Apple's earnings call conferences tend to be of general interest to the wider on-looking tech community, particularly Q1, which covers the lucrative October-to-December holiday sales period. With the iPhone 5s having sold in unprecedented numbers for a new Apple smartphone (or any smartphone, for that matter), and the likes of the Retina iPad mini and iPad Air having debuted, this Q1 earnings call was always going to be impressive, and in actual fact, it was record-busting.
With the 30th anniversary of the Mac, everyone's reminiscing about their history with the computer that arguably put Apple on the map. Thirty years after its announcement at an Apple shareholder meeting on January 24th 1984, the Mac has changed considerably, but Steve Jobs' vision of a computer that is both easy to use and powerful enough to do proper work with lives on. The new Mac Pro may pack more power than most of us would know what to do with, but thanks to Mac OS X, you don't need to be a computer scientist to use it.
In a world where we can manage our iPhones and iPads from the cloud and need never plug them into a computer thanks to iCloud, it's easy to forget that actually iTunes exists for the very same purpose. We know that we don't all use it here at Redmond Pie, and at least one writer doesn't even have an iTunes library to call his own. Music streaming services like Spotify and Rdio make iTunes even more redundant, so when Apple released iTunes 11.1.4 today it took some work to get excited about it.
The App Store and Google Play Store is far from short of remote control apps. That is, apps to control a PC or Mac from a smartphone or a tablet. With apps like LogMeIn and Splashtop proving popularas well as countless other lesser lights keeping the big boys honest, owners of phones and tablets aren't short of choice when it comes to remotely controlling their computers. Still, that apparently isn't going to stop Google from entering the fray.
There's been a ton of innovative and exciting mobile and desktop apps and tools that have managed to attract a lot of initial attention before falling into obscurity. Remember Knock? The app that allows you to unlock your Mac without inputting a password? Sure, it still has a fair amount of satisfied users, but the hype around it seems to have quickly dissipated into nothing. The same affliction doesn't seem to be applied in equal measures to tweaks that are released into the jailbreak world, with hype already starting to build for BioUnlock, a tweak that hooks into the iPhone 5s Touch ID sensor to essentially offer the same functionality as Knock.
If Android is your mobile OS of choice then it's highly likely that CyanogenMod has been on your radar for quite some time. The aftermarket firmware solution allows users to flash their Android powered devices to introduce features and offerings that aren't included in official builds of the open-source software.
The ability capture screenshots from an iOS device is extremely handy, and in most situations does a perfectly good job for the use case of the masses. With that said, if you're a developer, designer, app reviewer or just someone who derives excitement from capturing screenshots, then it can become a little tiresome having to capture screenshots on a device and then export to a computer or laptop for processing. Thankfully for us, the new iOS Capture app for Mac OS X users aims to resolve this issue by letting us remotely capture screenshots directly from our iOS device without even touching it. Technical genius or black magic? You decide.
We love a spot of nostalgia here at Redmond Pie, especially when it comes to the games that we used to play when we were growing up. We'll always have fond memories of Sonic, Streets of Rage and Castlevania, and being able to play them again and relive those memories is what keeps us young.
Apple's OS X Mavericks was first announced back at this year's WWDC, and although it hasn't really brought any earth-moving changes, it has somewhat enhanced the desktop operating system from last year's Mountain Lion. Having rolled out very recently, work as been ongoing with regards to changes and improvements, and today, Apple has seeded the first OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks beta to developers.
As with every new product launch from Apple, there is a brief period of downtime on the company's official site as the purchase process is streamlined for the inevitable rush of eager shoppers. If you are particularly keen on the Mac Pro, which was the reason that the official Apple site was briefly pulled offline just a short while ago, I'm afraid you're going to be waiting quite a while, with shipping times having already been pushed back to February.
