. All links are located at the bottom.

iOS6 & Mountain Lion:
In under a month 200 million iOS Devices are running iOS6. (fastes software upgrade rate in history, apples words).
125 million documents stored in iCloud.
iMessage, since last year customers have sent over 300 billion messages, 28,000 messages a second.
Game Centre has over 160 million accounts
Photo stream: Customers have shared over 70 million albums so far.

App Store:
275,000 iPad apps, 35 billion apps downloaded so far, Apple have paid out over $6.5billion to developers

iBooks:
1.5 million books ready to download, 400 million books downloaded, new continus scrolling theme(allows you to scroll through a book), books are now in iCloud and you can download them again at any point, tap and share any favourite quote to facebook, twitter, email or you can copy, Now supports 40 different languages.

Mac:
Mac growth Year-on-Year 15%; out growing the PC Market by 7x and for the last 6 years; reason for this is that it has been #1 in customer satisfaction and reliability, #1 desktop and Notebook in the US.

MacBook:
Best selling MacBook is the 13″ MacBook Pro, new 13″ MacBook Pro; 0.75 inches thin(20% thinner); 3.57 pounds in weight(almost a pound lighter); No Optical Drive; I/O Ports Left(Magsafe 2, 2x Thunderbolt, USB 3/2, headphone, dual microphones) Right(SD Card Reader, HDMI Out, USB 3/2); Retina Display 13.3″ Resolution 2560×1600; Facetime HD Camera 720p(30 fps); Backlit Keyboard; Glass Trackpad; Under the hood: (Dual Core i5 or i7 Ivy Bridge Processor, Intel HD 4000 Graphics, 8GB Ram, WiFi & Bluetooth, up to 768GB of Flash Storage, 7 Hour Battery); Shipping with: (2.5GHZ Dual Core i5, 8GB Ram, 128GB Flash Storage); Prices Start from $1699 and Ships from 23rd October.

Mac Mini:
I/O: (Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire 800, HDMI Out, Thunderbolt, USB3/2, Audio in and out, SD Card Reader); Under the Hood: (Dual or Quad Core i5 or i7 Ivy Bridge Processor, Intel HD 4000 Graphics, Up to 1TB HDD or 256GB SSD, Up to 16GB Ram, WiFi and Bluetooth); Shipping with (2.5GHZ Dual Core i5, 4GB Ram, 500GB HDD); Prices start from $599 and Ships from 23rd October.

iMac:
5mm edge(80% thinner); Display 5mm thinner(45%); No Optical Drive; 2 Screen sizes(21.5 inch and 27.5); Fully laminated design; Plasma deposition process; 75% Less Reflection; Facetime HD Camera(30 fps); Dual Microphones; Under the Hood: (Intel Quad Core i5 or i7 Processor, Nvidia Kepler Graphics, Up to 32GB Ram, Up to 3TB HDD, Up to 768GB SSD, WiFi and Bluetooth); I/O Ports: (headphone, SD Card Reader, USB 3/2, 2x Thunderbolt, Gigabit Ethernet); Apple Fusion Drive: 128GB SSD, Fused together into one volume, Faster Reads and Writes, Works automatically, Faster Performance, 3x faster; Wireless Keyboard and Magic Mouse; Shipping with: (21.5″ Display, 2.7GHZ Quad Core i5, 8GB Ram, GeForce GT 640M, 1TB HDD); Prices Start from $1299 and Ships from November; 27.5″ iMac Ships December.

iPad:
100 Million iPads Sold in 2 and half years; iPad Counts for 90% of Web traffic on a tablet; iBook Textbooks are available to 80% of the High School core US curriculum; iBook Textbooks in 2500 US classrooms; iBook Author has new Fonts and Templates; 94% of the Fortune 500 companies are using or deploying iPad.

iPad(3rd Gen):
A6X Chip(2x faster than A5X); 2x Graphics Performance; Next Generation of IPS; 10 Hour battery Life; Front Facing Facetime HD camera 720p(30 fps); Cellular version supports LTE; 2x Faster WiFi Performance, 2.5GHZ and 5GHZ; New Lightning Charger; Black or White;

iPad Mini:
Silver and Black, 7.9″ Retina Display, A5 Chip, 5MP HD Rear Camera and Front Facing HD Camera; Same as above but Different display and colour options.

iPad Mini Options:
Wifi: 16GB($329), 32GB($429), 64GB($529); WiFi+3G: 16GB($459), 32GB($559), 64GB($659).

Pre-orders start from October 26th and Ship from November 2nd.

Apple iPad Mini Event Video
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Apple Microsoft Mobile Applications Mobile Networks News

EE Launch 4G Service by The End of October

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Orange and T-Mobile, formally known as EE will be launching its new 4G and Fibre Optic service on October 30th 2012. This new service will please many customers on the EE network but if you are a customer that hasn’t got a LTE enabled device then you will not be pleased to learn that you will not be able to use the new 4G signal.

According to other operators they will not be using the 4G service until the end of 2013 which is unfortunate but every operator involved has agreed to set aside their differences to bring it widespread by the summer of 2013.

The advantages of 4G will mean consumers will enjoy up to 10x faster speeds than 3G, with estimated speeds up to 21mb/second; of course this will depend on area and network redundancy but you will see a speed difference.

On a whole the new 4G network will bring a big leap in wireless communications to Britain.

Apple Mobile Applications News Operating Systems

iOS 6 Maps: Did Apple Fail?

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Recently Apple launched its new Mapping system in iOS6 which replaced Google maps. Since the launch Apple has come under fire over the new service because it has returned false or missing data.

With many rumours floating about that the new service was having faults I took upon myself to do my testing; I found that in some places the maps had missing images and the 3D mode wasn’t all that it is was cracked up to be. If you was to search for The Eiffel Tower in Paris you will see that the image is flat and missing the point.

Hopefully these bugs will be fixed soon; Apple have offered alternatives in the App Store which include services like Bing, Waze and Google Maps. With the this in mind did Apple fail? or did they allow themselves to become withdrawn into the battle with Google and just drop maps because they felt the service was far to superior?

Many users have been left feeling let down by the service and they have reverted their handsets back to iOS 5 so they are able to use Google Maps agin.

In hindsight I believe Apple should have stuck with Google Maps because it worked and didn’t return false data but what will Apple do? Will they fix the issues or Will they revert back to Google Maps and calibrate with all companies involved to make an even richer experience with all platforms?

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